The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook (13 page)

‘Okay okay.’

Joyce looked up from the magazine she was reading. ‘No probs.
I’ll
answer the phone. He’s the big boss. He shouldn’t have to answer his own phone. People’ll diss him. I can do all that secretary stuff, easy.’ The young woman beamed a 100-kilowatt smile at her boss and yanked the phone off his desk on to her own.

Wong did not return the smile. Instead, he gave her a malevolent glare.

Joyce was in disgrace and he wanted her to know it.

She had brought a group of friends into the office the previous night. They had apparently missed the 7:30 showing of a movie and she had decided to kill some time by giving them a tour of her workplace.

As a result, Wong arrived at the office at eight the next morning to find that it stank of stale beer and was littered with small polystyrene boxes from the hamburger store. But worst of all, there was writing on the wall—a Chinese character drawn badly
in blood—
a shocking sight, and extremely negative
feng shui.
After he had got over his fright, he had become puzzled. His knowledge of Chinese characters was encyclopedic, but he was unable to precisely identify the one on the wall, and had wasted half an hour going through his old stroke-order dictionaries to try to locate it.

When Joyce finally arrived at the office at 10:25, looking the worse for wear, she had apologetically explained that it wasn’t a Chinese character at all, but an accidental splash of burgundy, a type of red wine from the land of the
gwailo.

‘But why is wine on
wall
?’ Wong had asked.

Her eyebrows came together crossly, as if he had asked a totally unreasonable question. ‘Well, you know, you open some wine, you have a bit of a party, the wine gets splashed all over the wall, you know how it is.’

Wong did not know how it was, as was evident from his irritated expression.

Joyce, clearly feeling guilty as well as hung over, wearily tried to make amends. She promised to get some super-strong stain remover. ‘Mind you, the way I feel now, I wouldn’t know whether to splash it on the wall or drink it,’ she’d said.

An uneasy silence had descended.

So later that morning, when she offered to man the phone, the
feng shui
master assumed that she was attempting to make up for her sins, which remained startlingly obvious on the office wall. Then he remembered that Joyce’s mobile phone was out of order—water had short-circuited the electronics. He realised that the real reason she wanted maximum access to the office’s single phone line was to keep her social life going. Pestilent
mat salleh.

After this, an uneasy peace was maintained for precisely seven-and-a-half minutes. And then the phone rang.

‘Hello?’ said Joyce. ‘Yeah, this is CF Wong’s office. Oh. Well, I’m afraid he’s in a meeting. Can I help you? I’m his personal assistant.’

Wong was surprised to hear this. What meeting was he in?

‘A what? A garage? No, we don’t do garages. Who is this? Sorry, but Mr Wong is a busy man. He has to do a lot of important offices and shops and homes. He doesn’t have time for garages. Try one of the cheap ones. There are lots in the phone book, probably. Look under ‘
feng shui
people’ or ‘mystics’ or something. Good luck. Bye-ee.’

She lowered the handset and gave her boss a self-satisfied smirk. ‘There you go. Got rid of a time-waster for you. He wanted you to do his garage. I
mean.
’

Wong was confused. ‘I am not in a meeting.’

‘Yeah, yeah, but that’s what secretaries say. Good ones anyway.’ Joyce threw a dirty look at Winnie, but she didn’t seem to be listening. ‘You mustn’t make it too easy for people to get hold of you.’

‘But who was it?’

‘Dunno. Some idiot. I told him you didn’t do garages. You don’t, do you?’

Wong thought about this. ‘First you ask price.
Then
I decide if I do it. Better.’

Joyce lifted her feet on to her desk and picked up her magazine. ‘Okay, but I bet you couldn’t charge much for something like that,’ she said, flicking through the pages.

‘Depend on who belong to it.’

‘It belonged to some bloke called Young. Nevis Young or something like that.’

Wong leapt out of his chair as if he had been scalded. ‘Nevis Au Yeung?’

Joyce peered over the top of her magazine at him. Unnerved, she had difficulty keeping her voice steady. ‘Yeah, that’s it. D’you know him?’ She quietly took her feet off her desk.

The
feng shui
man was instantly short of breath. His bony chest appeared to be constricted. He couldn’t speak. He found himself stiff and swaying like a poorly-assembled scaffold, his mouth wide open. He began hyperventilating.

‘Uh-oh,’ said Joyce, dropping her magazine and sitting bolt upright. ‘I guess I did something wrong.’

Wong clamped his mouth shut and took three deep breaths through his nose. He spoke quietly. ‘You mean the secretary of Nevis Au Yeung called to me?’

‘No.’

‘Who was it?’

‘It was the guy himself. Nevis wotsit.’

Wong’s eyes bulged and he looked as if he was about to fall over. ‘Aiyeeah! Aiyeeaaaaah!’ The
feng shui
master’s thin body started to tip backwards. He was about to faint.

Winnie, her fingers still spread in front of her, shrieked. ‘Get him! I think maybe he will fall over and break his head.’

The geomancer again swayed steeply backwards.

Joyce shouted to Winnie: ‘You get him—you’re closer.’

‘Cannot-ah! Nails not dry!’

But Wong didn’t fall over. His knees buckled and he merely collapsed heavily into his seat, his eyes still glazed. Thirteen seconds passed.

Then he jerked himself to his feet again and spoke urgently: ‘Call him back! Find the number in the book. Quick! He is the vice-chairman of East Trade Industries Company Limited. Also, he is the 39th richest man in Asia.’ (Wong, like many of his friends, obsessively memorised the
Forbes’
listing of the world’s wealthiest people every year.)

‘Yes, boss,’ said Joyce, suddenly suffused with guilt.

‘Phone book is there,’ said Winnie.

‘I’ll see if I can do a last-call-received redial thing on this phone,’ the young woman said, punching a few buttons. She bit her lower lip and crossed the fingers on her free hand. Success! ‘There you go. It’s ringing.’

All three held their breath.

‘Hi. Is that Nevis? Yeah? My name’s Joyce. I’m the assistant of CF Wong, the
feng shui
man? You called just now?’

‘Give me the phone.’ Wong, still emotional, spoke with difficulty, his voice husky.

‘Well, I’m just calling to say that he’s just come out of his meeting. He said he doesn’t normally do garages but he might do yours, ’cause you are on Mr Pun’s board and all that.’

‘Give me the phone.’

‘Is it an urgent job? You want him to come today? He probably can, but we’ll have to charge a one hundred per cent surcharge for express service. As a board member, you are entitled to one free normal visit, but we have a surcharge for urgent assignments.’

‘GIVE ME —’ ‘Yeah, one hundred per cent. And if you want Mr Wong himself to do it, instead of one of his staff, that will be a further one hundred per cent. That okay?’

Wong lowered the hand that was reaching out to the handset. Two hundred per cent surcharge? It sank in that Joyce seemed to be handling this rather well.

The young woman, starting to relax, leaned back in her plastic seat. ‘If money is like not really a major problem, I would suggest you go for the annual package price. You get a monthly visit from Mr Wong himself. It’s way cheaper than booking individual visits.’

Nevis Au Yeung’s tinny voice could be heard coming out of the handset, but not loud enough for the Wong to hear what he was saying.

The frantic
feng shui
master knew that Au Yeung was one of the wealthiest members of Mr Pun’s board of directors. But he had never shown any interest in
feng shui.
What had changed the tycoon’s mind?

Wong tiptoed around to the side of Joyce’s desk to eavesdrop. All he could hear was an unintelligible buzz from the handset.

‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘Sounds good. What’s the address? Ridley Park? Yeah. What number? Got it. See you at eleven. Bye-ee.’

She put the phone down with a self-satisfied smirk.

Wong, McQuinnie and Lim stared at each other. The
feng
shui
master spoke first. ‘Well?’

‘He’s expecting us at his place in Ridley Park at eleven.’

‘How much he is paying?’

‘The first visit will be the free one he gets because he is one of Mr Pun’s board members. But he’ll pay the surcharge. As for the follow-up visits, well, he said he’d pay whatever we asked. Make up a number, CF.’

Wong tried not to smile too broadly, but it was difficult. He grinned and his hands turned to fists. His eyes were wide as rice-bowls. His cheeks lifted themselves so high that his wrinkled-nested eyes almost disappeared. The room seemed filled with heavenly light.

Nevis Au Yeung.
He had to make up a number to put on an invoice for
Nevis Au Yeung.

Oh, were there enough numbers in the universe?

For most people, a garage implies a small, single-storey construction for one or two cars. But Nevis Au Yeung had a seventeen-car classic collection, and then another ten cars that he actually used. The tycoon’s cars were worth more than the average Singapore apartment complex. His family members had another three dozen vehicles between them, and then there were some forty or fifty spaces for staff cars. The garage Au Yeung had asked Wong to deal with was more like a three-storey municipal parking lot—but of course, this being Ridley Park, the building was an elegant, architect-designed, steel-sided structure disguised behind a bank of trees.

‘Oops, sorry,’ said Joyce, peering upwards as they stepped out of the taxi. ‘He said a garage. I didn’t realise he meant a bloody great building.’

‘No problem,’ said Wong, his eyes shining with pure, unadulterated greed. ‘We charge by square metre.’ He was already making a mental estimate of the floor space of the parking lot—four or five thousand square metres—and huge numbers of dollars were running through his mind. This was going to be a nice, fat job that would cover his office expenses for months.

A loud, musical toot exploded clownishly behind them. They quickly stepped out of the drive as a vintage car rolled up and stopped three metres in front of their knees.

‘Hello chaps,’ said the driver, a debonair man of about forty with thinning red hair and one arm dangling out of the car. A younger man, with pale brown hair and a freckled face, waved a greeting from the passenger seat. The car in which they sat appeared to have been driven straight from an Edwardian postcard.

‘Waah. So old,’ the
feng shui
master said.

‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,’ Joyce said.

‘Hmm?’ Wong asked, unsure what language she was speaking.

‘Can we help you? Come to see the motors, have you?’ The man spoke with a cinematic London accent, pronouncing
motors
as if it was two words:
Mo. Uz.

While Wong was searching for the right words, Joyce got ahead of him. ‘Morning. Do you guys like work here? We want to get in. There’s no bell. We’re here to do some work for Mr Nevis Au Yeung. This is Mr —’

‘No problem,’ said the cheery motorist, whose accent and dark tortoiseshell glasses gave him the air of a cut-price Michael Caine. He held out his hand, thrusting a business card at Joyce. ‘The name’s Dick Curdy. This is my brother Petey. Say hi, Petey.’

‘Hi Petey,’ said Petey.

‘We look after the Chairman’s little collection of motors for him. The ones He’s got left, anyway. Hardy-ha-ha.’

Joyce showed the card to Wong. CURDY’S CLASSIC CARS, it said, next to a picture of a vintage car.

‘That’s one majorly cool car,’ the young woman said. ‘Is it one of his oldest?’

‘What? This little number?’ Curdy slapped the car door, which looked as if it were made from green enamel. ‘Naah. This ain’t his. This is ours. Replica. Made about thirteen years ago. It’s younger than you are. It’s younger than Petey’s mental age. No, it’s our clients who own the vintage cars, not poor us. Me and Petey have to schlep around in cheap copy cars, or use shanks’s pony. We’re workers, the unwashed masses, the lumpenproletariat and all that.’

Petey man leaned out of the window. ‘You a motorist yourself, miss?’

‘No,’ said Joyce. ‘I can’t drive! I use the MRT—and shanks’s pony, like you.’

Wong turned an amazed face at her. ‘You use
horse
to come to work?’

The eyes of the men in the car changed focus slightly and the
feng shui
master realised there was someone behind them.

The two visitors turned to see a stocky, unsmiling man in a dark uniform approaching. He greeted the Curdy brothers with a courteous wave and opened the high security gates for them to drive through.

Then he introduced himself as Alyn Puk, day-shift security guard. ‘You’re the people He called? From the
feng shui
company, is it? Follow me.’

The Curdys waved a cheerful goodbye as their replica car roared past.