The Feng Shui Detective Goes South by Nury Vittachi Page B

all.’ Wong picked up a sheet of paper from the top of a pile. It was a letter. ‘See this? Each paper contains what we call “potential energy transaction”. Someone write you a letter. Or you write letter to someone. Or someone want you to buy something. Or phone them. Or send fax to them. Someone want to tell you something. They put some energy into paper. They put some effort into paper. If you read letter, do something about it, energy of letter-writer has become your energy. Turns into action. But if you take no action—if you just put paper on pile, energy dies. Then you get another paper. Add to pile. Then another. Then another. All these papers, you put on pile. Soon pile has hundreds of papers. You put into drawer. Drawer gets full. You make new pile on desk. Soon new pile has hundreds of papers. But each paper is piece of dead energy.’
    ‘I see,’ said Mirpuri, moving his head diagonally again. ‘I guess most of these sheets of paper are being pretty useless to me now. I just haven’t got around to—’
    ‘Piles of dead energy very bad. You come into office, you see big piles of old papers. Sucks out your energy. You feel tired, you feel dead energy too. You get leth-ar-gy.’
    ‘So I should be filing them aarl away in neat cabinets, like that?’
    ‘No. Because then cabinets become full of dead energy. Best you throw away all old papers. Only legal ones, important ones, you can keep. The rest, out. Otherwise too much leth-ar-gy, spreads all over office.’
    Mr Mirpuri nodded diagonally again. ‘Okay. This is making sense to me. Chuck out all the old piles of paper that are piling up everywhere. Fine. Do that farst. What else should I do?’
    ‘Get smaller desk. This desk too big.’
    ‘But you don’t understand. A senior executive is surely to goodness having to have a big desk. I’m the chairman of this company. I need a big desk. No one will have any respect for me if I am not having the biggest desk, definitely. Also I have a great many sundry items to put on the desk.’
    ‘This desk too big for this size room. Looks wrong. Feels wrong. Cannot walk around it easily. Must change it.’
    ‘If you say so,’ said Mirpuri, reluctantly. ‘I brought it over from India you know. Carved out of a single piece of—’ ‘Business office is place of change. Or process. Everything that comes in must be processed. Must be changed. Then ch ’ i will flow. Also money will flow.’
    Mirpuri blinked at the word ‘money’, a subject he evidently took very seriously.
    ‘You also need new carpet,’ Wong continued. ‘And different chair. And change colour of cabinets. And move partitions.’
    Mr Mirpuri sighed. This was going to be more expensive than he had expected.

    In a room with a view at police headquarters, Superintendent Gilbert Tan, thirty-eight, used his index finger to stab the telephone buttons with a great deal of unnecessary violence. It wasn’t that he was angry—quite the contrary: he was a quiet, rather repressed man most of the time, and it was when he found himself in a state of happy excitement that he tended to express it with hurried, sharp movements.
    Impatiently tapping on his desk with one hand, he used the other to hold down the speakerphone button on his telephone.
    He heard the phone he was calling give three rings before it was answered by a female voice.
    ‘Hello?’
    Tan snatched up the handset.
    ‘Winnie?’
    ‘No, this is Joyce. D’you want Winnie? She’s out.’
    ‘Hi, Joyce. How are you? Good, I hope? Actually, I want to speak to Mr Wong. Superintendent Tan here.’
    ‘Oh, hi. He’s out. On a case. There’s this girl, someone I know, actually, who’s been kidnapped, possibly, and, believe it or not, one of the suspects is actually a pol—’ Joyce stopped abruptly. ‘Anyway, CF’s out.’
    ‘Hmm.’ The police officer wondered what to do. ‘He has got his mobile with him, is it?’
    ‘Er. He’s not using it at the moment. There was an accident this