"The Feng Shui Detective" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vittachi Nury)

9 An imperfect enclosure

Five hundred years ago a great spirituality came to the west of Beijing. This was a time when tangible gave way to intangible. There was much magic.

Every day a bowl would fly from the holy temple to the Imperial Palace. Spirits would carry it. They were unseen. Empress Li would put alms in it. It would fly back to the temple.

One morning the Empress was not ready. She was in her nightdress. The bowl came into her room. She was half-awake only. She covered herself up. She made a joke.

‘What do you want so early? Five hundred girls for your 500 monks?’

The bowl flew back to the temple. It did not come the next day.

The Empress realised she should not have made this joke. She wrote a letter to the head of the temple. His name was Tao Fu. She told him what she did.

Tai Fu said: ‘There is only one thing you can do. You must send 500 girls for the 500 monks. Then you will not have insulted the spirits. There will be no untruth.’

So she sent staff to find 500 girls. After a long time they found enough. The girls were sent to the village of Shih Fu. This is near the temple. The 500 men and 500 women could not stay so close together without sin. They were tempted. They came together.

Tao Fu did not know what to do. The punishment for this sin was death. He decided he had to do it. He took the 500 monks and 500 girls and surrounded them with fire. They lit the fire to burn them to death.

But the Immortals were looking. They lifted the 500 couples straight to the Highest Heaven. They became saints. Tao Fu took the bed of Empress Li and made it into an altar.

Blade of Grass, from this incident a great truth became understood. The holy man who gives up love for his whole life is a pleasure to Heaven. But the holy man who gives up his whole life for love is also a pleasure to Heaven.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’

by C F Wong, part 287.

CF Wong put his journal away and picked up the day’s mail, which consisted of a single letter. As usual, there had been an armful of communications jammed into the C F Wong amp; Associates pigeon-hole downstairs. And as usual, most had been envelopes with windows (put into a drawer to await the weekly accounting session), phone number cards from taxi companies (binned), and items of junk mail (ceremonially burned in a bid to wreak a small karmic vengeance on the senders).

The geomancer examined the outside of the single example of genuine correspondence and gave an unhappy sigh. This, surely, meant trouble. The envelope bore the crest and marks of Master Dinh Tran of the Buddhist Vihara of St Sanctus, a man whose oddly cross-cultural title bore witness to the mixed history of his temple, built in south Vietnam on the site of a former Roman Catholic church.

‘Oh well, better eat the bullet,’ Wong said half out loud before tearing open the envelope and scanning the contents. The lines around his eyes grew visibly deeper as his gaze rolled down the page. ‘Aiyeeeaa,’ he breathed. ‘Terok-lah! AiyeeAAA.’

In the letter, Master Tran, a friend of Wong’s late father, requested the feng shui master’s urgent presence to deal with a complex problem. He must come now. The temple was willing to provide a fee equivalent to one day’s consultation to East Trade Industries. No mention was made of air tickets or accommodation. Presumably he would be housed in a Spartan room inside the temple complex. The offer of payment was academic anyway, because East Trade Industries would gallantly refuse to take any money in a case such as this. There were enough superstitious people on the board to ensure that, as Master Tran well knew. All in all, it was almost guaranteed to be a tricky and unprofitable way to spend a few days.

Wong tossed the letter to his assistant, Joyce McQuinnie, who was watching with curiosity.

‘I’m going to walk the streets again,’ he said.

‘Hit the road again,’ corrected Joyce, after a moment’s thought. She looked at the stamp on the letter. ‘ Vietnam! I’m coming with you. If Daddy lets me.’

‘Yes,’ Wong said absently, his mind already travelling. It could be all right. There was something other-worldly about Vietnam that sometimes uplifted his spirits, although Saigon itself could be depressing. And he had a cousin in Cholon he could see. Perhaps he could take a day or two off, do some meditation? It had been, what, eight or nine years since he had spent any serious time in a temple? He recalled how refreshed he had been after a week of quiet contemplation in a temple lodge in Chiang Mai. Or hang on, was he thinking of the free holiday he had received while doing the feng shui for that new five-star resort in Nusa Dua?

Master Tran did not have a phone or a fax machine, so Winnie Lim had to use the temple’s agent, a Thai import-export man carrying the unmelodious name Porntip, to inform the holy man that the geomancer would arrive on the Tuesday of next week for one day and one night, and would be accompanied by an assistant.

‘Didn’t know temples used like, feng shui guys,’ said Joyce.

‘Why not? They are buildings too.’

‘Yes, but they are a different type of thingie, I mean, well, a different type of-I don’t wanna say superstition, but you know what I mean.’

‘Different mumbo-jumbo,’ said Wong, recalling the word she had used on her first awful day in the office. It had a nice sound. He must look it up. Derived from the English slang word for the Boeing 747?

‘I mean, can’t they, like, just pray to God and stuff and get him to fix whatever their problem is?’

‘They are Buddhists. They don’t believe in God.’

‘Well, Allah or Buddha or the Great Pumpkin or whatever they worship, you know.’

Wong nodded. He didn’t know how to explain it to her in English, but this was exactly the reason why he disliked doing feng shui readings in temples or churches or any holy places. They were already so full of unseen influences that his job was infinitely more difficult. An altar which had been worshipped by thousands of souls over tens or hundreds of years, might have a great deal of stored ch’i energy, despite being in entirely the wrong place in feng shui terms.

Another difficulty was that holy men of any sort generally imagined themselves to be highly advanced in the spiritual arts, although many were extremely shallow. This meant they rarely paid more than lip service to the advice of masters of what they thought were lesser arts, such as geomancy. It was true that Master Tran had always had a healthy respect for feng shui, but Wong feared the existence of hostile skeptics among other temple personnel.

There was another thing. God or Allah or Buddha or-what did Joyce say? The Great Pumpkin? He must look that one up-might actually be there. He recalled once doing some private readings at an old church and encountering a terrifyingly powerful presence which had left him exhausted and disorientated. He recalled the words of Confucius, memorably quoted by the Tang Dynasty sage Han Yu: ‘Pay all re spects to spiritual beings but keep them at a distance.’

‘ Temples always difficult. Also big. And only one day. It will be difficult assignment.’ He put his fingers on his own temples and closed his eyes.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Joyce. ‘I’ll help. A friend of mine bought a fantastic CD case in a Saigon market-it’s sort of like basket-weave but in neon colours-and I want to see if I can get one. It would be kind of fun to stay in a monkey-house for a while. It’ll be all guys, won’t it? A hundred guys in bedsheets and me, totally rad.’

‘Monkey-house?’ asked Wong.

‘Yeah, monkey-house,’ said his young assistant. ‘Place where monks hang out. Not to be confused with “monastery”, which is the technical word for a building at the zoo where the monkeys are kept.’

Wong wrote it down. What a strange language English was.

Stepping out of the airport in Ho Chi Minh City was like entering the world’s biggest convection oven. There was a light breeze blowing, but rather than cooling the skin, the wind seemed to blast heat at them.

‘Wow. I won’t need a hairdryer,’ Joyce said. She watched amazed as an ice cream in the clutches of a small girl next to them melted in seconds and poured out of her hand. The young woman removed her denim jacket, being careful not to displace her earrings, a gold stud from Sri Lanka from which dangled a tiny holographic picture of a seated Buddha.

As is the case outside most Asian city airports, there was a bewildering mass of people standing around, and no obvious way of differentiating one party from another. How would they find who they were looking for? But seconds later, a tiny, brown, bird-like man in a floral print shirt scuttled up to Wong and shook his hand firmly. ‘CF, hello, hello, welcome to Vietnam. I haven’t seen you for a long time. Seven-eight years maybe?’

The geomancer nodded and bowed and then introduced the newcomer to Joyce. Porntip’s glee vanished like a popped soap bubble. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, no, no, no,’ he said, sharply withdrawing the hand that he had proffered in her direction. ‘I’m sorry…’ He looked back at Wong. ‘She’s a woman,’ he complained.

‘Yes,’ said Wong. ‘A woman.’

‘She’s not a man. She’s a woman.’

Joyce, irritated, grabbed the front of her skirt as if she were offering to lift it up. ‘Would you like to have a look and make absolutely sure?’ she asked.

‘No need,’ said Porntip.

‘Not necessary,’ said Wong.

In the car on the way to the temple, Wong and Porntip discussed the problem. Wong had apparently forgotten or had never realised how strict the temple was on the subject of women. It was rare for females to be allowed through the gates at any time of the day or night, the Thai businessman said, and one would never be allowed to stay the night.

‘No women at all, ever?’ asked Wong.

‘There is an open day once or twice a year, and then women can come, but only if they make a big donation or give presents, you know?’

‘When?’

‘May. The Lord Buddha’s birthday. Vesak. Also Dharma Day, Sangha Day.’

‘Fine,’ said Joyce. ‘I’ll just wait outside until May.’

‘Cannot. We are only here for one night,’ Wong explained.

Not for the first time, Joyce lamented the lack of irony in conversations in Asia.

The driver of the ageing Nissan was Porntip’s nephew, a chain-smoking young man of about sixteen, who went by the single name of Bin. He had left his window open and the temperature of the air rushing through the car varied from cool to searing, depending on its speed. After about forty-five minutes, the car hit the outskirts of Saigon proper, and slowed to a crawl. Porntip wound the window up and switched on a noisy and ineffective air-conditioner.

The little man had not aimed a single word at Joyce, and refused to catch her eye, despite the fact that when he turned around from his front passenger seat to talk to Wong, who was directly behind him, his line of sight ran past her.

‘Why no women can come?’ asked Wong.

‘They had a monk there who turned out to be a sex-change person,’ said Porntip. ‘When they found out, they threw him, er, her, out, of course. I think that was the last time they had a woman inside.’ He lowered his voice confidentially. ‘She was one of those, you know, third sex people.’

‘Yes, I know. In Singapore we have them too. We call them homo sapiens. They go to nightclubs. But in Singapore mostly are men.’

‘Yes. But sometimes there are women like that. Very perverted.’ Porntip gave that strange Thai laugh that signifies embarrassment rather than humour. ‘Women and women together,’ he added in a horrified whisper.

‘Have read about them. Pervert women. Short hair. In Singapore, they are known as Lebanese,’ said the geomancer.

‘Lesbians,’ Joyce inserted.

‘Yes, Lesbianese. Anyway, when did this happen? The sex-change monk?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe five-six years ago.’

Joyce, who was still seething, remarked that the temple did not seem to be very well up on the present understanding of the rights of transsexuals or transvestites or whatever the person might have been. ‘It doesn’t seem very religious to me to discriminate against people with a different sexual orientation,’ she said.

Wong gave her a long, hard look before replying. ‘Joyce please to remember. This is Asia. Those sort of people have no rights.’

Twenty minutes later, they were out onto the open road, and an hour of more restful driving into the rural areas brought them to the gates of the Buddhist Vihara of St Sanctus, in a tiny hamlet close to the village of Tho, southeast of Saigon.

Porntip told them to leave the bags in his car, while their arrival was announced. Wong answered several questions from Joyce about the organisation. The vihara was more like a convent than a standard temple, he said. It was closed to the public and its members were kept in a state of isolation. Nor was it involved in the sort of high-turnover ‘conscript’ Buddhism sometimes found in South-East Asia, where young men spend a couple of years as monks as part of their upbringing.

Just looking at it, Joyce could tell that this was a rural Zen Buddhist temple of a really old school. It was a large, prison-like compound. High, windowless walls in a muddy red colour framed a heavy wooden door with wrought iron fittings. You entered to escape the world, and some monks never left except in a box when they were dead, Wong had told her. ‘Scary,’ she had replied.

There was no need to knock. As soon as they approached, a small opening, about 6 inches square, slid open in the door. A pair of dark eyes glanced momentarily at Wong and then looked sharply and intensely at McQuinnie. The look was not one of lust, but fear. The little metal opening was slammed shut.

Nothing happened for a while. It was hot. Joyce was aware of her heart beating and her clothes being damp. The air felt clammy on her skin. The surroundings were quiet compared to Saigon. The boy Bin now kept staring at her. For some reason, she didn’t mind.

Six minutes and thirty-three seconds later, they heard footsteps again. The little opening slid open with a metallic scrape. A male voice started talking in Vietnamese. Porntip replied.

For the next few minutes, there were complex and high-octane negotiations between Porntip and the face behind the door. During this, the Thai businessman and the small, squat face in the door gave several pointed glances at Joyce. Porntip was evidently trying to get permission for the young woman to enter on the grounds that she was a professional consultant. They could tell from his hardened face at the end of the discussion that the outcome had been unsuccessful.

‘He says we and Bin can go in, but not the child.’

She blinked. ‘You don’t mean me?’

‘Yes, he means her,’ Porntip said.

‘I am a woman of nearly eighteen years old,’ she spat, her forehead turning into an angry map of lines. ‘THAT is a child.’ She gestured at Porntip’s short, tousle-headed nephew, who looked very much younger than she did.

‘Adolescence for women continues until twenty-four according to the tradition of this house,’ said Porntip. ‘Boys become adults at thirteen. I’m sorry, she is a woman and child, so she won’t be able to enter.’

‘That’s so dumb,’ snapped Joyce.

‘Why don’t you go shopping? There are some very nice tourist shops about an hour’s drive from here,’ said Porntip. ‘I can give you my nephew to guide you if you like.’

This was a bad idea on Porntip’s part, Wong knew. If there was anything Joyce McQuinnie hated, it was the assumption that she was a shopping addict-particularly since it was true.

‘I didn’t come here to shop,’ she lied, icily.

‘No time for that. Got your lo pan and books?’ Wong asked, taking her arm and pointing to the distance. ‘I do in side of the temple grounds and you do outside. Many, many influences here, I can see. Look at those trees. And that pointed thing there. You have a lot to do, Joyce. You will be more busy than me even. We meet again here in two hours. Okay or not?’

‘Yeah, guess so,’ she said, partly mollified by being taken seriously. She accepted the notebook he handed her.

‘Ask Mr Porntip to go with you, okay or not?’

‘No, I’ll be okay by myself, thank you.’

‘Bin can help. See you in two hours.’

Bin tilted his head to one side and gave her a toothy grin. ‘You like pirate CDs?’ he said. ‘Original artist, only 2 US dollars. Also software. Windows Office latest one. Tomb Raider III. Movies.’

‘Where?’ said Joyce.

‘Follow,’ said Bin.

Wong stepped through the door and was welcomed by a bulky man in a robe. The inside of the temple grounds were very similar to the modern Vietnamese temples he had seen tourists swarm all over-the only difference was that the tourist traps seemed more holy. More money flowed around and through them, and there was more motivation to make them visually conform to expectations, Wong mused. In contrast closed holy houses such as this were clean, dull and rather featureless.

His escort, who introduced himself as Brother Wasuran, explained that Master Tran had been summoned to a meeting of a Buddhist organisation in Saigon and would not be back until the evening or even the following morning.

‘Never mind,’ said Wong. ‘Always a great pleasure to spend time in a monkey-house like this.’

Although not attractive, the premises were functional. There was a large central courtyard with the objects of veneration in a building in the centre. The middle of the space was shared with a large bo tree, said to have been grown from a sprig of the tree under which Siddharta Gautama had sat. Over to the west was a rather dry, dusty garden, and to the east and the north were some rows of low buildings where the monks’ sleeping cells were. A training block stood to the south, and just next to it were the offices and the private rooms of the senior monks. Everything was a faded red.

‘Already can see problems,’ said Wong, peering into one of the cells of the northern sleeping block. ‘Sleep rooms are in north of grounds. They are entered by door facing northeast. But beds are pointing south. All this not a good combination. North is good for bedrooms for man and wife. Good for sex. But very bad for monks with no woman. I think can fix. Definitely have to move beds. Also maybe move door to sleeping block. And paint colour is no good. Must change. All paint colours.’

The geomancer stepped towards the middle of the courtyard and cast his eyes around again, then tapped his lo pan. ‘Also, garden in the west. I think that was not there before, is it?’

‘No, there used to be a shed for the carts there, but it fell down. We cleared it and turned it into a vegetable garden about two years ago,’ said Brother Wasuran, a rotund man of about forty, with a raspy voice and a neanderthal brow.

‘Plants are alive. Have very special sort of energy. Must be placed carefully. Can be very good. But now are in southwest. This is direction of soil ch’i. Not so good. Need make some changes there also.’

Wong was busy scratching notes into his pad when it occurred to him that he had not asked whether there was a specific issue which had to be resolved. Master Tran had explained in his letter that he was worried about ‘a general air of malingering and delinquency’, neither of which were words he understood, even after looking them up. ‘Is there some big problem I must fix?’ he asked. ‘What did Master Tran want me to do?’

‘There are lots of problems. He did not tell me exactly what to tell you. I think generally there is some unhappiness among the brothers. Twice we have found liquor bottles hidden in dark places. Once we found a magazine showing shocking indecent pictures and writings about, you know, man-woman relations and such things. We also found a case of 2000 cigarettes, and a television machine, you know, what do you call it? A video machine? We could not work out how it had come into the vihara, because the brothers do not go in and out very much, and we keep a careful watch on the door at all times.’

‘I see. Have many problems.’

‘There are other problems. We have many rats in the temple now. Hard to sleep. They live in the roof, run, run at night, very noisy,’ he rasped.

Wong made careful notes. He spoke to Wasuran as he scribbled. ‘Harmony is very important. Hsun Tzu said: “The stars go round; the sun and moon shine in turn; the four seasons come one after another; the yin and the yang go through their changes; wind and rain are widely distributed; all thing acquire harmony and have their lives.”’

‘It is so.’

‘Your problems: any more?’

‘Yes. I think Master Tran was worried because three men asked to leave. They want to stop being brothers, get married, they say. We think one of them must have brought the video machine and the bad magazine into the place, but no one admits it.’

‘What name?’

‘The men?’

‘No. The magazine.’

‘It was called Australian Women’s Weekly. Many things about love and conjugal things. Shocking.’

CF Wong and Joyce McQuinnie spent the afternoon working at a dining table in a nearby restaurant. After Porntip had introduced them as consultants working for the vihara, the owner was happy to attract good karma by letting them use the place in the lull between the midday and evening rush periods.

The assignment was turning out to be an enjoyable challenge. Joyce had bought some CDs, which put her in a good mood, and then efficiently mapped out the area surrounding the temple. She had discovered some major elements that needed to be taken into consideration: a village well, due south of the temple, a coffin shop to the northeast, and an electricity pylon, almost facing the front gate, albeit a long way off.

Wong carefully described the inside of the temple grounds to his assistant. He drew diagrams to explain each block’s relation to the other, and tried to describe the condition of the buildings. ‘It not too beautiful, but it is very span and spic,’ he said.

‘Spic and span,’ said Joyce.

‘Spic and span, span and spic, what difference?’ Wong complained.

‘Good question. Never mind. What else?’

Joyce was particularly intrigued by the stories of the video recorder, cigarettes and a magazine being smuggled into the building. ‘It has no windows that you can like reach from the ground, so the guys must have hidden them under their robes. The magazine I can understand, but a video-that must be tough to tuck into your underpants.’

‘Monks are not wearing underpants, I believe.’

‘I really wouldn’t know, and don’t expect to find out on this trip.’

Wong drew large and indecipherable maps showing the objects he considered key, immovable elements: the well, the bo tree, the outer walls and main buildings of the vihara.

Then he sketched in signs and symbols using his lo pan. He knew Joyce was frustrated that he wrote in Chinese characters, but was darkly aware his written English might contain embarrassing mistakes. The animal signs for each direction were then drawn in, with each given 30 degrees of the compass, starting from dragon in the north to snake in the northwest.

After consulting his old books, all of which were in Chinese, and drawing several lo shu diagrams, Wong started to formulate a plan. He explained it to Joyce, who wrote it out in carefully correct English, for delivery to the guardians of the temple tomorrow morning.

At four o’clock, Joyce revealed she was bursting to go on a serious shopping trip. By this time, she had made firm friends with Porntip’s nephew. Bin was clearly awestruck by her presence, and she shamelessly exploited this, using him as a personal tour guide.

‘Bin’s taking me shopping. I’ll be back in a few hours. Where am I sleeping tonight?’

‘You sleep here in Porntip’s house,’ said Wong. ‘I go back to temple now. Check our maps. I need to talk to Brother Wasuran. I sleep there. In case Master Tran returns. I will come here tomorrow. Meet you for breakfast.’

‘What time?’

‘Seven o’clock; okay or not?’

‘Seven! Way too early. Can’t we make it eight or nine?’

‘Monks will be awake at five o’clock already. Our flight at 10.50. Must leave to go to the airport at nine or 9.30.’

‘Okay, okay, seven it is. Jeez.’ She turned her full attention to Bin. She gave him a bewitching smile and draped one arm carelessly over his shoulder. ‘I need like a basketweave CD case. For my Discman, you know? There’s one that holds six CDs but my friend Melissa says you can also get one that holds twelve CDs and it has a headphone pocket.’

The love-struck Bin nodded and led her to the car.

By eight o’clock, darkness was falling, and the Vihara of St Sanctus was silent, except for odd scuttling noises, which Wong knew must be the rats. He tried to settle in his room, which was as bare and unappealing as a prison cell. His physical discomfort was partly compensated for by his feeling of emotional satisfaction. By making some relatively small physical changes, and altering the uses of several blocks, he was sure he could bring about major improvements to the feng shui of the monkey-house. He was convinced this would be quickly detectable, and gain him goodwill in the next world if not hard cash.

He placed his oil lamp on the small table and pushed the bed to a different angle, so the top of his head would be pointing towards the north.

As he settled down for the evening, he mused on his love-hate relationship with holy places. How could a feng shui master not be intrigued by places which had been devoted to unseen influences for centuries? Yet implementing changes in religious centres had always been difficult in the past. He would give the man in charge a list of changes which needed to be made, and they would make some of them on the spot, and make pledges to change the rest after he had gone. But he would probably not be invited back for an inspection and a salting, or closing ceremony. He would generally be left to hope that they did what he had suggested, and did not overrule his instructions. There was a lot of jealousy in mysticism, he decided. Once one gets some talent for sorting out the unseen influences on life, others who claim some ability in the same field quickly start to exhibit the worst sort of professional jealousy. Still, Master Tran had invited him to visit. What could be done? And he felt at peace. He had done his job well. He was in a house of spirituality. And it was good for him to be with monks, away from negative influences such as business-people, women and so on.

Wong had guessed there would have been no supper for the monks, so had spent much of his afternoon packing himself full of snacks, and had not complained when he had been sent to bed with neither food nor drink. He had also sneaked in a packet of a British delicacy to which he had become acquainted in Hong Kong -chocolate-covered Hobnob biscuits.

For some time, he lay awake in the pitch darkness, unable to sleep. At first, he was not aware that his mind was not drifting off to sleep in the normal way. It was only after an hour of re-arranging his limbs on the hard bed that he realised that he was failing to nod off.

What was keeping him awake? The room was dark, as there were no artificial lights on anywhere in the Vihara, and few street lights in the roads nearby. Also, there was virtually no sound. He was dimly aware of a cricket buzzing in a tree somewhere outside his tiny window, and twice he heard an owl hooting. Earlier in the evening, he had heard faint scratching noises in his room, which he assumed was the sound of the rats of which Brother Wasuran had complained. But even they seemed to have gone to sleep now. As he concentrated on the near-silence, he became faintly aware of the sound of recorded music, but it seemed very far away-certainly outside the boundaries of the temple, and probably somewhere in the nearby town. He opened his eyes wider, and noticed a slight gleam of moonlight shining through his window shutters, reflecting on the edges of the few items of furniture in the room. His stomach rumbled, and he wondered if he should get up and eat a biscuit. But it would be difficult to find the packet. He wondered absently whether he had zipped up his bag, and whether the snacks would be safe from the rats. This thought in his mind, he drifted into an uneasy sleep.

He was suddenly awoken by a loud scraping sound in the ceiling. Another rat. But this one sounded huge! There was silence for a moment, and then there was another scratching sound. He heard the wooden boards creak. He looked up and watched with horror as the planks bulged downwards with the weight of the creature or creatures in the ceiling. Suddenly, a plank was moved aside and a shadowy face appeared in the blackness.

Wong gasped and recoiled.

‘Surprise,’ said Joyce’s voice. Moments later, the young woman lowered her face into the light. ‘Don’t just stand there. Like, get me something to climb down on. That chair! No, the table. Can you move that table?’

‘What you are doing here?’ he snapped.

‘Get me down and I’ll tell you,’ she said.

He moved the oil lamp onto the chair and, with a grunt, lifted the table so that its legs would not scrape along the floor. He placed it as quietly as he could under the opening. ‘Here. Okay or not?’ He spoke in a nervous whisper.

‘Yeah, that’s right. Ow! Sorry. Just got a huge splinter. Look, move it to the right a bit. Yeah. Okay.’

With remarkable agility she dropped through the small hole on to the table-which promptly collapsed, sending her crashing to the floor.

‘Shoot,’ she said. ‘Right on my bottom. Oww. Jeez.’

‘Hurt or not?’

She winced, rubbed her lower back and rose slowly. ‘No no, I’m fine, only my pride et cetera.’

Wong’s eyes darted nervously to the small window. It would be disastrous if any of the brothers thought he had deliberately smuggled this young woman into the premises. Her femaleness would taint the atmosphere. They may all have to flee. Worse still, she was in his bedroom and night had fallen. He would be assumed to have improper motives. If this got out, he may not receive his annual bonus from East Trade. Thankfully the curtain was drawn, and the night seemed to be as quiet as before.

Then there was sharp knock on the door. He took in his breath sharply.

‘Ye-es?’ Wong asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

‘Are you all right?’ It was the gruff voice of Brother Wasuran. ‘I heard a noise. Did you fall?’

Wong gestured frantically at Joyce to hide under the bed. But she leapt onto the chair. The geomancer’s eyes popped. What was she doing? Was she going to climb back up? Then he realised that she was carefully sliding the plank back into place. This achieved, she hopped off the chair, placed it to one side, and rolled under the bed.

‘Fine, fine. Everything okay. Only table broken. No problem please.’

‘Oh, let me fix. I am coming in, please.’

The door had no lock, so Wong had no choice. Checking that his assistant was not visible, he opened the door and Brother Wasuran pushed his way in.

‘Oh, the table has broken, very sorry,’ the monk grated.

‘No, I am sorry,’ said Wong. ‘My arms are heavy. Maybe I am pressing on it too hard.’

Brother Wasuran looked with puzzlement at the geomancer’s skeletal limbs. ‘No matter. I’ll bring you a new one. Very sorry. Very bad.’

Wong held his breath until the fat man had left the room. A full five minutes passed before the monk returned with a new table. During this time, Joyce slid her head out to get some air, disappearing again when Brother Wasuran was heard waddling down the wooden aisles of the sleeping block. Then the monk stayed and chatted for another three or four minutes before bidding goodnight. When the door was shut, Wong enjoyed half a minute’s perfect peace, and then heard Joyce extricating herself from her hiding place.

‘Phew. Dusty under there. I was worried I was gonna sneeze. That would have dropped you in it. Teenage bimbo under bed. In a monkey-house too. What a laff!’

‘Not funny,’ said Wong in a stern whisper. ‘Please to keep voice quiet. Why you here? You should go. Should not be here. No women allowed. Is a rule.’

‘Hey, cool it, boss man. You should be thanking me. I just solved the mystery. Don’t you wanna know how I got here?’

There was only one chair, so Joyce steered her boss into it and stood next to him, pointing out her discoveries on his map.

‘Look. See this part here? I spent hours looking for an opening in the wall. It’s plaster at the front, but just fencing on this side and at the back. I prodded every plank, every fence post, all the brick bits, and there wasn’t any section that like, opened up. But then I noticed that some of the bricks were sort of depressed into the wall, round the back, do you know what I mean? Just enough room for someone’s toes. So I tried climbing up. There were more little holes in the bricks above-designed just right for someone climbing up.’

‘This is dangerous. Anyone see you?’

‘Naah, I was really careful. Bin was look-out. He turned out to be a real okay kid. Anyway, this was at the back, where there isn’t much traffic. It was getting dark. So I nipped up. About 10 feet up, the brick wall becomes a wooden fence. I just pressed the fence and it swung open. It was a secret opening. Totally cool. And I’d found it by myself just like that.’

‘Please to keep your voice quiet.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll be quiet, sorry. Anyway, listen. This is interesting. The fence bit opens up on top of the inner building here in the courtyard. What is this, some sort of garage?’

Wong looked at the shaded area on the map. ‘That is eastern altar. Smaller gold Buddha in there.’

‘Yeah, right. Anyway, I stayed quietly on the roof for a while. The building doesn’t connect with any other building, so I didn’t know what to do. It was kind of fun being on the inside of the temple without anyone knowing, so I just stayed where I was, lay down on my tummy and watched you all. Some of the younger ones are real hunks. I don’t suppose you can introduce me to the tall one…? No, okay, okay. I watched you going into your room. It was really funny.’

‘You could get us into big trouble. You should not do this.’

‘Oh, stop being so cross. This is a big discovery, I’m telling you. You see, I realised how people broke in and out and smuggled things. Several of the branches from the big tree come across to the roof of the place where I was. When it got a bit darker I climbed into the tree-now that was tricky. It’s probably been like, donkey’s years since I climbed a tree. Anyway, I shuffled along the branch-what are you looking so shocked about?’

‘This is not just a tree. This is the bo tree, grown from the bo tree where the Buddha got, er, got, er.’

‘Enlightenment.’

‘Yes, got enlightenment. You should not climb on it.’

‘Whatever. My skills as Catwoman are not being appreciated here. Just listen, can’t you? I didn’t hurt the tree. I’m a nature lover. I weigh 54 kilos. Anyway, the branches led to the roof section of this bit. The roof here is sloped, but you can get into a sort of atticky section and then slide along. Since I saw you were in the first room, it wasn’t difficult to crawl through the roof space and find you. The last bit of the journey was pretty scary-real Indiana Jones stuff-since most of it was in like, semi-darkness. But then, all the way along, I had this feeling that it was well-organised. You know, someone had taken this route many times, so I knew that there would always be a way forwards and I wouldn’t get stuck. I was just worried that someone from one of the other rooms would hear me. Also I lost my earring somewhere. My Buddha hologram thing. Cost ten pounds. I hope I can find it in the morning.’

‘I heard you. I thought you were a rat.’

‘Yeucch. There are rats here?’

‘Yes, the buildings have many rats. Brother Wasuran told me.’

‘Jeez, I’m glad I didn’t know that when I was up there.’

Silence fell. It wasn’t difficult to detect a scampering noise, as what sounded like a whole family of rats stampeded through the roof space above their heads in the direction of the room next to them.

‘Better you go now.’

‘Aren’t you going to thank me for making a great discovery, solving this mystery for you?’

‘Thank you. We will tell Master Tran in the morning. Now you go.’

Another rat passed over their heads.

The young woman shivered. ‘Eeee. I’m not going back up there if it’s full of rats. Besides, it’s seriously dark now. All the lights are off and stuff. I’m staying.’

‘But where you sleep?’

‘I’m an innocent young maiden. I need my beauty sleep. I’m going to sleep in that bed. I think the question is, where are you going to sleep?’

The night was passed in a state of great discomfort. At first, Wong was too furious to sleep. After a couple of hours, he became drowsy and tossed and turned on a blanket on the floor. He was reminded of his teenage years, sleeping on the floorboards of his uncle’s spice shop in Guangzhou. As the night wore on, his hips became increasingly sore and bruised. Joyce, relatively comfortable on top of his bed, had had several beers with Bin, and snored happily. The rats spent the night thundering from one end of the block to the other, apparently having an organised race meet. Wong eventually fell into a troubled sleep, full of strange images from his life.

He re-lived the time he had been fast asleep in the spice shop and had rolled under the rice sack, which had tipped over, hitting him with the force of a boulder, and bursting to bury him in an avalanche of hard white grains.

In his dream, he was a boy and ran to find his uncle. But when he opened the door, instead of a Guangzhou night scene, he found bright daylight. He was at the top of the OUB Centre in Singapore and had climbed out onto a roof ledge, sixty-four storeys above the ground.

Now he saw himself as an adult doing a feng shui reading. Mr Pun, director of East Trade Industries, was shouting at him from a window of a neighbouring building. ‘Hurry up, C F, you have to finish before we open to the public in five minutes.’

‘Cannot find my lo pan,’ Wong had replied, balancing precariously on the window ledge and searching frantically in a briefcase. ‘My bag full of rats.’

Then he slipped into the building through another window and found himself in Hong Kong, in an office containing a hanging string of coins, right in the malicious death position of the five yellow curses.

There were four doors to the room, but which one to take? He chose the first one, but it was locked. The second one opened onto a deafening rock concert, and the lead screamer on the stage was Joyce McQuinnie.

He slammed the door shut and opened the third door. It contained a large silver statue of a dragon with a red piece of paper in its mouth. It was dripping red liquid from its mouth into a tien-yuer benefactor den made of pink pottery. What did it mean?

Again he started looking for his lo pan. How could he tell what it meant without knowing what direction it was in? Was it east, in the direction of plum blossom?

Winnie Lim appeared behind him, doing her nails, and she started to laugh. ‘Madam Fu on the phone. She want you to come now-lah,’ she said. Then Mr Pun entered the room, looking impatiently at his watch. He started speaking to Winnie. The geomancer could not hear what they were talking about.

‘No. I can do it. I can do it,’ Wong had said.

The talking grew louder and louder.

He woke up. Blinking at the pale dawn light, he wondered where he was. He didn’t recognise the room. He didn’t know why he was on the ground, or why there was a bed next to him. Had he rolled off? Why were there a dozen faces at the open door? Was this part of his dream?

When he saw the men’s grey robes, his memory returned. His head fell back onto the rolled-up garment he had been using as a pillow. Oh no. He was in the temple. It must be five o’clock in the morning. Time to get up. But why were the brothers looking shocked? He suddenly recalled the presence of his assistant, and raised himself on his elbows. There she was, fast asleep, her dishevelled dress indecently revealing her knees.

‘No, no,’ he said to the men. ‘I can explain you. Truly.’

Master Tran arrived back at the vihara at seven, by which time Wong and McQuinnie had fled to Porntip’s house for a shower and breakfast.

The geomancer, stunned into silence by the humiliating events of the morning, sipped his green tea and cast sidelong glances at his assistant. They were having breakfast on the verandah. He was too angry to speak to her, and thought with pleasure that her term in his office was coming to an end. They would arrive back in Singapore today, a Wednesday, and she would be dismissed from C F Wong amp; Associates. After that, he would probably never see her again.

Joyce was having a conversation on a mobile phone with a friend. As he listened to her, he mused that the intriguing puzzle of her brand of English was probably the only thing he would miss about her. When she was talking to people of her own age and culture, her language was completely different from the English in his textbooks-probably just what he needed to learn to write good popular books in that language, he thought. Well, mo baan faat. Never mind. Good riddance. He would be quite happy if he never met another Westerner for the rest of his life.

His eyes still narrow with fury, he glanced up at her and tuned in to her conversation, to see just how much of her language he had picked up in the past ten weeks.

‘Synth. In The Exploding Blowfish. Grunge. Grunge meets techno-jungle with a bit of rap really. Anyway, so we’re at Lippy’s, and he’s like, “Yeah?” And I’m like, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “Getoutahere.” And I’m like, “Whatever.”’

No, he decided. Individual words could be understood, but put them together and they formed an incomprehensible code. Probably rubbish anyway.

Bin stepped into the scene, and cast his lovesick gaze upon his exotic foreign princess. She waved a greeting but did not consider his arrival worth interrupting her phone conversation for. She’d done her shopping.

The geomancer realised there was something new in the young man’s expression. It was no longer the face of a starry-eyed suitor, but the pained look of a wounded-but-still-loyal lover. Clearly the news of Wong’s apparent indiscretion had reached him. The teenage boy’s lips tightened as looked over at the Chinese man-his evil usurper.

‘Miss Joyce, I am ready to take you to the temple and afterwards to the airport,’ said Bin, and then nodded contemptuously at Wong. ‘And him.’

Porntip then summoned the geomancer to the phone. ‘For you. I think it is your boss.’

Wong hurried inside and stood to attention as he took the phone. But it was Winnie Lim, calling from his office in Wai Wai Mansions, Telok Ayer Street.

‘CF? Is Winnie. Mr Pun on phone this morning. He says he is very happy with you. His frien’ give him plenty big contrack-lah. Scratch his back for him. But you scratch his frien’s back, see? So all work out nicely.’

‘Do not understand. Say again please.’

‘Mr Pun. His frien’. Joyce’s daddy. Gave him a big contrack. Joyce’s daddy gave Mr Pun a big contrack. Mr Queeny very happy because you help his daughter with her school projeck. So now Mr Pun is very happy. He wan’ you to go to America.’

‘What? Me go to-? What for?’

‘Mr Pun got plenty work for you in America. Big property deal with Joyce’s daddy.’

‘I don’t like to go to America.’

‘You never been.’

‘I saw movies. Always police cars exploding in America. Very dangerous.’

‘Big money. Mr Pun is in very good mood. I think you call him now-lah, okay or not? You get good deal, I think.’

‘How big?’

‘You call him.’

‘When I get back. Afternoon.’

At 7.40 a.m., Joyce was sitting on the verandah of Porntip’s house examining and re-examining her purchases of the previous day. She had bought six CDs and eight VCDs. She knew they were pirate copies, but they were being sold at prices she couldn’t resist. She eased her nagging conscience by telling herself that she would play them a few times, see which ones she really liked, and then buy legitimate copies of the best ones.

Some combination of factors-a slight breeze, a distant bird-call, the sound of a car door closing-made her look up. The sight before her over the balcony railings was beautiful: a vista of palm trees, gently swaying as if doing a Mexican wave. The sky had not quite lost its morning pinkness, and there were a thousand tiny, rippled clouds, high in the vault of Heaven: a mackerel sky, her mother would have called it. There was the whining noise of a bus moving up a hill. A dog barked, its voice given a curious resonance by the rising wind. Then she heard a sound behind her.

Porntip’s servant woman brought her a vivid yellow drink. The old maid, whose face seemed to have melted on one side, spoke no English, so Joyce had no idea what it was. She nodded her thanks, and gingerly lifted it to her lips. The woman stayed to watch, so Joyce took a sip. It was oddly sweet yet it tasted thick and savoury at the same time. She smacked her lips, trying to separate the tastes. There was pineapple juice in it, she thought, and salt. A lot of salt. She decided it was disgusting-and then swallowed the rest of the contents of the tumbler. Disgusting in a rather nice way, she thought. The woman almost immediately disappeared into the shadows and re-emerged seconds later to refill it from a none-too-clean-looking jug.

Joyce thanked her with a smile and a nod. She looked at the salty-sweet drink and half-consciously began to realise how much she had changed in the past few weeks. She had eaten and drunk all sorts of strange things. And spent time with so many odd people. And helped crack criminal cases! And seen corpses. And been to Malaysia and Hong Kong, and India and Vietnam. And discovered a secret passageway in a Buddhist monastery.

And learned a bit of feng shui. She knew that a sheer cliff near a lake or the sea in the west was a ‘mountain star falling into water’. She knew that a semi-circle of mountains was an embracing road, a dragon’s lair. She knew that the Chien Kua was one of the Four West Houses. She knew that the numbers part of feng shui was based on the markings on a turtle’s shell seen several thousand years ago. She knew that soil ch’i damages water ch’i, and you need to place metal ch’i between them. She knew that soil-metal-water was the support cycle of the Later Heaven. She knew that things had their rightful places. She knew that it was important to arrange even the smallest things properly, because only then could larger objects find their correct space. She knew that things had unseen effects on other things. She knew that only when everything was in its right place did lasting harmony flow into a community.

One of the VCDs slipped from her hand, but she didn’t pick it up. She lifted the salty-sweet liquid to her lips, and took another sip. It was still disgusting.

By nine, the sun was high. Wong was sitting in Master Tran’s office. The chief monk was an old but sprightly man. His head was not fuzzy and shaven like those of his colleagues, but had the smooth hairlessness of advanced age. His skin was sun-browned and he had thick knuckles, like walnuts, on each gnarled hand.

Wong went through the details of his feng shui redesign in as much detail as time would allow. The head of the temple listened politely, and looked at the notes he had been handed. He then asked several questions, which were intelligent enough to show the geomancer that he took the business seriously.

Then Master Tran put the papers to one side. ‘ Merci bien. You have done well, and I have much to thank you for. Can I not persuade you to stay for lunch?’

‘I cannot. We have plane to catch.’ Wong looked down at his feet. ‘Master Tran, there is one more thing I have to tell you. There was a little problem this morning.’

‘I understand,’ said the old man. ‘You were caught in flagrante.’

‘No. I was in the sleeping room with my assistant. She is not a man.’

‘That’s what I meant.’

‘Oh. Yes. But let me explain. We discovered a route for smuggling things into the Vihara. A sort of opening in the wall. A tunnel in the roof space. I have marked the route on this map. You can see it. Decide what to do with it.’ The geomancer pulled another diagram from his file and placed it on the table. ‘You can block it. You will stop people bringing wrong things in. Also there is an escape of ch’i energy there. It acts as door in the northeast. Not good here. The ch’i of the northeast is cold. Cutting ch’i. Behaves in unpredictable way.’

‘CF, everything is unpredictable. If there is one thing I have learned in my life, that is it.’

Wong looked the old priest in the eye. ‘I must explain you something about last night. The reason girl was in my room. She was testing the route. This route which we discovered. She could not go back. It was too dark. She does not like rats. You have many rats. There was no other reason for her stay in my room. I slept on floor. I have witnesses.’

‘You certainly do have witnesses. You do not need to tell me all this. A monastery is the one place where gossip travels even faster than among shop women in a marketplace. None of this matters.’ The old man smiled.

‘But secret tunnel. This is an important discovery, no?’

‘To be honest, C F, no. We have known about that for years. I have sent junior brothers in and out through the hole myself if I needed some urgent supplies of something or other. I got someone to bring me a superb bottle of Taylor ’s 1975 last year. For my health, of course. Would you like a drop now…? No, okay.’

Wong needed a few seconds to ingest this information. ‘You knew about secret tunnel? Brother Wasuran said someone bring cigarettes and video machine in. And monks wanting to leave. These were problems, yes?’

‘Ye-es,’ said Master Tran slowly. He clasped his hands over his stomach. ‘This is true. But you have to understand how life works here. It is on a different scale to life in your busy-busy Singapore. Everything happens a bit more slowly. Yes, there was a case of cigarettes discovered, let me see, that was in 1988. And the video machine? That was discovered about five or six years ago, in the mid-90s. It was not really a big problem. You see, we have no television and no electricity, and I understand a video player needs both these things to work. These little incidents stick in the brothers’ heads because they are rare. We live a quiet life.’

‘So smuggling items not a big problem. But it is a feng shui problem. Changes flow of ch’i.’

‘I’m sure it does, and for that reason, it was good that you discovered that route and incorporated it into your report.’

‘Why you invite me here? What was the problem you want fixed?’

‘There was one particular problem, but it was a more general one. And it is one that you have already solved. Thank you.’

‘Gift of feng shui is given me by Heaven. Am happy to share with you.’

Master Tran moved over to a sideboard and took out a bottle of port. ‘Don’t mind if I have one, do you? C F, you have helped in ways that perhaps even you do not realise. For example, the fact that you were accompanied by your attractive girlfriend-’

‘Assistant.’

‘I’m sorry, your assistant, has had a very interesting effect on the men. And not a negative one. She is an interesting person, Brother Wasuran tells me. He had a chat with her before you went off to Porntip’s house for breakfast. It is always interesting to see something from another person’s point of view, particularly if that person is very different from oneself. It broadens the horizons. This is particularly important in something as closed as this monastery, where we don’t go out and mix much.’

‘My temporary assistant,’ added Wong. Tran’s words reminded him of his journal, part 73, his philosophy about the size of a person’s world. Only when you meet someone who doesn’t fit into your world is there an opportunity to make your world bigger. He had to admit, his dreadful assistant’s different point of view had proved slightly useful in a few cases. There had been many difficult times, but her impact had not been entirely negative in certain cases, he had to admit. Last night was a typical example. She had got him into the most awful trouble, yet at the same time, she solved one of the feng shui problems of the Vihara by discovering the secret passage. His reading would have been disastrously incomplete if she had not found the unofficial northeastern opening to the enclosure.

Master Tran returned to the table. ‘Your feng shui readings are greatly appreciated. We will attempt to implement as many of your suggestions as we can. I am quite sure they will have a beneficial effect on the temple. But let me tell you how your visit has really helped us.’

The old man looked out of the window of the dark room at the men, who were travelling across the yard to gather at the bo tree for a ritual.

‘This is a Zen Buddhist temple. Our work deals with the inner peace of the soul as well as the outer peace of the body. I have become aware over the past year or so that there has been some loss of faith here, some general disillusionment. Some of the brothers were getting curious about life outside, about the modern world, about women. This is natural. Naturally they were intrigued by your visit with a young woman.’

Tran turned from the window and sat down again. ‘When they saw you this morning after you had spent one night with a Western woman, they were shocked. You looked very tired. “Close to death,” Brother Wasuran said. They saw how much energy had been drawn out of you, and were left with an extremely negative impression of the delights of a free life, of life with members of the opposite sex, in the world outside.’

‘I did not sleep much last night.’

‘This is what they assumed.’

‘No. I mean I did not sleep much last night because I was uncomfortable on the floor. Not because… Not because of anything else.’

‘It does not matter what the truth is. What matters is the effect of the truth. This is a Zen principle. If a non-truth has the effect of the truth, then maybe it has made its own truth. This is possible. Whatever happened, the result was that the brothers were shocked at the draining effect of what they saw as your sinful behaviour. They did not want to be like you and lose their life energy, and die young.’

‘I had no sleep last night, and I am an old man. I was born fifty-six years ago.’

‘Interesting. Be that as it may. To be frank, I told the brothers this morning that you were twenty-seven.’

‘I see.’ Wong nodded. Truly, the way of Zen was mysterious and impossible to fathom.

He put his papers in his bag. The geomancer was happy to feel they had helped the old man, although he was still unclear about precisely how they had done it. Never mind. The problem was solved, that was the main thing. Tomorrow would be a new day and a new challenge. He suddenly frowned. Unless they sent him to America, which would certainly be the end of life as he knew it. He decided then and there that he would simply refuse to go. Let Mr Pun take away his retainer, if he wanted. He glanced through the old man’s window and noticed the activity in the grounds.

‘What the brothers are doing?’ the geomancer asked.

‘They are all in front of the bo tree. We had a little miracle last night.’

‘A miracle.’

‘The oldest brother was praying at the eastern altar last night and a small but perfect imagine of the Buddha fell into his hands from the sky. It is small, but it is really quite a marvellous thing. Like a tiny picture, but also like a little round door to Nirvana. You can look deep into it and see the Buddha inside. The brothers are worshipping it.’

‘Understand.’

The honk of a car horn outside reminded him that Joyce and Bin were waiting in Porntip’s Nissan at the front door, ready to go to the airport. The sun had risen to the height of the temple walls and was beginning to shine into the office, its light dappled by the leaves of the bo tree.