The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (18 page)
Security guard Alyn Puk was a changed man. He sucked his stomach in and somehow managed to suspend it at chest level. He strutted around, hands behind his back, chin high, pigeon-chested and proud.
‘The barskets,’ he kept repeating under his breath as he watched Harris Wu, Allie Ng and the Curdy brothers being dragged off by bodyguards to an uncertain fate. ‘Bloody doongu barskets.’
He saw Wong packing his charts into his bag and strolled over.
‘Never used to believe all that
feng shui
stuff-lah,’ he said. ‘But I guess it does really work, no?’
‘The flow,’ said Wong. ‘Flow of
ch’i
, flow of cars, very important. That Wu, he keeps saying how important is flow. He boasts about good flow in garage. So when I saw how he made the rooms stick out so bad, interrupt the flow, I knew something funny was there.’
‘Maybe better I study this stuff,’ said Puk. ‘This
ch’i
stuff is what?’
‘Scientist call it bio-electrical energy. Philosopher call it life force. Indian call it
prana.
Religious man call it God. I call it
ch’i.
’
‘Where does it come from?’
‘From centre of Earth. From sun, moon and stars. From sky and from beneath our feet. From outside us. From inside us.’
‘Can you see it?’
‘I can see what it touches.’
Puk, still filled with amazement at the events of the past few hours, could not stop shaking his head from side to side. ‘But how could they possibly think they could get away with it? I mean, someone would eventually have found that secret room that Harris built, even if it was months or years later, wouldn’t they?’
The geomancer nodded. ‘Yes. I thought about that. I think Harris Wu and Allie Ng plan to steal as many cars as they could—and then they would burn down whole garage, destroy the evidence. I study architecture. Mr Wu use many flammable materials. Unusual for garage. Very suspicious.’
Wong and McQuinnie left Ridley Park in Nevis Au Yeung’s Lincoln Towncar, the two of them feeling lost in the soundproofed, room-sized cabin. They sat with their backs to the driver. Sitting opposite was Foo-Foo, who had offered to drop them off at their office on her way out for a little shopping on Orchard Road. The socialite stared at Joyce, who had become quiet and morose.
‘Something wrong?’ Foo-Foo asked.
‘Naah. Nothing really.’
The young woman played with the ring on her finger. ‘It’s just—well, life seems so unfair. I mean, I know it’s wrong to steal and all that. But still, your husband has got loads of money and cars. He wouldn’t have missed a car or two. And— oh, never mind.’
‘And younger Curdy very cute.’ Foo-Foo looked away as she said this, to spare Joyce’s blushes.
‘Yeah.’ There was a moment’s silence and then Joyce realised what she had said. ‘I mean, was he? I don’t know. I didn’t notice. I never notice that sort of thing.’
The three of them drove on without speaking for the rest of the journey, and by the time the limousine reached Telok Ayer Street, the young woman had begun to regain her composure. She had a question for Wong as they struggled up the steep, rather odorous staircase of YY Mansions, as they walked up to their office on the fourth floor.
‘One thing I don’t understand, CF. If the Curdys’ car was green, and the Alfa Romeo was blue, how did they manage to switch them?’
‘They put green paint on Alfa, drive it out no problem.’
‘But how come Puk and the others didn’t notice that the car in the sealed room upstairs was not blue?’
‘Curdys very clever. They put yellow tinted windows in. Makes blue colour look like green. Anybody look inside, they see green car. But really is blue car.’
They arrived at the cracked frosted-glass door of CF Wong & Associates. Joyce grabbed his arm. ‘Before you go in, I need to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘While we were out of the office yesterday, I gave the keys to a friend of mine so he could come and use stain remover on the stain on the wall.’
Wong nodded. ‘I know. Winnie sent me fax.’
‘Unfortunately, the stain remover made it worse.’
‘Also Winnie told me that.’
‘So he came back this morning and repainted the wall. He said that was the only way to cover up the stain.’
‘Good,’ he said. Wong smiled. This was a happy ending to the stain-on-the-wall incident: a freshly whitewashed wall at someone else’s cost.
He moved to enter the office. But Joyce continued to tug at the fabric of his jacket.
‘Er, CF. I hope you’ll like it. He said he thought it looked really nice.’
‘I hope he use good quality white paint.’
Joyce swallowed. Her top teeth involuntarily bit her lower lip. She blew her breath out of her mouth. ‘Er. CF. He tried painting the stain white, but the red showed through. So instead, he went back to the shop to get more paint. He painted —’ But she didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence.
Wong had stepped into the room and gasped to find that the entire west wall of the office had been painted a vivid shade of crimson. Like a wall opposite a Chinese cemetery.
He stared at it for a few seconds. The sight filled him with horror. Blood. Gallons and gallons of blood. A wall of blood.
‘I think it’s lovely,’ said Joyce. ‘What do you think?’
Wong sat down in his chair. ‘Why do the gods hate me so?’ he moaned.
In the time of the Tang Dynasty (618–907), there were
many secrets in the kingdom.
People made plots against each other. People whispered
about each other. People were very careful what they said. People were very careful what they did.
All except one man. Official Guo Zyi took hammer
and nails. He nailed his door open. No one in his family
could shut it. Everyone passing could see inside.
When people walked past they peeked inside his house.
Now Guo Zyi particularly loved his daughter. She
was very bossy. He acted like a servant to her. People
saw him combing her hair. People saw him cooking her
meals. People saw her shouting at him. Everybody laughed
at them.
His two sons said: ‘Father, please close the door. Because
everybody can see us.’
But Guo Zyi replied: ‘I will not close the door. Because
everybody can see us.’
A time came when there was a great deal of slander and
lies against officials of the city. Many officials lost their jobs. Many people accused each other.
But throughout the period of civil disruption, no one
accused Guo Zyi of anything.
If you nail the door of your heart open, Blade of Grass, you
can be beyond the power of evil ones who slander and lie. This is great power you can acquire for yourself, with no
help from magic or from Heaven.
An ancient Chinese proverb says: ‘He who moves
towards the light does not need the glow of joss sticks.’
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong, part 126.
Dilip Kenneth Sinha wound down the taxi window, opened his mouth and drew in a large lung-full of air.
It was stinky, pestilent and toxic.
The precise ingredients were hard to pick out, but he could detect several distinctive odours. Jira, dhania and petrol were the top notes, with subtle after-tones of garam masala, urine, dalchini, methi and perspiration. Sumptuous!
He closed his eyes and a warmth rose from the depths of his soul. The pleasure he felt was rich and wholesome and genuine. Yes, the air in this place may taste vile, it may be packed with particulate matter, it maybe dangerous to health, but no matter: it was home air. It was
his
air. It was what he had grown up on and what had formed his body. He took another deep swig of it and opened his eyes to survey the marketplace he was passing.
People kept remarking about how Hyderabad had changed. They had talked for some years about changing its name to Cyberabad, because of the business community’s talent for technology. But as he gazed at the buzzing, packed streets of tiny houses, interspersed with large, traffic-locked thoroughfares, what struck Sinha most of all was how little it had altered over the decades.
It had always been a city with a bit of bustle about it, and that physical energy was still there. Groups moved in bright, vibrant clusters. Most of the women he could see were wearing lahenga choli outfits.
The only difference was that the number of men scurrying along the pavements in lungis and shirts of coloured cotton or printed polyester had fallen. There were now more men in dark trousers, Western ties and white shirts—short-sleeved shirts, naturally. One even saw a not inconsiderable number of male adults in full Western suits. And if you peeled their jackets off, you would find three further layers of clothing. The silk-lined worsted jacket hid a matching waistcoat, shirt and singlet, all four garments bravely being borne in a land where a single light cotton shirt was the only sensible upper body garment.
Sinha himself favoured the single-layer safari suit, as popularised in American B-movies set in Asia.
As the taxi slowly progressed through the maze of market streets to the beginnings of the financial district, he noticed with regret that modern clothing styles had made the business area of the town less colourful than the rest of the city. The office district imposed dark blues, charcoal greys and pinstripe blacks onto the city’s naturally colourful soul. It was as if the more sombre the tone of your dress, the more money you would make.
Yet for a thousand reasons, it was still the same old Hyderabad to him. Even here, several shops were still emblazoned with words like ‘Shirtings’ in antique, ornate fonts, instead of the slick ‘G2000’ logos you would see in clothing stores in Singapore. Cappuccino might be available in the five-star hotels downtown, but in his favourite canteen— which he had visited for breakfast—tea was still served warm and deep brownish pink, in tumblers instead of cups, with three spoonfuls of sugar already stirred in. And all items of traffic gaily announced their honking presence as they passed, giving the streets the air of a parade, compared to the low, discreet rumbles and roars of traffic in his present haunts of Singapore and Hong Kong.
Wong must be enjoying the architectural mix in the capital of Andhra Pradesh, Sinha mused. There were many reminders of the period of the British Raj, with stately colonial buildings at many major junctions. Certain corners reminded him of quarters of colonial Singapore. Yet the eye was regularly caught by other structures, equally grand, but with Islamic and Hindu backgrounds. As the taxi moved along the road leading out of the city, Sinha saw Saracenic, Mughal and mediaeval Indian themes along the houses spanning the wide boulevard.
On this visit, Sinha had spotted one thing he hadn’t seen before. Signs on the walls offered NO DEMOLITION VAASTU. In other words, practitioners of the Indian equivalent of
feng shui
would come and examine your premises with a cast-iron guarantee that the spirits would not decree that your house needed to be pulled down and a new one built in its place.
Feng shui
with an opt-out clause designed to keep costs low. Even Mr Wong hadn’t thought of that one.
Never mind the technological revolution: India remained India.
The room was black. It was so uniformly stained that it was difficult to believe that it had ever been any other colour. Only the presence of thin stripes of yellow wallpaper visible behind burned cabinets revealed that it had once been more brightly coloured.
‘Waah,’ Wong said.
‘Phew,’ Joyce agreed.
Sinha merely nodded in response. ‘The bomb itself was quite small. But the conflagration it started, as you can see, was sizeable. It caused the complete destruction of almost everything in the room. It turned this space into an instant furnace.’
‘Yuk,’ said the young woman, her face a mask of horror as she stepped gingerly onto a soft, mushy floor. Underfoot, a layer of moist ash was speckled with indistinguishable chunks of charred material. Eeee. Was any of it human remains? ‘And were there many . . . like
people
in here at the time?’