“Here? In Singapore? To earn money,” she said, surprised at his question. She took a bite of the duck; the meat was soft and tender.
“How long have you been in Singapore? Does your employer treat you well?”
“Two years. They’re all right.” She didn’t want to say too much about them. She wanted to finish her food, get her $250, and leave. The rain was still coming down; it looked as if someone was pouring glue on the windows.
“You are happy here?” he asked. He had not touched his food.
“Yes,” she said.
“You need to know what you want in Singapore, Natalia. If you don’t, how will you know when you have it?” He turned to his father. “Right, Pa?” Then he looked back at her. “You like the reservoir?”
“It is peaceful,” she said.
“Were you there five days ago, in the morning?”
She didn’t know where this questioning was going. “I can’t remember,” she said, starting to feel frightened.
He turned toward his father.
“Pa, what do you think of her? Do you like her? I’m going to marry her.”
The old man stopped eating and looked up. “Would she please you better than Mei?”
“She’s already pregnant.” There was a rising rage in Simon’s voice. “There’s nothing you can do this time.”
“Sir, what are you—” Natalia started.
“Shut up!” Simon snapped. “I’m going to marry her and there’s nothing you can do about it, Pa.”
The old man shot out of his wheelchair and his right hand curled around her neck. Her plate of rice fell to the floor, shattering. The man’s hands felt like sandpaper on her throat. Simon did not raise a hand to help.
“You’re going to kill her too?” Simon’s hands then locked around his father’s right wrist. “Is that what you want?”
Her fingers searched the table. She found a fork and quickly stabbed Simon’s father on the head. He did not let go, even as blood streamed down his gnarled face. She struck again with all the strength she could muster.
This time, the force made him let go and Natalia jumped away. Simon shouted at his father in Hokkien. The old man crumpled to the floor, bleeding. Natalia dashed to the door and bolted out, ignoring Simon’s shouts.
The security guard downstairs was reading a newspaper and didn’t even look up when she came out. She ran home in the rain. Then she dialed 999.
It was odd to read about the case in the newspaper, with Natalia as the star.
The paper said that XueLing and Simon had been seeing each other. The old man, incensed over his son’s relationship with a “Chinese dog” and his desire to marry her, leaped out of his wheelchair and wrapped his hands around her throat. Unlike Natalia, she lost the struggle.
Out of filial duty, Simon hadn’t reported his father. Instead, he hatched a plan. Dressing XueLing in red, he painted her nails and slipped her into the reservoir. He hoped she would return as a spirit and avenge her death.
Natalia spotting him that morning had been his undoing. And so he’d hatched another clumsy plan, one that would silence her. But both father and son ended up in prison — both were expected to spend their remaining days there.
That evening, Natalia headed to the reservoir, escaping her small room once again. The Chans would be back shortly, a distraction she now welcomed. In the last peaceful moments before they returned, however, she wended her way over to the water. Placing her hands together, she prayed — for XueLing, for her spirit, for the power of her red vengeance.
Murder on Orchard Road
by Nury Vittachi
Orchard Road
His New Year’s resolution was to give up murders. Murders were horrible, messy, smelly, difficult, heart-rending things. And not nearly as profitable as they used to be.
“Red or white?” the waiter asked.
“Tea,” C.F. Wong responded.
The feng shui master sat at a table at the ballroom of the Raffles Hotel, thinking about the trajectory of his career. For many years, he’d been a geomancer specializing in scenes of crime. He had masterfully cornered the niche, aided by the fact that no one else wanted it. Which was not surprising. His competitors had conditioned themselves for years to recoil from anything that could even metaphorically be associated with death, from kitchen knives to broken bowls.
So crime was Wong’s patch alone. Tenant murdered? The landlord would pay Wong to “do his feng shui thing,” to cleanse the place so it could be rented out again. Gang wars in your district? Wong would fix the bad vibes so that all the negative energy would move out of the area.
But lately, his job had started to depress him. He began to realize what his young assistant meant when she said that murders were “real downers.” The dead body and the room in which it was found were often in a highly unpleasant condition. You spent your time in dark corners, breathing foul air, dealing with unhappy people, one of whom might be an actual killer.
The money had compensated for that, but even this delight was seeping away. Property prices had risen so high in Singapore that people no longer shied away from renting places where horrible things had happened. Some tenants even sought them out for the discount from the market price. Thus, Wong’s share of the pie was shrinking daily.
His rivals in geomancy preferred to work for stupid rich people, who would pay them vast sums for visiting their luxury homes. They worked in mansions, sipping silver tip tea and sitting on designer sofas as they spouted random platitudes about chi and the flying star school and the flow of good luck. And these days, they usually got paid more than he did.
So Wong had decided to taste the easy life. Step one had been to muscle his way into the “designer” feng shui business, offering his services to event organizers.
After weeks of pitching, he had been hired to oversee the geomantic side of the arrangements at a major car racing event. This wasn’t Singapore’s famous Formula One race. This was a grudge-match-as-spectacle showdown between Emerson Brahms and Andreletti Nelson, who were among the world’s greatest racing champions. The men had long been archrivals, although it was hard to tell whether they really hated each other or were just media-savvy enough to know that finger-wagging and fist-thrusting attracted TV cameras.
Wong had checked the feng shui of all the venues, including this gorgeously decorated pink-walled room at the luxurious hotel on Beach Road — an avenue at the heart of the urban district, many kilometers from the nearest beach. The only major negative he had found was a grotesque clash between the event date and the birthday of the main sponsor, a businessman named Lim Cheong Li. But that had been solved easily enough. Arrangements had been made for the official opening of the event to be led by a Buddhist abbot named Sin Sar. This man had the perfect birthday in terms of earth roots and heavenly pillars. His presence would ensure the event would not just go well, but be an unforgettable triumph.
Wong had promised the abbot a big lunch and a small fee, and gave him strict instructions: “Don’t say anything. Don’t do anything. Just sit there. Pretend you don’t know English. When they give you a bell, just ring it. Then sit down and shut up. Shut up all the time. Got it?”
The man had nodded, but not without an audible sigh. “I’m not stupid,” he said, in his oddly high singsong voice.
Wong had responded with a fake smile. The man was not stupid. But he was an idiot, all the same.
The event opened smoothly. Wong sat at the staff table at the back and watched the VIPs take their places at the top table. Abbot Sin Sar sat down and smiled stupidly at everyone. He accepted a big glass of red wine and grinned.