These Violent Delights

by Chloe Gong

  “Relax,” Juliette said gently. “It is not your job to take on.”

  Rosalind placed both her hands flat on the table. Her jaw tightened. “I wish to help.”

  “Help me by getting some sleep.” Juliette tried for a smile. “Help us by dancing with all your beautiful brilliance, just so we can forget—even for a few minutes—that people are looting stores and settings fires in the streets.”

  Just so they could forget that madness was striking every little corner of this city, that this was not a force police officers or gangsters or colonialist powers could fight back against.

  Rosalind did not respond for a long moment. Then, to Juliette’s shock, she asked, “Is that all I am good for?”

  Juliette jerked back. “Pardon?”

  “One would think that I don’t even need to be a Scarlet anymore,” Rosalind said bitterly. Her voice was almost unrecognizable, forged by a shard of broken glass. “All I am is a dancer.”

  “Rosalind.” Juliette leaned forward too, then, her eyes narrowing. Where was this coming from? “You are a dancer, yes—but one in the Scarlet inner circle, privy to meetings and correspondences even your own father cannot stick his nose into. How can you doubt whether or not you are a Scarlet?”

  But Rosalind’s eyes were haunted. The bitterness had given way to anguish, and the anguish ate away at her temper until she was only gazing forward in defeat. That monster sighting—it had affected her more than she had let on. It had sent her on long nights and spirals, and now she was questioning everything that her life was stacked atop of, which was dangerous for someone like Rosalind, whose mind was already an eternal, sepulchral place.

  “It is only that it feels unfair sometimes,” Rosalind said quietly, “that you are allowed to be in this family and you shall have your place in the Scarlet Gang, but I am a dancer or I am nothing.”

  Juliette blinked. There was nothing she could say to that. Nothing except:

  “I’m… sorry.” Juliette reached out, placed a hand on her cousin’s. “Do you want me to talk to my father—”

  Rosalind shook her head quickly. She laughed, the sound brittle.

  “Please, never mind me,” Rosalind said. “I’m just… I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I need more sleep.” She stood then, squeezing Juliette’s hand once before letting go. “I have to get home now to rest if I want to be ready for my shift tonight. Are you coming?”

  She wasn’t, but she also didn’t want to let Rosalind go while it seemed like there was still a conflict here—a conflict between them—that had been left unresolved. It was unnerving. The hairs at the back of Juliette’s neck were standing up as if she and her cousin had just had a fight, but she could not pinpoint where the friction lay. Perhaps it was her imagination. Rosalind’s eyes had cleared now, injecting more spirit into her spine. Perhaps it had only been a brief moment of internal calamity.

  “You go on,” Juliette finally replied. “I have some more time to waste.”

  Nodding, Rosalind smiled once more. She walked out the door and another cold draft blew in, this one shaking Juliette so viciously that she curled her entire neck into her coat, becoming a girl swallowed in fur. Now there was not even a show to keep her entertained. She had no choice but to people-watch her Scarlets.

  “How long have you been wiping at that table for?” Juliette called.

  The waitress looked over, sighing. “Xiǎojiě, the stains are persistent.”

  Juliette shot to her feet and clacked over on her heels. She extended her hand for the cleaning cloth.

  The waitress blinked. “Miss Cai, it’s not proper for you to get your hands dirty—”

  “Pass it.”

  She passed it. Juliette scrunched it up in her fist. In three quick, violent motions—her hand coming down on the table so hard that it made a sound—the surface was smooth and clear and shiny.

  Juliette gave the cloth back. “Use your elbows. It’s not that hard.”

  * * *

  “I had a thought.”

  Benedikt looked up from his sketch pad, squinting in his attempt to focus on Marshall’s face. It was an overcast day, yet there was still a blinding brightness glaring through the thick clouds and streaming into their living room. The result was a terribly depressing sky without the comfort of proper, heavy rain.

  “My ears are on the top of my head.”

  Marshall flopped down on the long couch too, carelessly shoving Benedikt’s legs aside. He pretended not to hear Benedikt’s sound of protest, not moving even when he almost sat right on his friend’s bare foot.

  “Don’t you think it is a little peculiar that Lord Montagov has been sending us on so many Scarlet missions lately? How is he getting this information?”

  “It is not peculiar.” Benedikt’s focus returned to the movement of pencil against rough paper. “We have spies in the Scarlet Gang. We have always had spies in the Scarlet Gang. They certainly have spies among our ranks too.”

  “We have spies, certainly, but not to this extent,” Marshall replied. He always looked so somber when he was trying to concentrate. Benedikt found it a little funny, if he was honest. It didn’t suit Marshall—it was like a jester wearing a three-piece.

  “What? You think we have managed to infiltrate their inner circle?” Benedikt shook his head. “We would know if that were the case. Can you stop wriggling around so much?”

  Marshall did not stop wriggling. It seemed that he was trying to adjust his seat to get comfortable, but the couch cushions were going to detach and fly right off if he kept at it. Finally, he settled in and propped his chin on his fist.

  “The information has just been so accurate lately,” Marshall said, a hint of awe entering his voice. “He had the time of the masquerade before Roma did. This morning he sent me after Kathleen Lang and had her exact location. How is your uncle doing this?”

  Benedikt looked up from his drawing, then looked down again, his pencil moving in a quick arc. A line of a jaw merged with the curve of a throat. A smudge in the shading became a dimple.

  “Lord Montagov sent you after Kathleen Lang?” he asked.

  Marshall leaned back. “Well, he’s not going to send you or Roma into a Communist meeting. You speak the language, but your face does not blend in as mine does.”

  Benedikt rolled his eyes. “Yes, I understood that. But why are we following Kathleen Lang now?”

  Marshall shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose we want the information she acquires.” He squinted at the weather outside the window. A beat of silence passed, nothing but the rapid sound of shading from Benedikt’s nub of a pencil.

  “Should we resume our pursuit for a live victim today?” Marshall asked.

  Benedikt supposed they should. They were running out of time. Alisa was counting on them, and if they had more avenues to exhaust in order to find a cure, wasn’t it on them to at least try?

  Sighing, Benedikt tossed his sketchbook onto the table. “I suppose we must.”

  “You may always resume drawing after we fail and call it a night,” Marshall promised. He craned his neck and peered at the sketchbook. “But my nose is not that big.”

  * * *

  At sunset, Juliette slipped out of the burlesque club with her head down, her chin tucked into her collar. It was both an effort to avoid being seen and to brace against the frigid breeze—a gale that stung her skin with every point of contact. She didn’t know what it was about today that brought the early winter in with such a bite.

  “Buns, hot buns for two cents! Get them now, get them hot—”

  “Miss, miss, we’re selling fish for cheap—”

  “Fortune-telling! Palm-reading! Xiǎojiě, you look like you need—”

  Juliette swerved left and right through the open markets, staring at her shoes. She pulled the hood of her coat up until most of her hair was buried in the fur, most of her face swallowed by the fuzz. It wasn’t that it was dangerous to be recognized—she had ten thousand excuses up her
sleeve as to where she was going, but she wasn’t in the mood to spin lies. This city was her old friend. She didn’t need to look up to find her way around. This way and that way and this way and that, soon she was moving along Avenue Edward VII, finally lifting her head and bracing her cheeks against the cold to search for Roma.

  The activity along this street all headed in one direction—toward Great World. It wasn’t quite fair to call the place an “arcade” like Juliette was fond of doing. Rather, it was an indoor entertainment complex with everything under the earth. Distorted mirrors and tightrope walkers and ice cream parlors came together in a cacophony of activity that worked to suck away a day of your life and all the money in your wallet. The central attraction was the Chinese opera, but Juliette had never liked it much. Her favorite was the magicians, though she hadn’t been inside the arcade for years, and by now all the magicians she had once been familiar with had probably moved on or been replaced.

  Sighing, Juliette scanned the five blockbuster Chinese characters sitting directly atop Great World. They burned against the glow of the fading sun, backlit with the barest hint of fiery orange.

  White… golden… dragon… cigarettes, she translated, the task more confusing than it had to be. She had forgotten for the shortest second to read right to left instead of left to right, which she had gotten used to in the last few years.

  “Focus,” she muttered to herself.

  Juliette’s wandering attention dropped to follow the stream of faces coming in and out of the doors to Great World. She searched carefully—scanning the masses in the rapidly falling night as they followed loud advertisements into every vice readily available—until her gaze came to the front of a dress shop. Leaning upon a signpost, Roma stood with his hands buried deep in his pockets, shadows under his eyes.

  Juliette strolled over, her shoes silent against the gravel for once. She prepared to chide him for standing so far from the building and making it hard to find him. Only when she came near, something about his expression cut her off before she had even started.

  “What’s wrong—”

  “Don’t look back,” Roma began, “but you were followed.”

  “I was not.”

  Her denial came fast and unwavering, though it was more an act of rebellion on her part than true certainty. As she spoke, her first instinct was to swivel around and prove Roma wrong, but logic instructed her to refrain. She held herself still, all the tendons in her neck pulled taut. She had indeed been deep in thought while making her way over, concentrating on keeping her face hidden from those in her view rather than watching for the lurkers in her peripheral. Could she have picked up a tail?

  “A white man stopped right when you did,” Roma said. “He pulled a newspaper from his pocket and started reading it in the middle of the street. I don’t know what your thoughts are, but that is highly suspicious to me.”

  Juliette started rummaging through her pocket, cursing under her breath.

  “He might not be a threat,” she insisted. “Perhaps he is one of yours—doing surveillance on your activities.”

  “He is not Russian,” Roma countered immediately. “His clothing and hairstyle say British, and we have none of those within our ranks.”

  Juliette finally found what she was looking for and pulled out her facial powder. She opened the box and angled the mirror folded within, scanning the darkening streets behind her without turning around.

  “Found him,” Juliette reported. “Yellow handkerchief in the front pocket?”

  “That’s the one,” Roma replied.

  She didn’t know how Roma had distinguished the tail as British. He looked like any other foreigner on the street.

  Juliette peered closer at her mirror. She changed the angle slightly, slightly…

  “Roma,” she said, her voice rising. “He’s got a gun.”

  “Every foreigner in this city has a gun—”

  “He’s pointing it at us,” Juliette cut in. “He just drew it from behind his newspaper.”

  Tense silence fell between the two as they desperately thought through their options. Around them, Shanghai continued moving, alive and vibrant and unbothered. But Roma and Juliette couldn’t merge back into this crowd without being followed to wherever they were going next. There was no cover to hide behind and disappear from, nowhere to draw their own weapons before the Brit could see and shoot first.

  “Untie your coat and embrace me,” Roma said.

  Juliette choked on her sudden laugh. She waited for the pin to drop, but Roma was being serious.

  “You’re kidding,” she said.

  “No, I’m not,” Roma countered evenly. “Do it, so I can shoot him.”

  Their British tail was more than a hundred paces away. There were dozens of civilians walking back and forth in the space between. How did Roma expect to shoot him amid all those conditions, while embracing Juliette?

  Juliette gave the ribbon around her waist a tug, loosening her coat and lifting her arm in the same movement. In her other hand, she snapped her mirror closed, cutting off all her sights on the tail.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” she whispered. Her lungs were tight. Her pulse was a raging war drum.

  She wrapped her arms around Roma’s neck.

  Juliette heard his breath catch. A quick inhale, hardly perceptible had she not been so near. Perhaps he had not considered the fact that asking Juliette to act his cover would mean coming close to her. He certainly hadn’t expected her chin to automatically find its place in the crook where his shoulder met his neck, just as it always used to.

  They had both grown tall and grown thorns. Yet Juliette had slotted back so easily—far too easily for her own liking.

  “Lean closer,” Roma instructed. She felt his arm moving, retrieving his pistol behind the cover of her coat as it billowed on either side of them in the breeze.

  Juliette remembered when Roma swore to her that he would never pick up a gun. He had never grown comfortable with automatic weaponry like she had. In those few months she had spent in Shanghai at fifteen, Roma hadn’t been living the same life as she had. While he operated in his comfortable claim as the heir of the White Flowers, Juliette was fighting to be seen, hanging on to her father’s every word in fear that missing a single instruction would place her into obscurity.

  We do not have the luxury of mercy, Juliette. Look at this city. Look at the starvation that squirms under the layer of glamour.

  Her father’s favorite teaching tactic had been to take her to the attic of the house, so they could peer through the highest window together and squint at the city center on the horizon.

  Empires can fall in mere hours. This one is no different. Here in Shanghai, whoever shoots first has the best chance of surviving.

  Juliette had learned her lesson. It seemed that Roma had picked up the same sentiment in the years she had been gone.

  “Don’t miss,” Juliette whispered.

  “I never do.”

  A bang sounded from the space between them. Juliette immediately whirled around to catch the British tail collapsing where he stood, a bright-red spot blooming on his chest. There was a smoking hole in Juliette’s coat, but she barely noticed. Her mind was on the screams resounding around her as they sought the source of the sound, on the flurry of movement that had started atop the cobblestones.

  Gunshot sounds were common in Shanghai, but never in a place so occupied, never in a place that the foreigners liked to brag about to their friends back home. Gunshot sounds belonged to gangsters and conflicts across territory lines, in the hours when the devil prowled the streets and there was moonlight beaming down from the sky. Now was supposed to be reserved for the warmth of the sunset. Now was supposed to be a time of pretending Shanghai wasn’t split in two.

  Yet in the chaos, there were three other places of absolute stillness.

  Juliette hadn’t been followed by one man. She had been followed by four.

  So they needed to run now.<
br />
  “The arcade,” Juliette commanded. She turned to Roma, frowning over his slowness. “Come on. This is the first time I’ve actually had to run from a crime I’ve committed.”

  Roma blinked. His eyes were pulled wide, disbelieving. He didn’t seem to be entirely present as they dove into the crowd, pushing against the abundance of hands and elbows that were surging in all directions in an attempt to find safety.

  “A crime you committed?” Roma echoed softly. Juliette had to strain to hear him. “I shot that gun.”

  Juliette scoffed, turning. “Do you really need credit for—” Her sentence died against her lips. She had thought Roma was correcting her, claiming ownership over the crime, but then she saw the expression on his face. It had been an accusation.

  He hadn’t wanted to shoot.

  Juliette turned away quickly, shaking her head as though she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to. Here she was, thinking that he had finally adapted to the gun, and in the very next second he was surprising her with his playacting. How much of his exterior was a mere image? Juliette hadn’t considered before this moment that while Roma was being swept into the rumors on her cruelty, thinking her transformed into someone else, perhaps Juliette had been falling into the exact same trap, buying into the tales of ice and coldness that had originated from within the White Flowers themselves.

  Juliette frowned, ducking to surge through a small gap between two open parasols. When she emerged on the other side, her eyes wandered over to Roma again—to his clenched jaw and his calculating stare.

  She never seemed to know what was real and what was not when it came to Roma Montagov. She thought she knew him, and then she did not. She thought she had adjusted after he betrayed her, marked him off as wicked and bloodthirsty, but it seemed he still was not.

  Maybe there was no truth. Maybe nothing was as easy as one truth.

  “Quickly,” Juliette said to him, shaking her head to clear her mind.