The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (4 page)

Then Zhang scratched out the names at the bottom
of each scroll. He replaced each name with the name of
the other brother.

He gave the lists back. He said to the first brother:
‘
Now you have more than your brother.
’
And he said to
the second brother:
‘
And you have more than yours.

’
If you can win a battle by accepting your enemy
’
s
arrows, Blade of Grass, your victory will be untouchable
from any side.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong
,
part 343

He wrote feverishly, knowing that moments of creative tranquility within the Telok Ayer Street offices of CF Wong & Associates were rare and inevitably fleeting. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was one minute past ten o’clock. He had been working quietly alone for almost three hours. How kind the gods were, to bless him with staff who were always late! Long may their bad habits continue. He clapped his hands together and performed a short, grateful bow in the direction of the nearest temple, which was a few hundred metres south of his office. While not overtly religious, Wong had a deep-rooted habit of performing lip-service to the Taoist rituals he had learned during his childhood in Baiwan, a village in Guangdong Province, China. He could not pass a temple, even on the other side of the road, without a quick bow and a cursory wave of his closed palm.

Ten o’clock! He looked out of the window for a moment and blinked. One of these days, he thought, his receptionist-secretary-clerk-office administrator Winnie Lim might miss the entire morning—or not turn up at all. Perhaps she would go—what was the phrase in English? A wol? Or was that a type of bird?

Then there was the nightmarish intern that his main client, Mr Pun, had forced on him a few weeks ago. He would never forget the horrific moment a gawky young female
mat salleh
had appeared in his office speaking a bizarre and incomprehensible sub-dialect of English. ‘My dad’s like “My mate Mr Pun’s gotta real feng shooee master and you can work for him,” and I’m like “
Wow
”,’ she had said.

It had taken him a long time to establish any sort of proper communication with Joyce McQuinnie, who came from British-Australian parentage but seemed to speak only a strange language called ‘Teenager’. An early breakthrough had been when he had realised that her word for
yes
was ‘Whatever’. More recently, he had worked out that her term for
no
was ‘As if.’

On arrival at Telok Ayer Street, her first action had been to re-arrange her desk and chair to get more light. Who but the most insensitive person would unilaterally move the furniture in a feng shui master’s office? From then on, she spent her days talking in an unknown tongue to her friends, and laughing the way that only men were supposed to laugh. He found it almost impossible to
think
let alone work with McQuinnie in the office.

And it wasn’t just the noise that was a problem. Every day at 11 am, she would disappear for ten minutes before returning with a drink she called latte—a cardboard bucket of foam that made the office stink of bitter coffee and cow’s milk. To add insult to injury, at midday she would sniff his aromatic
nasi
kandar
lunchbox and turn up her nose with a pronounced ‘Eeeewwww!’ For her own lunch, she would order sandwiches so over-stuffed that she couldn’t get them into her mouth. Most afternoons, her desk would be liberally sprinkled with bits of shredded lettuce—
raw
lettuce, if you can imagine.

Worst of all, she insisted on accompanying him on many of his assignments, where her loud and garish presence—she wore shapeless clothes and too much jewellery—would unsettle his clients. A few brave ones tried to converse with her. A developer named Tak had politely asked her about how her studies had been going. She had replied: ‘Oh, they used to be like
okay
and I got through my Os but dad kept moving and everything went like pear-shaped, totally.’

Old Tak had turned to Wong. ‘Pear-shaped? Is that good feng shui?’

Wong had been unable to think of a reply, so had nodded sagely.

He shuddered at the memory of those difficult early attempts at communication. Then a rather more attractive thought drifted into his mind.

If Winnie and Joyce disappeared, he may have space and budget enough to get a real personal assistant: someone who would ease his workload, rather than add intolerable burdens to it. And he could redesign the furniture in the office and surmount the great shame he presently bore of being a feng shui master with a shockingly badly organised workplace. That, surely, would boost his spirits, not to mention his income. Oh, let Winnie and Joyce be a wol! With that delicious thought bringing a guilty smile to his lips, he turned his attention back to his work.

Slowing his breathing, the feng shui master gathered his scattered thoughts around him and refocused his attention on the masterpiece on which he had been working for several years: a volume he hoped would be his first major work published in English. The handwritten journal was ragged and dog-eared, but remained his proudest possession. Two hundred pages of anecdotes and quotations, it was already more than one and a half centimetres thick. Yet there was still a great deal to do.

To get back to work, he first had to clear himself of all distracting notions. It shouldn’t be difficult. The room was quiet. The clock on the wall didn’t work (something he would never allow to happen at the premises of a client, a stopped timepiece being an intolerably negative feng shui omen). The air conditioner hummed and clanked distressingly loudly, but after four years it had stopped being an obtrusive sound. The water cooler normally dripped—but it had been turned off, since the office manager had not refilled it for two weeks. Perfect peace and stillness descended.

The thoughts of his favourite sage, Mo Ti, started to flow into Wong’s head. It was as if he could hear the quiet but clear voice of the great thinker over the chasm of two and a half millennia of history.

For a few glorious moments, the only sound in the room was the scratch of Wong’s pen on the paper.

Which was the moment Winnie Lim chose to arrive.

‘Aiyeeaah,’ she screeched in her rasping voice, pushing the door so hard that it bounced against the wall and returned back to slam against her still outstretched palm. There was a splintering sound and a bright, gleaming crack appeared in the frosted glass.

‘Aiyeeaah!’ said Winnie again. ‘GLASS BREAKING. Cheap glass. I SUE YOU.’

‘I sue you for coming to work late,’ rejoined Wong.

‘I sue you for always putting me in bad mood.’

‘You can’t sue for that.’

‘Can. I get American boyfriend. American can sue for ANYTHING.’

Wong considered this for a moment and then decided that it was true. He lapsed into defeated silence as Winnie threw her handbag onto her chair and then disappeared for her first job of each day: to spend five minutes in the toilet checking her make-up—a redundant task, since she spent most of the day reapplying it in various styles.

She slammed the door again on the way out. The empty water cooler rattled.

Wong closed his journal and slipped it into his drawer. He was unlikely to get any more writing done this morning.

When the office administrator returned to the room, Wong decided that he had to at least attempt to take command of the situation. ‘I am ver’ busy today. Plenty work. You must do all the letters, postings, filings, phone callings. I must do urgent work on my book. Nearly finish,’ he lied.

She froze and turned her head towards him, fixing him with an icy glare. She said nothing.

Determined to tighten his grasp on the initiative with which he was grappling, Wong sat stiffly upright and glared back at her. He decided he would write her a detailed list of instructions to make sure she actually achieved some useful work today.

The staring contest continued for a few seconds, and then Winnie, bored, sat down and started busying herself at her desk.

The feng shui master watched uncomfortably over the top of a piece of paper. He pretended to concentrate on reading a letter for a while, his irritation preventing him from actually taking in any words.

The phone rang. And rang again. And continued to ring.

‘Pick it up,’ Winnie barked. ‘I’m busy.’ He glanced over and noticed she was applying tiny sticky-backed images of Canto-pop singers onto vermilion and cerise fingernails.

He picked up the handset. ‘Hello?’

‘Good morning. Who is speaking?’ said a voice.

‘You are speaking,’ replied the geomancer, who had grown up without modern appliances and had never mastered the intricacies of telephone etiquette.

‘Is it Mr Wong? I thought you had a secretary. When I call before.’

‘She is busy. Putting pictures of music people on her fingers.’

‘Oh,’ said the caller.

‘Who are you?’ The voice seemed familiar.

‘I am Mrs Tsai-Leibler.’

‘Oh. Mrs Tsai-Leibler. How are you? You are okay? Better now? Very shocking, what happen on Saturday. Okay now?’

‘Okay. Can I talk now, is it okay?’

‘Okay. What do you want to talk about?’

‘The fire. On Saturday. I know who did it. I know for sure.’

‘Ah, Mrs Tsai-Leibler, very interesting. But I think better you not tell me. Better you tell police. Fire is very serious. Very criminal. Very police matter. Not for me. I am only feng shui master.’

The woman on the phone sighed. ‘Mr Wong, I need to talk to somebody. Can I talk to you in Cantonese?’

‘
Hai-ah
,’ he replied.

‘
Ho
,’ she said, switching into their vernacular. ‘Then we can understand each other better. Mr Wong, the person who tried to kill me and my family on Saturday also tried to kill you.

This matter involves you, too. You are involved. You cannot avoid it.’

‘Yes, yes, true, true. But still, I repeat, arson is a criminal matter for the police to investigate. You have a suspect, you should tell the police. Not me.’

‘I have told the police,’ she said, a tone of despair in her voice. ‘They weren’t interested.’

‘No, no, I am sure they will be very interested.’

‘I’m telling you they weren’t interested.’

‘Why not? Some problem?’

‘Well, you could say that. The man who tried to kill us was a man named Joseph Hardcastle Oath. He used to be one of my husband’s patients.’

‘Oh, good. If you know name of suspect, makes it easier to find. You know where he lives, too?’

‘Yes I do. In the deepest part of Hell. He died two years ago.’

CF Wong wasn’t sure how to reply. ‘Ah. Understand. Police don’t like to investigate crimes committed by dead people.’

Calida Tsai-Leibler talked to CF Wong for almost an hour. By the end of the period, she had convinced him of two things. First, that it was hopeless for her to continue trying to interest the police in her theory that a ghost had set fire to her apartment two days earlier. She had tried, and they had told her firmly that they didn’t want to know. And second, he realised that she was not going to get off the phone until he had agreed to commit himself to take some action to investigate her claim.