The Scottish Banker of Surabaya - By Ian Hamilton Page 0,85
been asked earlier, although not as methodically as was her pattern. She’d been too eager to get to the picana.
Ava walked through the house and out the back door of the kitchen onto a small veranda. Perkasa stood over Cameron with a bucket in his hand. “No hose,” he said, as he threw water at Cameron’s groin.
She leaned against the wall of the house, in the shade. The Scotsman sat in the sun. “That’ll do,” she said. “I might as well talk to him here, assuming he’s prepared to talk.” She reached out and peeled the tape from his mouth.
“Are you prepared to be more forthright, Andy? Because if you aren’t, I’m telling you, that rod that’s been frying your balls is going to go up your ass. And if we have to do that, the pain is going to be indescribable.”
He was starting to revive, drawing deep, ragged breaths. His voice cracked. “Don’t hurt me anymore.”
“That’s all up to you.”
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“And the money?”
“I’ll do everything I can about the money. Just don’t hurt me anymore.”
Ava opened her notebook. “What actually happened to the money?” she asked Cameron.
“Can you take the tape from my eyes?”
“No, you talk to me first. The money — what happened to it?”
“Much as you thought,” he croaked.
“Much or exactly?”
He paused. “My mouth is really dry. Can I get something to drink?”
She looked at his mouth and saw a light crust at the corners. “Could you bring a glass of water?” she asked Perkasa.
“Much or exactly?” she repeated to Cameron.
“They found Purslow first. Neither he nor his boyfriend had taken any real trouble to cover their tracks. He must have thought he only had the Vietnamese guy to worry about. Once they got him, the money wasn’t hard to retrieve.”
“And then they had him killed?”
“Aye.”
“So where’s the money?”
“It was absorbed into the bank.”
“Where?”
“Here, as always. All the money flows into Surabaya.”
“All the money?”
He began to answer but Perkasa emerged from the kitchen, closing the door behind him. He walked to Cameron and rested the glass of water against his lower lip. Cameron slurped, licked his lips, and then slurped again.
“And who are ‘they’? Who ordered Purslow dead?” Ava asked.
“Rocca.”
“Rocca? Not Muljadi?”
“Rocca ran the show.”
“Muljadi was president.”
Cameron’s lips pressed together. Ava could sense him calculating how much he should say. “This is beginning not to work for me,” she warned. “Either you stop making me guess or I get the picana warmed up again.”
He groaned. “No, don’t do that. It’s just difficult to explain things in a way that doesn’t seem crazy.”
“Try me.”
“With Rocca and Muljadi, that’s the way they set it up. It was the same everywhere. The presidents of all the branches are Indonesian, except for me here, but there are Italians like Rocca in every one — in supposedly lesser positions — who actually call all the shots. I have two of them in Surabaya. They don’t have any titles; they don’t show their faces at the bank. We meet offsite. We communicate by phone, by computer. The Indonesians, me, the office here — we’re all window dressing.”
Ava stopped taking notes. She stared at Perkasa, who stared back. This wasn’t what she had expected. “Italians?”
“Aye.”
“I’m confused.”
“It isn’t going to get any simpler,” he said.
“Who are these Italians?”
“The ’Ndrangheta.”
“The who?”
He spelled the name.
“That doesn’t help me any.”
“They’re like the Mafia on steroids.”
“Sicilian?”
“God no. They think the Sicilians are sissies.”
“Where are they from?”
“Calabria, Reggio Calabria.”
“How did you connect with them?”
He shifted in the chair, then gasped. “You understand that I’m telling you this only so you’ll understand why the idea of getting your thirty million back is impossible?”
“Let me make that decision. Now, how did you get hired?”
Cameron shrugged. “I was working in Rome and had some clients who needed some cash moved around. I made it happen, for a fee, of course. After about a year of this, one of them asked me if I would consider changing banks. When I said it would depend on the money I was paid, he said that wouldn’t be a problem, and asked if I was willing to go to an interview. I said I would be happy to do that.
“This was June, but I didn’t hear from them again until September, when I got a visit and an invitation to go to a town called San Luca, near Calabria. There was a festival on, celebrating Our Lady of Polsi. I met the contacts from Rome and four other men near the