Free The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics by Nury Vittachi Page A

had gained status. One of the people who had hired him was a tycoon, another was a senior Communist Party official, and a third was a senior security agent working for the President’s office. In the last of these assignments, Wong had been asked to find the safest spot in the vicinity, in case ‘important people have to hide or find shelter for any reason’. This had not been difficult. Wong could do it without a map. He simply pointed out that Tsz Lum Cove, a bay cut into a nameless barren rock in the Yangtze Estuary, was sheltered in every way: physically and spiritually. A steep cliff hung over a small plateau just above sea level. The sides of the cliff surrounding the bay were so steep and the material it was made of was so thick (limestone and granite) that nothing could penetrate it—bad vibrations or the blast of major weapons. ‘Even if you dropped a bomb on Shanghai, a fisherman in Tsz Lum Cove would be just fine,’ he’d said.
    And he had been thrilled at how seriously the security chief had taken the pronouncements, laboriously writing down everything he said in simplified characters. In the end, the man had declined to pay his bill, calmly explaining that, ‘The President’s office does not pay for consultancy work; to work for us is an honour.’
    Normally, the feng shui master would have been furious at such a cop-out. But not this time. He had been content to bite his tongue and say nothing. Although he had never thought of himself as status-conscious, he was pleased to think that his words were being added to the emergency files for evacuating top people in the event of war in China. It made him feel important and, more significantly, it made him feel he could do some name-dropping and raise his fees.
    ‘We’re here,’ Bi said. The lift came to a halt, the internal elevator lights went out and the doors wooshed open.
    ‘Lights not working?’ Wong said, noting the darkness of the lift and the gloom of the corridor. ‘Power cut?’ The only light leaked out of the floor, like the emergency strips leading to exit doors on an aircraft.
    Bi shook his head. ‘No. We use an automatic dimmer to turn them right down so you get more of an effect when you enter the restaurant.’
    They followed the spooky floor-lit corridor around a turning to the left and came upon the main door of the restaurant. As Bi had said, the darkness enhanced the drama of the entrance. The doorway was bathed in multicoloured light and surmounted by a temporary sign: a neon light with the name of the dining club which was meeting tonight: This Is Living . The letters were in luminous yellow-green which gradually changed to shocking pink as they entered. Wong stopped and stared at it for half a minute, wondering about the feng shui implications of a light which changed colour (yet another modern artifact that broke the recognised laws of physics). Bi, impatient, grabbed Wong by the elbow and pulled him through the doorway.
    In shape, the restaurant was much as Wong remembered from the previous week—a large, elegant, oval-shaped room on two levels, with a balcony rail making sure no one tripped off the higher level, which had been turned into a sort of stage. But in another way, it looked very different—the lighting engineers had given it an otherworldly atmosphere with low-slung lights, focused beams, and mixed colours. The room was reddish on one side, blue on the other, and had a clear, balanced tone only in the middle.
    Wong looked up with delight at the suspended ceiling. Modern ceilings, to him, were one of the marvels of room design. Suspended ceilings, by definition, lowered the height of a room. But clever layering and lighting effects meant that the net result was to make it appear higher than it would otherwise have seemed.
    The room was dotted with tables—thirty-one of them—at intervals large enough for people to have discreet conversations: not like in most Chinese restaurants, where diners ate