The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (21 page)

Dr Liew’s technician was very different. Cheung Lai Kuen was a thin, bespectacled woman who tended to murmur under her breath, and walked stiffly around as if she had lower back pain. She was thirty-nine, daughter of a porter named Cheung Sin and a nurse named Mabel Poon. After talking to her, Wong had got the impression that she was rather resentful of the fact that her parents had been unable to send her to good schools. She seemed to think that she had the brains to have been a dentist, as opposed to a dental technician. After going to secretarial college, she had had a succession of low-paid jobs for three years before retraining for dental nursing. She had followed her new career for thirteen years, eight of them with Dr Liew, with whom she got on very well.

The time inevitably came when all staff had been called to deal with patients, and Wong had to busy himself with his readings. The building had its back to the waterfront and faced a hill, and thus was an unusual feng shui configuration known as ‘sitting empty, facing solid’. But the general picture was good. The water star was located in the east, and the east of the building faced the water, which was highly auspicious.

‘When we find this, we say, “The water star falls in the water,”’ Wong said to Dr Gibson Leibler during a gap between two patients. ‘Good sign.’

Dr Leibler, for the first time, gave the feng shui master a polite nod and half a smile.

On the whole, the intangible forces were good for both rooms, although the reception desk was ill-situated, Wong decided. The front surface was unhappily facing north-east, and he decided that when he next visited the office, he would hang an ornament—six copper coins with prowling tigers—over it. Despite his general dislike of superstition and the use of trinkets, he knew that physical reminders of non-visible energy often served a good purpose if used judiciously. He also realised that three out of the four people in the office—Gibson Leibler being the exception—would probably take comfort in physical items designed to ward off evil.

There were a small number of other negative factors revealed by a study of the floor plans. A temporary
shar
of five was found on the north-east side of the suite of offices, towards the back of Dr Leibler’s room, and a
shar
of two at the entrance to the office. These were calculated on a monthly basis, and would fade with the next moon, the geomancer calculated. But for now, there were likely to be more repeats of the bad phenomena. ‘Never mind,’ he told Amanda Luk, who had emerged from one of the surgeries to make reminder calls to two patients who tended to miss appointments. ‘I can deal with it.’

The feng shui master knew he could make the superstitious Cheung Lai Kuen happy by preparing a symbolic Cup from the Heavenly Pond to counteract the forces emanating from the Three Curses Position. He prepared several other feng shui items, but these he wanted to keep back until the problem recurred.

After finishing these operations, Wong quickly got bored. After the excitement of the arrest at the photographic studio at lunchtime, the late afternoon passed slowly. There was almost nothing he could do except sit in the waiting room, as if he were a phantom patient who waited quietly but whose name was never called. He decided to while away a few hours writing in his journal about the brilliance of the sages. The human atmosphere in the premises felt very uncomfortable, and he found himself drawn to the subject of deception.

Cao Wei, a great leader of Weizhou, was at a social
engagement with other army generals.

Just then, a messenger arrived on horseback. He had
bad news.

‘Some of your men have defected. They have joined
the enemy,’ the messenger said.

‘Oh dear,’ said Cao Wei. And then he smiled very
slowly.

The messenger rode back to the battlefields and told
everyone what Cao Wei had said. He also told them that
the leader had smiled very slowly.

The enemy leader, hearing this, decided that the
new men he had got were spies. He picked them out and
had them all executed.

The smile of a child comes from the heart. But never
forget, Blade of Grass: no one knows where the smile of
an adult comes from.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong
,
part 345

Joyce phoned Wong at the dental surgery at 3.11 p.m. to say that she had delivered the invoice to Mrs Mirpuri, and was now heading home to change before going out to Dan T’s Inferno for the happy-hour session which began at five o’clock. She said that Mrs Mirpuri had banned Danita from going out that night, but had allowed the two friends to spend an hour talking on the phone.

Joyce said all her attempts to get in contact with Calida Tsai-Leibler to ask about her cousin Maddy had come to nothing. Mrs Tsai-Leibler had gone to a secret location to protect her child from the murderous ghost, a domestic helper had explained.

‘I so don’t need another late night,’ the young woman had told Wong on the phone. ‘But I do want to talk to Maddy again. I think there might be another case there that I can solve. I seem to be doing pretty well this week.’

‘Yes, yes, you try to solve more cases, very good for me,’ Wong had replied. ‘Do my work for me. Then I can just do invoices, collect money.’

The geomancer was pleased to get some writing done, although he felt a little uncomfortable in the waiting room. The earlier part of the day had been a little too dramatic for him, and he was annoyed to discover several nasty bruises on his arms he had received from his encounter with Danita Mirpuri’s kidnapper. He decided that the best thing for him was to be home putting traditional Chinese ointments on his aching limbs, not sitting on the uncomfortably soft benches of a dentist’s waiting room. He wondered if Dr Liew might have some Pak Fa Yeow in the office. But would it be wrong to ask a modern doctor for traditional white flower oil medicine? Would he be laughed at? Worse, would he be charged proper consultation fees? Better not ask.

Still, at least it was cool and air conditioned. He suddenly realised that he could probably get more work done on his journal here than he would be able to in his un-air conditioned office over the next few days. He pulled the large volume out of his bag and started working on it again. Now what theme were we working on? Deception, that was it. The sages, both greater and lesser, often used a type of deception to solve problems and advance themselves, he mused.

During the period of the Five Dynasties (907–960)
the King of Zhao was a man named Li Decheng. He
came from the Southern Tang Dynasty in Jiangxi.

A mystic came to him and told him that he could
spot greatness in a person with a single glance.

The king was intrigued by this claim. So he arranged
a test for the mystic. He dressed his wife, a woman of
great class and breeding, in the costume of the court
dancers. Then he put her into a group of court dancers,
so that she looked no different from them.

When all was ready, he summoned the visiting
mystic.

‘Which of these ladies is my wife?’ the king asked.

‘It is obvious,’ said the mystic. ‘It is the one with a
glowing golden cloud over her head.’

The women tried not to move. But at the same time
they strained to see what was over the queen’s head.
They saw nothing.

But it was easy for the mystic to correctly identify
the queen.

Blade of Grass: If you cannot see something with
your own eyes, arrange to see it with someone else’s
eyes.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong
,
part 346

At 4.01 p.m., there was a scream. Wong dropped his journal and leapt to his feet. Receptionist Cheung Lai Kuen ran out of Dr Liew’s office and almost crashed into the feng shui master. With a yelp, she ran out of the premises and stood with her fists to her mouth in the lift lobby.

She was almost immediately followed by a large blonde woman in a pale blue apron with a metal device in her mouth. ‘Ak-grr-kr-warrr,’ she said and then also ran out of the office in the direction of the lift.

Dr Liew appeared. ‘Stupid patient. She’s run off without her shoes or her jacket.’

‘And with a mouth extension clamped between her jaws,’ said Dr Leibler, who had been watching from the doorway of his room. ‘She’s going to have a tough time explaining that to her family.’

‘
Mutyeh si?
’ Wong asked.

‘The ghost is inside. It’s in the room.’ Dr Liew spoke calmly and factually, but there was a noticeable tremor in his voice.

Wong marched toward the door of the room and stopped. He saw nothing inside. Carefully, he leaned the upper half of his body through the doorway. The drama all became too much for Amanda Luk, who also scampered outside to stand with Lai Kuen in the corridor. ‘I can feel it. It’s in there. It’s horrible,’ she said. A shiver of horror ran through her body.

‘You should have heard the sound it made. It was right next to me,’ said Lai Kuen, starting to cry.

Wong stepped right into the room. Dr Liew remained at the door, peering in.

There was no one in the room. That was immediately evident. It was a small space dominated by the dental chair, and there was simply nowhere anyone could hide. He glanced under the chair. Nothing. Cabinets lined the walls on one side, but they were shallow. It was difficult to imagine that anyone could hide inside them.

The room was silent except for a general hum. He realised that there were two buzzing sounds—one coming from a tiny air conditioning vent in the ceiling, and another coming from a small machine on the ground: a fridge, or sterilising unit of some kind, he ventured.

The geomancer looked around the room. ‘There’s nothing. It’s—’ He stopped abruptly.

There was the unmistakable sound of a male voice. It gave a pained, gently vocalised sigh. ‘
Ahhhhh. Owwww.
’ It apparently came from an invisible person sitting in the dentist’s chair.

‘Can you hear him?’ asked Dr Liew.

‘Can,’ whispered Wong, his eyes suddenly wide. ‘He’s there.’

He stood in front of the chair, and heard the sound repeated, coming from roughly where a person’s head would be. It really did seem to be a ghost patient. The geomancer’s jaw dropped.

Dr Liew started to back away towards the door. ‘Come out. We must leave this place.’ He turned around and stepped out.

Dr Leibler marched into the room. He had a studied expression of detachment on his face, but his nervousness revealed itself in the distance he kept from the centre of the room, where Wong stood in front of the chair. ‘Where is this alleged spirit?’ he asked with studied carelessness.

‘In the chair,’ said the feng shui master. ‘There.’ He pointed to the spot where the thing’s face would be.

‘
Owwww!
’ said the voice. It had a constricted quality— unmistakably the sound of a person moaning with a dental tool placed in his mouth. It followed this with a long, low whimper.