Sixteen
Juliette took her time arming herself. There was something comforting about the act, something satisfying about the smooth, cold feeling of a gun pressed to her bare skin—one sticking out of her shoe, one at her thigh, one by her waist.
She was sure others would disagree. But if Juliette ran with the tide, she wouldn’t be Juliette anymore.
After the incident in the French Concession gardens, it had been bedlam in the Cai mansion.
“Just listen to them,” she had told her parents, her eyes burning because of the late hour. “There’s no harm in listening—”
Disgruntled muttering had broken out immediately from the relatives gathered around on the couches—relatives who were inner-circle Scarlets and relatives who were absolutely clueless about what went on within the Scarlet Gang. Instead of going to sleep, they were all listening to a proposal that Juliette was directing only at her parents, and they all erupted with indignation, repulsed that Juliette would even entertain the notion of entering a meeting room with the White Flowers in peace.… “Shut up!” Juliette screamed. “Shut up, shut up, all of you!”
Save for her parents, they all froze with their eyes wide, startled like raccoon dogs caught in the light. Juliette was heaving for breath, her face still marred with Mr. Li’s blood. She looked a living nightmare.
Good, she thought. Let them consider me callous. It is better than marking me weak.
“Imagine,” Juliette said when she could breathe evenly again. Her outburst had forced the living room quiet. “Imagine what the foreigners must think of us.
Imagine what they discuss among themselves now as they watch their ocers clean the dead. We merely conrm that we are savages, that this country is a place where madness spreads like disease, taking its people in droves.”
“Perhaps that is good,” Tyler called from the base of the staircase. He was seated casually, his elbows leaning back on a step while the rest of his body lounged on the hardwood oors. “Why not wait for this madness to run its course? Kill enough foreigners until they pack up their bags and run?”
“Because that’s not how it works,” Juliette hissed. “Do you know what will happen instead? They listen to the sweet nothings of their missionaries. They take it upon themselves to be our saviors. They roll tanks onto our streets and then they place their government in Shanghai, and before you know it…” Juliette stopped. She switched from Shanghainese to English, making her best attempt at a British accent. “Thank goodness we colonized the Chinese when we did.
Who knows how they may have otherwise destroyed themselves.”
Silence. Many of her relatives had not understood her when she switched to English. It did not matter. Those whom she needed to convince—her parents— understood her ne.
“The way I see it,” Juliette continued, dropping into her natural American accent. “If our gangsters don’t stop dying, then we lose control. The workers in the cotton mills and opium centers start grumbling, the whole city starts to stir with chaos, and then the foreigners take over, if the Communists don’t get there rst. At least the White Flowers are an even playing eld. At least we are at an equilibrium, at least we have half the city as opposed to none.”
“Speak plainly,” Lady Cai said. She, too, slipped into accented English. “You mean to say that putting aside the blood feud with the White Flowers is more acceptable than the risk of foreigners ruling us.”
“Why can’t they just speak běndì huà?” an aunt muttered bitterly in complaint, no longer able to track the conversation.
“Only for one meeting,” Juliette replied quickly, ignoring the grumblings.
“Only for long enough to join our resources and put a stop to the madness once and for all. Only so the white men keep their hands off this damn country.”
And despite how strongly she had believed in her argument as she was delivering it, she’d still received the shock of her life when her parents had actually agreed. Now she looked into the mirror on her vanity, smoothed out her dress, and brushed a stray lock of hair back into her curls, pressing hard so it
would mesh with the gel.
Her hands were shaking.
They shook on her way down the stairs, as her heels clacked along the driveway, as she slid into the back of the car, scooting to the end so Rosalind and Kathleen could jam themselves in after her. They kept shaking and shaking and shaking as she leaned her head against the window, staring out into the city streets as they drove. She watched the people with a new light, observing the vendors selling their wares and the barbers doing their jobs on the street sides, dropping their tus of thick black hair to the concrete.
The energy in Shanghai had disappeared. It was like some great big hand had reached down from the heavens and yanked the life out of every worker on the streets—took the volume away from the vendors, the vigor away from the rickshaw drivers, the lively chatter from the men who hung around shops for no reason other than to talk to passersby.
At least, until they saw the fancy car coming down the street. Then their scared eyes turned narrow. Then they did not dare openly rage, but they did stare, and such stares spoke monologues in itself.
The gangsters were the rulers of the city. If the city fell, the gangsters got the blame. And then all the gangsters would die—killed in political revolution, madness or no madness, foreigners or no foreigners.
Juliette leaned her head back against the seat, biting down on the inside of her cheeks so hard that the taste of metal ooded across her tongue. Unless she could stop it, this was going to come to a bitter, bitter end.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” Rosalind whispered, leaning over to peer out the window.
“Not for long,” Juliette said in reply, in promise. “Not if I can help it.”
Her hands stopped shaking.
Alisa Montagova had memorized almost every street in Shanghai. In her head, instead of dendrites and synaptic nerves, she fancied there lived a map of her city, overlying her temporal lobes and amygdala pairs until all that she was made of was the places she had been.
When Alisa went missing from the places she was supposed to be, she was usually listening in on someone else’s conversation. Either within her own household or the whole city, Alisa wasn’t picky. Sometimes she would catch the most interesting snippets of the lives around her, bits and pieces that would come together in the most unexpected ways if she heard enough from dierent
people.
Today was a disappointment.
Sighing, Alisa climbed out of the vent she had squirmed herself into, giving up on the argument between Mr. Lang and his elderly mother. There had been some rumors about instability within the Scarlet Gang, of Lord Cai being uprooted by his brother-in-law, but that proved to be a load of baloney. The only threat Mr. Lang posed was boring the ears o his own mother, whom he was visiting in her small city apartment, constantly complaining about the way she made her dumplings.
“Oh dear,” Alisa said to herself. She peered down from the third-story rooftop she had found herself on, scratching her head. An hour ago, she had managed to sneak up here by climbing atop a street vendor’s stall. It had cost her only one cent (to buy a vegetable bun) and then the old man had let her scramble onto the structure to get a leg onto the window ledge of the apartment block’s second oor.
Since then the vendor had packed up and taken his conveniently tall cart with him.
Grimacing, Alisa searched for a ledge that could close the distance between the second oor and the hard ground, but she couldn’t see anything of use on this side of the building. She would have to nd another way down, and quickly too. The sun was hastening its descent, and Roma had threatened to take away all her shoes if she didn’t attend the meeting tonight, which, to Alisa, was a threat that shook her to her easily cold toes.
“They will scrutinize us down to every last detail,” Roma had said. “They’re going to watch Papa’s every move. They’re going to notice Dimitri’s prominence. Don’t let them notice that you’re missing too.”
So Alisa pinched her nose and slid down the water pipe into the alleyway behind the building. There was so much trash dumped here that she even had trouble breathing through her mouth. It was as if the stench were being absorbed through her tongue.
Grumbling, Alisa waded through the trash, trying to estimate how late she was running. The sun was already too low, almost out of sight within the city, tucked behind the buildings in the distance. She was so preoccupied with her worrying that she almost didn’t hear the wheezing until she passed right by.
Alisa froze.
“Hello?” she said, switching to the rst Chinese dialect that her tongue landed on. “Is someone there?”
And in Russian, a weak voice replied: “Here.”
Alisa scrambled back, hurrying through the trash bags in search of the person who had spoken. Her gaze landed on a blot of red. When she waded closer, the shape of a man appeared amid the trash by the wall.
He was lying in a pool of his own blood, his throat torn to shreds.
“Oh no.”
It didn’t take Alisa’s usual genius to work out that this man was a victim of the madness tearing through Shanghai. She had heard her brother whispering about it, but he wouldn’t tell her anything concrete, and he would never discuss it in the places she could listen in on. Perhaps he did that on purpose.
Alisa didn’t recognize the victim before her, but he was a White Flower, and by the look of his clothes, he was supposed to be working a shift at the nearby ports. Alisa paused, unsteady. Her brother had warned her to stay far, far away from anyone who looked like they were even a little unbalanced.
But Alisa never listened. She dropped to her knees.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help!”
A sudden burst of activity erupted at the end of the alleyway, confused, annoyed muttering from other nearby White Flowers coming to see what the
fuss was about. Alisa put her ear to the dying man’s mouth, needing to hear if he was still breathing, if he was still alive.
She was just in time to catch his last, long sigh.
Gone.
Alisa rocked back, stunned.
The other White Flowers gathered around her, their annoyance transforming into sorrow as soon as they understood why Alisa had been screaming. Many took o their hats and held them to their chests. They were not surprised to see such a sight before them. They appeared resigned—another death to add to the hundreds that had already occurred before their eyes.
“Run along, little one,” the White Flower closest to Alisa told her gently.
Alisa got to her feet slowly, letting the men deal with their own fallen.
Somehow, in a daze, she navigated herself back onto the streets, looking up at the
orange sky.
The meeting!
She started sprinting, cursing under her breath as she pulled up her mental map for the fastest route. Alisa was by the Huangpu River already, but the address she had memorized was much farther south, in the industrial sector of Nanshi, where the cotton mills rumbled and buildings turned from commercial to industrial.
The rival gangs were to meet there, far from the dened lines of their territories, far from the thoroughly established denitions of what was Scarlet and what was White Flower. In Nanshi, there were only factories. But amid those, there were either factory owners who were Scarlet funded or White Flower associated, or workers with grubby faces, living under gangster rule but ambivalent to the way the scales turned.
Some of those workers used to pledge their allegiance to one or the other, like the ones who were employed in the main city. Then the rural wages started to drop and the factory owners started getting richer. Then the Communists came in and started to whisper in their ears about revolution, and after all, you could only have a revolution if you cut o the heads of those in power.
Alisa agged a rickshaw and clambered onto the seat. The man pulling it gave her a strange look, probably wondering if she was old enough to be running
around on her own. Or maybe he thought her an escapee, one of those Russian dancers in the clubs eeing her debts. Those girls were the cheapest stage props in all of Shanghai—too Western-looking to be Chinese and too Eastern-acting to be exotically foreign.
“Keep going until the buildings look like they’re falling apart,” Alisa told the
rickshaw driver.
The rickshaw started moving.
By the time Alisa arrived, the sun was almost completely under the horizon, only a wedge oating above the jaundiced waves. She idled before the building that Roma had described, confused and shivering with the rst hints of the nighttime cold. Her gaze swiveled from the closed door of the abandoned warehouse to ten paces left of it, where a Chinese girl was looking out into the river. This far south, the Huangpu was a dierent color. Almost foggier. Maybe it was because of the smoke that drifted through the air around them, some from the nearby our mill, some from the adjacent oil mill. The French Water Works establishment was nearby too. No doubt that network was doing its part clogging up the place. Alisa stepped forward hesitantly, hoping to ask the girl for conrmation of their location. Her fur shrug was ruing in the breeze, all of it
some shade of orange under the sunset.
“It hasn’t started yet. Don’t worry.”
Alisa blinked at the Russian words, taken aback for a short moment.
Everything made more sense when the girl turned around and Alisa recognized her face.
“Juliette,” Alisa said without thinking. She gulped then, wondering if she would get hit for using the heiress’s name so casually.
But Juliette’s focus was on the lighter in her hand. She was playing with it ippantly, turning the spark wheel and then quenching the ame as soon as it burst to life. “Alisa, yes?”
That came as a surprise. Everyone in Shanghai knew of Roma. They knew of his cold blood and his reputation as the careful, calculating heir of the White Flowers. But Alisa, who had little to do with anything, was a ghost.
“How did you know?”
Juliette nally looked up and raised an eyebrow, as if replying, Why would I not?
“You and Roma practically share a face,” she said. “I hazarded a guess.”
Alisa didn’t know what to say to that; nor did she know what to say next in general. She was saved by a young White Flower opening the door to the warehouse and sticking his head out, spotting Alisa rst and then glaring at Juliette. The animosity wasn’t unexpected, even if they were supposed to be playing nice today. Merely organizing this meeting had put ve of their men in the hospital after one of the messages being run into Scarlet territory had been delivered a little violently.
“You better come in, Miss Montagova,” the boy said. “Your brother is asking after you.”
Alisa nodded, but her curious gaze kept going back to Juliette.
“Aren’t you coming in?”
Juliette smiled. There was some hidden amusement in that, the sort with a cause everyone would wonder about but no one would ever know.
“In a moment. You go ahead.”
Alisa hurried inside.
The climate within the warehouse could be best described as frosty. Lord Cai and Lord Montagov were simply staring at each other from opposite sides of the room, both seated behind their respective tables on their halves of the warehouse.
There weren’t many people here, and though the warehouse was small, the attendee numbers were meager enough for the space to feel roomy. Alisa counted less than twenty on each side, which was good. Gangsters had dispersed themselves into small clumps, pretending to be in conversation, but really, each side was watching the other closely, waiting for the slightest indication of an ambush. At the very least, it was unlikely any of these gangsters would act without instruction from Lord Cai or Lord Montagov. This meeting had forbidden upper-tier members of both the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers from attending unless they were in the inner circle. Those with power were harder to control. Meanwhile, the errand runners and messengers in attendance
did what they were told and conveniently acted as human shields in case things got messy.
She spotted Roma in the corner, standing stoic and far from Benedikt and Marshall. When he caught sight of Alisa, he waved her over vigorously.
“About time.”
Roma handed her the jacket he had been carrying in his hands. He brought it along because he knew Alisa always forgot her jackets and inevitably ended up shivering in the cold.
“Sorry,” she said, shrugging on the jacket. “Has anything interesting happened yet?”
Alisa ran her eyes along the table on their side. Their father was seated icily.
Beside him, Dimitri lounged back, one of his feet propped up against his other
knee.
Roma shook his head.
“Why are you so late?”
Alisa swallowed hard. “I ran into someone interesting outside.”
As if the mere mention of her was a summoning, Juliette came through the door then. Heads turned in her direction, but she simply looked ahead, her eyes
speaking of no emotion.
Roma’s mouth formed into a hard line.
“I shouldn’t have to tell you this,” he said quietly, “but stay well away from her. Juliette Cai is dangerous.”
Alisa rolled her eyes. “Surely you don’t believe those stories about her killing her American lovers with her bare hands—”
Roma cut her o with a sharp look. His scowl didn’t last long, however, because his attention was wandering o, and whatever he had registered caused him to tense all over.
Alisa followed his gaze, confused. Juliette’s expression was no longer one of cynical amusement. She nodded once at Roma. Noting Roma’s equally serious expression, Alisa decided that she was denitely missing something here.
“Alisa.”
She snapped her eyes back, facing her brother, who had already looked away.
“What?”
Roma frowned, then reached over and eased her hands away from her head.
She hadn’t even noticed that she was scratching intensely, pulling white-blond strands of hair out from their roots so that they were twisted around her ngertips like ropes of jewelry.
“Sorry,” Alisa said, knotting her hands together behind her back. A hot prickling was spreading down her skin. It was possible that she was overheating with her jacket on, but a line of goose bumps along her collarbone said otherwise. “I’m so warm.”
“What, do you want me to fan you?” Roma muttered. He pulled out a chair for Alisa, then took his own. “Sit still. Let’s hope this doesn’t go to shit.”
Alisa nodded and sat back, trying not to scratch.
When Juliette walked into the room, it was the weight of her gun pressed against her thigh that focused her against the weight of the stares. She nodded at her parents to acknowledge that she had arrived, then moved her gaze across the rest of the room. In the rst few seconds, she took in every face, matched them to a name, then ranked them in order of dangerousness.
There was Dimitri Voronin, who she had heard was aggressive and impossible to control, but today Lord Montagov valued diplomacy—or so he claimed—and so Dimitri would remain quiet. There was Marshall Seo, twirling what looked like a blade of grass between his ngers as if it were a real blade. Beside him, Benedikt Montagov sat with a neutral expression, looking like a pensive stone
statue.
And there was, of course, Roma.
Juliette joined Rosalind and Kathleen at their seats, pulling a chair out and dropping in. With great reluctance, she concluded that none of the White Flowers seemed more volatile than Tyler, who was practically trembling in his seat in eort to keep silent.
“This is for you,” Kathleen said, noting Juliette’s arrival.
She slid over a square piece of paper. Juliette lifted a corner and read the brief scribblings of numbers and street names. Kathleen had done it. She had met with her contact again and retrieved Zhang Gutai’s personal address.
“Did you nd anything at the Bund?” Juliette asked, tucking the address away.
“The bankers were clueless,” Kathleen replied. “Only one old woman had any information and she thought she saw a monster in the river.”
Juliette chewed over the thought. She said, “Interesting.”
Rosalind cleared her throat, leaning in. “What are we whispering about?”
“Oh.” Juliette waved a hand. “Nothing important.”
Rosalind narrowed her eyes. It looked as if she was going to say more, accuse Juliette of being dismissive. It would not have been undeserved—Juliette truly was trying to shut down unnecessary expansion on the subject, to keep quiet while they were in a warehouse full of White Flowers. But Rosalind took the hint. She changed the topic.
“Take a look at Tyler. He’s two seconds away from throwing a tantrum.”
Juliette turned around, her face pinched with distaste. His trembling had only intensied. “Maybe we should ask him to leave.”
“No.” Kathleen shook her head, then rose from her seat. “I’ll talk to him.
Asking him to leave would be making more trouble.”
Before Juliette or Rosalind could protest, Kathleen was already o, pushing her chair back and walking toward Tyler, dropping into the seat beside him.
Juliette and Rosalind couldn’t hear what Kathleen was saying, but they could see that Tyler wasn’t listening, even when Kathleen reached for his elbow and gave him a sharp shake.
“She’s too kindhearted for her own good,” Rosalind remarked.
“Let her be,” Juliette replied. “Too many kind hearts turn cold every day.”
A hush started to sweep through the warehouse. The meeting was starting.
From the corner of her eye, Juliette caught sight of Roma’s gaze once again. She wished Roma would stop looking at her. This whole thing felt strange for both obvious reasons and reasons she couldn’t precisely decipher. In bringing the Scarlet Gang and White Flowers together, it felt like cooperation, but it also felt
like defeat.
But they had no choice.
“Well, I hope everyone’s having a nice evening.”
Silence followed Lord Montagov’s words immediately. He spoke in the Beijing dialect, the most common Chinese tongue that the merchants and foreign businessmen learned rst, but it was accented. The older generation was not as uent as their children.
“I will proceed right to the point,” he said. “There is madness in this city, and it is killing Scarlets and White Flowers alike.”
Lord Montagov seemed pleasant enough. If Juliette didn’t know better, she would think him patient and unbothered.
“I’m sure that all will agree with me, then,” he continued, “that this must stop. Man-made disease or natural occurrence, we need answers. We need to gure out why it is aecting our people so heavily, and then we need to put a
stop to it.”
Only silence followed.
“Really?” a sardonic voice said. It was not directed at Lord Montagov, but at the silent Scarlet Gang. Marshall Seo stood up. “While the whole city dies, you still refuse to speak?”
“It is simply in my belief,” Lord Cai said coldly, “that when one announces a plan to put a stop to the madness, they should oer some of their own ideas rst.”
“Was it not your daughter who suggested this meeting?”
This came from Dimitri Voronin, who shrugged in a blasé, God-could-care sort of way.
“Our daughter,” Lady Cai cut in, her tone thunderous, “sought to begin a dialogue. It was not a promise nor the guarantee of an exchange.”
“Typical,” Dimitri scoed.
That remark didn’t sit well with the Scarlet Gang. The errand runners who surrounded Lord Cai twitched in their seats, their hands inching closer and closer to the guns hidden at their hips. Lord Cai made an impatient gesture, telling everyone to calm down.
“This is the situation at present,” Lord Cai said. He placed his hands upon the table, palms at on the cold surface. “Under the current circumstances, we have leads and sources to work with should we wish to investigate this madness.”
Lord Montagov opened his mouth, but Juliette’s father was not done.
“That means,” Lord Cai pressed on, “we do not need your help. Understand?
We are here in hopes of furthering our knowledge and quickening our investigation. That is the position of the Scarlet Gang. Now, do the White Flowers wish to share their knowledge, their ideas, and indeed begin a cooperation, or did they attend this meeting simply to leech, as they have been doing for decades?”
While the back-and-forth occurred, eyes were shifting left and right; gazes met in all directions. Everybody was having an unspoken conversation, one person asking the ubiquitous question and another giving the most minuscule shake of the head.
It occurred to Juliette then that perhaps the White Flowers oered no further avenues of investigation because they had none to give. But to the White Flowers, admitting that they were clueless was just as bad as oering up all their trade secrets. It gave away power. They would rather have the Scarlet Gang think them hostile.
And some members of the Scarlet Gang bought it.
As Marshall Seo scoed at the insult, muttering some inaudible retort beneath his breath, Tyler leaped to his feet, unable to hold himself back any longer. In two, three strides, he had crossed the divide.
Then Benedikt raised his gun, and Tyler froze in place.
The room collectively stopped breathing, uncertain what to do next, if now was a good time to react violently, if the simple act of raising a gun prompted retaliation. Juliette touched her own weapon, but she was more bothered with analyzing this turn of events, trying to connect them logically.
Marshall with the calloused hands was the one who had been threatened, but Benedikt with the paint-smudged ngers was the one reacting instead.
Juliette’s hands moved away from the holster at her thigh. She understood.
Benedikt had raised his gun to prevent Marshall from doing so rst. Marshall would shoot, but Benedikt wouldn’t.
“We thought this meeting was supposed to be peaceful,” Benedikt said quietly, an attempt to unknot the tension before him. He didn’t know who he was dealing with. Tyler wasn’t one for reason; he lashed out and thought through how to weasel himself out of the consequences later.
“Oh, that’s rich,” Tyler sneered. “Whip out your gun and then claim you’re talking of peace. Peace.”
In a ash, Tyler’s own double-action revolver was in his hand and pointed at Benedikt. Juliette was on her feet in an instant, moving so fast that her chair fell over, only Tyler was faster and he was already pressing down on the trigger.
“I hate that word like I hate all you Montagovs.”
He pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot echoed into the warehouse,
provoked gasps from every direction.
But Benedikt only blinked, unharmed.
Juliette halted in her steps, breathing hard, her eyes wide as she turned around and searched for Kathleen.
Kathleen winked at Juliette upon making eye contact. She opened her palm to show her the six little bullets that rested there.
There had been no damage, but the damage was done. Chairs were scraping back and gangsters were jumping to their feet; pistols were pointed and safeties were pulled; barrels were aimed—steady, even as the shouting began.
“If this is the way it is going to be,” Lord Montagov announced above the noise and the accusations and the heated swearing, “then the Scarlet Gang and the White Flowers shall never cooperate—”
He didn’t nish his declaration.
A choking noise was coming from the corner of the warehouse—a quiet gasping, over and over again. In confusion, the gangsters searched for the source, wary for any sense of a trick.
They didn’t expect the noise to be coming from Alisa Montagova, who wheezed one last time before dropping to her knees, her ngers launching at her own throat.
