The Feiquon Heist Read online

  Kheng decided to change the subject. Mostly in case Mrs Khamgenn came back out of the bank while they were still planning to theoretically filch from her all that she had.

  “Did you hear about Mr Salt’s wife. Salt says that she’s in hospital. They took her in yesterday on account of her kidneys apparently. They want to put her on one of those expensive machines. It sounds really quite serious. It could go very badly for his wife if they can’t afford to pay for use of the machine.”

  “Well he’s not going be able to cope with that on his guard’s salary. Maybe I should put him onto the Mrs Khamgenn idea.”

  “You’ve got the torch then, Mr Meebor?”

  Kheng had concluded that a rapid handover was the easiest way to get Meebor to move on and avoid an embarrassing incident with Mrs Khamgenn. Meebor signed the handover book and told Kheng that if he came up with any ideas for helping out with Salt’s wife, and if there was anything he could do to support, then just to let him know. With that he scooted out of the gate to make the most of the extra time that it appeared Kheng wanted to give him by turning up too early.

  Kheng took the old red plastic chair that Meebor had left under the tree, set it down next to the gate and returned to contemplate his dream. It had bothered him all morning, but he’d not really been able to focus on it as his wife had been going on about mending an old set of shelves. They had been under the house where the chickens roosted, but she wanted to use them in the kitchen for keeping plates. Why was he suddenly dreaming about his long since departed Aunt Kaylin, his father’s older sister? His main memory of her was the time when they lived in the village and she came to stay with them for several months. She was mean. Mean to his father and mean to him. He couldn’t really remember why she had turned up as he’d been quite young at the time. He had an idea that she was on her own, it was possible that she’d been left by her husband, and moved in with them as she had nowhere else to go. She would take out her frustrations at her failure by ordering Kheng to do chores all day. He would be sent to fetch firewood, collect water, get roots from the forest, mill the unhusked rice. The chores were hard work. They made his arms ache and feel like they had fire in them they burned so much with the pain. He’d missed out on quite a lot of school that year. There was also the incident at the market as well. Some of his childhood was a distant memory but that day in the market had remained with him as vividly as if it were yesterday. The thought of the market could always turn a pleasant daydream into a waking nightmare.

  Kheng was distracted by his visionary contemplations for the rest of the shift. Even his 4.30pm interaction with Mr Tann, who was still expressing his deep annoyance at the overwhelming amount of cash building up in what used to be a quiet provincial bank, failed to distract him from his deliberations.

  It was well after ten that evening when Mr Salt rolled up at the gates, late once again for his shift.

  “Mr Kheng. Sorry to be delayed again. I remembered the coffee this time. Brought two cups. I’ll just sign in the book for the torch. Then we can have a brew.”

  The coffee was really more of an excuse to talk again about his wife. Mr Salt sat on the front steps of the bank while Kheng sat on the chair and listened. Kheng felt quite sorry for Mr Salt. He clearly had no one but his wife and their two kids. Without his wife he’d be utterly lost and he had no one else he could talk to. Kheng observed there was a certain tragedy in the knowledge that the man whom Mr Salt had recently met and saw for two minutes a day so they could confirm the presence of a chair and a torch before parting ways was now his closest confident. After Salt had unburdened himself, they just sat there in silence for a while, staring out at the night and listening to the occasional insect or distant bark of a dog.

  Having realised Salt wasn’t going to let him go until they’d finished a second coffee, Kheng decided it was time to shift his thoughts to other things, and to tell him all about the dream.

  Salt listened intently to Kheng’s detailed description of his vision before giving his opinion.

  “Maybe the problem is that you’re looking for just one meaning, Kheng. I mean, with the buffalo, there’s clearly a forest spirit involved. Making you have your dream. But what if the buffalo is just there to help realise that this is a forest spirit talking to you? More of a point of reference. Not the message itself. The moon bit seems to be about wealth. Wealth at night I guess. As for your Aunt Kaylin, only you can really work out where she comes in. Was she famous for anything?”

  “Not really famous outside of our family. Finding trouble and inflicting pain were her usual achievements from what I remember of her.”

  “So a bit of a snake then. Maybe you were trying to dream of a snake but she came up by accident. That can happen apparently. My wife used to be into all that dream stuff. She would say that the person you should be dreaming of can appear as an animal or a tree, and then the person you actually dream of is representing something else. It can be all very confusing. Was Aunt Kaylin interested in triangles at all?”

  Kheng shook his head. He couldn’t quite see where Mr Salt was going with this. ‘Connecting the dots’ should normally involve dots where a reason to connect had been identified. It was not just connecting dots because they were dots.

  “What about the moon? Was it a crescent or was it full?”

  “The moon was full, like a big golden circle.”

  “Well, the moon is just about full now. Totally full tomorrow, I would think. So maybe you’re going to come into some wealth. Money left to you by your snaky Aunt Kaylin? Or maybe whoever that tree represents has got something to do with it? Whatever it is, looks like it could happen tomorrow.”

  Kheng shook his head.

  “No hope of that. Aunt Kaylin died penniless years ago. And if she did have any wealth the miserable old woman would have worked out how to take it all with her.”

  Superficial though Salt’s early analysis had been, it had given Kheng something to think about. There was no longer any doubt in his mind that a tree spirit of some sort was behind all of this. Everyone seemed to confirm that the buffalo element was proof beyond doubt. He was also inclined to accept that the vision of the golden moon, just a day before the real moon would be full, was setting the parameters and timing for whatever the dream was foretelling. So, he’d figured out the ‘who’ in part, and he understood the ‘when’ but the all-important ‘what’ still eluded him. Kheng explained all of this to Mr Salt.

  “Well, Mr Kheng. You’d better head home and start dreaming again. See if you can get this spirit back. Get him to add a bit of clarity to all of this. At least try not to wake up until after your Aunt Kaylin’s done her turn. I’ll try and get a good night’s sleep too. See if I get anything that might help.”

  Kheng thought it unlikely that Salt would be able to contribute through an additional dream. After all, Salt had never met his Aunt Kaylin. Besides, it was unlikely either of them was going to get much sleep after all that coffee.

  Kheng negotiated the plank-covered trench while Salt went over to the outside tap and washed out the coffee mugs. Kheng then started to make his way home. He had been left with one final niggling thought. Salt had said that trees could appear in dreams but really they might be a person. Somewhere in his mind Kheng felt he should know who that could be, but he just couldn’t reach far enough into his sub-conscious and grab the answer.

  24. Opportunity

  Ms Win-Kham had been following a simple three-stage plan for the entrapment of her new boss, Mr Hua Lin. The stages were fairly straightforward: flatter, ingratiate and ensnare.

  Stage one – flattery – had been initiated at their first meeting after the welcome lunch. Since then it had been applied liberally whenever an opportunity presented itself. Stage two – ingratiate – had been put into action shortly after Hua Lin stepped into his new office. For several weeks now Ms Win-Kham had been inveigling her way under the skin of Mr Hua Lin. Each morning she was the first of the bank clerks to arrive, not including
the bumbling old Mr Tann of course, who seemed to be getting increasingly erratic with his working hours. She was the first to greet Mr Hua Lin with enthusiasm as he entered the building, enquire sympathetically after him, and then rush to make him a coffee. Throughout the day she would ensure she was on hand to aid him with the slightest of problems. Perhaps there was an error in the ledger, a customer that was lingering too long in his office, a fly annoyingly refusing to accept that the open window it arrived through could have equal utility as a way to get out. Ms Win-Kham was there to correct, usher and swat, as the situation demanded. She was his ‘go-to’ employee and gradually she believed that she was becoming indispensable to him.

  It wasn’t all about time and devotion, she was financially investing quite heavily in her ambitions as well. She had bought a number of new outfits for the office. They guaranteed that she was respectable and appropriate, whilst making sure her look was always flattering to her figure and displayed just enough leg to get a regular glance from her employer. Contrary to the other well-to-do women who got their hair and make-up done early on a Friday or Saturday evening so as to be glamorous for the social events of the weekend, Ms Win-Kham had changed her beautifying appointment to early on a Monday morning so that she was at her most glamorous when she presented Mr Hua Lin’s morning coffee at the start of each week. Occasionally she would top up the coiffure and artistry on a Wednesday afternoon if she became concerned her resplendence wouldn’t make it all the way to Friday. Of course, the other women in the bank noticed this, but it was only spoken of in hushed whispers behind closed doors. To be so indiscreet as to say something directly would only underline their own insecurities rather than unbalance those of Ms Win-Kham. The men in the office were just pleased to have someone attractive in their midst and failed to question a deeper motive.

  All of the ‘stage two’ ingratiating was building a useful foundation for Win-Kham’s higher goals, but it wasn’t ever going to be a game changer. Ms Win-Kham knew this. If there were cuts at the bank and staff had to go then perhaps she would be a few places further from the top of the list of those to immediately receive the boot. However, it was a national bank, and she was a semi-government employee. Those sorts of jobs were ‘jobs for life’. Even if the country ran out of money they would still all go in each day as normal and sit at their empty desks to wait for the government to find some more. Meanwhile, the current level of ingratiation meant that her necessity to Mr Hua Lin was only in his daily work. She was not a necessity in his life. Once he left the office each evening Ms Win-Kham became an irrelevance until coffee was needed the following morning. She needed to consider that one day soon he would find a reason to pack up his provincial career and answer the call to return to the big smoke. Essential though Ms Win-Kham was to Mr Hua Lin in the machinery of the Maklai bank’s workings, she was never going to be part of his essential minimal luggage for the onward journey.

  It was now that Ms Win-Kham could see an opportunity to put stage three into action: ‘ensnare’. If she kept her wits about her, her prey was not far from experiencing what can happen when a woman as determined as Ms Win-Kham initiates the ‘ensnare’ option.

  The bank’s security had never been particularly good, but at least the money had always been counted regularly by Mrs Yeo-bo and then put in the safe. Right now, there was money that wasn’t in a safe, just a room with a regular lock, and it was as a direct result of a decision from Mr Hua Lin.

  Mr Hua Lin was clearly far too trusting and too set on his goal of running the bank with a modicum of regulation. He assumed that the provincial folk were all simple hard working nationalists devoted to the cause. He had failed to look at his rash decision through a more cynical lens. For Ms Win-Kham, it was simple. The money was not locked in the main safe, the extra money that did not fit was being kept in the bank because of Hua Lin. Should some of the money go missing, it would be difficult to prove where it had gone. Other than an unlikely full confession from a perpetrator caught in the act, the fault would lie squarely with the provincial manager. Mr Hua Lin had left himself wide open. The opportunity that he had provided to Ms Win-Kham was so simple it was almost laughable.

  If Ms Win-Kham had learned anything in life it was to make sure that when you make a decision you have considered every eventuality. For those eventualities where the decision could backfire, you could identify someone else who looked more responsible than you, and who would take the fall. Clearly Mr Hua Lin had failed to take a similar approach.

  Originally, Ms Win-Kham had thought that she would take some of the money from the safe room herself. It would have to be enough money for it to be a problem but not so much that she’d go to prison for most of her life if she was unlucky and caught red-handed in the safe room. However, there was very little chance of that. Once the money was gone from the room it was all relatively simple. The next day she could suggest helping out with a routine cash count. She was one of the more experienced bank staff and it would not seem out of place to say that she was worried about the high quantities of money in the room. Having done the counting, she would then discreetly point out to Mr Hua Lin that some of the cash was missing. He would demand a search and an enquiry. She would then help him to realise that an investigation would look bad. Bad for the bank, but more importantly, devastating for him. The bottom line for head office in Khoyleng was that the money had gone missing on his watch and he had allowed for all that money to be kept outside of the safe. Ms Win-Kham had played out the scene in her mind. The confident and aloof man in the suit with his chiselled facade would become like a young, frightened child with a quivering lip. Once he had calmed down a little Ms Win-Kham would help him to understand how she had the skills to cook the books and cover up the whole thing. He would have no choice but to go along with it. Once they started down the road in a partnership of corruption and secrets, then Mr Hua Lin was well and truly hers, as was his life back in Khoyleng when eventually they both moved there together.

  The plan was good, and stage three was all but ready to implement. However, the more that Ms Win-Kham studied the finer details and planned the implementation of her operation, the more she realised it had some minor flaws. She also could see that there was an even easier way to do it, and with much less risk to herself. Firstly she realised that it wasn’t as easy as she had thought to gain access to the safe room. It seemed that she was not the only one to have worked out that the new cash levels meant that security was a little compromised. Mrs Yeo-bo was looking increasingly stressed, and not only regularly locked the safe room door each time she used it, but made regular paranoid trips back to the room to check she’d locked it. A plan-B that worked in Mrs Yeo-bo’s increasing paranoia might be something to consider but a direct swipe of the money for now was out of the question. There is often innovation in the face of adversity and Ms Win-Kham’s lateral thinking soon allowed her to develop a new and deviously elegant scheme.

  25. Counting

  Mr Tann hadn’t achieved very much throughout the day. His job wasn’t one that demanded achievement. Ensuring the status quo was a respectable measure of a good job done. However, for much of the day the status quo had been ignored while he sat at his desk and added the details and timing to the ingenious plot that he had concocted the night before. He had meticulously studied the routine of Mrs Yea-bo. He’d studied the routine of Ms Win-Kham. He’d studied the comings and goings of Hua Lin and indeed everyone else in the bank that day. His main interest was the frequency with which people either passed by or entered the safe room. His analysis showed that the key to success in his endeavour was in the lack of money counting that went on throughout the day. He could see that now: he just needed to pick the perfect moment to get into the room where all the cash was.

  The bank had never kept overwhelming amounts of cash on site before. Papa Han had known how much they usually got through each week and so would ask the head office in Khoyleng to send down enough money to top them up to a sensible level. The system
of counting the cash had not yet adapted to the sudden change of policy whereby far too much money was being stored. There was more cash than there was time to count it unless the roles of several of the clerks were radically revised.

  In the old way of doing things, Mrs Yea-bo, the assistant cashier, would count the money as it was delivered. The provincial branch did not have a money-counting machine but the head office in Khoyleng did. Therefore, the money arrived in wads of one hundred machine-counted notes banded together by a thin strip of paper with the bank logo printed on it. Mrs Yeo-bo put 100% trust in the high-tech counting system that had applied the bands of paper, and considered the logo stamped in the middle as if it were an official wax seal. With her unwavering faith she never counted the individual notes, just the number of paper-bound wads, and then she put them all in the safe. This was still how things were done following Mr Hua Lin’s change of rules, even though most of the money no longer fitted into the safe but sat on the floor next to it in cloth bags. Mrs Yea-bo counted the number of wads, multiplied by 100, and recorded the result in the ledger as she had always done. This approach had served her well for all her years at the bank and had never caused a problem.

  In all his time at the bank, Mr Tann had known that Mrs Yea-bo diligently stuck to this routine. This was the inside knowledge that he would apply to commit his robbery. All he needed to do was find a good reason to be in the money room. The one he was currently favouring was to say that he was looking to see what sort of new safe they might need so that he could propose a ‘design’ to head office. He’d do a bit of pacing out to measure the space, or maybe even take a tape measure with him and note down the length of the room. Whilst there he would wait for Mrs Yeo-bo to leave and then subtly slip a few notes out of the top of some of the wads and then move them to the back of the piles. It would be a long time before they were used, maybe weeks. Mrs Yea-bo would only be keeping track of the money by counting wads. A wad of 97 notes was pretty indistinguishable from one of a 100 notes unless you counted each one. Yeo-bo’s faith in the head office machine guaranteed that she wouldn’t. Eventually it would become clear that the bank’s ledger was incorrect and that cash was missing from the safe room. However, Mrs Yeo-bo would blame the central bank’s counting machine. The management would never accept that, and an investigation would highlight that the new provincial manager had failed to make Mrs Yea-bo count the money properly, keep it in a proper safe and that he was also often a bit intoxicated most mornings when he arrived at work. There was very little question about where the blame would land. Mr Tann would get a bit of extra cash, which after years of service was a small bonus that his conscience could easily justify, and would pave the way to his new promotion at the same time. It was the perfect solution.