Wong had seemed highly sceptical at first, but appeared to become more and more interested as details flowed. When Sinha opened his bag and took out the paperwork he had on Clara/Madeleine, Wong quickly started flicking through it.
‘Unusual,’ he said. ‘Very unusual. Never seen case like this. Of course, is impossible to predict time of death precisely like this. Very silly and impossible.’
‘Exactly my initial reaction,’ said Sinha. ‘But look at the facts.’
‘It seems strange, but all signals point to this week,’ said Madame Xu. ‘For her to expire.’
Joyce quietly rejoined the table and made her own contribution. ‘She’s a really, really nice girl. She doesn’t deserve to die. You understand what’s going on, don’t you, CF? The insurance thing that I told you about?’
The geomancer looked up and nodded. ‘Understand,’ he said. ‘This man Ismail, he finds that girl is due to die on a certain day. The stars say which day. Then he gets engaged to her and takes out big life insurance on her: millions of ringgit. But he is nervous or something, so he goes to other bomohs, other fortune-tellers, who confirm that prediction is correct. Like you two.’
‘How do you know he’s bought life insurance on her?’ asked Sinha, surprised.
‘Actually, I delivered that piece of information,’ Joyce declared smugly. ‘That Ismail guy has taken out like at least three separate insurance polices on her life. I found out from Maddy—er, Clara.’
‘I can’t believe that,’ said Madame Xu, genuinely shocked. ‘He can’t be doing all this for money. I thought he was such a nice young man. And so in love with her.’
‘In love with her insurance policies you mean,’ sneered Joyce. ‘He’s evil. She found the documents hidden in his room.’
‘If it’s true . . . what a cad,’ said Madame Xu.
‘The bounder,’ said Dilip Sinha.
The geomancer pulled at the hairs on his chin. ‘So he is going to wait for her to die of natural causes, as predicted, very soon or even tomorrow, and then collect the money: clever plan,’ said Wong. ‘Very clever. He gets rich. But no murder committed.’
He shuffled the papers into a neat pile and then pushed them back towards Sinha.
‘What are you doing?’ said the Indian astrologer.
‘Holiday,’ said Wong. ‘I told you.’
‘You can’t go on holiday. We have to save this unfortunate girl.’
‘Yes,’ Joyce added. ‘She’s my friend.’
‘A gentleman known as the Great Bomoh said that she would die by the end of tomorrow—by five o’clock. My own work confirms that she will be dead very soon, as does the work of many lesser mystics,’ said Madame Xu. ‘If you go on holiday, by the time you get back, it will all be over.’
‘This is not the normal business of a feng shui master,’ said Wong. ‘We do not interfere with predictions of other people.
Some predictions are right, some are wrong. Even if it is right, we do not try to stop death. The gods give life, the gods give death. It is not for us to change anything. We cannot change anything.’
‘Wong, for pity’s sake, please just read through the birth charts and at least look at her earthy pillars of destiny for us,’ said Sinha. ‘That’s something none of us know how to do. So we can advise them on where to go to maximise their safety tomorrow, during the danger hours.’
‘Okay, Dilip,’ said Wong. ‘But then I go on holiday. Already booked. Mrs Leong is getting me a ticket to my heung ha to leave tonight. On Dragonair.’
Joyce’s head retreated into her shoulders with guilt.
Wong spent the following half hour carefully going through all the papers, and scribbling on charts and diagrams. He also read the notes provided by Amran Ismail and listened to accounts of meetings from both Madame Xu and Sinha. Joyce sat at a distance, watching all this, and shooting up prayers that Wong would take the case seriously.
After his tenth cup of bo-leih tea, Wong pushed back the papers and his cup. He’d finished his studies. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘If these dates are correct, the client enters very negative phase tomorrow. Her earthly branch is fire and it is interrupted by a powerful influence of metal and water tomorrow afternoon. Very negative.’
‘Enough to kill her?’ This was Joyce.
‘Feng shui does not show that. It only shows positive and negative. Not facts and details. What we do know is that tomorrow is very negative. But when we put it together with other findings . . .’
‘Then . . . ?’
‘Then it looks very bad. And certainly when you add findings of other mystics, it looks worse and worse.’
‘So you believe it? She really is due to like actually die tomorrow?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘But it is not as bad as it could be. It is what I might say, only ninety-five per cent bad.’
Madame Xu interrupted. ‘Not as bad as it could be? What’s good about it?’
‘Location is not the worst,’ said Wong. ‘Look at this chart here. Stars are unfavourable. But not the worst. Now if she was locate elsewhere, could be much worse.’
‘What do you mean located elsewhere?’
‘If she was in southern hemisphere. Like South America. Or Australia. Then death might even be one hundred per cent certain. My opinion only.’
‘Australia?’ said Joyce. ‘Excuse me. I have something to say . . .’
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. Joy
ce 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.
Friday:
A perfect
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, tra
ins, 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.
But he had grown up in a place where you could always see the sky. In low-slung cities, slow-moving clouds act as useful direction markers for hours on end. But in modern skyscraper cities of crowded canyons, there was nothing from which to get one’s bearings. He had never been a good map reader, so these days had got into the habit of guiding himself around with his south-pointing lo pan. After leaving the hotel, he had walked for twenty minutes in what he thought was a triangular route, but had ended up in a totally unfamiliar quarter.
So he decided to sit on a small wall and use the opportunity to study the map of Sydney he had picked up at reception. Although tourist maps tended to omit important things, such as contours and mountains, they usually included watercourses, viewing towers, cable cars and so on, which provided him with a basic overview of a city’s feng shui.
Water meandering gently between east and west to the south of a key location was always the most favorable situation. But it was clear from the map that the ch’i in this city had pooled to the south of the river. North of the waters, there were relatively few items marked as being of interest to tourists. South of the channel, the map was covered with tiny symbols identifying key landmarks. Evidently Sydney was a yang city south of the estuary and a yin city to the north.
Then there was a network of major roads, a bridge, an undersea tunnel and a sizeable railway operation. He reckoned he could easily spend a couple of weeks examining the feng shui characteristics of the city.
But no time for that now. They probably had only eight or nine hours in which to find Madeleine Tsai. He tried, without success, to fold up his hotel map. Then he crumpled it up in his pocket, and took a chance on small road to his left as a possible route back to where he had started. To his surprise, it proved correct. He had turned one further corner and gratefully sighted the hotel again. Time to go back to his room and make some calls.
The Feng Shui Detective Goes South Page 17