The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (32 page)

The geomancer shivered and made a conscious effort to change the flow of his thoughts. They had to rethink their mission.

‘What do we do now?’ Joyce asked.

‘Yes,’ said Wong. That was the question. What did they do now?

‘I wanna go home.’

‘Yes.’

Her eyes were still wet and she had acquired a sniff that wouldn’t go away. ‘If you pay for the tickets, I’ll get Daddy to pay you back when we get back.’

‘Must think first.’

‘Naaah. You can’t go home now. We have a girl to rescue. Or did you forget?’ This was Brett. Unlike the two visitors from Singapore, he was still on a high. He had loved being the instrument of arrest at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, despite the fact that the police had unaccountably and immediately decided that the good guys were the bad guys and the bad guys were the good guys.

What’s more, he had been thrilled to have spent almost three hours in the police station. Important people in uniform were taking note of what he was saying. Sometimes they were literally jotting down his words of wisdom as he uttered them.

And not just any old cop shop, but a police station at The Rocks, in the heart of Sydney. He had become a part of a human drama. It was so refreshing to belong again after two months of unemployment.

‘So what do we do now? We get them ourselves, right, mate? The police won’t get them so we have to arrest them ourselves and take them into custody. And then get some evidence. Right?’ he asked, looking from one to the other.

‘No. I’m tired,’ said Joyce, who was still weepy. ‘I wanna go home.’

‘I guess I’m a bit hungry too,’ said Brett. ‘Wish I’d bought those sambos. Fancy getting a feed or something? Chips? Snags?’

‘The snagging room,’ the geomancer recalled from somewhere.

‘Let’s go and have a nice cup of tea,’ said Joyce. ‘I think that’s what we need. That’s what I need. Somewhere quiet and far away from any bad guys.’

‘Cuppa tea sounds fine,’ said Brett. ‘After all, we are rels.’

He slung his thick arm around Joyce’s shoulders. Her eyes widened with alarm.

The two of them headed to a café on George Street. Wong said he wanted to go for a walk, promising to return in half an hour. He took Brett’s mobile phone. ‘You have any problem, you call me. I come back quick,’ he said.

The geomancer decided to walk back to a little garden he had seen on his walk early that morning. He thought he could locate it from where he stood. But after walking for seven minutes and failing to find it, he decided to look for another spot in which he could sit and think.

A few minutes later, he found the perfect place: a grassy knoll under a tree in the middle of a nearby park signposted The Domain. The roads were reasonably distant, and formed an embracing road that pulled energy towards the spot, but without swamping it completely: an ideal place to make a decision.

Should they go home to Singapore or should they stay? Wong knew exactly what he wanted to do. He wanted to race to the airport and get on the first plane back to safe, boring, secure Singapore. Australia was all too dramatic for him—there were too many unpredictable, difficult things needing to be dealt with at once: a young woman with a terrible clash in her pillars of destiny who had to be helped against her will, a giant
bomoh
who had to be found and restrained, a traumatised intern who needed to be sent back to her father, a group of murderous Hong Kong triads who had to be avoided at all costs. These all added up to one thing: serious bad fortune. Logically, they should leave at once.

He recalled the wonderful lesson in the
Book of Chuang Tzu
on the importance of non-involvement. Fire, the sage wrote, is its own enemy. It destroys itself. Similarly, the cinnamon tree grows into such a delicious spice that it must be chopped down and consumed. The sage Chuang Tzu, while thinking on these things, was saddened by the way that powerful things contained the seeds of their own destruction. But that night, in a dream, he saw a Chinese sacred oak, the wood of which is not good for carpentry and is never used for building. The tree said to the sage in the dream that it had spent thousands of years acquiring the ability to be entirely useless. ‘Now all the other trees in the forest are regularly chopped down but I am not,’ the tree said. ‘When danger is all around, becoming entirely useless becomes the only condition which is of any use at all.’

The lesson was clear: if preserving life is the end goal, you must be neither greatly evil nor greatly good. The evil soon come to a bad end—but heroes also often come to a bad end. Better to be neither.

So why did he not immediately agree to go to the airport when Joyce had suggested it? He tried to locate, within himself, the precise emotion that was preventing him from taking that step. ‘It’s because I know,’ he said out loud. ‘Because I know what the
bomoh
will do. I know where he will go.’

His mind went back to the trip in the back of the police van from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the police station. As the vehicle had moved along the roads, Wong had noticed that something outside had suddenly caught Amran Ismail’s eye. The tall man’s head had jerked to one side and stopped moving. Wong had followed the direction Ismail’s eyes were facing, and then he had seen it too.

Both mystics were transfixed.

There, in the distance, was a structure that had an extraordinary amount of
ch
’
i
: And it was all bad. ‘Waaah,’ Wong had breathed to himself.

It was a massive building on a platform that seemed to cut into the water. He had noticed it vaguely an hour earlier as they had crossed the bridge. But now he got better look at it. Clearly it was built on some sort of plinth that jutted into the harbour. Somehow, it appeared to be falling over. He had never seen anything like it: it was like a huge pile of massive bowls that had tumbled down—and then been frozen at the point at which they smashed into the floor. Huge, curved, shell-shaped walls jutted almost vertically into the sky. They were arranged in series, as if the pile of bowls had shifted to one side, each bowl moving individually, before the whole pile crashed.

As a building, it would be totally impractical. The sharp curves would create enormous problems with shaping the rooms in the upper stories. Further, the walls had no windows—whoever was inside had a prime waterfront property, but seemed to have no means of enjoying the view.

But the worst thing of all was the cutting
ch
’
i.
It was a feng shui master’s worst nightmare. A series of angles cut deep into the central area of the structure—it would be like a series of chopping blades, or axe-heads pointed at whoever was in the middle. The feng shui of the building must be atrocious. There was no doubt at all in Wong’s mind that anyone who spent much time in that building would suffer enormous upheavals, arguments, fights, and possibly sickness or death.

As the lights had changed and the police van had moved further along the road, Wong noticed that Ismail’s head moved to keep the monstrous building in view. Although not a trained feng shui man, Ismail, as a mystic, would surely realise that the ugly thing on the waterfront was the perfect spot in which to conjure bad fortune for Madeleine Tsai. If anything tumultuous were going to happen to a person in Sydney, that was the place in which it would happen.

And this was the crux of Wong’s dilemma as he sat in the park, trying to decide what to do next. He reckoned there was a better than ninety per cent chance that Amran Ismail, upon being released from the police station, would immediately have taken Madeleine Tsai to that monstrous falling-over structure that had so firmly caught his eye.

The next question was this: since he, Wong, knew where Ms Tsai would be, was it incumbent upon him to rescue her?

No. He had no obligation to do so. There was no commission, no contract, and no deposit had been paid.

So that led to another point: what happened next was his own free decision. What did he stand to lose or gain by staying voluntarily to help her? It appeared likely that if he could find her, and possibly rescue her, or even help her just a little bit, he stood to gain a great deal out of it. Wong visualised a traffic accident about to happen during the approach to the monster building, and him, following a few steps behind, snatching Ms Tsai out of harm’s way. He was anxious to intercept her, if at all possible, before she reached it. The building was a feng shui man’s worst nightmare. There was no way that he would enter it himself or even step within its shadow.

The crux of the matter was this: The fates had given him a unique chance to help someone very, very rich. And that meant that he would be rewarded, for sure. Her father, he knew, was wealthy beyond imagination. The gift would surely be huge. And Old Man Tsai would surely cover expenses, too. He could send the tycoon an invoice which could cover his and Joyce’s fares to Australia—he’d pretend that they always travelled first class—and then add on a day rate of thousands of dollars a day for each of them. US dollars, perhaps. He could earn a fortune.

But if they went home now? Things were very different. He would have to pay for new air tickets. Even if Joyce’s father reimbursed him for those, he would still be out of pocket. The invoice for the old tickets would arrive from Susan Leong’s travel agency next week. He would get no payback whatsoever for this whole wild goose chase. And then there was the hotel bill, for which he had paid cash. All in all, he stood to loose everything he had made from Mrs Mirpuri this week. He felt physical pain at the thought of this. He clenched his fists so tightly he almost gave himself stigmata.

So what was it to be? If they stayed one more night, at least there was a chance that they could earn some money from Tsai Tze-ting. What if they stayed, but failed to find the girl? Even then, there would only be one pair of airline tickets to pay for, which, hopefully, Joyce’s father would be persuaded to cover. Maybe he would pay Wong back for the hotel as well? After all, this whole trip had been his idiot daughter’s idea—a misguided mission to find her friend, which he, Wong, had gone along with only out of the kindness of his heart. If Joyce’s father would cover such charges, most of the money from Mrs Mirpuri could be retained as revenue. And if the dentists paid as much as he hoped they would, this could still turn out to be a good week for him.

‘We stay,’ he decided. ‘Finish the job.’

The next two hours were spent in a blur of frantic activity— which again achieved nothing at all. Joyce, at first, had been upset that Wong had changed his mind about heading straight back to Singapore. And she was even more annoyed when he revealed that financial considerations were his main reasons for doing so.

‘For many years I want a reason for Old Man Tsai or someone like that to owe me favor. Now it has come. I cannot let opportunity go,’ he had said.

‘So this girl’s a tin-arse,’ Brett had commented. ‘Interesting.’

Incensed, Joyce had announced that she was going on strike with immediate effect. She had flatly declared that she would refuse to provide him with any further help in any way, or even accompany him on his mission to catch up with Madeleine Tsai and Amran Ismail—much to Wong’s delight.

‘I’m going back to the hotel,’ Joyce snapped. ‘Oh—maybe not.’ She recalled that the triads knew the hotel in which they were staying, and knew her name and room number. ‘Maybe I should book into another hotel under a fake name? What should I do? Can you find me a room and pay for it?’

‘You can’t play silly buggers here,’ interrupted Brett, who was entertaining himself by snapping the plastic forks in the coffee shop. ‘This is Australia. We have rules. You have to show your passport or ID when you book into a hotel. No fake names allowed. You can probably be arrested.’

Joyce sniffed. ‘Well, I’m still not going to help you get that guy. It’s like
totally
dangerous. I could get killed. I’m too young to get killed. I don’t like this job any more: triads, police—they’re all horrible. I used to work in a tax office. A tax office is really nice. Nothing happens.’

‘I don’t want you to get killed,’ Wong assured her. ‘I will go and search for Ismail myself. No problem. No need for you to come.’