Ten
A few days later, Juliette was on a warpath for leads.
“Stay alert,” she told Rosalind and Kathleen quietly outside the squat building of an opium den. Across the street, there were two doors with red roses taped to them—a Scarlet calling card in theory, but a loud, clear threat in reality.
Rumor had it that the Scarlets started using red roses only in mockery of the White Flowers, who would paste any old white ower to the doors of the buildings they took in territory disputes. But the use of the red rose had begun so long ago that Juliette wasn’t sure if there was any truth to the claim. All that was certain was that having a red rose taped to one’s door was a last warning: to pay up, give in, cash out, or do whatever it was that the Scarlet Gang had demanded of you, else face the consequences.
This entire street was under Scarlet control, but every territory had its problem areas.
“Stick close to me,” Juliette continued, waving her cousins forward. The moment they entered the opium den and stepped upon damp, uneven oorboards, the three girls were instinctively pressing their hands to the line of their hips or the band of their waists, comforted only by the presence of the weapons hiding under the rich fabric of their clothing. “There may be active assassins working here.”
“Assassins?” Kathleen echoed, her voice pitching high. “I thought we came here to shake unpaid rent money for your father.”
“We are.” Juliette parted the beaded curtains, stepping through the partition and into the main den, where the smells of distorted histories and forced
addictions oated freely. The scents wafting into her nose reminded her of a rose on re, of perfume mixed with gasoline and set aame until the remaining ash could be used as thick, heady cosmetics. “But the Scarlet grapevine tells me this is also a socializing ground for Communists.”
They paused in the middle of the den. The remnants of old China were stronger here, amid the various paraphernalia—the pipes and the oil lamps— that had been brought over from before the turn of the century. The decor lagged well behind the times too, for while the chandeliers on the ceiling looked like the ones hanging golden and glittering in every Shanghai burlesque club, the bulbs were covered in a thin layer of grime, oily in appearance.
“Be careful,” Juliette warned. She eyed the bodies slumped against the walls of the den. “I doubt these people are as docile as they look.”
A few centuries ago, when this place was still the home estate of a royal or a general, it might have been opulent and lush. Now it was a husked-out building of missing oorboards and a ceiling sagging with the weight of itself. Now the couches bore holes where patrons extended their legs, and the armrests were worn down where patrons rubbed their grubby hands before tossing up a few cents and hurrying out—that is, if they weren’t enticed into the back rooms rst.
As Juliette craned her neck and searched the den for the madame in charge, she heard giggling echo from the corridors. In the next few seconds, a group of young women skittered out, each dressed in a dierent pale-colored hanfu, which Juliette supposed was an attempt to invoke the nostalgia of China’s previous eras. If only the skirts of their hanfu weren’t caked with dirt and their hairpins weren’t one sharp motion from falling out. If only their giggles weren’t incredulously fake even to the untrained ear, their red smiles curved vivaciously but their eyes dull.
Juliette sighed. In Shanghai, it was easier to count the establishments that didn’t double as brothels than the ones that did.
“How can I help you?”
Juliette turned around, searching for the voice who had spoken cheerily from behind. Madame, as she called herself, was inclined upon one of the couches, a lamp burning away beside her and a pipe tossed carelessly across her torso. When
Juliette wrinkled her nose, Madame rose, inspecting Juliette just as closely as Juliette was inspecting the black stains on the older woman’s hands.
“I’ll be,” Madame said. “Juliette Cai. I haven’t seen you since you were four years old.”
Juliette raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t aware we had ever met.”
Madame pursed her pale lips. “You wouldn’t remember, of course. In my mind, you’ll always be a little thing toddling around the gardens, oblivious to everything else in the world.”
“Uh-huh,” Juliette said. She shrugged ippantly. “My father failed to mention this.”
Madame’s eyes stayed level, but her shoulders hitched with the slightest signal of oense. “I was rather good friends with your mother for some time”—she harrumphed—“until… well, I’m sure you heard that somebody accused me of being too friendly with the White Flowers a decade ago. It was all hogwash, of course. You know I hate them as much as you do.”
“I don’t hate the White Flowers,” Juliette shot back immediately. “I hate those who harm the people I love. Most often they tend to be the White Flowers.
There’s a dierence.”
Madame snied. With every attempt she was making to relate to Juliette, she was getting pushed away. Juliette could keep at this all day. She loved picking holes in other people.
“Indeed, but don’t let them hear you say that,” Madame muttered. She shifted her attention away from Juliette then, changing tactics and grabbing Rosalind’s wrist, crooning, “Oh, I know you. Rosalind Lang. I knew your father, too, of course. Such precious children. I was so upset when you were sent to France. You won’t believe how much your father crowed on about the excellence of a Western education.” Her eyes turned to Kathleen. A beat passed.
Juliette cleared her throat.
“Bàba sent us here to collect,” she explained, hoping it would direct Madame’s attention back to her. “You owe—”
“But who are you?” Madame asked, interrupting Juliette to address Kathleen.
Kathleen narrowed her eyes. Rather tightly, she replied, “I’m Kathleen.”
Madame made a performance out of searching her memory.
“Oh, Kathleen. I remember now,” she gushed, clicking her ngers. “You used to be so rude, always sticking your tongue out at me.”
“I was a child, so you will have to forgive my past misdeeds,” Kathleen replied dryly.
Madame pointed at Kathleen’s forehead. “You have the Sagittarius constellation birthmark too. I thought I remembered—”
“Who?” Kathleen interrupted. It sounded like a dare. “Who do you remember having it?”
“Well,” Madame said, embarrassed now. “There used to be three of you Lang siblings, right? You had a brother, too.”
Juliette thinned her lips. Rosalind hissed through her teeth. But Kathleen— Kathleen only stared at Madame with the attest look in her eyes and said, “Our brother is dead. I’m sure you heard.”
“Yes, well, I’m very sorry,” Madame said, sounding not sorry at all. “I also lost a brother. Sometimes I think—”
“Enough,” Juliette interrupted. This had gone on long enough. “Can we speak elsewhere?”
Madame crossed her arms tightly and pivoted on her heel. She did not ask for the three Scarlets to follow her, but they did so anyway, trotting along and pressing up against the walls when they had to pass the pastel girls ittering about the narrow hallways. Madame led them into a bedroom decorated in various shades of red. There was another door here, one that led straight out onto the streets. Juliette wondered if it was for easy escape or easy entrance.
“I have your rent money.” They watched Madame wade through the discarded clothes on her oor, reaching under the slab of a mattress she called a bed to retrieve her money. Muttering beneath her breath, Madame counted the coins, each clinking into her palm to the tune of the groaning ceiling beams.
Madame extended her arm, oering Juliette the money in her st.
“Actually—” Juliette closed her hand around Madame’s and pushed the money back. “Keep it. There is something else I would prefer.”
Madame’s pleasant expression faltered. Her eyes swiveled to the side, to the
other door.
“And what would that be?”
Juliette smiled. “Information. I want your knowledge regarding the Communists.”
The pleasant expression on Madame’s face dropped entirely. “I beg your pardon?”
“I know you let them frequent this place for their meetings.” Juliette cocked her head, once at Kathleen and once at Rosalind. The two sisters broke away from their positions beside her and fanned into the room, each planting themselves in front of an exit. “I know one of these back rooms isn’t holding a girl and her eternal pleasure ride—it holds a table and a replace to keep the members of the Communist Party of China warm. So tell me, what have you heard about their role in this madness sweeping through the city?”
Madame barked out a sudden laugh. She lifted her lips too wide. Juliette could see the thick gap between her two front teeth.
“I haven’t a clue what you mean,” Madame said. “I keep out of their business.”
Is it fear or loyalty preventing her from talking? Juliette wondered. Madame was Scarlet-associated but not a gangster, loyal to the cause but not quite willing to die for it.
“Of course. How rude of me to assume,” Juliette said. She ried through her pocket, then grinned brighter than the thin, diamond necklace she had retrieved, now dangling between her ngers. “Will you accept a gift from me to make up for my insolence?”
Juliette skittered behind Madame before Madame could protest, and Madame did not move, either, for what was the harm in taking a diamond
necklace?
It was not a diamond necklace.
Madame squawked when Juliette pulled the garrote wire tight, her ngers ying up to scrabble at the pressure digging into her skin. By then the wire was already wrapped around her neck, the micro-blades piercing in.
“Those who are loyal to the Scarlet Gang are dropping dead in droves,”
Juliette hissed. “Those who dirty their hands for us are falling victim to the madness, while people like you remain tight-lipped, unable to decide whether you bleed scarlet or ght for the workers’ red rags.” Thin beads of blood bubbled
to the surface of Madame’s smooth skin, enough to stain the hues of her neck. If Juliette pulled the wire only a hairsbreadth further, the blades would dig deep enough to scar upon healing. “Which shade do you bleed, Madame? Scarlet or red?”
“Stop, stop!” She wheezed. “I speak! I speak!”
Juliette loosened the wire a minuscule fraction. “Then speak. What role do the Communists play in this madness?”
“They do not claim responsibility for the madness,” Madame managed. “As a group, they remain resolute that this is not of their political doing. Privately,
however, they speculate.”
“Regarding what?” Juliette demanded.
“They think one genius within the Party schemed it up.” Madame’s ngers tried to claw at the wire again, but the wire was too thin for her to secure a grip.
All she achieved was scratching, her nails grazing at skin as if she were mocking the madness’s victims. “They whisper of having seen one man’s notes, planning
it all.”
“Who?”
When Madame seemed to hesitate, her tongue gagging forward, Juliette pulled the wire tighter in threat. By the door, Rosalind cleared her throat, an unspoken recommendation for Juliette to ease up and watch herself, but Juliette did not falter. She only said, her voice as calm as the morning tide, “I want a name.”
“Zhang Gutai,” Madame spat out. “The Secretary-General of the Communists.”
Immediately, Juliette let go of the wire, bringing it back to her side and giving it a shake. She retrieved a handkerchief from her pocket, giving the chain a wipe down until it was sparkly and silver once again. When she tucked the wire away, she oered Madame the handkerchief with the same bright smile she reserved for working apper parties and charming old men.
Madame was pale and shaking. She did not protest when Juliette tied the handkerchief around her neck, carefully adjusting the fabric until it soaked up the line of blood.
“I apologize for your troubles,” Juliette said. “You’ll keep this between us, won’t you?”
Madame nodded blankly. She did not move when Juliette summoned Rosalind and Kathleen back to her side; nor did she protest when Juliette tossed all the cash she had in her pocket onto the table to belatedly pay Madame for the information.
Juliette marched out of the room, her heels echoing loudly as she exited the den with her cousins. She was already forgetting how steady her grip had been upon the wire, how willing she had been to hurt Madame for what she wanted to hear. All she could think about was the name she had received—Zhang Gutai —and how she was to proceed next.
Kathleen watched her the entire car ride back. Juliette could feel it like a slick sweep of grease across her forehead: something that was bothering her without doing any harm.
“What?” Juliette nally demanded when the car stopped to let Rosalind out.
As soon as Rosalind slammed the door after herself, shrugging her fur throw over her shoulders and strutting into the burlesque club to do her noon shift, Juliette slid across the backseat until she was directly before Kathleen, who was slouched across the seats facing her. “Why do you keep giving me that funny look?”
Kathleen blinked. “Oh. I wasn’t aware you had noticed.”
Juliette rolled her eyes, raising her legs to rest on the soft cushion beside Kathleen. The car started back up, the crunch of gravel beneath its wheels loud.
“Biǎojiě, you underestimate the eyes I have”—she gestured all over her face —“everywhere. Did I cause oense?”
“No, of course not,” Kathleen said quickly. Slowly, she sat up straight, then gestured to Juliette’s hands. Juliette looked down. There was a smear of blood that she hadn’t managed to clean in the soft space between her thumb and index nger. “I guess I was expecting you to just wave a gun around or something. I didn’t think you would actually threaten her.”
Kathleen had always been the pacist. In the letters that she and Rosalind had sent to America while Juliette was away—always tucked within the same envelope—Juliette could immediately tell the dierence between the sisters.
There was the matter of handwriting, of course. Rosalind’s big loopy letters when she wrote in English or French and her wide, spread-out Chinese characters, as if each stroke were trying to run away from the others. Kathleen, on the other hand, always wrote like she was running out of space. She squished her letters and strokes until they overlapped, sometimes carving up the previous character with the brunt of the next. But beneath that, even if they had typed their letters out on a typewriter, Juliette could tell. Rosalind wrote on the state of aairs as anyone in this city would. She was bright and witty from years of education in classical literature. The sweetness of her words would drip onto the page as she bemoaned Juliette’s absence and told her she would have been beside herself if she had seen Mr. Ping last week when his suit pants ripped down the middle. It wasn’t that Kathleen wasn’t as well read—Kathleen merely looked inward. She would never write a summary on the latest blood feud casualty and then oer a wise idiom on the cyclical nature of violence. She would lay out a step-by-step procedure on stopping further brutality so they could live in peace, then wonder why nobody in the Scarlet Gang seemed to be capable of doing so.
Juliette had always had an answer. She only never had the heart to tell
Kathleen.
It was because they didn’t want to.
“Madame deals with the rira day in, day out.” Juliette set her chin in her hand. “Do you think she would be scared at the mere sight of a gun?”
Kathleen sighed irritably, smoothing down her hair. “Nevertheless, Juliette, it’s not like—”
“You have been present at some of my father’s business meetings, no?”
Juliette interrupted. “I heard Māma say Jiùjiu brought you and Rosalind along for some time a few years ago, before you lost the stomach for it.”
“It was only Rosalind who lost the stomach,” Kathleen countered evenly, “but yes, our father did take us along for some negotiations.”
“Negotiations,” Juliette mocked, leaning back in the seat. Her voice came out in a sneer, but the derision wasn’t directed at Kathleen. It was directed at the way the Scarlet Gang warped their own language, as if everybody did not already know the truth. They should begin calling it what it really was: extortion, blackmail.
Having arrived at their destination, the car slowed to an idle outside the mansion gates, its engine rumbling. The gates surrounding the house were new, replaced right after Juliette left. They were an utter nuisance for the men stationed out front whenever relatives arrived every ve minutes hoping to enter, and now the two on duty hurried to pull the heavy metal spires open before Juliette could yell at them for being slow.
But that was the price for safety in the face of ever-present danger.
“You remember, don’t you?” Juliette asked. “My father’s tactics?” She had seen plenty during those short few months of her rst return. Even before that, when Juliette was only a child, some of her earliest memories were of raising her arms to be picked up and smelling blood emanating o her father when he did so.
The Scarlet Gang did not tolerate weakness.
“Yes,” Kathleen said.
“So if he can do it,” Juliette continued, “why shouldn’t I?”
Kathleen had nothing to say to that. She merely sighed a little sigh and opped her hands to either side of herself in defeat.
The car came to a complete stop. A maid was already waiting to open the door, and though Juliette took the helping hand out, it was only a matter of courtesy; in her beaded dress, it was easy for her to scoot out of the car and step down from its high elevation. Kathleen, meanwhile, needed a few seconds to make a dignied exit, the connes of her qipao slowing her progress. By the time Kathleen’s shoes crunched down on the driveway, Juliette was already heading toward the front door, angling her head toward the sunlight to warm her cold face.
It would all fall into place. She needn’t worry. She had a name. First thing tomorrow, she would show up at this Zhang Gutai’s place of work and confront him. One way or another, Juliette would stop this madness nonsense before her people suered for it.
Then a shriek shot through the gardens. “Ali, what’s wrong with you?”
Juliette whirled around, reacting fast to the panic echoing through the
gardens. Her heart stuttered in horror.
It’s too late.
The madness had come knocking on her doorstep.
“No, no, no,” Juliette hissed, rushing toward the ower beds. There, Ali had been on her way back into the house, a laundry basket lled with clothing propped on her hip. Only now the basket was lying on the roses, bundles of folded clothing crushing them without mercy.
And Ali was tearing at her own throat.
“Get her onto the oor,” Juliette yelled at the nearby gardener, the one who had gotten Juliette’s attention in the rst place with his shriek. “Kathleen, get help!”
Juliette took one of Ali’s shoulders. The gardener took the other. Together they tried their hardest to force the maid down, but by the time Ali’s head thudded against the soft soil of the rose beds, her ngers were already knuckle- deep into the muscle and tendon running through her neck. There was a horrible wet, tearing sound—a sensation of dampness as blood spurted outward —and then Juliette could see bone, could see clearly every ridge of ivory white spliced neatly through the pink-red of Ali’s neck.
Ali’s eyes turned glassy. Her hands slackened, the chunks of torn esh sliding from her loosened grasp and dropping to the ground.
Juliette wanted to throw up. The blood pouring from Ali’s throat ran and ran, seeping into the soil until the earth was stained dark, until the stain grew large enough to stop merely a few feet away from the former site of the old servants’ house, where Nurse, too, had met her end.
This is why, Juliette thought numbly. This is why we shall not love more than we need to. Death will come for everyone in the end— A terried scream shot out from the main house.
Kathleen.
Juliette bolted to her feet. “Kathleen!” she roared. “Kathleen, where are you?”
“Juliette, come!”
Juliette slammed through the front door and sprinted through the living room, drawing concerned gasps from the few confused aunts who had risen from their gossiping on the couches. In a frenzy, she skidded into the kitchen to nd Kathleen standing by the long counter, her body frozen in horror, hands pressed to her mouth and muing her words in an eort not to scream.
A cook was writhing on the oor, blood already trickling down his forearms.
Three feet away, under the doorway into the main hallway, another maid was in the process of collapsing, leaning against the jamb and striking herself to resist
the madness.
“Step back—”
The maid collapsed. The rst arc of blood from her throat ew wide, staining the intricate carvings of the doorway and painting the beige walls into an abstraction. Faintly, Juliette wondered if they would ever be able to get such a stain out, or if it would remain in this house forever. Even when painted over or scrubbed viciously from the jamb, its presence would remain, stinking up the room with the Scarlets’ failure to protect their own.
The maid stilled. It seemed that was what nally jolted Kathleen into acting, because she surged forward then with a strangled gasp, her long hair swinging
and shaking into her face in her haste.
This madness—it could be contagious.
“Stop!” Juliette shrieked.
Kathleen froze in her steps. The only sound that could be heard in the sudden silence was Juliette’s heavy breathing.
She turned back, facing the two aunts who had cautiously crept into the kitchen. They covered their mouths in horror, but Juliette didn’t give them time to be horried.
“Send for some of the men out front to clean this up,” she said. “Tell them to wear gloves.”
