“At least I don’t look got up as a grease monkey:’ she said. “Who’s just escaped from somewhere in a jailhouse jumpsuit.”
“At least I don’t clash with the feng shui vibes around this place.”
“What are you doing here anyway?”
He shrugged his head over a brightly plush shoulder. Ugh! “Haven’t you heard? I’m doing radio spot news for KREP.”
“KREP?”
“It’s French for tasty little roll of powdered sugar,” Awful Crawford explained with a customary leer.
“Who would hire you as a journalist?”
“It’s an all-news, all-talk format, not some Muzak-talk mush-‘n’-slush station like WCOO that your friend Matt Devine works
for.”
“I’ll take a slush station over sleaze any day. Excuse me.”
A mike appeared in Crawford’s white-knuckled fist. “All right, listeners, we’ve just buttonholed Las Vegas’s favorite flack
Temple Barr on her way into Maylords … and this little gal has some buttons worth holing-”
Temple, regretting her distant collection of instep-spearing high heels, drove her clog into Crawford’s tennis-shoe-shod instep on the way past.
“Oops!” He coughed, then went on gamely. “She’s been called away by the head feng shuister. Meanwhile, here’s a glasstotin’ man hauling sixteen tons of plate into Maylords’s front window. Let’s hear what he has to say.”
“Outta my way, dork, I drop this and you’re sushi under glass. Shrimp sushi.”
Temple grinned as she entered the building, then paused to sense some of Friday night’s terror settling back on her shoulders. She dusted them off, as recommended in yoga class to release muscle strain as if it were dandruff.
The simple gesture did banish a certain tension.
She moved ahead into the central atrium, prepared to do her duty.
Instead of the long buffet table of Friday night, a round orange damask-draped model sat at the circular space’s exact center.
Like a bull’s-eye, Temple thought sourly, glancing around for any protruding gun barrels.
Amelia Wong, her handmaidens, and bodyguards were lined up behind the table.
On it sat a giant wooden salad bowl like Temple’s mother still had from the ’60s, heaped with oranges.
Tall vases sprouting vivid orange tiger lilies flanked the … urn, Orange Bowl.
Temple bit her lip. Giggling did not seem to be the proper ceremonial reaction here.
Amelia Wong’s black eyes noted her arrival. A flick of her lashes ordered Temple to a position behind the table. Perhaps it was an altar.
She edged closer to Baylee Harris. The tall blond young woman seemed the most realistic of the bunch, maybe because she was such a physical opposite to their grand dame, Amelia Wong.
“What’s going on?” Temple whispered.
Baylee squinched down so Temple could hear the answering whisper. “She is about to do the Three Secrets
Reinforcement.”
Temple stood at attention. She had never seen a Three Secrets Reinforcement before, although she had a few secrets of her own.
Amelia Wong stood as straight as a tin soldier behind the bowl heaped with oranges.
“Twenty-seven oranges,” Baylee managed to whisper before falling silent.
Amelia Wong cradled one hand in another, then began chanting what sounded like Sanskrit: ” Ga-tay ga-tay, para ga-tay, para sum ga-tay, bhodi swaha.’ “
New Age was the trail mix of culture. Nine times she repeated the mantra.
Then she lifted an aluminum pitcher and poured water into the bowl until it was three-quarters full.
Systematically, her long, lacquered fingernails tore the rinds off the piled oranges, letting them sink into the water.
The oranges themselves were cast into a plastic trash bag at her Manolo Blahnik-clad feet.
Lifting the heavy wooden bowl, Amelia moved ceremonially toward the front door.
“Isn’t this all sort of futile?” Temple asked Baylee. “I mean, the windows are blasted away. You could walk through them.
Where’s the protection?”
“It’s the why, not the where,” Baylee said solemnly. “This blessing is best used on a place where security has been compromised. That’s the cool thing about feng shui. It works in the past, present, and future.”
Temple thought about it. Like all mystical things, feng shui was in the eye of the believer.
She nodded, feeling the same about it as she did about religious and superstitious gestures in generaclass="underline" what the heck. It
couldn’t hurt.
Amelia folded the middle fingers of her right hand into her palm, leaving only the pinkie and the forefinger erect.
Behind her back, Temple tried this position and found her muscles rebelling. It must take practice, like bullfighting. Or bull throwing.
Rapidly, Amelia flicked her folded fingers outward. Temple counted nine times. It was a bit like the shoulder-dusting gesture of yoga, designed to release tensions.
Next, Amelia cradled the fingers of her left hand in her right, her thumb-tips touching.
Then she performed a two-handed finger weave. Temple blinked. She saw the curled little fingers touched by the thumbs, the ring fingers straight up, the middle fingers crossed and touched by the index fingers.
This was an amazingly complicated position. Temple felt her knuckles ache just to witness it.
Cradling the bowl of orange peels in one crooked arm, Amelia Wong marched right to the store’s entrance doors. With the same flicking motion, she sprinkled the water on the hard-surface floor.
Temple watched Kenny Maylord’s brow morph into pale corrugated cardboard. Water droplets would be as lethal to upholstery in an interiors store as they were to Wicked Witches in Oz.
Amelia Wong was busy chanting some new mantra: ” ‘Om ma-ni pad-me hum.’ “
It reminded Temple of the classic kid’s trick: getting some innocent to chant, syllable by syllable, “0 wah to goo Siam.”
Temple concluded that children’s games often carried over to adult life.
Beside her, Baylee chanted her own descriptive mantra in a discreet whisper. “She is cleansing the area. The Six True Words will remove all the bad luck and negative chi, or life force here. The finger flicking is called an Expelling Mudra. It would help if we all joined in to visualize the evil being removed.”
Temple flowed into the procession that followed Amelia Wong as she sprinkled and chanted her way through the store, watering every model room.
Kenny Maylord looked dazed, no doubt wondering if orange spots would soon be busting out all over his showroom.
Temple flowed into visualizing the water spots drying and leaving no trace. That was the only kind of positive chi she could imagine as the outcome of this ritual, so vaguely religious in nature.
It took almost an hour for Amelia Wong to return to the front entry and the table, or altar. Plenty of time for all the videographers to shoot their hearts out.
“Next,” she announced, “the Three Secrets Reinforcement.” She turned to place the bowl on the table, and froze in midgesture, frowning.
Temple was perfectly situated to see her glowering profile and follow her stare right to the gleaming bitter-orange Murano.
A car, Temple supposed, was a sort of room, and it had not been blessed with water spots.
Amelia Wong was clearly about to take care of that omission. First she walked solemnly around the vehicle, chanting and sprinkling. ” ‘Om ma-ni pad-me hum.’ “
Temple couldn’t help hearing that as “Oh Ma, no pat my bum.”
Having completed her ceremonial circuit, Amelia pulled the driver’s door open with her sprinkling hand, keeping the water
bowl lifted in the other.
Something came tumbling out from inside the deep black tinted window glass and painted orange steel. It fell to the beige