The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (28 page)

‘Jack what?’

‘There’s a young man named Jackie Sum who is here with two other gentlemen.’

‘To see me? Are you sure they want me? I’m Joyce McQuinnie, in room, er, 706?’

‘That’s right. That’s who they asked for. Do you want to speak to one of them?’

‘No worries,’ said Joyce, slipping back into the Australian lilt that she had had as a child. ‘Just send ’em up.’

She had not missed the fact that the receptionist had specified that they were young men. She raced to the mirror to see if she looked all right. She dabbed some perfume under her ears and on her wrists, and started trying to get her hair into some kind of order. Who could they be? Must be friends of CF’s. Actually, he had talked about getting in touch with the local feng shui masters here in Sydney. It must be them. Wong was sometimes a surprisingly fast worker. That was the advantage of being an early riser, she supposed.

Two minutes later, there was a knock on her door.

Joyce took one last look in the mirror, and then went to open the door. ‘You’re a fast mover, Mr Sum,’ she said. ‘Oh. It’s you.’

‘Yes,’ said Wong, stepping into the room. ‘Good you woke up. We have plenty work to do. Must get started. Must leave immediately. Right now.’

‘Yep. I’m ready to rock ’n’ roll.’

He gave her a look.

‘Not literally,’ she added. ‘Even I don’t go dancing at this time of the morning.’ She strolled over to the desk and started picking up things to put in her handbag. ‘Ready to start searching, I mean.’

‘Quick. We must leave now. Who is Mr Sum? You mention Mr Sum. When I came in.’

‘Isn’t he one of your friends?’ Joyce replied. ‘He phoned from downstairs. He and his friends are coming up now.’

‘Must be mistake.’

‘You don’t know him? Could he be a Sydney feng shui man?’

‘I didn’t call any yet.’ His expression was becoming increasingly concerned.

Joyce shrugged her shoulders. ‘Anyway, we’ll find out in a minute. I think reception said his name was Jackie. Funny name for a guy.’

At this news, Wong seemed to jump out of his skin.

‘Jackie! Come,’ he said. ‘We go. Quick!’

He grabbed her hand and tugged her violently towards the door.

‘Wait. Let me get my bag. What’s the deal here?’

‘
Fai-dee!
’ he shouted.

They moved out of the door, Wong pushing her unceremoniously like peasant shoving a reluctant bullock to a cart.

‘The lift’s that way,’ Joyce said.

‘I know. So we go this way.’

Escaping from a hotel is much harder than it seems in the movies. After running down four flights of stairs, both Joyce and Wong slowed to a crawl. And there were still three more stories to go. They could barely move.

‘Phooo!’ said Joyce. ‘It’s a—long—way—down. Let’s— take—the elevator.’ Each word came out as a gasp.

‘Okay,’ agreed Wong, his chest rising and falling as he took deep draughts of air. ‘Maybe there is service elevator.’

They went through a couple of swing doors and eventually found a metal lift the staff used to transport baskets of laundry and other goods between floors.

It trundled slowly and noisily down towards the ground floor, but stopped at the second. The doors opened, and a chambermaid entered. She was fortyish and had rosy cheeks. ‘G’day,’ she said. ‘You’ve come the wrong way. This is the staff lift. You should use the main lifts. They’re much nicer.’ There was a strong smell of disinfectant from her basket.

‘He’s a feng shui man,’ Joyce explained, pointing to her companion. ‘He won’t use the other lifts because they have bad feng shui.’

‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘Really?’ She looked around at the ugly non-slip steel plates of the cargo lift in which they stood. ‘But this lift has good feng shooee, does it? Does that mean it gives me good luck to use it?’

‘Definitely,’ said Joyce.

‘That’s good. I go up and down in it a hundred times a day if at all. Mind you, it hasn’t brought me any good luck yet. Does it take a long time to come through?’

‘Um. Paint your room pink and drink a glass of orange juice every morning,’ ad-libbed Joyce. ‘The good luck will start to flow.’

Thanking her, the woman advised them to get off at the first floor and go through a door on the right. ‘That leads you back into the hotel main lobby. Or you can turn left and go to the back of the hotel, to the place where the buses pull up. I’ll get some orange juice straight away. Thanks for the tip.’

They thanked her in turn and raced out of the back door of the hotel into the car park. The morning air was cool and reviving.

‘Come on,’ said Joyce. ‘We can sneak out through the side gate and get a taxi around the front.’

‘Where to?’

‘I don’t know.’

Instead, Wong insisted they walk at a brisk pace to the right, where he vaguely recalled from his morning walk that there was a narrow alley leading to a busy main road. It seemed to be a good route for people who wanted to quickly leave the immediate area of the hotel and get lost in the rush hour crowd.

Wong looked at his watch. It was 8.49. The pavements were fairly busy, and the pair quickly blended in with office workers racing to their workplaces. They found a small park by taking a tortuous route on the other side of a busy road called Day Street Harbour and sat on a secluded bench, watching pigeons peck at the ground.

‘So who IS Jackie? You’d better tell me what is going on.’

Wong looked nervously around. ‘I think he is Big Brother.’

‘Maddy’s brother? That’s nice. So why are we—’ ‘No, Big Brother.
Goh-goh. Daai-loh.
It means—’ ‘Step brother? Adopted brother?’

‘Let me talk. You know what is a triad?’

Joyce thought for a moment. ‘Yeah. They’re like bad guys—I saw a Chow Yun-fat movie once. Like the mafia?’

‘Yes. I think Jackie Sum is a Hong Kong triad. They are looking for Maddy. He is called Big Brother. He is senior rank.’

‘They want to rescue her?’ Joyce asked hopefully.

‘They want to kill her.’

‘Oh.’

She appeared not to have believed her ears. She repeated: ‘They want to
kill
her?’

‘Probably.’

Joyce was speechless. She froze like a statue. She seemed to have stopped breathing entirely.

Silence descended. They watched the pigeons peck at the ground. There was a chiming sound, like an old-fashioned ice cream van in the distance. Somewhere, a duck quacked. A child’s voice could be heard shouting: ‘It’s over here. Mama.
Mama.
’ The traffic lights in the distance changed colour, triggering a roar of vehicles.

A flood of questions burst out of her. ‘Why did they want to come up and see me? Where did they get my name? How did they know we were in Australia? How do they know who I am? What are they doing here? I don’t understand any of what is happening. Why are we running? Why do they want to kill Maddy? Do they want to . . .’ She trailed off, unable to finish the sentence.

‘No. They don’t want to kill you,’ he answered quietly.

‘So why are we running from them?’

The geomancer sighed. ‘It all start to make sense to me now. Maddy comes from family who is involve with triads in Hong Kong. 14K is name of big triad group, one of the biggest. Remember Cady Tsai-Leibler?’

‘Maddy’s cousin.’

‘Yes. Owner of the flat in Ridley Park. Wife of dentist.’

‘Yes, yes, I know.’

‘Now I remember something what she said. She said that she had friends in Hong Kong could sort out problems—any sort of problems—but not ghosts. She said many strange things. I think she is from triad family. I think Maddy also got mix up with triads. I think she was girlfriend of one triad. Senior triad. Name Jackie Sum. She is young, pretty. What they like.’

‘So if she was one of them, why do they want to . . . kill her?’ She clearly found the phrase hard to say.

‘There is one thing no triad girlfriend is allowed to do. She did it, I think.’

‘What is it?’

‘Leave.’

‘Oh.’ Joyce contemplated this for a while. ‘So they’re cross with her because she wanted to leave the triads and be, like, a normal person?’

‘I think so. So she leave Hong Kong. She go to Malaysia.

She change her name. She move around only at night. She hang out in underworld in Malaysia. She meet Ismail. He looks after her. She is happy for a while. But Ismail is also difficult person, dangerous person. Also
ho marfan—
much trouble. After he found out that she had much big bad luck coming—then again she is in danger.’

‘Huh. The moral of this story seems to be don’t date dodgy guys from the underworld. They may be cool guys with big pecs but they eventually try to kill you.’

Wong nodded. ‘Too bad.’

Silence returned. Joyce had become increasingly nervous.

Her shoulders were hunched. She appeared to be shivering.

Every time someone walked by, she followed them with her eyes. Every time someone glanced at them, she tensed herself, ready to spring up and start running again. Every time she heard a car engine roaring, she imagined a group of men with guns jumping out of the car and running towards her.

‘You didn’t answer my question. Why were they coming to see me? Why me? I’m nobody. I’m a schoolgirl. I’m nothing.’

‘I don’t know. They have been looking for Maddy for long time, I think. Their contact in Singapore maybe see her or her boyfriend visiting home of Madame Xu. So they go to see Madame Xu yesterday, after we go to airport. Dilip Sinha is there. He tells them that Maddy is a friend of yours. He gives them our names, name of our hotel. So they fly to Sydney on next plane. They arrive early this morning. They go straight to hotel. They want to see you, because they want you to tell them where Maddy is.’

‘But I don’t know where Maddy is.’

‘Yes,’ said Wong. He didn’t want to tell her what he thought the most likely outcome would have been had they been caught: that the triads would have beaten or tortured them half to death in a bid to find the slightest clue to Madeleine Tsai’s whereabouts.

The feng shui master glanced at the young woman. He felt odd, uncomfortable, fidgety. He wondered for a moment whether he was coming down with an illness. But then he realised that the unfamiliar feeling was more emotional than physical. His hostility had waned, and had been replaced by a small spark of sympathy. Children are not normally required to deal with triad death threats.

Again, the quietness flowed around them. The small park seemed such a natural, peaceful place. It was strange and terrifying to be talking about evil and murder in a sunny, green spot so filled with freshness, flowers and chirping insects.

‘CF,’ said Joyce, without looking around at him.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m scared.’

Wong nodded. ‘I too.’

She turned to him. ‘You know, when you see this sort of thing in the movies, the hero gets more and more determined to risk everything to save the person in trouble. He’ll, like, go out on a limb. He’ll give up his own life, even.’

He looked at her with curiosity. What was she about to suggest?

‘But it’s not like that in real life,’ she said. ‘Is it? You know what I wanna do?’

‘What you want to do?’

‘Go home.’

Wong nodded. ‘Me too.’

‘I hardly know Maddy. Why risk my life to rescue her? It’s kinda dumb really if you think about it.’

‘Kinda dumb, yes.’

‘She’s probably hung out with these sort of people all her life. She’s an underworld person. She knows how to handle herself in these situations. I don’t. What do I know? I’m experienced at nothing. I’m experienced at being in school. And working in a tax office. I know the names of all the members of N’Sync. Those are the only things I’m good at. I’m out of place in, in, this situation.’

‘Understand.’

She turned pleading eyes to him. ‘I wanna go home. Please, CF?’

‘I think it is good idea,’ he said. He started fumbling inside his jacket. ‘Wait first.’ He pulled out a large envelope that contained what Joyce recognised to be ticket folders from Susan Leong’s travel agency. Wong studied the writing on the tickets. ‘Hmm,’ he said. He ran his fingers over the wording and mumbled in Cantonese. ‘
Ho marfan.

’ ‘What?’

‘Big problem. I bought cheap tickets. Cannot change date.

Can fly home tomorrow only. Not today.’

‘Can’t we just buy new tickets?’

‘No. Very expensive. Very wasting. To not use these tickets.

Cannot.’

Joyce was annoyed. ‘I’ll pay for them.’

‘You have money?’

‘No.’

‘You have credit card?’

‘No. Dad says I can get one when I’m eighteen.’

‘So how you pay for the tickets?’

‘You pay on your credit card. Daddy will pay you back.’

‘I got no credit card. Credit card bad feng shui. Makes money move away, cannot see it go. Very bad.’

This stumped Joyce. ‘That is like
soooooo
dumb. Whoever heard of a grown-up without a credit card? I didn’t even know it was
allowed.

’ Wong grit his teeth and folded his arms.

She bit her nails and thought for a while. ‘I know. I’ve got it. Some of my family from my dad’s side still lives in Australia. I’ve got an Aunt Su in Sydney. She’ll give us some money.’

She grabbed the geomancer’s forearm. ‘If I get money from my family, can I buy two tickets out of here on the first plane?’

Wong, still irritated, gave her a look of tentative approval. He unconsciously put his hand protectively over the wallet in his inside jacket pocket. ‘Maybe we can leave early. But only if you pay. I already spend too much.’