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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 finally 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. “Biaojie, you underestimate the eyes I have”—she gestured all over her face—“everywhere. Did I cause offense?”
“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 finger. “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 pacifist. 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 difference 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 affairs 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 offer 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 riffraff 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 Mama 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 five 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 first 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 off 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 flopped 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 dignified exit, the confines 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 suffered 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 flower beds. There, Ali had been on her way back into the house, a laundry basket filled 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 floor,” Juliette yelled at the nearby gardener, the one who had gotten Juliette’s attention in the first 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 fingers 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.
