Five
Midday sunlight streamed through Juliette’s bedroom window. Despite the shine, it was brisk out today, chilly in the sort of way that drew the roses in the garden a little straighter, as if they couldn’t aord to lose a single second of the warmth ltering through the clouds.
“Can you believe Tyler?” Juliette fumed, pacing her room. “Who does he think he is? Has he been bullying his way around for the past four years?”
Rosalind and Kathleen both pulled a face from upon Juliette’s bed, where Rosalind was braiding Kathleen’s hair. That look was as good as conrmation.
“You know Tyler doesn’t have any real inuence in this gang,” Kathleen tried.
“Don’t worry—ow, Rosalind!”
“Stop moving and maybe I wouldn’t have to pull so hard,” Rosalind replied evenly. “Do you want two even braids or two lopsided braids?”
Kathleen folded her arms, hung. Whatever point she had been raising to Juliette seemed completely forgotten. “Just wait until I learn how to braid my own hair. Then you’ll have power over me no longer.”
“You’ve been growing your hair long for ve years, mèimei. Just admit you think my braiding is superior.”
A smattering of sound came from right outside Juliette’s bedroom door then.
Juliette frowned, listening while Kathleen and Rosalind continued on, with no indication they had heard the same noise.
“Of course your braiding is superior. While you were learning how to style yourself and be ladylike, I was being taught how to swing a golf club and shake hands aggressively.”
“I know the tutors were bigoted assholes about your education. I’m only saying right now to stop squirming—”
“Hey, hey, hush,” Juliette whispered quickly, pressing a nger to her lips. It had been footsteps. Footsteps that stopped, probably in hopes of catching a oating piece of gossip.
While most mansions of big-name bosses sat along Bubbling Well Road in the city center, the Cai house resided quietly at the very edge of Shanghai; it was an eort to avoid the watchful eyes of the foreigners governing the city, yet despite its strange location, it was the hotspot of the Scarlet Gang. Anybody who was anybody in the network would come knocking when they had free time, even though the Cais owned countless smaller residences in the heart of the city.
In the silence, the footsteps sounded again, moving on. It probably mattered little if the maids and aunts and uncles passing by every minute tried to eavesdrop—Juliette, Rosalind, and Kathleen were always speaking in rapid English when it was only the three of them, and very few people in the house had the linguistic ability to act as eavesdroppers. Still, it was irritating.
“I think they’re gone,” Kathleen said after a while. “Anyway, before Rosalind distracted me”—she shot her sister a feigned dirty look for emphasis—“my point was that Tyler is merely a nuisance. Let him say what he wants to say. The Scarlet Gang is strong enough to deect him.”
Juliette sighed heavily. “But I worry.” She wandered to her balcony doors.
When she pressed her ngers to the glass, the heat of her skin misted up the surface immediately in little dots: ve identical spots where she left her mark.
“We don’t take note of it, but the blood feud casualties keep rising. Now, with this strange madness, how long will it be before we don’t have the numbers to be operating anymore?”
“That won’t happen,” Rosalind reassured her, nishing the braids. “Shanghai is under our st—”
“Shanghai was under our st,” her sister cut in. Kathleen snied, and pointed to a map of the city that Juliette had unfurled on her desk. “Now the French control the French Concession. The British, the Americans, and the Japanese have the International Settlement. And we’re battling the White Flowers for a
stable grasp on everywhere else, which is a feat in itself considering how few Chinese-owned zones are left—”
“Oh, stop.” Rosalind groaned, pretending to have a fainting spell. Juliette had to stie a giggle as Rosalind splayed an arm across her forehead and opped back onto the bed. “You’ve been listening to too much Communist propaganda.”
Kathleen frowned. “I have not.”
“At least admit you have Communist sympathies, come on.”
“They’re not wrong,” Kathleen retorted. “This city is no longer Chinese.”
“Who cares.” Rosalind kicked out with her foot suddenly, using the momentum to push her body upright, sitting so fast that her coied hair whipped into her eyes. “Every armed force in this city either has an allegiance to the Scarlet Gang or the White Flowers. That is where the power is. No matter how much land we lose to the foreigners, gangsters are the most powerful force in this city, not foreign white men.”
“Until the foreign white men start rolling in their own artilleries,” Juliette muttered. She walked away from the balcony doors and trailed back toward her vanity table, hovering by the long seat. Almost absently, she reached out, trailing her nger along the lip of the ceramic vase that sat by her cosmetics. There used to be a blue-and-white Chinese vase here, but red roses did not match the whorls of porcelain, and so the swap had been made for a Western design instead.
It would have been so much easier if the Scarlets had run the foreigners out, had chased them away with bullets and threats the moment their ships and their fancy goods docked in the Bund. Even now the gangsters could still join forces with the tired factory workers and their boycotts. Together, if only the Scarlet Gang wanted to, they could overrun the foreigners… but they wouldn’t. The Scarlet Gang was proting far too much. They needed this investment, this economy, these stacks and stacks of money ooding into their ranks and holding them aoat.
It pained Juliette to think about. On her rst day back, she had paused outside the Public Garden, spotted a sign that read NO CHINESE ALLOWED, and burst out laughing. Who in their right mind would forbid the Chinese from entering a space in their own country? Only later did she realize it hadn’t been a joke. The foreigners truly thought themselves mighty enough to enforce spaces
that were reserved for the Foreign Community, reasoning that the foreign funds they poured into their newly constructed parks and newly opened speakeasies justied their takeover.
For temporary riches, the Chinese were letting the foreigners make permanent marks upon their land, and the foreigners were growing cozy. Juliette feared the tables would turn suddenly one day, leaving the Scarlet Gang to realize they had found themselves standing on the outside.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Juliette jerked to attention, using the vanity mirror to peer at Rosalind.
“What?”
“You looked like you were plotting murder.”
A knock came on Juliette’s bedroom door before she could respond, forcing her to turn around properly. Ali, one of the maids, opened the door and shued through, but remained hovering over the threshold, unwilling to step too far in.
None of the household sta knew how to deal with Juliette. She was too bold, too brazen, too Western, while they were too new, too uncertain, never comfortable. The household sta rotated every month as a matter of practicality.
It prevented the Cais from learning their stories, their lives, their histories. In no time, their month was up and they were being shoved out the door for their own safety, cutting the ties that would bind Lord and Lady Cai to more and more people.
“Xiǎojiě, there’s a visitor downstairs,” Ali said softly.
It hadn’t always been like this. Once, they had had a set of household sta that lasted through Juliette’s rst fteen years of life. Once, Juliette had Nurse, and Nurse would tuck Juliette in and tell her the most heart-aching tales of desert lands and lush forests.
Juliette reached out, plucked a red rose from the vase. The moment she closed her hands around the stem, the thorns pricked her palm, but she hardly felt the sting past the calluses protecting her skin, past the years she had spent chasing away every part of her that qualied for delicate.
Juliette hadn’t understood at rst. Four years ago, while she knelt in the gardens, trimming their rosebushes with thick gloves on, she hadn’t realized why
the temperature around her had risen so intently, why it sounded almost as if the entire grounds of the Cai mansion were shuddering with… an explosion.
Her ears were screeching—rst with the remnants of that awful, loud sound, then with the shouting, the panic, the cries wafting over from the back, where the servants’ house was. When she hurried over, she saw rubble. She saw a leg. A pool of blood. Someone had been standing right at the threshold of the front door when the ceiling caved in. Someone in a dress that looked like the sort Nurse wore, with the same fabric that Juliette had always tugged on as a child, because it was all she could reach to get Nurse’s attention.
There had been a single white ower lying on the path into the servants’ house. When Juliette shook o her gloves and picked it up, her ears ringing and her whole mind dazed, her ngers came upon a pinned note, one written in Russian, in cursive, bleeding with ink when she unfolded it.
My son sends his regards.
They had wheeled so many bodies into the hospital that day. Corpses upon corpses. The Cais had been playing nice, had decided to ease up on an age-old hatred whose cause had been forgotten to time—and look where it had gotten them: death delivered directly to their doorstep. From that incident onward, the Scarlet Gang and White Flowers shot at each other on sight, guarding and defending territory lines as if their honor and reputation depended on it.
“Xiǎojiě?”
Juliette squeezed her eyes shut, dropping the rose and smoothing a cold hand over her face until she could swallow back every memory that threatened to erupt. When she opened her eyes again, her gaze was dull, uninterested as she inspected her ngernails.
“So?” she said. “I don’t deal with the visitors. Get my parents.”
Ali cleared her throat, then twisted her hands through the rough hem of her button shirt. “Your parents are out. I could fetch Cai Tailei—”
“No,” Juliette snapped. She regretted her tone immediately when the maid’s expression turned stricken. Out of all their household sta, Ali was the one who treated Juliette with the least amount of caution. She didn’t deserve to be barked at.
Juliette tried for a smile. “Let Tyler be. It’s probably just Walter Dexter downstairs. I’ll go.”
Ali inclined her chin respectfully, then hurried away before Juliette’s temper came back. Juliette supposed she gave the household sta the wrong impression.
She would do anything for the Scarlet Gang. She cared for their welfare and their politics, their coalitions and alliances with the merchant rms and investors.
But she did not care about little men like Walter Dexter, who thought themselves mightily important without the capacity to back such a claim. She had no desire to be running the errands that her father didn’t want to do. This was far from the cutthroat business she had expected to be welcomed into when she was nally summoned back. If she had known that Lord Cai would leave her out of the blood feud, out of the same paralleled sniping occurring on the political stage, maybe she wouldn’t have rushed to pack her bags and pour out the entire contents of her alcohol stash when she left New York behind.
After the attack that killed Nurse, Juliette had been shipped back to New York for her own safety, had had to simmer on her resentment for four long years. It wasn’t who she was. She would have rather stayed and braced herself on her own two feet, ght with her chin held up. Juliette Cai had been taught not to run, but her parents—as parents tended to be—were hypocrites, and they had forced her to run, forced her out of the thick of the blood feud, forced her to become someone far removed from the danger.
And now she was back.
Rosalind made a throaty noise as Juliette shrugged a jacket over her beaded
dress. “There it is again.”
“What?”
“The murder face,” Kathleen supplied without looking up from her magazine.
Juliette rolled her eyes. “I think this is simply my resting expression.”
“No, your resting expression is this.” Rosalind imitated the most scatterbrained expression she could manage, eyes wide and mouth open, swaying in circles on the bed. In response, Juliette threw a slipper at her, drawing giggles from Kathleen.
“Shoo,” Rosalind chided, smacking the slipper away and biting down on her laugh. “Go attend to your duties.”
Juliette was already walking out, making a rude gesture over her shoulder. As she trudged down the hallway of the second oor, picking at her chipping nails, she paused in front of her father’s oce to shake out her shoe, which hadn’t t right ever since it had gotten caught on a drain covering.
Then she froze, her hand on her ankle. She could hear voices coming from the oce.
“Ah, excuse me,” Juliette hollered, kicking the door open with her high-heeled shoe. “The maid said you were both out.”
Her parents lifted their heads at once, blinking plainly. Her mother was standing over her father’s shoulder, one hand rested on the desk and the other placed upon a document in front of them.
“The sta say what we want them to say, qīn’ài de,” Lady Cai said. She made a icking motion with her ngers at Juliette. “Don’t you have a visitor to entertain downstairs?”
Hung, Juliette pulled the door closed again, glaring daggers at her parents.
They hardly paid her heed. They simply went back to their conversation, assuming Juliette would run along.
“We have lost two men to it already, and if the whispers are true, more will fall before we can determine exactly what is causing it,” her mother said, voice low as she resumed speaking. Lady Cai always sounded dierent in Shanghainese than any other language or dialect. It was hard to verbalize exactly what it was except a feeling of calm, even if the subject matter carried a terrible squall of emotion. That was what it meant to speak your native tongue, Juliette supposed.
Juliette wasn’t really sure what her native tongue was.
“The Communists are beside themselves with joy. Zhang Gutai won’t even need a megaphone for recruitment anymore.” Her father was the opposite. He was quick and sharp. Though the tones of Shanghainese came completely from the mouth instead of the tongue or throat, he somehow managed to make it reverberate tenfold within himself rst before releasing the sound. “With people dropping like ies, capitalist ventures cease to grow, factories become ripe for revolution. Shanghai’s commercial development comes to an abrupt stop.”
Juliette grimaced, then hurried away from her father’s oce door. No matter how hard her father had tried through his letters, Juliette had never cared much about who was who in the government, not unless their ongoings had some direct eect on Scarlet business. All she cared about was the Scarlet Gang, about whatever immediate dangers and tribulations they were facing on a day-to-day basis. Which meant that in scheming, Juliette’s mind liked to gravitate to the White Flowers, not to the Communists. But if the Communists had indeed unleashed madness onto this city as her father seemed to suspect, then they, too, were killing her people, and she had a bone to pick with them. Her father hadn’t been overlooking the deaths in favor of politics this morning after all. Perhaps they were one and the same.
It does make sense that the Communists could be responsible for the madness, Juliette thought as she started down the staircase toward the rst oor.
Only how could they possibly manage such a feat? Civil war was no novelty.
This country was in political turmoil more than it was at peace. But something that caused innocent people to gouge their own throats out was certainly far from any biological warfare Juliette had studied.
Juliette bounded onto the last step of the staircase.
“Hello!” she shouted. “I am here! You may bow!” She entered the living room and, with a start, found a stranger primly seated on one of the couches. It was not the annoying British merchant, but it was indeed someone who looked very similar, only younger, around her age.
“I’ll refrain from bowing if that’s okay,” the stranger said, an upward tilt to his mouth. He rose to his feet and stuck out his hand. “I’m Paul. Paul Dexter.
My father couldn’t make it today, so he sent me.”
Juliette ignored the outstretched hand. Poor etiquette, she noted immediately.
By the rules of British society, a lady was always to have the privilege of oering the handshake. Not that she cared about British etiquette, nor how their high society dened what a lady was, but such minuscule details pointed to a lack of training, and so Juliette led that away in her head.
And he really should have bowed.
“I assume you’re here for the same request still?” Juliette asked, smoothing her sleeves down.
“Indeed.” Paul Dexter took back his hand without any malice. His smile was a cross between that of a Hollywood star and a desperate clown. “My father promises you that we have more lernicrom than any other merchant sailing into this city. You will not nd better prices elsewhere.”
Juliette sighed as a few cousins and uncles ltered through the living room, waiting for them to pass. As the group walked by, Mr. Li clapped a hand over her
shoulder good-naturedly.
“Good luck, kid.”
Juliette stuck out her tongue. Mr. Li grinned, wrinkling his entire face, then produced a small wrapped candy from his palm for Juliette to take. She was no longer an overeager four-year-old who would eat until she gave herself a toothache, but she took it anyway, popping the candy into her mouth while her
uncle strolled away.
“Please sit, Mr. Dexter—”
“Call me Paul,” he interrupted, perching again on the long couch. “We’re a new generation of modern people and Mr. Dexter is my father.”
Juliette barely refrained from gagging. She bit down on the hard candy instead, then collapsed onto an armchair perpendicular to Paul.
“We have been admiring the Scarlets for some time now,” Paul continued.
“My father has high hopes of a partnership.”
A visible shudder swept through Juliette’s body at the familiarity Paul had with the term “Scarlets.” As a name, the Scarlet Gang sounded a lot nicer in Chinese. They called themselves hóng bāng, the two syllables twirled together in a quick snap of vowels. Such a name curled in and out through Scarlet tongues like a whip, and those who didn’t know how to handle it properly ended up
lashed.
This was Paul Dexter’s lashing.
“I’ll give you the same answer we gave your father,” Juliette said. She drew her legs up onto the armrest, the layers of her dress falling back. Paul’s eyes followed the motion. She watched his eyebrow twitch with the scandal of her long, pale thigh on show. “We’re not taking on any new endeavors. We’re busy enough with our current clients.”
Paul feigned disappointment. He leaned forward, like he could persuade her with mere eye contact. All it did was show Juliette that he hadn’t quite brushed out a clump of pomade in his sweep of dark-blond hair. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “I hear there’s a rival business who might be more enthusiastic about the oer.…”
“So perhaps you should try them,” Juliette suggested. She straightened up suddenly. He was trying to entice her into listening by suggesting he would take his business to the White Flowers, but it mattered little. Walter Dexter was a client they wanted to lose. “I’m glad we could resolve this matter so promptly.”
“Wait, no—”
“Goodbye now…” Juliette pretended to think. “Peter? Paris?”
“Paul,” he supplied, frowning.
Juliette summoned a smile, not unlike the scatterbrained one Rosalind had been mimicking earlier. “Right. Bye!”
She hopped to her feet and pranced across the living room, toward the front entrance. In a blink, her ngers were on the heavy handle and she was pulling the door open, eager to get rid of the British visitor.
Paul, to his credit, was fast to recover. He came up to the door and bowed.
Finally, some manners.
“Very well.”
He stepped out, onto the front stoop, then pivoted again to face Juliette.
“May I make a request, Miss Cai?”
“I already told you—”
Paul smiled. “Can I see you again?”
Juliette slammed the door shut. “Absolutely not.”
