Indonesian partnership during the years of the tiger economy, and fallen under majority Japanese control after the tiger leaped too far for its own good and went crashing into a ditch.
This had been the typical story for Southeast Asian businesses in need of financial rescue at the end of the previous decade. While many Western analysts had been gleefully forecasting economic Ragnarok for the Japanese, they had done what they had excelled at doing throughout history — learning from their mistakes, adapting to changed circumstances, and ultimately turning misfortune into advantage. Their rebound strategy had been twofold. First, they had propped up joint ventures with companies in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Phillipines by offering infusions of operating capital in exchange for bigger pieces of the action: i. E., controlling shares. Second, they had reprioritized, shifting away from a dwindling Asian market and focusing on export to cash-rich American buyers.
Japan's shrewd exploitation of opportunity had not only yielded heaping economic dividends to legitimate businessmen, but also kept the sake flasks of yakuza criminal syndicates overflowing, bringing particular rewards to the influential Inagawa-kai, which was entrenched in the Asian banking community, which had itself capitalized a large percentage of the corporate buyouts. Indeed, a graphic analysis of these financial interrelationships might aptly portray a long line of smiling, satisfied men, each with his hand deep in the pocket of the fellow in front of him.
In the case of the Omitsu Industrial resuscitation, the Canbera family had both brokered the deal and provided lending capital to the Japanese investors under exceptionally generous terms of repayment. That the Canberas had myriad ties to the yakuza was something the borrowers knew and accepted from the outset. That they might be called upon to provide a host of illicit favors to their 'black mist' creditors was likewise considered a distasteful but acceptable part of their payback agreement.
As the old saying went, Kinzo thought, it was necessary to cross many fjords in passing through the world.
'Let me tell you my predicament,' Nga said, cursing Khao Luan and his barbarians for the onerous position in which they had placed him. 'There was an accident yesterday involving a foreigner. A white man.' He gave Kinzo a meaningful glance. 'It was fatal, you see.'
Kinzo sat there looking at him.
'I want to make it clear that I had nothing to do with what happened, and would personally choose to report his death to the police,' Nga said. 'But the circumstances— and the parties involved — are such that I would have a difficult time proving it was unintentional.'
Kinzo remailed silent.
Nga folded his hands on his desk, considering his next words. This was the delicate part.
'There's a problem with the body,' he said. And met Kinzo's gaze with his own. 'With disposal of the body.'
Kinzo took a breath, released it, waited another moment. Then he slowly nodded, wondering what sort of infernal madness Nga was flirting with… and dragging him into as a reluctant participant.
'I have a shipload of cargo leaving Pontianak tomorrow afternoon,' he said. 'It will be crossing the Straits of Melaka en route to points west.'
Nga looked at him.
'Ah,' he said. 'The open sea… is a lonely place.'
Kinzo nodded.
'Were a man to fall overboard on such a voyage,' Nga said, 'I would imagine he might never be found.'
Kinzo moved his shoulders. 'Even should the currents wash him ashore, the ravages of the sea and fish upon his body would make it hard for anyone to identify him. Or conclusively establish the cause of his death.'
Nga smiled a little.
'As always, my friend, you make perfect sense,' he said. 'Give me the ship's name and exact place of departure, and I can arrange for the luckless one we have discussed to be brought aboard tonight.'
Kinzo saw the uneasiness at the edges of Nga's smile, and decided to reinforce it with a cautionary word. He disliked the banker and resented his outrageous imposition… and apart from that wanted to be sure Nga realized this was no minor impropriety of the sort his father had been covering up his entire life.
'Since you seem to value my thoughts, I feel obliged to share some with you,' he said. 'If a man with no friends were to disappear without explanation, his loss would be a blank space that goes unnoticed and unfilled. But things rarely occur in a void, especially when it comes to human affairs.' He paused, then leaned forward. 'If there are people left behind to miss him, an investigation is a foregone certainty. Should it turn out to be persistent, even the total absence of physical remains might not be enough to keep the circumstances of his 'accident' from being unearthed. Attention must therefore be given to all possible eventualities. Do you understand?'
Nga stared at him. The smile had fled his lips.
'Don't worry,' he said. 'I'm taking care of everything.'
Unconvinced, Kinzo didn't answer.
Kirsten stood looking at her sister in the kitchen of Anna's home in Petaling Jaya, neither woman speaking, their faces gravely serious. On the butcher block between them were neat piles of chiles, water spinach, bok choy, white radish, and other ingredients for the stir-fry they had been preparing for dinner. A bamboo steamer filled with bean sprouts sat on the stove top, the burner beneath it still unlit. Behind Kirsten, an electric rice cooker worked quietly.
Her face pale, Anna was trembling with distress, the knife she had been using to chop her vegetables forgotten in her hand.
'Maybe you ought to put that down before you cut yourself,' Kirsten said, nodding her chin slightly toward the knife. She gave Anna a strained smile. 'Or me.'
Anna stared at her as if she hadn't heard a word she'd said. The faint hiss of the rice cooker was all that broke the stillness in the room.
Kirsten opened her mouth to say something else, thinking even another tortured attempt at humor would be preferable to the silence… but then she decided to leave it alone. What had she expected anyway? Surely not sympathy. She had been staying with Anna and her family for several days now, having arrived with a concocted tale about needing to get away from things because of a romantic breakup, an emotional situation that had pushed her to the edge, all of it complete drivel.
It wasn't that she had meant to keep the truth from Anna and her husband, certainly not for this long, but whenever she'd started to share it with them, the words had refused to come. And so she had continued the deception until it had gotten out of hand — like everything else in her life recently.
At times, Kirsten had thought her guilty conscience and dreadful worries about Max really would drive her out of her skull, and by this morning had realized she couldn't bear her freight of secrets anymore. Her resolve firmed, she had planned to wait until her brother-in-law got home from work, sit him and Anna down in their living room, and tell them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help her God.
But as a surgeon at a government hospital in KL, Lin was often detained with some emergency or other, and when he'd phoned to say that might be the case this evening — well, she had feared her determination might crumble before he arrived, and decided it might be best to make her confession to Anna alone rather than chance putting it off again.
Still, Kirsten hadn't been looking forward to it, and choosing the right moment had been difficult. Oddly enough, however, her mind had been on something else entirely as they'd started their dinner preparations a half hour ago, just before she came out with her story… or rather, before it had leaped from her mouth all on its own.
The incident she'd been remembering had occurred the previous day, when she was babysitting Anna's two kids, Miri and Brian. They'd been out in the condominium's small backyard playing, and Miri, who was five, had caught a grasshopper while poking around a flower bed, then started shouting for her older brother to find a jar to put it in. He'd run into the house in search of one, leaving her to stand there with her small hands cupped around the insect… but when he'd taken longer than Miri expected, her initial excitement over capturing it had turned into a sort of jittery dismay.
'It's getting away,' she'd yelled, her eyes wide and frantic. 'It's too big'
In fact, it had been very big — that the local bugs were always of the king-sized variety was one of the harder things to which Kirsten had needed to get reaccustomed upon her return from England — even harder than
