Nury Vittachi - The Feng Shui Detective

‘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.’