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

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In the twenty-ninth century BC there was a man named Fu Hsi. He had great skill in designing things. But not palaces. He liked to design gardens and rivers.

There was a big flood. The River Lo overflowed. Fu Hsi spent many days walking on the hills around the palace. He drew maps showing where dykes should be built. When the flood came back, the palace was safe. Fu Hsi became very famous.

One day, he was sitting on the banks of the River Lo. He started watching the turtles which swam there. His eyes fell on the patterns on the shells of the turtles. One of them had a shell which had a section in the middle at the top and eight sections around it. Fu Hsi noticed something. The dots in the east, middle and west segments added up to fifteen. When he added the marks north, middle and south, they were also fifteen. Southwest, middle and northeast too added up to fifteen. Northwest, middle and southeast were also fifteen in total.

This became known as the nine-piece magic square. Blade of Grass, the main thing was that Fu Hsi learned that there could be order in things. Order that you cannot see but is very magical.

He had knowledge of architecture and knowledge of hidden magic. Fu Hsi became the founder of feng shui.

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’,

by C F Wong, part 81.

His hand stopped, mid-flourish, and he looked at his watch. Oh, already 9.15. Time to go. He would have to do some more writing later. C F Wong slipped his journal into his desk and slid his chair back, the sudden scraping like a roar in the quiet room where his office administrator was sinking back into sleep. The noise caused Winnie Lim’s head to bob up. ‘I will come back before lunch. Maybe twelve o’clock,’ he told her.

Joyce McQuinnie, who was in the middle of a lengthy, murmured personal call on the phone, told her listener to hang on. She spoke to her boss over her feet, which were on her desk encased in a pair of pointed cowboy boots, purchased, oddly, as a souvenir of Melaka. ‘Where’re you going? Am I coming?’

‘This is your decision. I am going to Hong Siu Publishing Company in Orchard Road.’

‘Oh. Was that the assignment you said about last week, and I’m like, “Yawn-yawn, that’s as dull as a dead dodo’s doodoos”? Like an office in an office block?’ She spoke with the voice of a yawn.

‘No. No one is dead there. But, yes, it is an office in an office block.’ He picked up his bag.

‘I think I’ll just stay and write up my notes from last week. I’ve got so much to do today I don’t think I can spare like, a minute even.’ She put her feet back on the desk and resumed her somnolent conversation, which seemed to consist mainly of making humming noises.

‘Okay. Winnie, if there are any important calls, please call me at Update. I will definitely be back before one.’ The office administrator did not reply, being now engrossed in adding green glitter to the gold paint on her nails.

‘Update?’ This was Joyce, interrupting herself again.

‘Update is the name of the magazine Hong Siu makes.’

‘Becky, gotta go. Catch ya.’ Joyce abruptly threw the handset into its cradle, jumped to attention and started sweeping items into her shoulder sack. With a canine yelp of extraordinary volume, she extracted the paper cup of coffee she had swept into the bag, and cleaned out the frothy mess with a paper tissue. ‘Yuk. Hang on two ticks. Just getting my bits. I’m coming with you.’

Ten minutes later they were both slumped silently in a taxi, which was locked in a log-jam of cars gently drifting northwards along New Bridge Street. The young woman’s interest surprised Wong. The previous Friday he had explained that the present assignment was very much the standard corporate feng shui reader’s task: to go to an office where business had been poor, and arrange for changes to ensure better fortune. The building was a relatively new skyscraper in Orchard Road, and the job was scheduled for two mornings. Joyce had said that it sounded dull.

He admitted to himself that it would not be a challenging task. He recalled having done a similar job in the very same building, maybe two years ago. It was an almond-shaped tower on a rectangular podium, and belonged to the Four West Houses, being of the Chien Kua, with its back facing northwest and its element being metal. The office suites within radiated outwards like a wheel, and he was hoping that the one he was about to visit would be northwest or northeast of the centre, the more prosperous directions for such a house. But given the business problems, he knew it was more likely that it would face south or southeast.

Still, there was much that could be done even in the worst cases. He thought with pleasure of instances where he made simple changes to the placement of elements within an office suite and caused a dramatic change in the way the ch’i energy flowed. Once he had dealt with an executive, born under an earth sign, who had encased herself entirely in a wood-panelled office, which of course destroyed her natural soil energy. The geomancer’s first move had been to add a red carpet under her chair, to provide a supportive and protective layer of fire ch’i. He then moved her desk to the northwest corner of the room, facing southeast, to build up the woman’s ability to command respect. Other changes made outside her office caused the energy to flow smoothly through the premises, pooling slightly around her desk. During a follow-up visit the following week, he found that the general improvement to the office environment would have been detectable by anyone with any sensitivity.

Wong, like many feng shui masters, knew the lore of several of the more serious schools of the arcane art, and had no scruples about mixing elements of the Flying Star method with those of the Eight Directions or Three Yuan method, if the result was a workable solution to a difficult problem.

Yawning in the taxi, Joyce explained her change of heart. He had not previously mentioned that the publishing house was the office of Update, a small but lively twice-a-week tabloid newspaper of which her flatmate Emma, a flight attendant with Singapore Airlines, was an enthusiastic reader. Update had started as a weekly, two years ago, but now appeared on Tuesdays and Fridays. Joyce, although she had spent less than a month in the city-state, had quickly got into the habit of reading it-particularly enjoying a four-page section called Yoot at the back of the magazine, featuring music and celebrities.

She said she was especially keen on one reviewer, who signed himself B K. ‘He reckons the Mooneaters are really cool, while most people are like, ‘Moon-Who?’ B K also loves That Guy’s Belly, have you heard them?’

‘That what?’

‘That Guy’s Belly.’

‘Whose belly?’

‘No, I guess not. But, like, it’s good to see that there’s someone in this part of the world who appreciates music with a bit of like, class, you know? I mean, it’s not all good. There’s this columnist called Phoebe Poon who is just awful, always trying to be clever-clever, you know, whatever, while really she’s just the pits. She really sucks.’

‘Sucks what?’ asked Wong, instantly regretting the question.

‘Not sucks anything. Just sucks.’

‘Oh, I see,’ he lied.

Talking to Joyce was always exhausting. He knew that some adult men were attracted to young women, but had they ever tried talking to them? They were so completely separate a species that he could not see how any form of human relationship could be possible. One could communicate better with a dog.

The geomancer looked out of the window and marvelled for the thousandth time at Singapore ’s skyline. He still missed the easy predictability of life in calm, rural Guangdong, but he had to admit, there was something enjoyably energising about this electric city, with its towering glass and steel monoliths, which the tropical morning sun was even now turning into million-watt fluorescent lights. And the people, uniform in their white shirts and black briefcases, appeared to be electrified as well, so busy getting things done that their whole lives disappeared in a blur of inconsequential activity. So often he found himself trying to fix the office of some harassed executive with his lo pan, when he longed to tell the man that the best thing would be to flee the office and spend a month squatting on a rotting jetty in Guangzhou watching slow ferryboats ply the Pearl River.

‘You know people in Singapore. I think the people in Update they will be very busy. Perhaps we should not talk to the staff too much. Just do our work quietly.’

‘No prob, gotcha,’ murmured Joyce, who had suddenly become sleepy again.

‘The job, it should not be hard.’

‘Neat.’

‘No, publishing places are often very messy. But I think this will not be difficult. I did a similar office in the same building two years ago. Brighter Corp. The offices, when you move in, are very badly designed for feng shui. But I could see what had to be done. It was easy to redesign the office so that the problem went away completely. Brighter Corp did very well after that, and moved to a much bigger office six months ago. I did that one too.’

He smiled at the memory. There was nothing wrong with boasting a bit if you are an old man just telling the truth to a young person who would benefit from hearing it. For a fleeting second Wong felt correctly positioned in life, as if the spheres and the stars had momentarily swung into the right positions. Little irritations aside, life was good. A friendly sun glinted from the window of the taxi opposite. A DJ’s babble trickled, uncomprehended, into his ears from a panel in the door at his elbow. The driver was nodding at the wheel. A tree waved in the slight breeze. Wong looked at Joyce and found, for the first time, an absence of hostility in his own gaze toward her, although he sensed no warmth in it.

Eight minutes later, the taxi broke free from the slow train of morning traffic on the main road and turned in to the dropping-off point of a grand but rather character-less skyscraper. Wong saw, through the glass doors, the familiar pink-brown floor of polished granite, and dark marble walls, a combination that was now more or less uniform for lobbies of Singapore office blocks.

Heading from the car to the building was like running from a fridge through a sauna to another fridge.

When they were in the fashionably dark mirror-walled lift, the geomancer looked at the address card in his hand, and noticed something which gave him a start. ‘Oh. Hong Siu Publishing is on the same floor that Brighter Corp was on. I wonder if-’

But his question went unasked as the elevator arrived on the twelfth floor and the door opened. To the left of the elevator bank, they saw the glass doors of Hong Siu Publishing, and he received his answer. The company to which they were heading was housed in the old offices of Brighter Corp.

Somewhat taken aback, he rang the bell, and a smiling, helmet-haired receptionist buzzed the door open, and led them to the editor-publisher, Alberto Tin, a chubby man of about thirty, who clamped one hand over the mouthpiece of the phone handset to which he was listening, and whispered: ‘Wait a minute. I’ll come, quick. Sit, sit.’

Joyce retreated to the black leather sofa behind them, but the geomancer remained standing and peered into the main premises to the left of the publisher’s office. With difficulty, his sleepy assistant pushed herself off the marshmallow-soft seat and joined him. The space had been divided into a main work room and a series of smaller offices on either side. There were desks piled with paper, each with an individual computer, apparently where the writers and editors worked; another part featured desks in clusters, carrying large monitor screens and surrounded by computer equipment, which presumably housed the design and production staff.

The staff, mainly young people in casual clothes, seemed caught up with what they were doing on their screens, and didn’t look up when the newcomers stepped into the room. The air-conditioning was set very high, and strip-lighting gave the room a blue-white glow. The stop-start, clickity-clack of computer keyboards formed a low undercurrent of sound.

Wong glanced at his watch and looked towards the window on the far side, getting a directional bearing by the position of the sun. He then scanned the premises. Alberto Tin’s office was in the northwest, the classic position for the head of a company.

The writers appeared to be in the south of the room, an area always associated with reputation, social skill and public profile. Due west was a room containing a bespectacled woman and lots of box files: the company accountant, more than likely, if they had followed the correct teachings of the compass method.

Surprisingly, even the parts of the feng shui guidelines which were often skipped, such as the right places for transportation and investment, appeared to have been carefully adhered to. East was the advertising director’s room-and she, presumably, would have the responsibility of expansion and developing new business, with the help of ch’i from that direction. Next to the reception was an open area containing a pair of young men who were not in suits, and were holding motorcycle helmets: presumably the dispatch riders, properly placed in the southeast, which fosters efficient movement.

Even Joyce noticed that the room had been laid out with respect for the correct principles. ‘I’m not an expert,’ she said, but they seem to have followed like, a lot of your principles. Look where that tree and that water thing is. Water supports wood, right? It looks as if it has been feng shuied pretty well already.’

‘This is the old office of Brighter Corp,’ Wong said. ‘It has been, ah, feng shuied. By me.’

‘Oh. So they made changes which ruined the energy flow in your original plan or something?’

Wong looked around carefully before vouch-safing an answer to that question. He poked his head down a corridor and looked into another area. ‘Everything is almost exactly as I had designed it for the other company.’

‘Does that mean you got it like… wrong?’ Joyce gave him a teasing grin.

‘No! I was not wrong,’ said the geomancer, crossly. ‘Just because the physical space is right, does not mean I am wrong, you, you Form Schooler.’

‘Okay, okay, keep your hair on. You don’t have much to waste, after all.’ Joyce appeared to be expecting a laugh. When it did not appear, she sank her head into her shoulders, suddenly cowed.

Wong, who had stormed away to look down a corridor, returned and then said more quietly: ‘I was not wrong. Maybe the space is arranged in the right way for the flow of energy. But you do not stop there. Not unless you are the youngest amateur in the Form School. There is so much more. What if the birth chart of the company, or the boss, does not fit with the commencement chart of the office? Or what if the company’s move was at the wrong time, and in the wrong direction? What if the company moved on a day of five towards the number five, thus unleashing destructive power? This could cause a bad effect, indeed. Or there could be some change outside. A new building, a new park, a new lake, understand or not?’

He strolled over to the window near the production area, and a young man momentarily glanced at them before returning his attention to the screen. The Singapore cityscape was constantly changing, of course, and Wong noticed several new buildings coming up. But there was no obvious bringer of bad fortune in the view.

A voice called from behind them. ‘Sorry, sorry for abandoning you. Come, come, come into my office and take a seat.’ Alberto Tin summoned them towards his glass tank with flapping palms. ‘It is good to see you, thank you for coming. Would you like some tea, coffee, Coke?’

‘No, thank you,’ said Wong.

Joyce winced, having an insatiable appetite for caffeine.

‘Well, would you just like to get started? Is there anything I can do for you? Any questions?’

‘Yes. Many.’ Wong sat down, took out his pens and notebooks, and asked Tin a lengthy series of questions, eliciting his birth date, birth time, place of birth and other details. He asked for the date the company was founded, the date that business started in this new office, and the date the newspaper was launched. He requested floor plans and all other documents relating to the design of the office, including a map of the computer network. It took nearly twenty minutes to pull together all the information the geomancer asked for, and assemble it in the conference room, which was to be the work room for the pair from C F Wong amp; Associates.

While Wong started to examine these, Joyce turned to Tin and flashed him a smile. ‘Hey, I really like your mag. It’s way cool. I read it all the time. My flatmate is a subscriber from way back, like for a year or more.’

‘That’s very kind of you. Always good to meet our boss. I always tell the staff that the people who buy our publications are our employers and paymasters, so thank you.’ The roundness of Tin’s face was unfortunately emphasised by his page-boy haircut, circular glasses and wide smile, which turned his cheeks into two smaller circles.

‘I particularly like the Yoot section. I gotta ask you. Why is it called that? I mean, who’s Yoot? Is that like your nickname or something?’

‘We named it after one particular politician’s pronunciation of the word “youth”, you see.’

‘Oh, right, I see. Yeah, I suppose with a Singapore accent. Cool. In England we say yoof. I like your reviewer B K. He likes all the same music I do. I like Dudley Singh’s film reviews, too.’

‘Well, thank you for the compliment. I will tell him. In fact, you have told him. You see, I am B K.’

‘You are? Well, that’s great. Those Mooneaters rock.’

‘They do.’

‘Trip it, trip it, trip-trip hop.’

‘Do me baby, please don’t stop.’

‘Shake your booty in my face.’

‘Push it mama to the top. Yo!’

‘That’s such a cool song,’ said Joyce, with a laugh. ‘The lyrics are like, awesome, totally.’

‘Totally,’ agreed Tin.

Wong gave them a sidelong glance. Tin understands her language. So, it must be a sort of code which can be broken by adults. What is the cultural significance of shaking a boot in front of one’s face? He wondered whether there was a phrase book available on teenage argot.

‘Hey, in the mag your name is B K, but your name’s Alberto, right?’ Joyce was excited.

‘My name is Alberto, and B K and Phoebe Poon. There are only five staff on the editorial side of this newspaper. We all do several columns and have several names. This is standard for successful publications in Singapore. Small staff in editorial, big staff in the ad sales department.’

‘Is Dudley Singh real?’

‘Dudley Singh is real and so is Susannah Lo. You Westerners say many hands, light work. We Singaporeans say few hands, many profits.’ He gave a theatrical frown. ‘But sadly not so in this case. Never mind. Your Mr Wong I hope will help in this regard. Oh, do please excuse me. I shall be right back.’ The helmet-haired woman was waving at him through an internal window. He scurried off to take a phone call.

Wong had already sketched out a rough chart and was examining it with puzzlement. This assignment, which he had believed would be the easiest of the month, had turned into a challenge. How could an office he had already done, and counted as a success, have turned into such a financial flop? There must be something dramatically wrong with timing. Lo shu charts should provide the answer. But first, he must check the basic shape and direction of the premises.

As he pored over the floor plan, Joyce made an announcement, evidently feeling the need to make amends. ‘Hey, here’s something I can do for you. You need to find the middle first, right? Difficult because the office is such a weird shape with the curved window and that L-shaped bit that goes towards the lift, right? Well, I can calculate the middle of a complex rhomboid. I learned it in geometry. You gotta calculator?’ She held out her hand.

Wong just looked at her.

‘Okay, no calculator, huh? Never mind. I can borrow one from B K’s secretary.’

‘Mr Tin.’

‘Yeah.’

She returned two minutes later with a desk calculator from the accountant’s room and sat down in Tin’s leather seat at the head of the conference table. ‘Lemme see. You measure the sides of these bits first, and then…’ The young woman was relatively silent for the next ten minutes as she sat with her tongue caught between her teeth and covered a sheet of paper with scribbled calculations.

‘Bloody difficult, because of this curved bit,’ she said. ‘Hang on a mo. Hmm. Three point five. Plus a half…’

Another five minutes of scribbled calculations flowed. At last, she sat back and surveyed her handiwork with pride. ‘I think the middle is sort of here. Or maybe a bit this way. Hey, what are you doing?’

She looked up to see the old geomancer had cut a piece of cardboard into the shape of the floor plan. He held up a pencil and attempted to balance the card on it. After a few attempts, he found the point at which the card stayed balanced on the tip of the pencil lead. ‘Here is the middle of the premises,’ he said.

Joyce looked deflated. ‘Oh. Right. Yeah, I suppose that’s a quicker way of doing it.’

She compared the middle of the room, according to his pencil-balancing method, with her own result. ‘Well, I was nearly right, sort of, well not too far out, I guess, anyway, I was in the same sort of bit. Think I’ll go and get some Coke from the machine, want some? No? Whatever.’

Wong soon lost himself in his most arcane charts, studying floor plans, consulting almanacs, taking measurements, taking light readings, taking magnetic readings, examining what was outside the windows, going through each room carefully to make sketches. He drew more than a dozen lo shu charts.

Tin, in an interlude between his endless phone calls, re-entered the room and carefully explained the activities of the office. ‘The writers, artists and so on are in that space over there, because it is supposedly the most creative. Dudley is the chief there. The pages, once read by the proofreaders, are taken to the Sam Long Output Centre, two floors down, for processing by my deputy, Susannah Lo, who is also production editor. We bring each plate back here when ready to go. The final camera-ready pages are prepared by 1.15 p.m. exactly, the day before distribution, which is when it goes to the printers. Hollis News Retail distributes them, largely through its own outlets. Money from dealers, subscribers and advertisers is all dealt with in that little room there. The previous tenants told us that is supposedly the best place for attracting gold and holding on to it, in feng shui terms.’

‘Your office design is correct,’ said Wong. ‘It fits with what I said on my earlier reading of the room. For the previous tenant. What exactly is the problem, please? Low sales, low readers, low advertisements?’

Alberto Tin gave a deep sigh. It was clear that he was a cheerful man by nature, but he was under heavy pressure. As soon as his smile disappeared, Wong could see the heavy grey bags under his eyes and tension in his mouth.

‘The problem is-well, to be honest, I don’t know what the problem is. The readers love us, the mailbag is bigger than ever, we’ve got better writers, better photographers, better design, our marketing woman has been working flat out. But it’s just not working. People are just not buying the thing. We were doing 26 000 a year ago, which is not bad for a young, small mag in a relatively small market. This year we were hoping to climb steadily. Instead we’re down to about 9000 or 10000. We cannot survive like that. The advertisers are dropping out like the proverbial flies.’

‘Why not do some ads on TV?’ said Joyce. ‘You get neat ads these days.’

‘We’ve recently invested a lot of money on an advertising blitz. The circulation climbed by about ten per cent, and then fell back again. Very disappointing.’

‘Distribution: that is okay or not?’ asked Wong.

‘We get extremely good positioning from Hollis. Susannah knows the people from Hollis really well, she has relations there. They make sure we get excellent display, right on the counter-front, at all their outlets. But it’s not been enough. Sales are still down. Without the circulation, we can’t get the advertisers. We’re slowly dying. Our backers have given us four weeks and then they’re closing us down.’

Dispensing the bad news had caused the cheerful little man to wilt like an under-watered rubber plant. His shoulders had become round, his chest had caved in and his head had fallen forwards.

‘It’s a great little mag,’ said Joyce. ‘I mean, by Singapore standards, of course.’

‘Thanks.’

Wong told Tin that he wanted to know more about the physical way money moved in and out of the company. The publisher disappeared, returning five minutes later with a bespectacled woman whom he introduced as Sophie Melun, the newspaper’s financial director. ‘Sophie will tell you what you need to know about the money side. I’m going to have to leave you now. I’m heading to Changi to catch a plane to K L, see one of our investors. Ask Susannah or Dudley if you have any questions; they’re in charge while I’m gone. I’ll be back early on Friday.’

Tin put on a toughing-it-out smile and marched out with a wave.

The job thoroughly intrigued the geomancer. The more he studied the firm, the more he was convinced that it stood to succeed or fail on the grounds of feng shui alone. The company was apparently doing things right in business terms, yet was failing for purely intangible reasons.

After he had finished interviewing Ms Melun and returned to his charts, Joyce looked up from the back issue of Update she was reading. ‘So what’s the diagnosis, doc?’

‘The answer is in the birth charts, I think. Each year has its own nine-square number. It takes up the birth chart’s middle. The middle number on the top of the turtle’s back. You remember that story I told you about the turtle on the River Lo? The number of the year goes down by one as each year begins. So 1998 was a Two Year, 1999 was a One Year, 2000 is a Nine Year and so on.’ He showed her a page of charts in a book.

‘But each person also has their own nine-square number. You have your own lo shu chart. It depends on when you were born. You must find the nature of your own ch’i energy. Then you can see how your fortunes will be. A business, also, has energy. It has a birth date. You can find its nine-square number.’

‘Cool. So what’s my number? I was born in 1983.’

‘The year does not begin on January 1 and continue to December 31. No, it goes from Lunar New Year to Lunar New Year. Your birthday is February 9. So you were born in the Year of Eight.’

‘How d’you know my birthday? I don’t remember telling you.’

‘That was one of the first things I checked. After you joined the office. I had to, of course.’

‘To make sure I wasn’t like, a monster with bad vibrations that would upset your office, I suppose. Well, I bet you’re glad I turned out so nice.’

‘Ye-es,’ he said, with not quite enough conviction.

Wong busied himself with his charts, and Joyce, quickly bored, wandered off. As the final copy deadline of 12.30 p.m. approached, and each staff member met his or her final deadline for the issue, the atmosphere began to lighten, with people breaking away from their computers and stopping to chat over their desks or stand by the drinks machine.

She quickly struck up a friendship with Dudley Singh, a tall young man of about twenty-five, and they stood by the coffee machine talking at length about the movie stars they hated, which were legion.

In the production department, Susannah Lo took Wong through the technical process in detail. The pages were prepared on the computer, and then sent to the platemaker.

‘This we call a plate,’ she said. ‘No, no, please don’t touch it.’

Wong whipped his fingers away and apologised.

‘It is very delicate. We have to be very careful, because this is the final product that goes to the printer, from which the actual newspaper is made. It will be collected by the printer very shortly, printed this afternoon, and distributed tomorrow morning. You will see it at the news stands from about seven.’

Ms Lo, a small, unsmiling woman of about forty in a designer suit, had owl-glasses which perched precariously on a tiny nose.

‘Is it available at every news stand?’ Wong asked.

‘There are complex relationships between various publishers, distributors and retailers, which I don’t really want to get into. We are signed with Hollis News Retail as our prime distributor, and they do a pretty good job. We get excellent display at their shops, and they also distribute some to other retail chains, street stands, as well.’

‘Are you aware of any problems in the sections you are boss of?’

Ms Lo pushed her glasses back and replied: ‘No. Production and distribution are fine. I think the problem must be in editorial or marketing.’

The geomancer nodded. He looked back at the page of classified ads in front of him, and tugged at the straggly hairs on his chin.

On Tuesday morning, C F Wong rose at 5.30 as usual, and was in his office at Wai-Wai Mansions soon after 6.30. He gulped down a sharp bowl of Chiuchow tea to wake himself up, and started drawing fresh lo shu charts for all the decision-makers and major investors involved with Hong Siu Publishing, complete with water stars and mountain stars. He went on to draw the Four Pillars of Wisdom, and Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches, for each person.

After an hour, he had covered his desk with charts, and started to litter Joyce’s and Winnie’s desks with scribbled sheets.

The young Western woman arrived at 9.30 to find her desk had disappeared under a mass of paperwork. She placed her coffee on the window sill and plonked herself down heavily on her chair. It was a hydraulic office chair, and she liked to lift it to maximum height, so she could swivel it from side to side, swinging her legs and irritating the others.

‘Wanna hear my theories?’ she asked.

This was the sort of instance when one really had to ask oneself about one’s adherence to the truth, Wong thought. Clearly he did not want to hear her theories. But she was his boss’s client’s daughter.

‘Okay,’ he said, but with so little enthusiasm that he hoped she might get the message.

‘Well. I went to TGIF’s last night. I’m like, “What do you think about Update?” And Emma’s like, “It’s really cool.” Becky’s like, “Everybody I know reads it.” Emma’s had two letters in its letters page last month. Anyway, I’m like, “So what could be done to improve it?” and they gave me some ideas. I’ll tell you them,’ she said, generously.

She took a sip of coffee, depositing chocolate powder on her nose, and continued: ‘The first thing we all agreed is that there should be more writing about like bands and less about restaurants and cheezy nightclubs and stuff. Who wants to read so much about boring old food?’

‘I think maybe that you do not understand the publishing business,’ Wong replied. ‘Western pop groups like the Beatles probably will not buy advertisement space in a Singapore magazine. But local restaurants, they will.’

‘The Beatles? The Beatles broke up already. John Lennon is dead. He died two years before I was born.’

‘Well, then he will not be buying an advertisement.’

‘Where you going?’

‘I am going out to buy one. You want to come?’

‘We get it delivered.’

‘I want to buy one from a shop.’

They stepped from the musty, cramped doorway of Wai-Wai Mansions into a dazzling mid-summer Singapore morning and had to virtually shut their eyes against the light as they strolled south on Telok Ayer Street, towards a small cluster of shops near an office complex. The central business area had grown to absorb what had been a quiet road and the background rush of traffic formed a rumbling background hum.

Wong found a streetside newspaper vendor and bought a copy of Update. The seller looked at him with suspicion, as if it was somehow indecent for a Chinese man in his fifties to be buying a magazine with a pop star on the cover.

Moving a few metres away from the kiosk, the geomancer opened the magazine and started flicking through the pages.

‘What’re you looking for?’

‘This page.’ Wong flicked towards the back of the journal, and found a section of lonely hearts advertisements.

Joyce tried to, but did not quite succeed in, stifling a smile. It suddenly occurred to her that she knew nothing at all about her boss’s personal life: whether he was living with someone, or had children, or where he lived or what he did after work.

‘Joyce, you do something for me please?’

‘Sure, what?’

‘You go down that street. Take the second road on the right side. You will find some small shops. Will you see if any of them have this magazine? Then buy one from them. And also, buy copies from any news stand you see while you are going. Take a pen and write down on each copy where from. The name of the shop and the street where you bought it. Get as many as you can. Meet back at the office in half an hour.’

‘Doing some sort of survey?’

‘Yes.’

By 10.30, Joyce had returned to the Wai-Wai Mansions with eight copies of the new Update and Wong with twelve.

She entered to find that Wong had been scolding Winnie Lim, who had swept up his entire morning’s work and dumped it in a black dustbin bag. ‘Too messy, must be bad feng shui,’ she was saying. ‘Beside, I cannot fin’ my lipstick; a hundred-over sheet of paper on my desk.’

Growling, Wong took the stack of magazines to his meditation room and turned to the lonely hearts page of each copy. He nodded to himself as he looked at where each had been bought, and laid them out across the floor. He wrote notes to himself in Chinese as he examined each issue.

‘Lonely hearts? What’re you looking for?’ Joyce asked. ‘Not a girlfriend, I take it.’

‘Girlfriend no. Answer yes.’

He told her that he had pressed his finger quite firmly onto the plate from which that particular page had been made, while studying the production process. ‘See, you can see it here. That tiny mark is the mark I made. But you can only see it on this copy. And that one and that one. You can’t see it on any of the others.’

‘I guess they must have noticed it and fixed it.’

‘Maybe so.’

On Thursday, Wong and McQuinnie spent several hours at the publishing house.

Wong had explained to Susannah Lo and Dudley Singh that he had found several problems. The basic layout of the office needed little change, but there were alterations needed to certain desks.

‘The problems are revealed by the lo shu charts. The biggest one is the timing of your move. The company has the central lo shu number four. When you moved into this building, you moved west, from Victoria Street to Orchard Road, which is in the direction of four, your own number. You should not move towards yourself. This is like pushing two identical magnets together. The energies do not help each other. They fight each other. The result is great effort and hard work, but not much good result. Obviously this is a problem here.’ He looked up from the chart at which he had been pointing.

‘Please think of it this way. When you move a company, you are like a farmer moving a field of apple trees. You need to wait until the right time of year. Then you carefully dig them up. Then replant them at the right time of year in the right place. This was not done.’

‘Whoa, this sounds like major bad news,’ said Singh. ‘You don’t expect us to move out and move in again on the right day, I hope?’

‘The shareholders would never agree. Too expensive,’ said Ms Lo.

‘No, I don’t ask you to move,’ said the geomancer. ‘There are many other actions you can take, much simpler. There are some matters concerning Mr Alberto Tin’s personal birth chart. I will go through that with him when he comes back tomorrow. We need a ceremonial re-launching of the company. This will be at a precise time on a precise day. This I will discuss with Mr Tin. There are some suitable dates coming. Some within only a few weeks. Also, there are some small changes to make in the editorial section. Just a few small things. The flow of ch’i energy there is too fast. This is not difficult to fix. I need to place some sea salt at certain positions. Sea salt is very yang. It will make the ch’i energy more solid. Then, the element of metal-’

‘No changes in the production section?’ interrupted Ms Lo.

‘None.’

‘Then I will get back to work. You can talk to Mr Singh alone about the changes in the editorial section.’ She rose and walked smartly back to her station.

On Friday, Wong phoned Alberto Tin’s mobile phone to hear that he had just landed at Changi Airport. The geomancer and his assistant arranged to meet the publisher at 11.30 a.m. at the Tai Tong Hoi Kee restaurant.

When Tin entered, Wong and McQuinnie rose immediately and told him to accompany them. We can come back for dimsum afterwards,’ said the geomancer. ‘I want to have a long talk with you. Go through your birth chart. Also some matters of office placement. But first, we want to show you something.’

They walked 100 yards down the street, making polite chit-chat, until they came to a kiosk selling journals and books. Wong purchased a hot-off-the-press copy of Update and flicked to the editorial letter at the front.

‘There are actually two editions of the new Update. I’m afraid Ms McQuinnie and I, we did a little changing in one.’

‘What? What do you mean?’ Tin looked startled.

‘We did some, aaah, editing, I think it is called.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Do not be afraid. We have not inserted any bad things into your journal. We made it more accurate.’

‘But how could you do it? And what did you do?’ He started nervously examining the page at which the journal was open.

‘Your staff member Dudley Singh helped us. He formed a friendship with my assistant. You see, we found that the plates of your magazine are actually sent to two output centres. Not one. One makes the magazine you usually see. Ten thousand are printed. The other output centre makes a separate one. Prints 30 000 copies. But you don’t know this.’

‘What? What are you saying?’ Tin’s eyes seemed to want to burst through his spectacles.

‘Let me explain it. I’m better at explaining things than you,’ said Joyce. ‘Hollis News Retail has been like reprinting your newspaper. The ones they sell in their shops, most of them are not your ones, you see. They print their own ones, and they sell them, and they keep the money. They print a large number; 30 164 I think is the exact number. I phoned their printer and managed to wheedle the details out of them.’

‘You are saying they illegally reprint my newspaper, sort of pirate it?’

‘Yes,’ said Wong. ‘You print 10 000. Hollis sells them for you. You know about that. The plates are prepared by the Sam Long Output Centre in your building. But the pages also go to another output centre. A place called Wan Kan Colour Printers. There another 30 000 and some are printed, you see? Wan Kan Colour Printers is a subsidiary of the Hollis Group.’

The chubby publisher was momentarily speechless. Then he recovered himself. ‘How can that be? They have no right to do that. What do they do with them?’

‘Hey, B K, what do you think?’ said Joyce. ‘They sell them, of course. You see, Mr Tin, the actual circulation of your newspaper has grown to like, 40 000 copies a time. A lot of these are like, separately printed by Hollis and sold by the Hollis Retail network, which keeps the profits. That is why you see so many people-like me and my friends-buying the thing, but your records show so few sales. It’s quite a neat trick, really.’

Wong nodded. ‘You get all costs. They get all profits.’

‘They are selling 30 000 copies, twice a week, at my expense? Plus their usual cut of my sales? They must be making an absolute fortune.’ Tin was in shock, and breathing heavily. ‘How can they get hold of the pages? Who is giving them to them?’

Mr Wong held up his finger to show Joyce that he would answer this question. ‘We do not like to commit slander and libel upon anyone. But I think maybe you should ask Ms Susannah Lo that question. She is in charge of the pages after they are finished. And she has relatives in the Hollis Group. Do you remember you told me that yourself? Changes made to the pages after she has taken them do not go into both editions.’

‘I just-I just don’t understand. How on earth…? But look, if the paper is so successful, and is making helluva big money for them, why are they tricking me and leading me into financial disaster? The thing is about to shut down.’

The geomancer nodded sagely. ‘I think maybe they will let your operation crash. They can then buy it cheaply. Then they can launch the magazine again as their own. They know that it is already a success. They can cut you out.’

‘I’ll sue them. What they have done is criminal. I’ll sue them in the courts for every penny they have.’

Joyce giggled. ‘Yeah. You should. But you may have to like get in the queue.’

‘What do you mean?’

Wong looked into the middle distance. ‘The sage Lu Hsueh-an, he said: “There is looking and there is seeing. Many people look. But only the Perfect Man sees.”’

The geomancer wagged his finger and turned to Joyce. ‘Many people saw the turtles in the River Lo. But only Fu Hsi saw the markings on the turtle’s back. So he found the magic square of nine.’ He addressed his next comment to Tin.

‘You look at this magazine, but you do not see it.’

The publisher just looked confused.

‘Can I tell him?’ the young woman asked, clapping her hands and almost hopping with glee. ‘We made like four changes to the version of the paper that was like stolen and reprinted by Hollis. I mean, Dudley did them really.’

She showed him the masthead on page two. ‘First, the publisher’s name and registered address and the printers’ details have been changed from yours to Hollis’s.’

She flicked back to the front page. ‘Second, the paper looks the same, but look closely and you notice the name has been changed. It does not say Update. It says Upyours.’

She opened the magazine again. ‘Third, most of the actual articles don’t appear in this. Dudley replaced them with what he called “dummy text”. They obviously didn’t read the thing but just put it into the printing machine and pressed the button. Hee hee.’

Tin, moving in slow motion, took the magazine out of her hands and slowly flicked through the pages with amazement. ‘I see. Dudley did all this?’

‘Yeah. In minutes. He’s pretty cool.’

The publisher was tugging uncomfortably at his collar. ‘You said four changes.’

‘The fourth one is-I’ll show you,’ said Joyce, taking the magazine out of his hands again. ‘Just here. Look, just read that paragraph. Dudley inserted this little article in the Upyours edition about various people.’

Tin scanned the report on page three. ‘Good grief, Wong. You guys have insulted practically everyone that counts in this city.’

‘Not me,’ said Wong. ‘Not us. Hollis publishing. Their name is all over the publication. They financed it. They signed it. They printed it. And they distributed it. It is their liability. Not yours. Not mine. Shall we go and have that breakfast now? The cha siu so at Tai Tong Hoi Kee very good.’

The two men, Tin in a daze, started to move back towards the restaurant, but Joyce moved in the other direction. ‘Bye guys. You go and have a dimsum orgy. I’m meeting Dud for a cappuccino at Starbucks on Orchard Road. He’s asked me to do some CD reviews for him. You don’t mind me moonlighting a bit, do you, C F? I get the latest CDs before they hit the shops and I get to keep them. Way cool.’

She plugged her ears with her CD headphones before he had a chance to reply, and walked away, her head keeping time with an unheard rhythm.