by Ian Hamilton
The first words from his mouth were, “This is fucking crazy.”
“That’s not a good start,” she cautioned.
“I don’t know half of what you’re talking about,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Well, let’s talk about the half you do know about. Fred Purslow, for example. Were you acquainted with him?”
“No.”
“You’ve never heard the name?”
He hesitated.
“Don’t think you can lie to me,” Ava said.
“I heard the name.”
“That’s all?”
“He was an employee, low-grade. I had no reason to know him.”
“Are you saying that when he took off with thirty million dollars, Muljadi didn’t brief you?”
“That’s when I heard the name, but it was almost in passing. Muljadi said he had things under control.”
“And it seems he did. I mean, he took care of Purslow, he recovered the money, and he scared off Lam. That leaves the rather obvious question of what he did with the money. So what did he do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“We were closing the Toronto operation, things were in a state of flux —”
“That is a pathetic explanation,” Ava said.
Cameron shrugged.
“Who owns the bank?” she said sharply.
“We have a large number of investors.”
“And they don’t care about thirty million dollars, plus or minus?”
He didn’t answer.
“And tell me, just how did you create all those billions of dollars in equity?”
“Our investors put a lot of money in and there was good management.”
“Of course, good management. I’m told you were a major player in the Toronto real estate market.”
“We’re a commercial bank overseas. We invested heavily in real estate and other safe business opportunities in Toronto and New York and everywhere else.”
“So why leave Canada?”
“My board doesn’t like to be overcommitted to any one market. I operate under a set of guidelines, investment limits. Once I reach a certain threshold in one market, we move on to another.”
Ava noticed that the tension in his voice was easing. He was obviously comfortable talking in generalities about the bank. She switched gears. “I want the thirty million dollars returned.”
He rolled his head back, twisting his neck. “How do you expect me to do that?”
“You’re the president.”
“Get real. I’d have to go to my board to get their approval.”
“So how much can you transfer on your own authority?”
“Things are very tightly controlled.”
“How much?”
“No more than a million.”
“Well, if that’s true then you’re going to have to get creative,” Ava said.
“I don’t understand.”
“No matter. Look, Andy, I’m going to tape your mouth again and I don’t want you to resist. Then I’m going to get my associate and we’ll resume our questioning.”
He stiffened again. “This is a waste of time,” he said. “There’s no way I can get you thirty million dollars. A million, yes, that I can do. And that I will do. You can split it among your friends here and tell your clients whatever story you want.”
She taped his mouth and left the kitchen.
Perkasa sat in the Nissan, the door open, the air conditioning thrumming. “He isn’t being cooperative. I’m ready to use the picana,” she said.
Ava had seen a picana used only once before. She had been in China with one of Uncle’s men and had located a scam artist who had a lot of local protection. They had a limited amount of time to find out what they needed, and Uncle’s man had suggested using a picana to speed up the process.
The electric prod was about half a metre long, with a bronze tip and an insulated handle. It could be plugged into a control box with a rheostat, used to raise or reduce voltage, and a transformer connected it to any ordinary electric wall socket. Uncle’s man was quite expert with it. He stripped the scammer and then wet the target to reduce the electrical resistance of his skin. He had Ava adjust the rheostat control while he applied the tip to various parts of the guy’s body. She was worried they might actually kill him, but Uncle’s man explained that although the current was high-voltage, the amperage was low. It took less than fifteen minutes for them to get all the information and cooperation they needed.
Cameron hadn’t moved while she was gone from the room. Perkasa took a disinterested glance at him. “Take his pants down while I hook up the machine,” Ava said.
Cameron squirmed, rocking his body back and forth. “Be still,” she said.
The picana looked new, the current range higher than she remembered. In China the prod had delivered between twelve and sixteen thousand volts. This one promised to go all the way up to thirty thousand. Ava plugged it into the wall socket and turned up the rheostat. When she turned back, Cameron’s shorts and underwear were already dangling around his ankles. She looked at his penis. It was fat and stubby and he hadn’t been circumcised, so flesh hid the head. She thought it was one of the ugliest things she had ever seen. His testicles sat on the chair, spread out by the contact. Ava thought about wetting him but figured he was sweaty enough.
She set the picana at twenty thousand volts and moved closer. “Lift his penis,” she said to Perkasa.
He reached down and grabbed it, averting his eyes. As he raised it, the testicles went along for the ride. Ava moved to one side, slipped the picana underneath, and then placed the tip hard against them.
Cameron’s body contorted so violently that he raised the chair from the floor. Ava kept pressing up. His head was rolling from side to side, screams audible even through the tape. She pressed harder.
Ava wasn’t aware how much time elapsed. Even when he emptied his bowels, the excrement spilling over the chair seat, she kept the prod in place. It wasn’t until Cameron began to convulse that she slid it out from under his testicles.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said to Perkasa.
He grimaced.
“No reason to clean him. He’ll just do it all over again when I zap him again.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to pay Waru a bonus when this is done. I’m sure he wasn’t counting on this.”
“Neither was I,” he said, matter-of-factly. Perkasa looked at Cameron. “Do you think he’ll be more cooperative now?”
“One more time and then we’ll ask,” Ava said.
She wasn’t sure how much damage she had done. He wouldn’t be fit for any sexual activity for a while, but with one more treatment maybe she could make that closer to permanent. She turned the rheostat up to thirty thousand volts. She looked down at the chair and saw that Cameron’s testicles were half hanging over the edge, so she wouldn’t have to ask Perkasa to expose them. She slid the picana tip just under them and then pulled it high.
The chair came off the ground again. Cameron’s body twisted left and right as if he was trying to shake something off. The chair teetered to one side and Ava thought for a second he was going to fall over, but Perkasa reached out and steadied it.
He had screamed when the jolt first hit him, but as she continued to press, the noise lessened until it became not much more than a whimper. His body became less active as well, the contortions becoming twitches, his legs shaking less violently. She knew he was almost unconscious and retracted the picana.
“Let’s give him a few minutes to recover,” she said. “Then I’ll ask my questions again.”
They went outside, the morning sun now high in the sky and the heat bearing down on them. “It might be a good idea to clean him up a bit,” Perkasa said. “It’s going to smell something awful in there in a few minutes.”
Ava nodded. “Take him and the chair out the back door and hose them down. I’ll join you in
a few minutes.”
( 31 )
Taking the Moleskine notebook and pen from her bag, she reviewed the questions she had written the night before. Most of them had 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 sanctuary for the Lady. They described what they wanted me to do and offered me the job as president, at four times the money I was making in Rome, plus bonuses that could double that again.”
“Just what were you supposed to do to make that kind of money?”
“Run the bank.”
“I thought you said they called the shots.”
“I meant that I was to pretend I was running the bank.”
“I don’t understand. Why would Italian gangsters want to buy a bank in Indonesia, in Surabaya?”
“To launder money.”
“But how? How could that work? What did you have to do to make it happen?”
Perkasa moved closer. Ava had been so intent on listening to Cameron that she had forgotten he was there. He seemed as drawn into the story as she was.
Cameron said, “Can I have some more water?”
Perkasa still had half a glassful in his hand. He held it to Cameron’s mouth.
“They had everything figured out by the time they hired me,” Cameron said. “They had established contacts with senior Indonesian customs officials and had worked out a system for moving cash into the country. They had bought off senior banking regulators and inspectors so they wouldn’t ask too many questions about the bank’s growth. They had figured out how they could move money out of the country and put it to work safely and for the long term, but what they still needed was bank systems, the nuts and bolts of the loan process. That’s what they wanted me to do — provide the paper trail, make everything look above board and legitimate.”
“Fuck,” Perkasa said.
Ava shot him a glance that said, Be quiet. “How do they move the cash in?”
“By the planeload.”
“You’re joking, right?”
He shook his head. “They pack the bills in bales, like hay. The charters arrived about once a month at first, but during this past year we’ve been up to a plane a week. They aren’t huge cargo jobbies, mind you, just mid-sized private jets that are stripped to the walls, but you can get a lot of money in them. Most of the planes came from Italy at the start, and then Venezuela came online. It’s one or the other since then.”
“Do these charter planes have a company name?”
“Brava Italia. I think one of them owns it.”
“And now one comes every week?”
“Aye, usually Tuesday nights. That’s usually when I can count on seeing the Italians. They’re always there to meet the plane. They park it in a hangar and then unload the money into a panel van. We take it to the bank, count it, and record it.”
“What are their names?”
“Foti and Chorico.”
“They go alone?”
“Them and me.”
“Wh
o’s on the plane?”
“The pilot and co-pilot, no one else.”
“And Customs turns a blind eye?”
“The planes land and are taxied directly to a hangar at the far end of the airport that we rent as we need it, and unloaded without a single question in all the years up to now.”
“Then what?”
“We drive the money to the bank, count it, register it as a foreign investment, and then convert it all to rupiahs.”
“Again no questions?”
“The provincial bank officials in East Java and the national ones in Jakarta have been happy to play along.”
“Then you move it out?”
“Aye. Initially we put a ton of money into the Bali region — you know, to establish a local base. Then gradually we expanded outwards. They choose the markets and the investments. Italy, of course, but never Calabria; Rome mainly, but we financed a lot of construction in Milan as well. Then New York. Caracas and Porlamar, on Margarita Island, in Venezuela. A lot of them retire there. And Toronto, of course.”
“What kinds of investments?”
“Real estate. Office buildings, apartment buildings, shopping centres, subdivisions — you name it, we finance it. About the only thing they won’t go near is casinos and casino-hotel complexes. They don’t like the attention they attract. They don’t like the idea of having to get licensed, of questions being asked, of all those regulators.”
“Who owns the real estate?”
“Them.”
“The Italians?”
“Yeah. They set up a web of companies as fronts everywhere, but at the end of the day they own or control them all and they’re funnelling money to themselves.”
“Those companies have names, yes? And officers? And shareholders?”
“I have no idea who the people are who are listed as officers and shareholders. I assume the Italian powers keep themselves hidden and use friends, lawyers, accountants as the official faces. But I’m not sure. I never asked. I was never even curious. I knew what the reality was; I didn’t need unnecessary detail.”
“So the branches you set up in places such as Toronto and New York were for the sole purpose of returning money to the ’Ndrangheta?”
