The Feng Shui Detective Goes South

by Nury Vittachi

  Geez. That’s like so amazing. Wait till I tell the gang.’

  Wong, speaking in bursts between consuming large amounts of dim sum, explained that Mrs Mirpuri believed her daughter had been snatched by persons unknown on her way home from a shopping trip on Sunday evening. A ransom note had been delivered to the family home the following morning. But the mother did not think the kidnapping was particularly serious.

  The crime may have been committed by a policeman friend of theirs, the mother had said. Danita had just announced her engagement and it might be some sort of jealousy problem.

  ‘Gotcha,’ said Joyce, nodding sagely. ‘It’s lurrve. That fits.

  If I know Dani Mirpuri.’

  ‘Lerv?’ asked Wong, pausing with a chicken foot halfway to his mouth. ‘What means lerv?’

  ‘Lurrve is a type of love. If you love your mum or your dog or ’N Sync, that’s love. But if it’s like so heavy, you know, a big deal, with like drama and, and, you know the sort of thing, you want to kill yourself or something—like something in a movie—then it’s lurrve.’

  ‘I see.’

  Joyce smiled. ‘That is so Dani. I only like really talked to her a few times, but both times she went on and on about the guys who were after her. There was one guy called Roger. I remember that, because I remember telling her that I thought it was a dorky name. Can’t remember what she said he did. And the other guy . . . there was a guy called Kinny she used to talk about. I think he was a policeman. Yes, that’s right, the policeman.’

  Wong saw an opportunity to get a bit of peace and quiet so that he could enjoy his breakfast. ‘Idea,’ he said. ‘Why not this be your case? You can do main investigation. You know everybody. I can work on other case. House burning down case. Ridley Park. With Madame Xu.’

  ‘Really? Me do it? That would be like so cool.’

  ‘But you must be careful. Gather facts. Write down. Consider. Phone people.’

  Joyce was thrilled. ‘This has gotta be my case, if you think about it. I know all the suspects and the victim and everything. I bet I can work it out. A kidnapping! But this is like so incredible. Totally.’

  She pulled out the remains of the office mobile phone and started dialling her friends, while Wong gratefully devoted himself to the meal. He angled his seat slightly to one side, so he would not have to look at her.

  Over the next ten minutes, Joyce had long, involved conversations with each of the members of her gang and several of their associates, making copious scribbled notes on pages of her Filofax. ‘He did what? And she’s like . . . ? Yeah. Gotcha. When? But what was he like? No, not what he looked like. What was he like? Nice guy type, evil kidnapper type, you know, what?’

  They left the restaurant thirteen minutes later, and Joyce insisted on making a stop at Delifrance to have her own breakfast. Wong had an odd feeling that someone was watching them through the window—but when he turned to look, there was no one there.

  As she wolfed down eggs, ham and croissants, she told her employer what she had learned. ‘There were basically three guys in Dani’s life. Ram was a geeky Indian kid who his parents wanted her to marry. Quite rich. But he had a beard which turned her off. Real scratchy. She was also going with this policeman called Kinny Mak, who was like totally besotted with her, you know? Then there was this other guy called Charles Something who she met at a club and really hit it off with.’

  ‘Hit what off with?’

  ‘Just it. It means, like, they were really in tune with each other.’

  ‘Karaoke?’

  ‘No, they just met at Dan’s. But Charles was like an investment banker or something like that. Pots of dosh. Or so he said. Nike reckons that she must’ve run off with him, because he was like the most exciting. But I dunno. If he had loadsa money, they wouldn’t need to do any sort of kidnap–ransom scam, would they? I think it’s more likely that she has run off with Kinny Mak. I mean, if he’s a policeman, he wouldn’t earn very much, so they would need to do some sort of scam to get some money out of her folks, right?’

  ‘But a policeman would not do a kidnap, I think.’

  ‘Normally, yes. But what if it’s lurrve? Lurrve makes people do strange things. That’s why they call it lurrve.’

  Wong made a mental note to look that one up in his Shorter Oxford when he returned to the office.

  They sat on the top deck of the SBS bus, an odd couple, fascinated by each other, but without the slightest trace of romance. ‘I love travelling in the front seat of the top deck of the bus,’ said Madame Xu Chong Li. ‘One feels satisfyingly ahead of the crowd.’

  ‘Unfortunately that would also be true if the bus crashed and we were all flung headlong through the front window. We would take first place,’ Dilip Sinha replied.

  ‘What a morbid mind you have. All that time last year spent helping the homicide squad, I suppose.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘It’s the view from here that’s nice.’

  Just then, the bus pulled up right behind another, and some small boys sitting in the back seat of the vehicle in front pressed their noses against the glass, making faces at the couple.

  ‘The view is ever changing,’ said Sinha.

  They conversed in a genial, relaxed fashion, but would sometimes go for several minutes without even a glance at each other. Instead, their eyes crawled over the city streets, collecting data and filing it away for future use.

  It wasn’t until they were a good twenty minutes into their journey to the Chettiar Temple at the junction of Tank Road and River Valley Road, next to Fort Canning Park, that Sinha realised that something was wrong. Madame Xu was preoccupied with something. The gaps between the bits of small talk were a fraction longer than they should have been. She cut from topic to topic much more often than normal. And her right hand was twitching restlessly, as she played incessantly with a heavy ring on her index finger.

  He turned and looked at her face. There was an extra wrinkle between her eyebrows, a heaviness around her mouth. He was suddenly convinced: she was harbouring a worry that she had not shared with him. It was his duty as a friend, he decided, to see if there was anything he could do to help.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘It may never happen.’

  She turned to him in surprise. ‘You know?’ she said, astonished.

  ‘Of course I do. A man with my skills naturally has a sensitivity to disturbances such as the one that is currently causing you great concern. Worrying about something which may or may not happen is like paying rent on an apartment you may never need.’

  ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘Let us just say: it came to me.’

  ‘That’s remarkable.’ She was silent for a moment, apparently dealing with a new level of respect for her friend’s psychic ability. She turned to look him in the eye before speaking again.

  ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘Everything,’ he said, using his large hands to make an all-encompassing flourish. ‘I have been your friend for many years, after all. You have no secrets from me. I hate to see you repressing your unhappiness.’

  The conversation stopped there for a pregnant pause. The bus continued on its way for another two minutes before they exchanged words again.

  Madame Xu laughed. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course!’

  Sinha looked at her with a smile. ‘Returning to your normal self?’

  ‘I should have guessed,’ the fortune-teller said with breezy cheeriness. ‘When I swore to tell not a soul about it, I should have realised that my twin soul was an exception—had to be an exception.’

  ‘There can be no secrets between us.’

  ‘Exactly! How can two people who can read each other’s minds have secrets between them? It’s simply impossible. This is nothing to do with breaking pledges of secrecy. It is simply a fact of life for psychic people. Secrets cannot exist for us. He should know that. Being one himself.’

  Sinha made a grunt of agreement, but wondered if
he was losing the thread of the conversation. He imagined that secrets must be an awful thing for a person like Madame Xu to deal with. With her habit of uttering almost everything that floated through her mind, it would be difficult to keep one set of facts locked away.

  The thought reminded him about the one secret he himself had promised to keep, the previous morning: the analysis he had shared of Ismail’s client Clara—she with the shocking astrological chart that descended into immediate oblivion. His instinct had been to race to consult experts, to work as a team to find ways of reinterpreting or reversing this awful fate, to look for remedies that would save her.

  But the Malaysian bomoh had been adamant. He had revealed his secrets to him under pain of confidentiality unto death. Sinha had agreed to the conditions, and was ready to abide by them. Amran Ismail had said he needed to deal with the issue himself.

  ‘Secrets are heavy things,’ Sinha said philosophically to his companion on the bus. ‘Because they exist to us, yet they do not exist to the people around us. Thus the burden of carrying them cannot be shared. The loneliness of the mission appears to amplify the weight of the burden.’

  ‘It’s not being able to DO anything about it that makes it difficult for me,’ said Madame Xu. ‘As you know, I am no talker. I am a doer. Strong, silent type.’

  ‘Er, up to a point,’ Sinha said. ‘But you know, I feel exactly the same about the burdens I carry for clients and friends of clients. For how can one know about impending crises without acting upon them? Especially when the secret one is carrying is one with the gravest of repercussions for the person concerned.’

  Madame Xu’s unexpected reaction to this statement was a broad smile. ‘You DO know. You really do,’ she trilled. ‘Well.

  How remarkable.’ She shook her head in happy amazement. ‘I have long known that you and I have a spiritual connection, but I never realised that it is really true that we can have no secrets between us. Our ability to read each other’s minds make it quite impossible.’

  Sinha gazed at her.

  ‘So what are we going to do about Clara?’ said Madame Xu.

  ‘We have to do something.’

  Now it was Sinha’s turn to be amazed. She knew! ‘You know about that?’ he breathed.

  ‘This is what we are talking about, is it not?’ she asked.

  ‘Er, yes. It is. It is.’ Sinha put one hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Let’s get this straight. A Malaysian bomoh called Amran Ismail came to you, shared with you the details of a client for whom death is prophesied, and asked for you to confirm the prediction—is that what happened?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘And he made you swear not to tell another living soul about it, upon pain of death?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘You swore on a chicken?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Fresh blood on your wrists?’

  ‘Gravy, really.’

  ‘Gravy? Curious. And your reading of the data of the young woman, whose name is Clara, confirms what his initial reading said: that she is going to die on a certain date in the very near future? Possibly even Friday this week?’

  ‘Absolutely right. Dilip Sinha, your skills in mind-reading are astonishing. You have absorbed the thing that has been on my mind all morning and you have every last detail correct. It is almost as if you were hiding under the table when Mr Ismail visited my apartment yesterday.’ Her expression suddenly changed, and she turned a stern face to him. ‘You were not, I hope?’

  ‘I was not,’ said Sinha. His mind was racing. Clearly, the bomoh wanted confirmation from more than one authoritative source about the impending doom of his client. Once he had checked the charts, and told him that he was on the right lines, the man had gone straight to Madame Xu for the same reassurance. ‘What were your conclusions about the prospects for Ms Clara?’

  ‘Something terrible is going to happen to her. On Friday. That’s what the Great Bomoh told him. So precise. Too precise. And yet nothing I could find contradicted it. It really seems as if nothing can be done about it. Shame, isn’t it? I mean, for a girl so young.’

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘A shame.’

  ‘Can we not put our heads together and get Wong in on this and come up with possible solutions to the problem?’

  ‘You promised Mr Ismail that you would not tell a soul about this.’

  ‘It’s true. But I haven’t told a soul about it. Your mind-reading powers extracted it from my mind. My mouth spilled no secrets. I am in the clear, as Inspector Tan would say.’

  ‘Superintendent.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  They travelled for another minute in silence.

  ‘Her prospects are astonishingly bad, aren’t they?’ said Sinha.

  ‘Yes,’ said Madame Xu. ‘Extraordinarily.’

  ‘Poor girl.’

  He smiled to himself as he walked into the dull, cracked-tile porch of an old commercial building on Perak Road. Now this was the sort of activity that made CF Wong happy. He had picked up his bag and taken a bus two kilometres north over the Singapore River to find the offices of Mirpuri Import–Export and Sundry Goods Pte.

  He had visited the Mirpuri home in a pleasant suburban street in Mount Faber Park several times. But he had never given the full feng shui treatment to the family business, which was spread over two floors of a rather run-down, mixed-use block on Perak Road, on the eastern edge of Little India. Of course, he hadn’t officially been commissioned to do a reading of the premises, but he knew he could spend a few hours doing what he did best, and slip it onto an invoice that Mrs Mirpuri would pay without reading.

  Although Danita Mirpuri was officially Joyce’s case, he had told her that he would have to do the feng shui examinations until her skills had reached a higher level. A thought had struck him. If his intern could be trained to do a range of useful work independently, she wouldn’t need to follow him around like a piece of gum on his shoe.

  Today, he would spend a few hours focusing on Danita Mirpuri’s office. Then he would devote the following morning to doing a reading of her bedroom at home. If she remained missing, he would return to the family office the following afternoon and do the entire premises. This could, quite possibly, be stretched out to two full days’ work, all charged at full rate time and a half, including the express service surcharge. He imagined that the so-called kidnapping—no doubt some sort of bizarre lovers’ game in disguise—would come to an end within a day or two. It was thus logical to maximise billable income by doing as much as possible as quickly as possible.

  A small, anemic elevator gave him a slow, rather claustrophobic ride to the sixteenth floor. There, it dropped him in an ill-lit corridor with three doors, none of which bore a name. Only by looking at small numbers on doorjambs could he work out which button to press.

  The doorbell played ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ in an excruciating monotone. He was greeted and ushered into the musty, wood-panelled reception by a Chinese secretary, who then summoned her boss, Mohan Mirpuri, a stout man of fifty-three with white, slicked-back hair. Although Wong knew the family had been in Singapore for more than twenty years, the patriarch still spoke English with a pronounced north Indian accent.

  ‘Mr Wong! I am tinking it has been more than one year over since we saw you before. In the house,’ the businessman gushed.

  ‘Yes. I think more than one year.’

  ‘Sooo sorry to be troubling you about my daughter but she is being a bit of a problem child from time to time, you know, ha ha?’

  ‘Yes. So sorry your daughter missing. Hope is nothing serious.’

  ‘Not very serious,’ said Mirpuri. ‘Only kidnapping I think. By one of the boyfriends. But which one? This is the question we are asking ourselves.’

  ‘May I see the office?’

  ‘You are very free to study the offices or our home, see if you can be picking up clues. Wark this way.’

  He took the geomancer down a dark corridor to a large, gloomy room
with no door. It contained several desks and cabinets, all of which were piled high with dusty, yellowing papers.

  ‘She has very big office,’ said Wong. ‘For very young woman.’

  ‘Oh, this isn’t her office. This is my office,’ said Mirpuri. ‘I thought you might like to do my office farst? Business has not been so great recently. Also I have had a bad flu which I cannot shake off. So much snot, you know. Very uncomfortable.

  I wonder if you can fix all that? Why do Danita’s office when she is not even here? Seems pointless. Do mine now, and when she comes back, do hers. Can do?’

  ‘Can.’

  Wong spent an hour gathering basic details of the office. The premises as a whole had a dragon hill to the north-east. The charts revealed that the most favourable direction was the fourth sector, and the least favourable the ninth. It was a K’un building, with the door oriented to the north. For a more detailed examination, he needed the occupant’s personal details, key dates of his life history and job description; the date the building was built and the company moved in; and he needed an understanding of what each cabinet or desk in the room contained. He asked the import–export man more than two dozen questions, and then sent him out of the room so that he could think in peace. The geomancer sketched out various charts, all covered with scribbled writing in tiny Chinese characters.

  When he had covered nine sheets with writing and diagrams, Mirpuri reappeared in the doorway. ‘How are you going? Come to any interesting conclusions?’ he asked.

  ‘Many,’ said Wong. ‘There is much you can do to make your fortune better.’

  Mirpuri produced a magazine. ‘Let me show you something. I got this from a friend. It’s a catalogue of feng shui stuff from Hong Kong. Mail order. I was thinking, I could get a cat at the entrance, and then a hanging money sword over that side, pointing to the room where we process the orders, and then a pair of door gods for the entrance, plus this thing called a seven fortunes bowl—’ ‘No need,’ said the geomancer. ‘Trinkets no need.’

  Mirpuri looked suddenly deflated. ‘Really? I’m tinking I would be doing very, very good thing to get some objects scattered around the place, and perhaps a fish tank at the front entrance. Fish tanks are good, right? You think gold fish or tropical?’