The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (13 page)

‘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?’

Wong shook his head. ‘Hong Kong feng shui is too much superstition. Very silly. First job in feng shui is not to add things to room like this, already too much-much overcrowded. First job is to
clear
things. Not add things.’

‘Oh. I see,’ Mirpuri said. ‘What do I have to clear out of it?’

‘I tell you. Lot of things. You sit down.’

The businessman moved awkwardly around the desk to get into his large padded leather seat. ‘Okay. I’m sitting. Now tell.’

The geomancer looked around the room. Then he turned his gaze back to his client. ‘Main problem with this office is dead energy. Too much dead energy. This kills your energy.’ Wong pointed to the piles of yellowing paper on the cabinets. ‘This pieces of paper. I think they are old, you don’t use them now. You must get rid of them. Common problem in old offices, even some new offices. Dead energy makes—’ He looked in his notebook for an English word he had written down. ‘Leth-ar-gy.’

Mirpuri moved his head diagonally from side to side three times to indicate qualified agreement. He had a guilty expression on his face, like a small boy caught with his hand in a cookie jar. ‘I am having spring clean from time to time. Things are piling up, you know how it is.’

Wong nodded. ‘Some people are file people. They file-file-file, put everything away in cabinet. Some people are pile people. They put on paper on top of another paper, pile-pile-pile.’

‘Which is better?’

‘File people better than pile people. But throw-away people best of all.’ Wong picked up a sheet of paper from the top of a pile. It was a letter. ‘See this? Each paper contains what we call “potential energy transaction”. Someone write you a letter. Or you write letter to someone. Or someone want you to buy something. Or phone them. Or send fax to them. Someone want to tell you something. They put some energy into paper. They put some effort into paper. If you read letter, do something about it, energy of letter-writer has become your energy. Turns into action. But if you take no action—if you just put paper on pile, energy dies. Then you get another paper. Add to pile. Then another. Then another. All these papers, you put on pile. Soon pile has hundreds of papers. You put into drawer. Drawer gets full. You make new pile on desk. Soon new pile has hundreds of papers. But each paper is piece of dead energy.’

‘I see,’ said Mirpuri, moving his head diagonally again. ‘I guess most of these sheets of paper are being pretty useless to me now. I just haven’t got around to—’

‘Piles of dead energy very bad. You come into office, you see big piles of old papers. Sucks out your energy. You feel tired, you feel dead energy too. You get leth-ar-gy.’

‘So I should be filing them aarl away in neat cabinets, like that?’

‘No. Because then cabinets become full of dead energy. Best you throw away all old papers. Only legal ones, important ones, you can keep. The rest, out. Otherwise too much leth-ar-gy, spreads all over office.’

Mr Mirpuri nodded diagonally again. ‘Okay. This is making sense to me. Chuck out all the old piles of paper that are piling up everywhere. Fine. Do that farst. What else should I do?’

‘Get smaller desk. This desk too big.’

‘But you don’t understand. A senior executive is surely to goodness having to have a big desk. I’m the chairman of this company. I need a big desk. No one will have any respect for me if I am not having the biggest desk, definitely. Also I have a great many sundry items to put on the desk.’

‘This desk too big for this size room. Looks wrong. Feels wrong. Cannot walk around it easily. Must change it.’

‘If you say so,’ said Mirpuri, reluctantly. ‘I brought it over from India you know. Carved out of a single piece of—’ ‘Business office is place of change. Or process. Everything that comes in must be processed. Must be changed. Then
ch
’
i
will flow. Also money will flow.’

Mirpuri blinked at the word ‘money’, a subject he evidently took very seriously.

‘You also need new carpet,’ Wong continued. ‘And different chair. And change colour of cabinets. And move partitions.’

Mr Mirpuri sighed. This was going to be more expensive than he had expected.

In a room with a view at police headquarters, Superintendent Gilbert Tan, thirty-eight, used his index finger to stab the telephone buttons with a great deal of unnecessary violence. It wasn’t that he was angry—quite the contrary: he was a quiet, rather repressed man most of the time, and it was when he found himself in a state of happy excitement that he tended to express it with hurried, sharp movements.

Impatiently tapping on his desk with one hand, he used the other to hold down the speakerphone button on his telephone.

He heard the phone he was calling give three rings before it was answered by a female voice.

‘Hello?’

Tan snatched up the handset.

‘Winnie?’

‘No, this is Joyce. D’you want Winnie? She’s out.’

‘Hi, Joyce. How are you? Good, I hope? Actually, I want to speak to Mr Wong. Superintendent Tan here.’