The Scottish Banker of Surabaya

( 4 )

Ava lived in a condo in Yorkville, in the centre of Toronto, surrounded by boutiques, art galleries, restaurants, and stores on nearby Bloor Street that showcased a wide swath of the world’s luxury clothing, jewellery, and leather brands. It was early Monday afternoon when she pulled up in front of her building, handed her Audi A6 keys to the concierge, and took the elevator with Maria to her unit.

The drive from Orillia had been slow and uneventful. She had dropped off her mother at her house in Richmond Hill, a northern suburb, and then worked her way down the Don Valley Expressway to the city. Maria lived just off the Danforth, the eastern extension of Bloor, only a few kilometres away, but she spent the afternoon with Ava as she stocked up on instant coffee at the Starbucks almost directly across the street from her condo and bought groceries at Whole Foods on Avenue Road. They ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant and went back to Ava’s to have sex. Then Maria left to get organized for her work week.

Ava sat at the window and looked down at Avenue Road. The traffic was moving slowly, and it would be moving even more slowly in the days to come as the city repopulated after the long weekend. What the hell am I going to do with myself? Ava thought before going to bed.

She slept well, was up by seven thirty, made coffee, and retrieved the newspaper from the door. She carried paper, coffee, and her computer to the small table by the kitchen window. She glanced outside. The street below was teeming with traffic and pedestrians, everyone with someplace to go, something to do.

She turned on her computer and waded into her emails. May Ling had sent her daily diary and was urging Ava to think more seriously about joining forces. Amanda Yee said her father was impressed with the business she’d constructed with May and was giving her more and more responsibility; for the first time, he was talking about retiring. She made no mention of Michael. Ava had no reason to think this was a bad sign, but she did. Mimi had emailed to say she and Derek were buying a house in Leaside, a neighbourhood filled with professional daddies and yummy mummies. Ava could already feel her slipping away. And then her father, Marcus, had written that the crisis with Michael had convinced him he needed liquidity. He was going to sell all his properties and put the money into some safe interest-bearing bonds. It would allow him to spend more time with his family, he said. Which one? Ava wondered.

Everyone in flux, everyone in transition, she thought, her feeling of aimlessness deepening.

She decided to go for a morning run when the traffic outside settled down, and then later in the afternoon to walk over to the house where she was tutored in and practised bak mei. She wasn’t back to full strength yet, but she was getting close, and the pain the exercise brought on was becoming more manageable.

She opened the newspaper, scanned the news section, and then turned to the business section. The word Ponzi jumped out at her from the headline on the front page. The article wasn’t related to the Theresa Ng situation, but it brought her name back into Ava’s head and reminded her there was an obligation she needed to fulfill. She reached for the phone and called Hong Kong.

When Uncle didn’t answer his cellphone, she called his apartment. Lourdes, his Filipina housekeeper for more than thirty years, picked up. “Ava, he is lying down,” she said. Ava detected a touch of worry in her voice.

“Is there a problem?”

“Food poisoning, he says.”

“Again? Didn’t he have that just a few months ago?”

“And several times since then.”

“Has he seen a doctor?”

“He won’t go.”

“What are the symptoms?”

“He gets feverish and then the chills, throws up, has the runs. I’ve been making him sip warm water to stop from getting dehydrated.”

Ava hadn’t detected anything different about him, but then she hadn’t seen him since Macau. He initiated all the telephone contact, and he seemed the same man to her. “Have you talked to Sonny?”

“No, not yet, but I’m going to.”

“Well, tell Uncle I called, and if he’s up to it, to call me back.”

Ava walked to the bathroom to get ready to go out. As she brushed her teeth and then her hair, she thought about Uncle. He had been in his late sixties or early seventies when they met, and even adding on the years they had spent together, she thought of him as ageless. It depressed her to think he might not be.

Her run took close to an hour. She went north on Avenue Road, around Upper Canada College, where the children of Canada’s elite were now back in school. The kids were still arriving when she ran past, through part of the affluent neighbourhood of Forest Hill, and then turned east. She trekked over to Mount Pleasant, the western edge of Leaside — Mimi and Derek’s new home — and then ran south, dodging around prams and Filipina yayas. When she got to Bloor Street, she turned right and headed back to Yorkville.

It was nearly ten o’clock when she walked into her condo. The message light on her phone was blinking. She checked the last number and saw that it was Uncle. Ava debated for a second about showering first, then picked up the phone and called his Hong Kong apartment.

“Wei,” Uncle said.

“It’s Ava.”

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“I was going to ask you the same question.”

“I’m fine. It is just that you usually do not call unless there is something pressing.”

“Sorry if I alarmed you,” she said, pleased to hear his voice sounding robust. “It’s just that we have been offered a sort of a job, and I wanted to discuss it with you and get your opinion.”

“Sort of a job?”

“A small one, for a Vietnamese woman who knows my mother. She and her family are out of pocket for about three million Canadian dollars.”

“Tell me about it,” he said.

His request surprised her. She had expected him to reject it out of hand because the amount was so much smaller than the jobs they normally took on. Ava began to explain Theresa Ng’s dilemma and Uncle listened without interruption. When she was finished, she said, “I feel obliged to give her an answer today or tomorrow. I don’t want her hanging on to false expectations.”

Uncle was so quiet Ava wondered if he was still there. Then he said, “The total scam is for about thirty million, you think.”

“Yes, that’s the number she used.”

“Recovering thirty million interests me.”

Ava wondered if he had heard her properly. “Uncle, Theresa has lost three million, not thirty.”

“I know, but all those other people who lost money, you do not think they want it back?”

“I’m sure they do, but they haven’t approached us, have they.”

“Maybe because they do not know who we are.”

Where is he going with this? she thought. It wasn’t like him to complicate matters. “Uncle, I’m not about to start chasing down these people one by one to ask them to hire us.”

“But there is nothing to stop Theresa Ng from contacting them, is there? Let her do the work. Tell her to get hold of them and persuade them to sign on with us, organize a meeting if she has to. Three million is of no interest, of course, but if she can deliver commitments for anything over twenty million, then let us take the job.”

This was not what she had expected, and it took her a minute to process Uncle’s suggestion. On the surface it made sense, at least if her intent was to stay with Uncle. How could she tell him that wasn’t entirely where her head was? How could she tell him she was seriously weighing other options? Sure as hell not in this phone conversation, she thought. In fact, in any phone conversation. When and if the day came for her to part ways with Uncle, she’d tell him face to face. “Okay,” she relented. “I’ll call Theresa and see if she is willing to do this. If she is, I’ll give her a week to pull it together. How does that sound?”

“That sounds reasonable.”

Ava paused. “Lourdes told me about the food poisoning,” she said as casually as she could.

“It was nothing.”

“I find it unusual that you get it so frequently.”

“I have to stop eating bargain sashimi.”

“Was that it?”

“Every time.”

“You have enough money to eat the most expensive sashimi in Tokyo a thousand times a day.”

“Old habits die hard.”

She knew he meant his careful spending of the Hong Kong dollar. “My mother says, ‘Penny wise, pound foolish.’”

“Your mother knows a lot of clichés.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

He laughed. “I will be more careful.”

Ava hung up the phone, feeling better about his bout of illness but frustrated that he hadn’t told her to let go of the Theresa Ng case. He was supposed to be her excuse for saying no. Now she would have to depend on Theresa’s inability to deliver more clients.