The Feng Shui Detective Goes South (26 page)
Joyce settled back in her airline seat and clipped her safety belt on. The plane’s engines started to roar as the aircraft taxied down the runway. She was filled with pride. That afternoon, she had performed a miracle. She had done something way above and beyond the call of duty. She had moved a mountain to Mohammed.
She had managed to persuade CF Wong to abandon his holiday and pay cash—out of his own pocket—for two tickets to Sydney, the aim being to find a young woman who had not hired him and had made no promises to pay him anything at all. In short, she had achieved the impossible.
She recalled the look of amazement on the faces of Dilip Sinha and Madame Xu Chong Li as Wong had agreed to take on the case. And it was all because she had made a dramatic speech. It must have been a great speech. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember a word of it now. It had just burst out of her mouth in a great torrent of words. It didn’t seem to make a lot of sense as she was saying it, but it seemed to have done the trick.
‘Damn!’ she said quietly out loud, as she realised that her minidisc had been sitting on the table in front of her at the table at Ah-Fat’s. She could have easily taped her speech, had she thought of it.
‘What?’ said Wong, who thought he had been spoken to.
He was in the next seat, fiddling with his seat belt, which was too long for his skeletal trunk.
‘Nothing,’ said Joyce.
She realised that it was when she was detailing the rewards that would be his that he started to become convinced that maybe he should take the task. She recalled vaguely saying that she, Joyce, would be grateful to him for the rest of her life. But that probably hadn’t been the deciding factor. Then there was her observation that the young woman in question, whose life he was sure to save, was highly intelligent and would be a worthy citizen of the world in future. That was also unlikely to have been a major contributor to changing his mind. No, the clincher would have been the line where she talked about Maddy’s rich family. There was Maddy’s father, an ultra-rich and powerful Hong Kong businessman who owned more than a thousand properties in the city, and had six cars and a private cruiser. And there was her brother, also a major financial figure in his own right. Yes, that was the moment that Wong’s head had tipped to one side and he had become visibly interested.
He had briefly interrupted her, she now remembered, to get more details about her relatives. She had been unable to provide any except for the fact that she recalled Maddy saying that her father was a very big property developer and her brother had loads of staff and was one of the most powerful businessmen in Hong Kong. Joyce had decided it would be wise to leave out the fact that Maddy had told her she was estranged from her family.
Wong was fascinated. ‘Madeleine Tsai? Father is property developer?’ he had echoed. ‘You mean Tsai Tze-ting? Is this Ms Tsai the daughter of Tsai Tze-ting? Why nobody has told me this before? Why did not Mrs Tsai-Leibler tell me this?’
Joyce had no idea what Maddy’s father’s name was, but she had thought it wise to nod. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That must be the guy. Her dad and her brother are like really rich. It would be good to get some people like that to feel deeply, deeply grateful to you. That sort of gratitude is worth much more than a few dollars paid as a deposit.’
There had been further discussion on these lines. Joyce, in truth, couldn’t remember very much about what Maddy had said about her family. But she hoped that the details she had related to Wong had been more or less accurate.
She felt herself being pushed back into her seat by the G-force as the Cathay Pacific jet lifted its nose from the runway at Changi and soared into the night sky.
Two hours into the flight, Joyce grabbed Wong’s arm. She had picked up a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
and was flicking through it, trying to find something that would remind her of the name of Maddy’s brother’s company. She’d already gone through the
Financial Times
with no success. She had eventually found it on the fifteenth page she had scanned of the
Journal.
‘Here it is,’ she said. ‘I think this is what Maddy’s brother’s company is called. I remember at the time thinking it was an odd name, because it was more numbers than letters.’ She pointed to a headline on the page.
He peered at it. ‘What? What name do you mean?’
‘There,’ she said. ‘401(k). That was the name of his company in Hong Kong.’
She scanned the article. It seemed to be about tax laws in the United States. There was no reference to any Hong Kong firm.
‘The article is not about his company, but his company has the same name as this tax thing: 401(k),’ she said. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘Strange,’ said Wong. ‘This 401(k) is name of tax law.
Maybe he is tax consultant. So he name his company after tax law.’
About five minutes later, Wong grabbed her wrist so hard that orange juice slopped out of the glass she was holding.
‘Joyce. I have important question. The company of Maddy’s brother. Maybe is not 401(k). Maybe is 14K. Can you remember?’
‘Don’t know. Hmm.’ She thought for a few moments. ‘Actually, it could be. It could be 14K. Why? Do you know anyone at that company?’
Wong breathed out very slowly. ‘There is a big group in Hong Kong called 14K. But is not a company. Is an, er, organisation.’
‘That must be it,’ said Joyce.
Wong was silent for a few more minutes. Then he turned to her again. ‘Joyce, I have one more very important question. Very important. When Maddy talk about her brother, did she say “brother” or did she say “big brother”? Please remember carefully.’
Joyce tilted her head up as she tried to recall a late night conversation at Dan T’s Inferno two nights earlier. ‘I think . . . she said . . .
big
brother, actually. Does it make a difference?’
Wong opened his mouth as if to breathe out again. But no breath came. He seemed to be in a state of shock. Joyce watched with astonishment as the geomancer appeared to physically sink into his airline seat. Both his head and body seemed to shrivel and he appeared to be pressing himself back, as if he wanted the economy class seat to swallow him.
The plane shot forwards at four thousand metres towards Australia and a sure forecast of death.
In Ye County during the rule of Wei Wenhou, a witch
had said that a beautiful girl-child should be sacrificed
to the River God every year to ensure there would be no
floods. Once a year, a girl was placed on a floating bed of
reeds and pushed into the water to drown.
Families with daughters moved away and the town
began to become deserted.
The new magistrate Ximen Bao wanted to help the
village. He said he would attend the sacrifice.
The witch appeared and the rituals began.
‘Stop,’ the magistrate said. ‘This girl is not beautiful
enough. Find a fairer maid.’
Ximen Bao ordered that the witch be thrown into the
river to tell the River God that there was a delay.
The witch could not swim. When she failed to
reappear Ximen Bao said: ‘Send her assistants to bring
her back.’
All the officials were thrown one by one into the
river until those who were left declared that the River
God no longer wanted to marry human girls.
The annual marriage ceremony was cancelled and
town began to grow and prosper once more.
If you cannot push an enemy in the way you want
him to go, Blade of Grass, push him in the direction in
which he is already going. He will still fall over which
is the aim of the exercise.
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong, part 350
Although the double-layered hotel curtains stretched from floor to ceiling, morning light streamed into the room through a narrow gap that had been left when they had been clumsily yanked together late the previous night. Joyce woke up, blinking at the unaccustomed walls and alien furniture around her. A disconcerting period when she didn’t realise where she was passed in seconds. This was Sydney. Madeleine was here, somewhere. She turned to the bedside table and noticed a red LED panel showing 7.58 a.m.
This was unusually early for her to be awake—she normally considered herself short-changed of sleep if her flat-mate woke her before 9 a.m. But today was different. There was no time to waste. Somewhere in this teeming city was the missing Ms Tsai, and they had only a matter of hours in which to find her. Joyce’s biggest worry was that Amran Ismail would be furious that the day would pass without Maddy being hurt or killed in some sort of accident—and then decide to make up for fate’s shortcomings by taking practical steps himself.
Wong, surely, would already be up. She couldn’t remember his room number, so she pressed the button on the phone marked ‘Operator’. When a hotel staff member answered, Joyce found that her voice wasn’t ready to speak yet—she coughed long and hard into her pillow before apologising in a croak and asking to be put through to her travelling companion. The phone in Wong’s room trilled but went unanswered. Clearly he had risen with the larks and gone out on the job. Or perhaps he was in the hotel having breakfast downstairs somewhere.
I
’
m
hungry too
, she thought.
Still exhausted after her succession of late nights, Joyce had great difficulty in pulling her bones out of the over-soft hotel bed. It was as if they had been glued to the sheets. Yanking herself free of the heavy coverlet, she slouched groggily to the window, pulled open the curtains and gazed at the city below her.
The glare hurt her eyes. But at the same time, the view triggered an involuntary intake of breath. She was thrilled to be reminded of what a magnificent city Sydney was. Clusters of tall buildings, standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the waterfront, crowded to get a glance at the ocean.
Even at this hour, the harbour was a hive of activity, with powerboats and marine police vessels and working trawlers all crawling past and around each other in what seemed to be a well-rehearsed dance. Ferries whisked commuters across the bay and a small water-tours boat skimmed the coastline, readying itself to show tourists the sights.
Looking inland, Joyce marveled at the way the city itself seemed almost as full of motion as the water, despite the solidity of the stone and glass monoliths dominating the waterfront. Roads and expressways pumped energy around a network of concrete veins. And the pulse was not just throbbing at ground level. There were raised motorways, hovering helicopters and shimmering aircraft appearing and disappearing behind clouds. Between two skyscrapers, she noticed part of a monorail curling along a curved track.
The pavements would soon be thick with crowds, pouring out of cars, buses, taxis, trains, boats and aircraft. How on earth were they going to find one young Chinese woman? It wouldn’t be easy.
She headed to the shower for a blast of water to wake her up.
At last: there was the hotel again. C F Wong had risen too early to make calls, so he had gone out for a walk to get a feel of the environment. He had quickly got lost—it was rather embarrassing for a feng shui master to have such a poor sense of direction.