Mr Wong Goes West

by Mr Wong Goes West (v5. 0) (epub)

  ‘That’s right, no king.’

  ‘Only a Queen.’

  ‘She is not married?’

  ‘She is married. She’s married to the Duke of Edinburgh.’

  ‘Ah. A Queen can marry a Duke?’

  ‘Yes, yes, a Queen can marry anyone she wants. Even a commoner. Even a foreigner. But not a Roman Catholic. That makes things awkward.’

  ‘Understand,’ said Wong, not understanding at all. ‘If the Queen marries the Duke, does the Duke become King?’

  ‘No. He was actually a Prince—Prince Philip—before she married him. After marriage, he became a Duke. The Duke of Edinburgh.’

  ‘So a Duke is bigger than a Prince?’

  ‘Uh, no, not really. It’s all rather hard to explain. He’s still a Prince, as well as being the Duke of Edinburgh.’

  ‘Oh. He is Scottish?’

  ‘No, he’s Greek.’

  ‘Edinburgh is in Greece?’

  ‘No, in Scotland. But he’s not Scottish himself. Although they do now live in Scotland. For some of the time. It’s a bit complicated.’

  Wong was alarmed when the truck they were in skimmed too close to some sort of fork-lift baggage vehicle, nudging it to one side, and causing it to tip over with a loud crash. ‘Aiyeeah,’ he said, putting his hands to his ears.

  Manks did not appear to notice, continuing to talk. ‘I’ve got some very good documents explaining it very simply and clearly. They’re in my bag at the hotel and I will be very happy to give you one. It’s a short book, really, but admirably clear. Explains everything you need to know about the royal family. I wrote it myself, actually.’

  Wong nodded. ‘What sort of job is it and how much you pay? I am very, very busy this week.’

  ‘I think the money should not be a problem. We’ll pay your usual fee, of course, plus the usual expenses. We pay promptly and discreetly. Indeed, discretion is our middle name. This is what I want to talk to you about at this moment: the importance of discretion.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I want to impress upon you the importance of total, utter discretion at all times in this affair. We want you and Ms McQuinnie to do some work with The Family, and their main London residence, Buckingham Palace, while regarding this job as entirely private. You will get a lengthy briefing about this, and you will be asked to sign a succession of documents, some of which are very lengthy. Everything related to this assignment must be kept discreet and private. Indeed, I would go so far as to use the word secret.’

  ‘Why secret? Something bad happen in Buckingham Palace? Someone murder someone there?’

  ‘No, no, no, no, no! That would be preposterous, not at all. It’s just that anything that the royal family do—well, if the press gets hold of it, that’s the end of it. While the royal family is held in high esteem by the vast, vast majority of the public, the press in my country is rather anti-monarchy. Extremely anti-monarchy, you might say. Especially the damned columnists. Evil nightmare monkeys, every last one of them. Anything that leaks out is used against them. If people were to find out that money was being spent on a feng shui master, they would likely raise an enormous fuss—the headlines would say, “Despicable royals use public purse for financing nutters” or something. They’d say that even when the Queen uses her own money for something.’

  ‘Nutter?’

  ‘A nutter—it’s British slang—it just means “crazy person”, really. The press would assume that anyone who believed in feng shui would be mentally deranged, that’s all. No insult intended or anything.’

  ‘No problem. Many of my client are Asian businessmen. They also like to keep everything secret.’

  ‘Well, this is exactly the same as that.’

  ‘Mostly because they are crooks.’

  ‘Oh. Well, perhaps not exactly like that, in this case.’

  They drove around another hangar and began a second circuit of the same trail. But this time, the truck hit a fire hydrant, pushing it over and causing pressurised water to gush out in a fountain behind them. Once more, Manks appeared not to notice—although he did look surprised at the drops of water which fell onto his windscreen. ‘Rain out of a clear sky. That’s good luck in British superstition,’ he said approvingly.

  Wong shuffled along the bench seat, closer to the middle of the vehicle, realising that it would be safer to be away from the sides. It was a wise decision. Seconds later, they clipped an airport bus, knocking off its wing mirror.

  Manks was lost in his own world, unaware of the results of his erratic driving. He wanted to move on to matters of detail. ‘Now, The Family has had a great deal of bad luck in the past couple of decades.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘You follow royal news?’

  ‘No, somebody told me.’

  ‘There have been an unwarranted number of high-stress events, tragedies even.’

  ‘Yes, being born with such big ears and long noses—this very negative.’

  ‘I wasn’t really thinking of that. I was really referring to the string of bad marriages, the death of the Princess of Wales and so on.’

  ‘Princess of Wales die too?’

  ‘Too…?’

  ‘Lady Diana died in car crash.’

  ‘Oh, I see, no…there isn’t another princess who died. The Princess of Wales is the formal title of Lady Diana…er…Princess Diana, to be more correct. They are one and the same person.’

  ‘She was a princess from Wales?’

  ‘No, she was a commoner from England. But her title was the Princess of Wales.’

  Wong decided it would be wiser to not try and make sense of any of this. He took a small notebook out of his jacket. ‘I will need their full names, date of births and place of births. Then I can start research immediately. Take a long time to do full feng shui reading for each member. How many person?’

  ‘Well, I’m really just thinking of the immediate family, so no more than eight or ten people. Perhaps twelve.’

  ‘You know their names, ages, date of births?’

  ‘Of course.’ He tapped his temple. ‘I’ve been working with them for years. It’s all up here. Who would you like to start with?’

  ‘Head of household. Queen’s husband.’

  ‘Ah, Prince Philip. Well, he may be the man of the house, but it would be a protocol problem to consider him the head of the household. So let’s start with Her Majesty. Tell you what. Let’s pause for a minute.’

  He stopped the truck at a forty-five degree angle across the road, opened his briefcase, and pulled out a laptop computer, which he had left on standby. Bringing it to life, he called up a photograph of the Queen. ‘Okay. There she is. Elizabeth Regina, born in 1926.’

  Wong jotted it down. ‘Her family name is Lagina?’

  ‘Regina. Elizabeth Regina. That’s not really her family name, but that is the formal name she carries. The women are Regina. Kings are Rex.’

  The feng shui master’s eyebrows wrinkled at this. ‘But Joyce told me that “Rex” means “dog” in England.’

  Manks considered this. ‘That’s true, in a manner of speaking. In the West, the Latin word Rex is used as a name for dogs, but also is the word for kings.’

  Wong slowly shook his head. No wonder Western civilisation was in such a mess. There was no sense of propriety.

  The public relations man continued: ‘Technically speaking, members of the royal family only have first names. But they are known colloquially as the Windsors, as if it was their surname. But when they have a need to sign their full names on any document, they normally write Mountbatten-Windsor.’

  Wong wrote it down. ‘So her surname is Mountbatten-Windsor. That was name of her father?’

  ‘Actually, no. I think one could not accurately say that that was her father’s name.’

  ‘Oh. You don’t know who the father was?’

  ‘Of course we know who the father was!’ Manks looked horrified. ‘We know her father and her father’s father and so on, all the way back
to Egbert, King of Wessex, who reigned from 802 to 839 AD. Creating a long and distinguished line stretching back over one thousand years—just think of that, Mr Wong. One thousand years!’

  ‘In China, one thousand years is not long. I come from line of Yellow Emperor, nearly five thousand years ago.’

  ‘Well, that’s China. A thousand years is a long time in England.’ He stopped. ‘I’ve lost my line of thought.’

  ‘You say you think her father’s name not Mountbatten-Windsor.’

  ‘Ah, yes, that’s right. Well, it’s like this. The surname of Queen Victoria’s eldest son Edward VII was actually Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which was the family name of his father Albert, a German. When war broke out between the British and the Germans in 1914, Edward’s son George assumed a name that sounded less Germanic and more English.’

  Wong nodded. ‘I see. He was a double agent.’

  ‘No. King George V was not a double agent.’

  ‘So why he needs a fake name?’

  Manks thought about this for a moment. ‘It was sort of for PR reasons. I like to think he was an early example of an individual who instinctively knew the power of good branding.’ He puffed out his chest and looked rather proud of this notion. ‘Anyway King George V decided to call himself Windsor. That was the name of their castle. Many people these days, of course, assume that the castle was named after the family. Not so. The family was named after the castle.’

  ‘So they are going by fake name Windsor, but really they are the, er, Sexy-Cobber-Goater family?’

  ‘Er, not sure if I would call it a fake name. Maybe we should think of it as an adopted name. And it’s Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Hmm. Perhaps I am giving you too much information. Let’s go back and start again.’

  ‘Understand. This information top secret.’

  ‘No, it’s not exactly secret. But let’s just think of them as the Windsors.’

  ‘Queen Windsor.’

  ‘No, we don’t say Queen Windsor. Traditionally we only use first names.’

  ‘Elizabeth Vagina.’

  ‘Regina.’ Manks started to look seriously concerned at this point. ‘Look…let me make it as simple as I can. The most senior members of the family go by first names only. But they do have surnames, which they only use on certain occasions. The family as a whole abandoned their German name and adopted the name Windsor. But in the 1960s, the Queen and Prince Philip decided to call their immediate family Mountbatten-Windsor, to differentiate themselves from the other Windsors.’

  ‘They had a fight?’

  ‘No, they did not have a fight. They just did it because… well, I don’t know if there is an official reason. They just did it. Are you following me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Wong lied.

  ‘There’s one more thing. On some occasions members of the royal family use their title as if it was a surname. For example, His Royal Highness Prince Harry, when he joined the army, was known as Cornet Wales. See how it works?’

  The feng shui master thought long and hard about this. ‘So for his family name, he uses the name of the country his mother was not born in.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Wong shook his head. ‘Very suspicious. All this use of fake names. Must be hiding something.’

  ‘Um. I think you’ll find that that’s not really the case. Anyway, you won’t be looking for anything fishy there. You will merely be doing a feng shui reading of the main living area of Buckingham Palace. Do you understand?’ Manks was starting to look thoroughly disaffected.

  ‘You want me to find out what is causing bad fortune?’

  ‘In a nutshell.’

  ‘In a nut shell? What nut shell?’

  ‘That’s just a figure of speech. It means, well, never mind. Check out the bad fortune in the palace. Alleviate the situation. Stop the bad…what do you call it…bad ch’i, or whatever it is from flowing. Now you will not be working alone. I contacted the gentleman you mentioned yesterday. Mr DK Sinha, the expert in vaastu. He’s flying into Hong Kong from Singapore as we speak, and will be joining us on the flight.’

  ‘Wah! Sinha is coming too. This is good news. He is very good man. We are both members of the same union.’

  ‘Very good. Next week, we’re flying in Shang Dan, a gentleman based in Shanghai; a medium called Elsa Dottvik from southern Germany, and we’ve also booked a couple of English people to look over the premises, including Edward Alaine, a famous dowser.’

  Wong nodded. ‘You are taking good care of your Queen. These sound like good people. Shang Dan is also old friend of mine.’

  ‘Well, I like to do things properly, Mr Wong. You will soon find out that when Manks is involved in anything, every detail is covered. So, do you have any questions for me?’

  ‘When will I be paid?’

  ‘I’ve slotted you in for three days in Britain. At the end of the third day, you can be paid immediately.’

  ‘The full amount, before I leave Britain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Cheque or cash? I need something I can cash immediately.’

  ‘We can arrange a cashier’s cheque or a bank transfer, if you wish.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘But we want good service out of you. We want all negative energy banished from The Family and their premises. We want wonderful good news, nothing but good news, from here on out. Do you get me?’

  Wong nodded. ‘Can. But will cost more. Royals more expensive than people.’

  Watching from a distance was a tall stocky man with dark skin and short hair. Wong did not notice the man watching him as he got out of the truck and headed back towards the hangar, nodding politely as Robbie Manks continued to talk.

  ‘Hi, Paul, it’s me.’

  She was shocked to see him. He looked years older. He looked sick. He had purple bags under his eyes, which stood out against the pallor of his dumpling-coloured skin.

  Joyce had turned up at prison unannounced and had initially been flatly refused permission to see him. It was only when she pretended to be his sister and explained that she did not live in Hong Kong and would be leaving the territory the next day that the officer at the gate had become fractionally less intransigent. From her time spent living in Asia, she knew that she could pull the ‘irrational, emotional white woman’ trick: for some reason, Asian males seemed to have an in-built terror of Caucasian females, and she could always get rules bent if she pretended she did not understand the regulations, or indeed the concept that rules existed, and gave the impression that she was about to become screechy and unhinged.

  The exhausted door guard had eventually sent her up the ladder to the duty warden. He had consulted a woman who turned out to be some sort of social worker assigned to Paul’s case. The woman had argued that the prisoner had refused to speak to anyone, and she was inclined to give Joyce brief contact with him, presumably in case she had a positive effect on him, but only if the prisoner personally consented.

  The warden had then relented and allowed her five minutes. ‘When I say five minutes, I mean five minutes only,’ he said. Unsmiling, he handed Joyce into the care of a guard who had walked with her through five separate layers of lockable gates before she was shown into a cold, empty room painted hospital green, and told to wait by an internal glass window.

  Almost ten minutes passed before Paul Barker, looking haggard and unhappy, had been shown into a chair on the other side of the window. In reply to her greeting, Paul merely touched his lips with the tip of his left index finger and waved his right index finger from left to right like a metronome. The message was clear.

  ‘You’re not talking?’

  He dipped his chin in affirmation.

  ‘Not even to me?’

  He said nothing. But his eyes seemed to tighten their grip on hers.

  ‘Paul.’ Joyce felt she had been aching for this moment for a year, but now it was here, she didn’t know what to say. If they could not use words, how could they communicate? They could not touch, hug or squeeze each other’s h
ands. Would a one-way conversation work?

  ‘If you won’t talk to me, that’s fine. I believe in you, Paul, and whatever you think is right, that’s what you should do. Perhaps I’ll just talk anyway and you can listen. We’ve only got five minutes.’

  She looked at his face, and a flicker of a smile crossed his lips.

  ‘Well, what shall I tell you? Shall I tell you what’s going on in my life and you can listen, and then I’ll ask about you, and you can reply or not reply or nod or not nod or whatever you like, okay?’

  He said nothing, but seemed to relax slightly in his chair.

  Despite what she had just said, she couldn’t think of anything in her life worth talking about in comparison with the drama of the situation he was in, so she turned the subject back to him.

  ‘How are you bearing up? Could you tell me that, at least?’

  He spoke, his voice little more than a whisper: ‘The Cure, 1980.’

  Joyce blinked. Okay, so he wanted to play Obcom. It was better than silence. She thought about it for a few seconds. ‘Is it “Boys Don’t Cry”?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Two can play at this game. Stevie Wonder, 1974.’

  A genuine smile.

  ‘So you got that, hey?’ Joyce said. ‘“You Haven’t Done Nothin’”. What about Billy Swann, 1974—“I Can Help”. Will you let me help?’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Robert John, 1979. Barbra Streisand and Donna Summer, 1979.’

  Joyce thought about it. ‘Robert John I don’t know. Barbra Streisand? Was it “No More Tears”?’

  Another smile. Again, a phrase from Paul, spoken in a whisper: ‘Gloria Gaynor, 1979.’

  ‘“I Will Survive”. Ha ha ha. Very funny. But Paul, this is not a joke. I mean, look, I’m sorry to bring this up, but, well, you’re bringing it up yourself. Will you survive? This is part of China now. I don’t even know what they do to people on murder charges…I mean, maybe there’s a death penalty here. I’m sorry to talk about all this, but you have to face the facts. This is really, really serious.’

  ‘Blue Oyster Cult, 1976.’

  ‘“Don’t Fear the Reaper”,’ she offered.

  He nodded, pleased with himself. ‘Queen, 1975.’