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.
Puk, a tired-looking man who seemed too heavy to be in his present profession, led them to a small office set into the ground floor of the car park building. While they were walking, he used his walkie-talkie to summon someone else. ‘Harris Wu there, is it? This is Puk. Could you get him to come over to my office? Tell him the feng shui people are here. Yah. Now. Over.’
They heard a roar as Dick Curdy drove his elegant, low-slung replica vintage car into the garage block. It made a purring noise that kept changing in tone as it drove up a network of ramps to the third storey.
Wong had already noticed that people on the site, like the ancient Israelites, refused to utter the name of their leader. He was referred to simply by the reverential pronoun ‘He’ — clearly spoken with a capital initial.
The three of them sat down at a desk in a tiny office.
‘The usual rules apply,’ Puk said. ‘You know already, is it?’
‘No,’ Joyce said.
‘Yes,’ Wong said. ‘You mean stuff is confidential?’
‘Yah, man. Nutting you say or hear while working on His premises can be pass’ on to anyone else—media or newspaper man, broadcaster, like that—and no photography or recording of any kind is allowed and all that stuff, et cetera, et cetera, you know? Just sign here.’
Puk made them both sign a privacy contract that was far too long and boring to read. Then he threw it carelessly into a filing cabinet.
Another man arrived, a tall, thin, bow-tied man with Shanghainese features and an educated Singaporean accent. He was wheeling an office chair in front of him. He squeezed through the doorway and handed his name card to the two visitors. ‘Harris Wu,’ he announced. ‘I’m the architect for all His Ridley Park buildings. You the feng shui consultants, is it?’
After they all shook hands, Wong aimed his attention back to the security officer. The sheer depth of the gloom emanating from the man drew his eyes like a magnet. The man was so filled with depression that he looked as if he might implode. ‘Okay. What do you need from us?’
Wong leaned forwards. ‘Is there specific problem? Or he just want general feng shui reading?’
For a few seconds, Puk did not answer. Then he tilted his head back and surveyed the ceiling. His expression changed slightly, from misery to irritation. ‘You mean He didn’t tell you?’
‘Tell what?’
‘There is something specific you have to handle.’ Puk clasped his hands together, suddenly serious. ‘I guess the Chairman want me to brief you only. Well, this may sound crazy, but . . .’ His voice trailed off and he turned to the window, as if the words he was seeking might be etched on the glass.
They waited.
He abruptly turned back. ‘Three cars have been stolen. He doesn’t like it when His cars are stolen. He doesn’t want any more cars to disappear. If more cars are stolen, He will be very, very angry. We do not want to see Him very, very angry. That’s the size of it, really.’
‘Ah. Stolen. Bad. Mr Au Yeung call police?’ Wong asked.
Puk nodded. ‘Oh yes, we did all the obvious stuff. We call police. We call private detectives even. And that’s after His own staff did a comprehensive check. The Chairman has His own police force, sort of thing, you know?’
‘Find anything?’
Puk looked uncomfortable again. ‘No. Couldn’t work out how it was done. How they were taken. All three cars disappear—poof—in broad daylight. We have security cameras at the only one exit-entry station, and yet we have no video record of cars being driven out. Somehow they were taken out of the building, but not through driveway.’
‘What cars was it?’ the feng shui master asked.
‘Jaguar XK160, 1930 Aston Martin and 132 Bugatti. All very rare one.’
‘What other ways are there out of the building?’ Joyce asked.
Architect Wu volunteered an answer: ‘There aren’t any. Well, there’s the fire stairs.’
‘But cars can’t go down the stairs.’
‘Correct.’
‘So how did the thieves get them out?’
Wu shrugged his shoulde
rs. ‘We don’t know.’
Puk clasped his hands together again and gave the frozen smile of a man forced to speak nonsense. ‘They vanished into thin air.’ He clicked his sweaty fingers. ‘One moment they were there, the next moment they were gone. How did they do it? I don’t know. Ask David Copperfield. Maybe Mr Copperfield took them. For me, that’s the only sensible suggestion.’
‘So you contack this Mr Copperfield?’ Wong wanted to hear more about this suspect.
Joyce whispered much too loudly: ‘He’s joking. David Copperfield doesn’t nick cars. He just makes like aircraft disappear.’
‘He is aircraft thief? Corporate jet of Mr Au Yeung?’
Puk stepped in. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have confused the issue. The jets are fine. Just the cars are gone. Three of them, anyway.’
Wong pulled at the little hairs on his chin. ‘Maybe someone tamper with video cameras?’
‘Naah,’ said Puk. ‘I thought of that. No one has tampered with those things. I check them myself every morning. Besides, there are human staff as well as cameras at the in-out ramp.’
Joyce excitedly turned to the architect and gestured with her hands as she spoke. ‘Maybe there’s a secret tunnel somewhere, and they drove the cars away down them. Or maybe someone lifted them off the roof with a helicopter.’
Harris Wu just stared at her. He seemed to be wondering whether to dignify her ideas with a reply. ‘I built this place,’ he said at last, an icy edge to his voice. ‘I think I would probably know if there were tunnels or helicopter landing pads.’ He closed his eyes and his lips thinned. His expression said: God give me patience to deal with fools.
She bit her bottom lip and nodded apologetically. ‘I guess so,’ she whispered, feeling one centimetre high. ‘Sorry.’
Wu opened his eyes and took a deep breath. He moved forwards and his office chair creaked. ‘It’s like this. We don’t know how the cars were spirited out of the building. Puk and I, we checked and re-checked every single possibility. So then . . .’ He looked to the security guard, unsure of how to continue.
‘Tell them,’ said Puk. It was not an instruction, but a challenge.
The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Page 9
