Nevis Au Yeung looked at Wong. ‘They are saying what?’
Wong looked blankly back at him, screwing up his lips and shaking his head as if to say: I know nothing.
‘— Hey!’ Joyce suddenly stopped singing, screwed up her face and moved closer to the screen. ‘That’s not Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.’
Wong, as usual, had no idea what his assistant was talking about, or whether she was merely uttering nonsensical noises. But it seemed she had observed something.
‘What?’
She pointed to the screen. ‘Curdy’s changed his car. Look.’
‘Stop TV please,’ the feng shui master said to Foo-Foo.
She pressed the pause button and the picture froze, shivering slightly, and missing a section along the bottom.
Wong barked at his assistant. ‘What do you say, Joyce?’
The young woman pointed to the green car. ‘That’s not the car that the Curdys have been arriving in. That one had running boards.’
‘Running boards?’
Joyce pointed to the car on the screen video, to the space beneath the doors. ‘See here? There below the doors? He had a car with running boards under the doors before. That’s very important. That’s where the wings are hidden, you see.’
Nevis Au Yeung rose heavily to his feet and joined the small group clustered around the television. ‘What wings?’ he asked in a curiously high voice, forgetting to be angry.
‘The wings that make the car fly,’ Joyce explained, as if she was talking to an idiot.
The chairman’s wife nodded enthusiastically. ‘Right,’ said Foo-Foo. ‘I remember. Wings come out of the running boards when you go off a cliff and you can fly.’
‘This car can fly?’Au Yeung asked, incredulously.
‘Of course,’ said Joyce. ‘How else could they escape from the pirates?’
Nevis straightened up and looked even more aggrieved. ‘How come no one told me this car could fly?’
‘This car looks similar, and it’s the same colour, but it’s different. A bit, anyway.’ Joyce stabbed the play button and the car on the screen disappeared off screen.
‘Cute,’ she whispered to herself, as Petey’s face whisked past.
‘The car or the driver?’ said Foo-Foo with a laugh.
Joyce bit her lip, not realising she had spoken out loud.
‘Mr Au Yeung. You think you have one big problem in your garage: disappearing cars,’ Wong began. ‘But this is not true. Really you have two big problem in your garage.’
They were standing on the third floor of the car park. The evening sun was shining low in the sky at an angle where it slanted into the building. Everyone was squinting.
The feng shui master waved his hand at the diminished row of collectable cars and the empty climate-controlled workshop, its shutter open like a shocked mouth. ‘You think thief using black magic was disappearing your cars. Between nine o’clock morning and eleven o’clock morning, the cars vanish. But no cars leave the building at that time. So where do they go?’
Wong picked up the remote control. ‘Answer is nowhere. They do not leave the building.’
He pointed the remote control at the wall of Allie Ng’s flat and put his thumb on the button that triggered the infra-red beam. ‘Allie Ng is cousin-brother of Harris Wu, the architect who built this building. Ng and Wu is the same word in Chinese. Different dialect. Same character. Same name. Harris Wu built two automatic doors, not one. First is for workshop. Second is secret door built on side of Allie’s apartment.’
The wall began to rise, tucking itself in to the ceiling revealing the 132 Bugatti secreted there.
There was a gasp from the assembled watchers.
‘First, your Jaguar XK160 disappears. But was not taken out of garage. Just stored here. Everybody looks for clues at exit doors, can find none. Because car has not gone out of exit.’
He turned to stare at the suddenly terrified Allie Ng, who looked wide-awake for the first time. Harris Wu tugged uncomfortably at his shirt collar, his eyes turning to stare at Wong.
‘Car stays in secret compartment for a while. Maybe one day, maybe few days, I don’t know. But when Ng is on night shift and no one else is here, in the middle of the night, video is switched off and car is quietly driven away.’
Allie Ng started to walk backwards but Puk, who had already hung up his uniform, grabbed him firmly by the arm.
Nevis Au Yeung spoke in his deep, rumbly voice: ‘I don’t understand. Where did that secret wall come from?’
Wong said: ‘Architect who built building built it. Who else? Few days after, 1930 Aston Martin taken, same system. Stored for few days, then taken away when everything quiet. A week ago, 132 Bugatti taken. But still here. Not taken out yet. Hidden in apartment space.’
Harris Wu fell in a slump to the grimy floor and put his hands over his face, a picture of misery.
‘That’s amazing,’ said Au Yeung. ‘And my Alfa? Is that hidden here somewhere else?’ The short, fat tycoon snatched the remote control out of Wong’s hand and clicked it at all the walls he could find. ‘Here maybe? Or here? Or here? Give me a clue, Wong, where is it?’
The feng shui man said nothing, and the businessman’s attempts to use the device to make other walls tilt upwards produced no movement.
‘Alfa is different problem,’ said Wong. ‘Not hidden behind walls.’
Joyce piped up, grinning. ‘We didn’t solve that one through feng shui methods,’ she said. ‘Actually it was something I noticed that helped us find out what happened to that.’
The feng shui master continued: ‘Alfa was not stolen today. It was stolen two days before.’
Nevis and Foo-Foo gasped.
‘But how?’ Puk asked. ‘It was here this morning. I saw it myself. We checked on it every morning and every night, me and —’
‘Will explain,’ said Wong. ‘The two Mr Curdys came every day for past two weeks. They arrive in their own replica classic car. Spend all day working in sealed garage on Mr Nevis Au Yeung’s Alfa. But they are not really servicing it. They are removing pieces. They take out engine cover from Alfa, put it on their car. Next day they take out mudguards, swap with their car. They do it very carefully, so no one notice. In small-small steps, they swap most dis- dis- dis . . .’
‘Distinctive?’ suggested Joyce.
‘Thank you. Distinctive bits of Alfa. They put distinctive bits of Alfa on to their car. Two days ago, they leave their car here and drive off in Alfa. Car in workshop still looks a bit like Alfa.’
Dick Curdy spluttered, in a faux upper-crust British accent: ‘I say, steady on.’
Puk was baffled. ‘But how? I don’t get it.’
Wong turned to the security guard. ‘When you look through yellow-tint security window every morning, you see old car. You think is Alfa. But really is their car with a few Alfa pieces on it. They gamble that you don’t notice any difference between one old car, another old car. Looks almost the same. They think you and Mr Au Yeung too stupid to notice difference.’
The tycoon growled: ‘So they’ve taken my car away and left me with theirs?’
‘No. This afternoon, they drove off in their car. So there is nothing left in the workshop—nothing at all.’
The tycoon nodded, the truth slowly dawning on him. ‘They drove off with my car and their car, the car your girl refers to as a Chitty. The flying car.’
‘Yeah,’ said Joyce. ‘That’s just my nickname for it. ’Cause it looks like the car in the video? Caractacus Potts’?’
Dick and Petey started to walk away.
‘Stop them,’ Nevis Au Yeung said.
Curdy turned to Wong. ‘You can’t prove any of this in court.’
‘I don’t need to prove anything in court. I am my own court of law,’ said Nevis.
The four large men who always hovered near the tycoon moved swiftly to grab hold of the Curdy brothers.
Security guard Alyn Puk was a changed man. He sucked his stomach in and somehow ma
naged to suspend it at chest level. He strutted around, hands behind his back, chin high, pigeon-chested and proud.
‘The barskets,’ he kept repeating under his breath as he watched Harris Wu, Allie Ng and the Curdy brothers being dragged off by bodyguards to an uncertain fate. ‘Bloody doongu barskets.’
He saw Wong packing his charts into his bag and strolled over.
‘Never used to believe all that feng shui stuff-lah,’ he said. ‘But I guess it does really work, no?’
‘The flow,’ said Wong. ‘Flow of ch’i, flow of cars, very important. That Wu, he keeps saying how important is flow. He boasts about good flow in garage. So when I saw how he made the rooms stick out so bad, interrupt the flow, I knew something funny was there.’
‘Maybe better I study this stuff,’ said Puk. ‘This ch’i stuff is what?’
‘Scientist call it bio-electrical energy. Philosopher call it life force. Indian call it prana. Religious man call it God. I call it ch’i.’
‘Where does it come from?’
‘From centre of Earth. From sun, moon and stars. From sky and from beneath our feet. From outside us. From inside us.’
‘Can you see it?’
‘I can see what it touches.’
Puk, still filled with amazement at the events of the past few hours, could not stop shaking his head from side to side. ‘But how could they possibly think they could get away with it? I mean, someone would eventually have found that secret room that Harris built, even if it was months or years later, wouldn’t they?’
The geomancer nodded. ‘Yes. I thought about that. I think Harris Wu and Allie Ng plan to steal as many cars as they could—and then they would burn down whole garage, destroy the evidence. I study architecture. Mr Wu use many flammable materials. Unusual for garage. Very suspicious.’
Wong and McQuinnie left Ridley Park in Nevis Au Yeung’s Lincoln Towncar, the two of them feeling lost in the soundproofed, room-sized cabin. They sat with their backs to the driver. Sitting opposite was Foo-Foo, who had offered to drop them off at their office on her way out for a little shopping on Orchard Road. The socialite stared at Joyce, who had become quiet and morose.
‘Something wrong?’ Foo-Foo asked.
‘Naah. Nothing really.’
The young woman played with the ring on her finger. ‘It’s just—well, life seems so unfair. I mean, I know it’s wrong to steal and all that. But still, your husband has got loads of money and cars. He wouldn’t have missed a car or two. And— oh, never mind.’
‘And younger Curdy very cute.’ Foo-Foo looked away as she said this, to spare Joyce’s blushes.
‘Yeah.’ There was a moment’s silence and then Joyce realised what she had said. ‘I mean, was he? I don’t know. I didn’t notice. I never notice that sort of thing.’
The three of them drove on without speaking for the rest of the journey, and by the time the limousine reached Telok Ayer Street, the young woman had begun to regain her composure. She had a question for Wong as they struggled up the steep, rather odorous staircase of YY Mansions, as they walked up to their office on the fourth floor.
‘One thing I don’t understand, CF. If the Curdys’ car was green, and the Alfa Romeo was blue, how did they manage to switch them?’
‘They put green paint on Alfa, drive it out no problem.’
‘But how come Puk and the others didn’t notice that the car in the sealed room upstairs was not blue?’
‘Curdys very clever. They put yellow tinted windows in. Makes blue colour look like green. Anybody look inside, they see green car. But really is blue car.’
They arrived at the cracked frosted-glass door of CF Wong & Associates. Joyce grabbed his arm. ‘Before you go in, I need to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘While we were out of the office yesterday, I gave the keys to a friend of mine so he could come and use stain remover on the stain on the wall.’
Wong nodded. ‘I know. Winnie sent me fax.’
‘Unfortunately, the stain remover made it worse.’
‘Also Winnie told me that.’
‘So he came back this morning and repainted the wall. He said that was the only way to cover up the stain.’
‘Good,’ he said. Wong smiled. This was a happy ending to the stain-on-the-wall incident: a freshly whitewashed wall at someone else’s cost.
He moved to enter the office. But Joyce continued to tug at the fabric of his jacket.
‘Er, CF. I hope you’ll like it. He said he thought it looked really nice.’
‘I hope he use good quality white paint.’
Joyce swallowed. Her top teeth involuntarily bit her lower lip. She blew her breath out of her mouth. ‘Er. CF. He tried painting the stain white, but the red showed through. So instead, he went back to the shop to get more paint. He painted —’ But she didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence.
Wong had stepped into the room and gasped to find that the entire west wall of the office had been painted a vivid shade of crimson. Like a wall opposite a Chinese cemetery.
He stared at it for a few seconds. The sight filled him with horror. Blood. Gallons and gallons of blood. A wall of blood.
‘I think it’s lovely,’ said Joyce. ‘What do you think?’
Wong sat down in his chair. ‘Why do the gods hate me so?’ he moaned.
4 A little computer trouble
In the time of the Tang Dynasty (618–907), there were many secrets in the kingdom.
People made plots against each other. People whispered about each other. People were very careful what they said. People were very careful what they did.
All except one man. Official Guo Zyi took hammer and nails. He nailed his door open. No one in his family could shut it. Everyone passing could see inside.
When people walked past they peeked inside his house.
Now Guo Zyi particularly loved his daughter. She was very bossy. He acted like a servant to her. People saw him combing her hair. People saw him cooking her meals. People saw her shouting at him. Everybody laughed at them.
His two sons said: ‘Father, please close the door. Because everybody can see us.’
But Guo Zyi replied: ‘I will not close the door. Because everybody can see us.’
A time came when there was a great deal of slander and lies against officials of the city. Many officials lost their jobs. Many people accused each other.
But throughout the period of civil disruption, no one accused Guo Zyi of anything.
If you nail the door of your heart open, Blade of Grass, you can be beyond the power of evil ones who slander and lie. This is great power you can acquire for yourself, with no help from magic or from Heaven.
An ancient Chinese proverb says: ‘He who moves towards the light does not need the glow of joss sticks.’
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong, part 126.
Dilip Kenneth Sinha wound down the taxi window, opened his mouth and drew in a large lung-full of air.
It was stinky, pestilent and toxic.
The precise ingredients were hard to pick out, but he could detect several distinctive odours. Jira, dhania and petrol were the top notes, with subtle after-tones of garam masala, urine, dalchini, methi and perspiration. Sumptuous!
He closed his eyes and a warmth rose from the depths of his soul. The pleasure he felt was rich and wholesome and genuine. Yes, the air in this place may taste vile, it may be packed with particulate matter, it maybe dangerous to health, but no matter: it was home air. It was his air. It was what he had grown up on and what had formed his body. He took another deep swig of it and opened his eyes to survey the marketplace he was passing.
People kept remarking about how Hyderabad had changed. They had talked for some years about changing its name to Cyberabad, because of the business community’s talent for technology. But as he gazed at the buzzing, packed streets of tiny houses, interspersed with large, traffic-locked thoroughfares, what struck Sinha most
of all was how little it had altered over the decades.
It had always been a city with a bit of bustle about it, and that physical energy was still there. Groups moved in bright, vibrant clusters. Most of the women he could see were wearing lahenga choli outfits.
The only difference was that the number of men scurrying along the pavements in lungis and shirts of coloured cotton or printed polyester had fallen. There were now more men in dark trousers, Western ties and white shirts—short-sleeved shirts, naturally. One even saw a not inconsiderable number of male adults in full Western suits. And if you peeled their jackets off, you would find three further layers of clothing. The silk-lined worsted jacket hid a matching waistcoat, shirt and singlet, all four garments bravely being borne in a land where a single light cotton shirt was the only sensible upper body garment.
Sinha himself favoured the single-layer safari suit, as popularised in American B-movies set in Asia.
As the taxi slowly progressed through the maze of market streets to the beginnings of the financial district, he noticed with regret that modern clothing styles had made the business area of the town less colourful than the rest of the city. The office district imposed dark blues, charcoal greys and pinstripe blacks onto the city’s naturally colourful soul. It was as if the more sombre the tone of your dress, the more money you would make.
Yet for a thousand reasons, it was still the same old Hyderabad to him. Even here, several shops were still emblazoned with words like ‘Shirtings’ in antique, ornate fonts, instead of the slick ‘G2000’ logos you would see in clothing stores in Singapore. Cappuccino might be available in the five-star hotels downtown, but in his favourite canteen— which he had visited for breakfast—tea was still served warm and deep brownish pink, in tumblers instead of cups, with three spoonfuls of sugar already stirred in. And all items of traffic gaily announced their honking presence as they passed, giving the streets the air of a parade, compared to the low, discreet rumbles and roars of traffic in his present haunts of Singapore and Hong Kong.
Wong must be enjoying the architectural mix in the capital of Andhra Pradesh, Sinha mused. There were many reminders of the period of the British Raj, with stately colonial buildings at many major junctions. Certain corners reminded him of quarters of colonial Singapore. Yet the eye was regularly caught by other structures, equally grand, but with Islamic and Hindu backgrounds. As the taxi moved along the road leading out of the city, Sinha saw Saracenic, Mughal and mediaeval Indian themes along the houses spanning the wide boulevard.
The Feng Shui Detective's Casebook Page 12