The Feng Shui Detective

by Nury Vittachi

  ‘Doing some sort of survey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  By 10.30, Joyce had returned to the Wai-Wai Mansions with eight copies of the new Update and Wong with twelve.

  She entered to find that Wong had been scolding Winnie Lim, who had swept up his entire morning’s work and dumped it in a black dustbin bag. ‘Too messy, must be bad feng shui,’ she was saying. ‘Beside, I cannot fin’ my lipstick; a hundred-over sheet of paper on my desk.’

  Growling, Wong took the stack of magazines to his meditation room and turned to the lonely hearts page of each copy. He nodded to himself as he looked at where each had been bought, and laid them out across the floor. He wrote notes to himself in Chinese as he examined each issue.

  ‘Lonely hearts? What’re you looking for?’ Joyce asked. ‘Not a girlfriend, I take it.’

  ‘Girlfriend no. Answer yes.’

  He told her that he had pressed his finger quite firmly onto the plate from which that particular page had been made, while studying the production process. ‘See, you can see it here. That tiny mark is the mark I made. But you can only see it on this copy. And that one and that one. You can’t see it on any of the others.’

  ‘I guess they must have noticed it and fixed it.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  On Thursday, Wong and McQuinnie spent several hours at the publishing house.

  Wong had explained to Susannah Lo and Dudley Singh that he had found several problems. The basic layout of the office needed little change, but there were alterations needed to certain desks.

  ‘The problems are revealed by the lo shu charts. The biggest one is the timing of your move. The company has the central lo shu number four. When you moved into this building, you moved west, from Victoria Street to Orchard Road, which is in the direction of four, your own number. You should not move towards yourself. This is like pushing two identical magnets together. The energies do not help each other. They fight each other. The result is great effort and hard work, but not much good result. Obviously this is a problem here.’ He looked up from the chart at which he had been pointing.

  ‘Please think of it this way. When you move a company, you are like a farmer moving a field of apple trees. You need to wait until the right time of year. Then you carefully dig them up. Then replant them at the right time of year in the right place. This was not done.’

  ‘Whoa, this sounds like major bad news,’ said Singh. ‘You don’t expect us to move out and move in again on the right day, I hope?’

  ‘The shareholders would never agree. Too expensive,’ said Ms Lo.

  ‘No, I don’t ask you to move,’ said the geomancer. ‘There are many other actions you can take, much simpler. There are some matters concerning Mr Alberto Tin’s personal birth chart. I will go through that with him when he comes back tomorrow. We need a ceremonial re-launching of the company. This will be at a precise time on a precise day. This I will discuss with Mr Tin. There are some suitable dates coming. Some within only a few weeks. Also, there are some small changes to make in the editorial section. Just a few small things. The flow of ch’i energy there is too fast. This is not difficult to fix. I need to place some sea salt at certain positions. Sea salt is very yang. It will make the ch’i energy more solid. Then, the element of metal-’

  ‘No changes in the production section?’ interrupted Ms Lo.

  ‘None.’

  ‘Then I will get back to work. You can talk to Mr Singh alone about the changes in the editorial section.’ She rose and walked smartly back to her station.

  On Friday, Wong phoned Alberto Tin’s mobile phone to hear that he had just landed at Changi Airport. The geomancer and his assistant arranged to meet the publisher at 11.30 a.m. at the Tai Tong Hoi Kee restaurant.

  When Tin entered, Wong and McQuinnie rose immediately and told him to accompany them. We can come back for dimsum afterwards,’ said the geomancer. ‘I want to have a long talk with you. Go through your birth chart. Also some matters of office placement. But first, we want to show you something.’

  They walked 100 yards down the street, making polite chit-chat, until they came to a kiosk selling journals and books. Wong purchased a hot-off-the-press copy of Update and flicked to the editorial letter at the front.

  ‘There are actually two editions of the new Update. I’m afraid Ms McQuinnie and I, we did a little changing in one.’

  ‘What? What do you mean?’ Tin looked startled.

  ‘We did some, aaah, editing, I think it is called.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Do not be afraid. We have not inserted any bad things into your journal. We made it more accurate.’

  ‘But how could you do it? And what did you do?’ He started nervously examining the page at which the journal was open.

  ‘Your staff member Dudley Singh helped us. He formed a friendship with my assistant. You see, we found that the plates of your magazine are actually sent to two output centres. Not one. One makes the magazine you usually see. Ten thousand are printed. The other output centre makes a separate one. Prints 30 000 copies. But you don’t know this.’

  ‘What? What are you saying?’ Tin’s eyes seemed to want to burst through his spectacles.

  ‘Let me explain it. I’m better at explaining things than you,’ said Joyce. ‘Hollis News Retail has been like reprinting your newspaper. The ones they sell in their shops, most of them are not your ones, you see. They print their own ones, and they sell them, and they keep the money. They print a large number; 30 164 I think is the exact number. I phoned their printer and managed to wheedle the details out of them.’

  ‘You are saying they illegally reprint my newspaper, sort of pirate it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Wong. ‘You print 10 000. Hollis sells them for you. You know about that. The plates are prepared by the Sam Long Output Centre in your building. But the pages also go to another output centre. A place called Wan Kan Colour Printers. There another 30 000 and some are printed, you see? Wan Kan Colour Printers is a subsidiary of the Hollis Group.’

  The chubby publisher was momentarily speechless. Then he recovered himself. ‘How can that be? They have no right to do that. What do they do with them?’

  ‘Hey, B K, what do you think?’ said Joyce. ‘They sell them, of course. You see, Mr Tin, the actual circulation of your newspaper has grown to like, 40 000 copies a time. A lot of these are like, separately printed by Hollis and sold by the Hollis Retail network, which keeps the profits. That is why you see so many people-like me and my friends-buying the thing, but your records show so few sales. It’s quite a neat trick, really.’

  Wong nodded. ‘You get all costs. They get all profits.’

  ‘They are selling 30 000 copies, twice a week, at my expense? Plus their usual cut of my sales? They must be making an absolute fortune.’ Tin was in shock, and breathing heavily. ‘How can they get hold of the pages? Who is giving them to them?’

  Mr Wong held up his finger to show Joyce that he would answer this question. ‘We do not like to commit slander and libel upon anyone. But I think maybe you should ask Ms Susannah Lo that question. She is in charge of the pages after they are finished. And she has relatives in the Hollis Group. Do you remember you told me that yourself? Changes made to the pages after she has taken them do not go into both editions.’

  ‘I just-I just don’t understand. How on earth…? But look, if the paper is so successful, and is making helluva big money for them, why are they tricking me and leading me into financial disaster? The thing is about to shut down.’

  The geomancer nodded sagely. ‘I think maybe they will let your operation crash. They can then buy it cheaply. Then they can launch the magazine again as their own. They know that it is already a success. They can cut you out.’

  ‘I’ll sue them. What they have done is criminal. I’ll sue them in the courts for every penny they have.’

  Joyce giggled. ‘Yeah. You should. But you may have to like get in the queue.’

  ‘What do
you mean?’

  Wong looked into the middle distance. ‘The sage Lu Hsueh-an, he said: “There is looking and there is seeing. Many people look. But only the Perfect Man sees.”’

  The geomancer wagged his finger and turned to Joyce. ‘Many people saw the turtles in the River Lo. But only Fu Hsi saw the markings on the turtle’s back. So he found the magic square of nine.’ He addressed his next comment to Tin.

  ‘You look at this magazine, but you do not see it.’

  The publisher just looked confused.

  ‘Can I tell him?’ the young woman asked, clapping her hands and almost hopping with glee. ‘We made like four changes to the version of the paper that was like stolen and reprinted by Hollis. I mean, Dudley did them really.’

  She showed him the masthead on page two. ‘First, the publisher’s name and registered address and the printers’ details have been changed from yours to Hollis’s.’

  She flicked back to the front page. ‘Second, the paper looks the same, but look closely and you notice the name has been changed. It does not say Update. It says Upyours.’

  She opened the magazine again. ‘Third, most of the actual articles don’t appear in this. Dudley replaced them with what he called “dummy text”. They obviously didn’t read the thing but just put it into the printing machine and pressed the button. Hee hee.’

  Tin, moving in slow motion, took the magazine out of her hands and slowly flicked through the pages with amazement. ‘I see. Dudley did all this?’

  ‘Yeah. In minutes. He’s pretty cool.’

  The publisher was tugging uncomfortably at his collar. ‘You said four changes.’

  ‘The fourth one is-I’ll show you,’ said Joyce, taking the magazine out of his hands again. ‘Just here. Look, just read that paragraph. Dudley inserted this little article in the Upyours edition about various people.’

  Tin scanned the report on page three. ‘Good grief, Wong. You guys have insulted practically everyone that counts in this city.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Wong. ‘Not us. Hollis publishing. Their name is all over the publication. They financed it. They signed it. They printed it. And they distributed it. It is their liability. Not yours. Not mine. Shall we go and have that breakfast now? The cha siu so at Tai Tong Hoi Kee very good.’

  The two men, Tin in a daze, started to move back towards the restaurant, but Joyce moved in the other direction. ‘Bye guys. You go and have a dimsum orgy. I’m meeting Dud for a cappuccino at Starbucks on Orchard Road. He’s asked me to do some CD reviews for him. You don’t mind me moonlighting a bit, do you, C F? I get the latest CDs before they hit the shops and I get to keep them. Way cool.’

  She plugged her ears with her CD headphones before he had a chance to reply, and walked away, her head keeping time with an unheard rhythm.

  3 A kitchen god’s life

  A little mystery always remains. Such is life. The ultimate can never be understood. But this should not frustrate you, Blade of Grass. Knowing that you cannot know is the First Principle.

  In the year 950, the Ch’an Master Wen-yi was asked: ‘What is the First Principle?’

  He replied: ‘If I were to tell you, it would be the Second Principle.’

  The Record of the Transmission of Light, chuan five, tells the story of Hui-chung. He was a monk. He died in 775. One time, he agreed to take part in a debate. It was about Wu. This is translated as ‘nothingness’ or ‘inexpressibility’.

  He sat in the chair but said nothing. The time for the debate began. Hui-chung said nothing.

  The other monk said: ‘Please propose your argument so that I can argue.’

  Hui-chung said: ‘I have proposed my argument.’

  From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’,

  by C F Wong, part 90.

  This, thought Joyce McQuinnie, is just too weird. C F Wong had just introduced her to an old Indian guy who appeared to be wearing two tiny wigs, one on each ear. Small but thick mats of white hair, they caught and widened her eyes, and it took a considerable effort to wrench her gaze from the man’s miniature ear-muffs to his heavy, hooded eyes as she shook his hand. No way could they be natural. He told her his name.

  ‘Uhh, hi.’

  ‘Hello. Extremely pleased to meet you I’m sure, Ms McQuinnie,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, thanks, good to meet you, too, er…’ She had immediately forgotten his name.

  ‘Dilip Kenneth Sinha,’ he reminded her. ‘My friends call me Dilip, or D K, or ‘you silly old fool,’ more likely. The more honest of them, anyway.’ He flashed a row of long, horse-like teeth, gave a staccato laugh like a burst of gunfire and turned his palms outwards in an elaborate flourish. ‘Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-uh.’

  ‘Ha ha. Just call me Jo.’

  He was rather over-dressed for the location, in an expensively tailored dark Nehru-collared suit. The rather featureless outfit on his tall, stooping, waist-less body made him look like an upholstered banana. His hair was white, contrasting sharply with his dark, almost aubergine, skin. His eyebrows looked like blow-dried caterpillars. He was extremely hirsute. She noticed that the peppery five o’clock shadow on his face went all the way up to the bags under his eyes. She decided that the wiglets on his ears might be real after all.

  Dilip Sinha beamed at her and swayed slightly. He had a tendency to move his head up and down and diagonally like the spring-headed dolls you find on taxi dashboards, but his wrinkle-nested eyes were pleasantly grandfatherly, and he spoke with easy sincerity. ‘Delighted to have you join us tonight. Can’t remember when we last had a visitor to the mystics. Many, many moons, it must have been.’

  ‘Thanks for having me,’ she said, blushing at her phrase, which she suddenly thought better suited to a six year old leaving a birthday party.

  ‘I think our last visitor was six years ago, or was it seven? It was the year after Chandrika’s brother left. Now when would that have been?’ He started to ramble inconsequentially about dates and Joyce found his droney tone hard to listen to. His old-fashioned Edwardian English had a little Indian twang, and there was a clipped quality to some of the words that she was beginning to recognise as a distinctively Singaporean intonation.

  She was grateful that the old man had proved so welcoming, as she felt totally adrift, for many reasons: the people, the time, the location, the planet. What was she doing here? She had a strange feeling that she was sticking her head out of a box. She felt oddly exposed. She felt alien. Her breathing was slow but her heart was beating fast. She felt tired, as if energy was pouring out of a hole in her abdomen. Concentrating was an effort.

  Scheduled tonight was a special emergency meeting of the Investigative Advisory Committee of the Singapore Union of Industrial Mystics. The union had only a handful of active members, although Wong had told her that meetings had attracted as many as twenty-five in the past, and there were more than forty names in the books. Visitors were technically not allowed, but Wong had phoned a couple of other committee members in advance and received permission for Joyce to be there. ‘These are the real old masters of Eastern thought. They use different names for different things, but really, it is all the same under the skin. A rose by any other name is still smelling, right, understand or not?’

  At first she had been reluctant to cancel the just-hangingout evening she had planned with her friends. She found Wong to be difficult company at the best of times, and was rather daunted by the idea of spending her evening in a meeting with three or four Wongs, some of whom may even be more weird and impenetrable than he. But her friends had been blown over by her account of her adventures in Malaysia -‘You saw like a real corpse?’- and she had decided that it was worth sacrificing a night out for an experience that may make a story to tell. ‘Yeah-yeah, I’ll come,’ she had said to Wong earlier that day. ‘It’s cool. You have to keep pushing the envelope, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Wong had replied in a neutral tone to disguise his bafflement.

  Shortly before 8 p.m., the geomancer and his assist
ant had marched through some narrow streets in what seemed to be an older part of town, and had turned a corner to enter a large area of restaurants and open-air food stalls. It was so poorly lit that Joyce wondered how diners could see what they were eating. After walking a few yards, she realised that the restaurant through which they were walking was part of a series of street cafes, forming a lengthened, disjointed circle, with the jumbled seating for the public filling the centre of the ring.

  Joyce was struck by the sights and smells. It was dark. It was warm. There was something almost frighteningly surreal about the surroundings. In the shadows, fat hawkers appeared and disappeared in the steam from their cooking carts, like djinns conjured up from lamps. Their faces, lit from beneath by their cooking fires, seemed barely half-human. Every few seconds, there would be a sudden woosh and an explosion of conjurer’s smoke as a catty of wet bok choi slid into a super-heated giant wok, before being energetically slapped around with extra-long chopsticks. The sounds of the food market seemed indecently loud in the blackness, which made the night seem further advanced than it was. Against the background roar of several hundred diners talking in that half-shouted style common to Chinese restaurants, there were the cries of the independent vendors with their portable stove-carts, the sizzle of the ‘show’ dishes, the clinks of a thousand bottles and dishes, and the honks of the traffic backed-up on the adjoining high street.

  She was half-conscious that it was the sort of lively nighttime, fire-lit gathering that was somehow primal: people must have gathered at dusk like this to share cooked meats over bonfires ever since man evolved. She sensed the appeal of allowing herself to be sucked into the scene, but she felt too unsettled and unconnected to submit to it. She couldn’t relax. She felt her world was one of brightly lit, surgically clean McDonald’s restaurants. This dark, noisy doppelganger was all just a bit too far beyond the boundaries, she mused.

  The feng shui master slid his thin form gracefully through the tables, evidently knowing where he was going, although in his companion’s eyes, the restaurants all blurred into one pandemonious dining hall. She followed more tentatively, squinting at her feet to make sure she did not tread on ill-placed bags, children or small dogs.