Mr Wong Goes West by Nury Vittachi Read Free Book Online

Indonesia and even more in Africa, but the Queen of England is the lady you have in mind, I take it?’
    ‘The Queen is coming?’ Chong-li asked.
    ‘It’s not the Queen. It’s a member of her family. It could bePrince Charles, or…or one of his sons.’ Joyce’s eyes instantly glazed over.
    ‘Prince Charles coming to visit you?’ Chong-li was impressed. ‘My. That
is
a coup. Well done. How did you set that one up? I have often invited him, but have never had the pleasure. I thought after he lost his wife he might be tempted, but he resisted my blandishments.’
    ‘Or his sons.’
    ‘He has boys, does he? No girls? What a pity. A pretty wife he had. Girls would have been nice.’
    ‘The boys are pretty nice, too,’ said Joyce, and then blushed.
    Sinha at once noticed the reddening of her cheeks. ‘Aha. Instant scarlet. I do believe you have designs on the boys, is that right? Are you planning to let CF do the work so that you can devote yourself to seducing one of the princes from the tower for yourself?’
    Chong-li started singing: ‘One day my prince will come…’
    ‘No, of course not,’ said Joyce, looking down at the table, as if there was something in its cracked vinyl-coated surface of great interest. ‘But I wouldn’t mind meeting Prince Will. He is a bit of a dish, although I don’t know if he’s really my type.’ She uttered this last phrase with patently false nonchalance.
    ‘Talking of dishes, why don’t you sample some of these?’ suggested Sinha, sweeping his hand over the plates.
    Joyce shook her head. She lived on processed snacks and coffee, and only occasionally forced herself to eat actual food. She scanned the array of weapons-grade curries with suspicion. Although she could enjoy a mild chicken tikka marsala with some white rice and a poppadum if she was feeling adventurous, the more exotic dishes repelled her British–Australian palate. They kind of had
too
much taste, sort of thing.
    ‘Mm…no thanks. I think I’ll just have a poppadum.’
    While the rest of them were eating, Joyce explained to them that she and Wong had just landed an assignment involving something that was going to be front-page news all over the world. A revolutionary new European aircraft called Skyparc had just flown into Hong Kong. It was a British version of a giant plane built by Airbus Industrie, a European consortium, and was being offered for sale as a luxury skyliner to Asian airlines. One of the group of organisations responsible for the meeting, the British Trade Commission, was assumed to know most about Chinese conventions, because of Britain’s long official history in Hong Kong. There were aristocrats on board, and an executive called Mr Manks, who was something to do with the royal family, had suggested the conference rooms aboard the plane be inspected by a feng shui master before the meeting.
    ‘You have been asked to feng shui an aeroplane,’ said Sinha. ‘Surely a moving craft by definition cannot be feng shuied? Items of transport have no north and south, no east and west. And in the case of an aircraft in particular, it spends much of its time in the air, and thus has no direct relationship to the ground, so no up or down. Surely it is the mountains and rivers and topography that define the macro-feng shui of a place? A moving aircraft…well, every minute, its relationships with the surrounding geography change.’
    The others knew that Sinha was allowed to engage in technical, even adversarial discussions about feng shui, as he was a master of
vaastu
, the Indian equivalent.
    Joyce agreed. ‘But we’re just doing a feng shui reading for the aircraft’s main conference room while it’s in the hangar. This is not your ordinary airplane. Skyparc is “your office in the air”.’
    She pulled out the copy of
Time
magazine and showed them the photograph. ‘We just have to make sure there is nothing that can go wrong for this particular sales meeting. Easy. Airplane sales deals