These Violent Delights

by Chloe Gong

  “I’m going to kiss you now.”

  And on the patch of grass behind a Communist stronghold, swarmed with police from every settlement, below the crisscrossed telephone wires and bloody glass windows, Juliette reached for Roma. She took his face between her hands and shifted forward to meet his lips, kissing him with all the intensity of their lost years. Roma responded in kind, his arm coming around her waist and holding her—holding her like she was precious, a sprite snagged out of the wind.

  “Forgive me,” he breathed when they broke apart. “Forgive me, Juliette.”

  She was tired of hatred and blood and vengeance. All she wanted was this.

  Juliette twined her arms around him and pressed her chin to his shoulder, holding him as close as she dared. It was a reacquaintance, a homecoming. It was her mind whispering, Oh, we are here again—at last.

  “I forgive you,” she said softly. “And when this is over, when the monster is dead and the city is ours again, we’re going to have a proper chat.”

  Roma managed a laugh. He pressed a kiss to the side of her neck. “Okay. That’s fine by me.”

  “For now”—Juliette released him, extended her hand—“I suppose we have a monster to find.”

  Thirty-Four

  A light rain starts over the city. The people on the streets run for shelter, hastening to draw their bāozi stalls off the pavement. They snap at their children to hurry, to get inside before the skies fall… and before the roar of sound echoes up from the south.

  By now everyone has heard the rumors. A Communist revolt plots to stir today in Nanshi. At first they planned a slow uprising, factory after factory, following each other’s example in a precise domino effect. Now they hurry. They have heard about the murder of their Secretary-General. They worry that there is an assassin after the Party. They scream in vengeance and vow to rise with the workers of the city all at once, before any one segment can be cut down.

  The rain trickles on. Upon a rooftop, five young gangsters are one of the few still spots in this city, unbothered by the gray weather. They sit scattered on the concrete tiling—two side by side in equal concentration, two close together, and one facing the city, her face turned to the wind, letting the beads of water soak into her hair.

  They simmer in misery. Their attempts at saving a beloved little blond girl in the hospital may have sped up her demise instead. If chaos truly erupts today, then death is soon to follow.

  They can only pray and pray that a rumor is a rumor. They can only hold on to their belief that whispers in this city mutate faster than disease and hope for once they are correct.

  The wind blows. A bird squawks.

  “Perhaps we should run away. The madness is bound to spread to every corner of this city at some point.”

  “Where would we go?”

  “They have started calling America the land of dreams.”

  A snort floats up into the clouds. It is a sound that exists incongruous with the rest of the anxiety seeping along this city’s arteries. It is the only sound that epitomizes the land in question, somehow both charming and terrible, both dismissive and weighted down. The land of dreams. Where men and women in white hoods roam the streets to murder Black folks. Where written laws prohibit the Chinese from stepping upon its shores. Where immigrant children are separated from immigrant mothers on Ellis Island, never to be seen again.

  Even the land of dreams needs to wake up sometimes. And though there may be beauty beneath its core rot, though it is big and open and plentiful, hiding those who want to be hidden and shining on those who wish to be remembered, it is elsewhere.

  “This is where we belong, Roma. This is where we will always belong.”

  The voice quavers even with the surety of such words. They fool themselves. These heirs think themselves kings and queens, sitting on a throne of gold and overlooking a glittering, wealthy empire.

  They are not. They are criminals—criminals at the top of an empire of thieves and drug lords and pimps, preparing to inherit a broken, terrible, defeated thing that looks upon them in sadness.

  Shanghai knows. It has always known.

  This whole damn place is about to fall apart.

  * * *

  “We waste time hiding out up here,” Marshall said. He was sitting with heavy impatience, constantly shuffling forward or toeing his shoes along the lines in the concrete.

  “What would you have us do?” Juliette asked, tipping her head back. She resisted leaning right onto Roma, if only because that would look rather horrifying from Kathleen’s point of view. “If the Larkspur has some role in this, he has moved locations since our last visit and erased every trace of his physical existence. If the Larkspur has no role in this and lied to us about Zhang Gutai’s guilt only so we would kill him, then that’s it.” Juliette splayed her hands. “Dead end.”

  “Impossible,” Kathleen muttered beneath her breath. “In a city so big, how can nobody else know anything?”

  “It’s not a matter of whether someone else knows anything,” Benedikt said. “It’s the time we have left. We cannot move Alisa from her machines at the hospital without endangering her. We also cannot leave her there when the factory next door rises up in revolt.”

  “They may not rise for weeks,” Marshall said. “The numbers at their meetings are still low. Their force has not grown quite so mighty yet.”

  Roma shook his head. The movement trembled his frame. “Their force is not mighty,” he said, “but everybody else is weak. This madness has taken too many. If not in body, then in mind. Those who remain alive do not remain loyal.”

  “A matter of time,” Kathleen echoed.

  Benedikt sighed fiercely. “None of this makes any sense.”

  Marshall muttered something quietly to him and he hissed something back. Noting the conversations to have split and Kathleen to be deep in thought, Juliette craned her head back to Roma, clicking her tongue for his attention.

  “We’ll figure it out,” Juliette said when Roma looked down. “She is not lost.”

  “For now she is not,” he replied, his voice low. “But they will kill her. They will slit her throat while she sleeps. She will die as my mother did.”

  Juliette blinked. She straightened up, turning to face him properly.

  “Your mother died of illness.”

  A raindrop landed on Roma’s cheek. He wiped it off, the motion looking exactly as it would if he had brushed aside a teardrop instead. When their gazes met, there was no confusion on Roma’s part, no puzzlement over why Juliette would believe such to be the case. There was only a soft, flinching… sadness.

  “Wasn’t it?” Juliette prompted. For whatever reason, the insides of her wrists began to sweat. “How could your mother’s throat have been slit from illness?”

  Roma shook his head. He said gently, like a caress, “It was a Scarlet hit, dorogaya.”

  Suddenly Juliette could not breathe. Her vision became invaded by terrible violet dots. Her head grew light. It took all her effort to remain still—remain outwardly unaffected.

  “But the blood feud is the blood feud. Don’t think much on it. Don’t dwell. It’s not your fault.”

  “I thought it was illness,” Juliette barely managed. “They said it was illness.”

  Lady Montagova had died two weeks after Juliette left Shanghai. Two weeks after the attack on the Scarlet house that had killed all their servants.

  Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God—

  “The White Flowers only maintained that not to lose face,” Roma said. “She was found with a red rose forced into her hand.”

  “Wait!”

  The sudden exclamation came from Benedikt, and Juliette startled to attention with a solid jerk forward, drawing a strange glance from Roma. He placed a reassuring hand on her back, all the gestures of their past remembered again with no need for formal reintroduction.

  But Juliette barely registered it. Her mind was racing.

  You have to tell him. He has to know.


  He’ll never forgive me.

  Juliette shook her head quickly, clearing her thoughts. This was a matter to address later. It did no good to think on it now.

  “What did the Larkspur say to you?” Benedikt demanded now. “Give it to me word for word.”

  “Benedikt, we already told you earlier—”

  “Again,” he said sharply. “Something is very familiar about this.”

  Roma and Juliette exchanged a curious glance.

  “He said,” Roma replied, “ ‘Zhang Gutai is turning himself into a monster. I am making the vaccine using information he is giving me.’ ”

  Benedikt’s hand rocketed out to grip Marshall’s shoulder. “Before that?”

  “It is a little irrelevant,” Juliette replied, wrinkling her nose.

  “If you told me before, tell me again.”

  “He asked, ‘You wish to know my business with Zhang Gutai?’ ” Roma replied. “Benedikt, what is it?”

  Benedikt’s frown deepened and deepened. Kathleen crept forward, as if it wasn’t enough for the five of them to be dispersed across the small rooftop anymore—they had to draw tighter and tighter, making a circle to prevent the information between them from escaping.

  “When we were staking out Zhang Gutai’s apartment,” Benedikt said slowly, “we saw foreigner after foreigner come in to speak with his personal assistant. They attempted to talk politics but left within minutes.”

  A fat droplet of rain came down on his forehead.

  “Is this about the Frenchman you chased after?” Marshall asked.

  Benedikt nodded. “I tried to threaten him into telling me what he was doing there,” he said, “but he only insisted that his business with Zhang Gutai was none of mine. At the time I did not think it so strange, but…” Benedikt frowned. “Why would he speak on his business with Zhang Gutai so specifically if it was his assistant whom he was meeting with?”

  The facts began to line up in Juliette’s head too, one by one. Perhaps the Larkspur was under a false impression.

  “Zhang Gutai’s personal assistant,” Juliette said. “I don’t suppose he is also Zhang Gutai’s professional assistant at Labor Daily?”

  “Yes, he is,” Kathleen answered confidently. “Qi Ren. He is his notetaker at Communist meetings. He must also be his transcriber at work.”

  The empty desk with the memo for Zhang Gutai. The drawings of the monster. The shuddering back door, as if somebody had just vacated their desk in feeling the onslaught of a transformation, hurrying outside so nobody would see…

  She recalled Qi Ren’s attempt at introducing himself as Zhang Gutai when she and Roma had showed up at his door. She recalled his easy answer, as if he was used to doing so, as if his job was to take the meetings Zhang Gutai did not wish to waste time with. As if he was used to impersonating his superior, acting on his behalf to the clueless foreigners who came knocking for meetings.

  “Maybe the Larkspur did not lie,” Juliette said quietly. “Maybe he thought he was telling the truth in revealing Zhang Gutai to be the monster.”

  Which would mean Zhang Gutai was never the monster of Shanghai.

  Qi Ren was.

  Without warning, the building beneath their feet rocked with a hard jolt. The five of them shot up, bracing for attack. Nothing immediately came. But as shouting started from the streets below and the sensation of heat blew into the rain, they realized something was very, very wrong.

  Their vantage point up on the rooftop allowed their sights to extend two or three streets in each direction. To the west, a fire was roaring in the yard of a police station. There had been an explosion—that had been the impact felt underneath their feet. It had shaken all the rickety, neighboring buildings, unsettling a fine layer of dust and grit that floated down to the pavements.

  And in such dust, workers were pouring into the police station like a colony of ants, all with red rags tied around their right arms, as bright as beacons.

  This was not the clean-cut uniform of a foreign army. These were the rags of the people, rising up from within.

  “It’s starting here,” Juliette murmured in disbelief. “The protests are starting in the city itself.”

  It was genius. There would be too much havoc to put a quick stop to urban protests. The chaos in the city would galvanize those in the outskirts, would incite them to rise up with steel-backed urgency and roaring mayhem.

  It is starting.

  “The hospital,” Roma gasped. “Benedikt. Marshall. Get to the hospital. Protect Alisa.”

  Protect her until they could kill the monster.

  “Go home,” Juliette, meanwhile, commanded Kathleen. “Grab all the messengers. Have them warn the factory owners to flee immediately.”

  They surely had been warned already to be cautious about an uprising, warned against the mass meetings screaming for an end to gangster rule. But no one could have known it would start with such intensity. They would not be expecting such vigor. They would pay for the miscalculation with their heads.

  Kathleen, Benedikt, and Marshall hurried off, sparing no time. Only Roma and Juliette were left for a beat longer on that rooftop, surrounded by fire and bedlam.

  “Once more,” Juliette promised. “This time we do it right.”

  Thirty-Five

  Roma and Juliette thundered up the steps to Zhang Gutai’s apartment, where Qi Ren would be waiting. At some point, Juliette noticed blood still drying in the lines between her fingers. It created handprints on the railings she grasped as they climbed flights and flights of stairs without pause.

  When they came upon the top floor, Juliette stopped just short of Zhang Gutai’s door.

  “How do we do this?” she asked.

  “Like this.”

  Roma kicked down the door.

  Zhang Gutai’s apartment was a mess. As Roma and Juliette stepped in warily, their shoes sank right into water, which drew a gasp from Juliette and a curse from Roma. The hardwood tiles had flooded from a running water source that sounded like it was coming from the kitchen. The water rose all the way up to their ankles and was only rising more with every second. If not for the high ledge of the doorframe, they would have flooded the rest of the building upon opening the apartment door.

  Something was not sitting right with Juliette. She dropped to a crouch and dipped a hand into the water, frowning as the cold seeped into her fingers. The water swirled, danced, lapped. It reminded her of the Huangpu, of the way the current always moved in a dozen different directions, carrying away whatever floated into its tide, carrying away all the dead that collapsed by its side. The gangster clash at the ports. The Russians on their ship.

  The first victims of each wave of madness…, Juliette thought suddenly, were they all by the Huangpu River?

  “Juliette,” Roma called quietly, summoning her attention. “It appears that there was a fight.”

  Juliette stood again, shaking the water off her hand. Deeper into the apartment, there were papers scattered everywhere: thin leaflets of propaganda and thicker sheets of accounts—numbers and letters and characters all bleeding together in the water. As she moved about, Juliette peered over the kitchen counter, finding pots and pans turned upside down, not only floating in the overflowing sink but lying dented on the tables, as if someone had taken the saucepan and repeatedly struck it against something.

  “Where is he?” Juliette whispered. The state of this apartment only furthered her confusion. Why would an old man, an assistant of a Communist, turn himself into a monster? Why flood the floors and dent all the kitchen equipment?

  “He’s not here,” Roma said. His eyes were latched on something over her shoulder. “But someone else is.”

  Juliette looked to where Roma pointed and saw the slumped figure in the corner of the living room. She and Roma had sat there once while Qi Ren served them tea. Now the chairs were overturned and the radio was smashed in pieces atop the rug, where another young man was collapsed. His legs were splayed in an awkward
V-shape under the water while his back leaned against the wall. His neck lolled forward so severely that all that was visible was the top of his head—blood-matted, dark-blond hair.

  Juliette’s eyes widened. “My God. That’s Paul Dexter.”

  “Paul Dexter?” Roma echoed. “What’s he doing here?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” Juliette muttered. She rushed forward, sinking her knees into the shallow water before she shook Paul’s shoulder vigorously. There was a deep scratch on his forehead and what looked like four claw marks on his neck, marring his pale skin with red gouges.

  Juliette shook him harder. “Paul. Paul, wake up.”

  Slowly, Paul’s eyelids fluttered. The third time Juliette called his name, Paul’s eyes finally opened fully and focused on her. He frowned.

  “Miss Cai?” Paul rasped. “What are you doing here?”

  “You answer first,” Juliette replied wryly.

  Paul coughed. It came out as a wheeze, one that sounded like there was no liquid left in his throat.

  “The Larkspur sent me,” he said slowly. He looked around, patting his hands about the space beside him, and seemed to relax when he found his briefcase, which had been floating in the water.

  “What are you doing on the floor?” Roma asked.

  Paul suddenly stiffened, as if his memory was returning piece by piece, triggered by the question. Wincing beneath his breath, he worked to adjust his position and pull himself higher along the wall, until he was sitting well enough to place his briefcase back onto his lap.

  “The monster…” Paul exhaled. “It attacked me.”

  “It attacked you here?” Juliette demanded. She stood and spun in a circle, sloshing water as she surveyed the living room. “Where is it now?”

  “I—I don’t know,” Paul answered. His eyes lowered while he opened his briefcase and checked on the contents. He placed something into his pocket. “Heck, it could still be here. Could you help me up, Miss Cai?”

  With a glance over her shoulder, eyeing the rising water levels and still finding something off about that fact, Juliette extended a hand, biting back a haughty retort at Paul Dexter’s uselessness.