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Right in time to see a woman bawling on the sidewalk, cradling a body in her lap.
The body was a bloody mess, hands stained red and throat so messy that its head was barely hanging on by the force of the neck bone. The crying woman cradled the head, pressed her cheek to its deathly white face.
The car started to move again. Juliette turned her gaze to the front, to the passing blur of the windshield in the front seat, and swallowed hard.
Why is this happening? she thought desperately. Has this city committed such awful sins that we have come to deserve this?
The answer was: yes. But it wasn’t entirely their fault. The Chinese had built the pit, gathered the wood, and lit the match, but it was the foreigners who had come in and poured gasoline upon every surface, letting Shanghai rage into an untamable forest fire of debauchery.
“Here we are,” the chauffeur said, braking.
Juliette, her jaw tight, got out of the car. In the French Concession, everything was a little bit shiny, even the grass beneath her feet. These gardens were usually gated, but they had been pulled wide open tonight specifically for this function. When Juliette walked through the gates, it was as if she had entered another world—one far from the dirty streets and tightly cramped alleyways that they had just driven through. Here it was greenery and climbing vines and slick intentions, little gazebos sitting patiently in quaint nooks and the darkness pulling in, pulling the shadows of the tall, wrought-iron gates that bordered this garden long into the grass, growing longer with every second of the violet sunset.
Despite the chill, Juliette was sweating a little as she browsed the crowds of people dispersed across these delicately kept gardens. Her first order of business was identifying where every relative had situated themselves. She found most of them easily, scattered about and socializing. Perhaps she had taken it a bit too far to bring so many weapons. Because of the knife strapped to the small of her back, her dress was too tight at her waist, and the white fabri
c at her knees was bunching up with every step. But Juliette couldn’t help herself. By bringing weapons, she could fool herself into thinking she could act if disaster struck.
She tried not to acknowledge that there were some disasters she couldn’t fight off with her knives. The foreigners here certainly did not care. As Juliette walked, she overheard more than one giggle about the rumors of madness, British men and Frenchwomen alike clinking their glasses in celebration regarding how intelligent it was to stay out of the local hysteria. They acted like it was a choice.
“Come, Juliette,” Lord Cai prompted from ahead, straightening his sleeves.
Juliette followed obediently, but her eyes remained elsewhere. Under a delicate marble pavilion, a quartet was playing soft music, the sound floating toward a clearing where some foreign merchants and their wives were dancing. There was an even ratio of Scarlet gangsters and foreigners in attendance—merchants and officials alike—and a few were going so far as to be conversing in the fading twilight. She spotted Tyler within those groups, chatting with a Frenchwoman. When he saw her looking, he waved pleasantly. Juliette’s mouth soured into a line.
Nearby, the strings of lights looped across the gazebo awnings flared to life with a sudden whoosh. The gardens became illuminated with gold, pushing out the darkness that would have otherwise crept in when the sun settled completely into the sea.
“Juliette,” Lord Cai prompted again. Juliette had slowed her walk to a snail’s crawl without noticing. Begrudgingly, she picked up her pace. She had noted that most of the attendants remained in groups with those to whom they were alike. British women who had moved here with their diplomat husbands laughed with one another, their laced gloves swirling their pastel parasols. French officers clapped one another on the back, howling over whatever unfunny joke one of their superiors just told. Yet dispersed in different sections of the garden, three loners stood unassociated despite their best efforts to look as if they were occupied in proper business.
Juliette stopped again. She cocked her head at one of them—the one who was intensely examining the plate in his hands.
“Bàba, doesn’t that boy look Korean to you?”
Lord Cai didn’t even follow the direction of her gaze. He put his hands around her shoulders and nudged her in the direction they were going. “Focus, Juliette.”
It was a moot command. Juliette didn’t require any focus when they approached the Consul-General of France because when the men spoke, she simply faded into the background. She was barely more than an ornament decorating the place. She tuned in and out of the main conversation, not even catching the Consul-General’s name. Her focus was on the two men standing at attention behind him.
“Do you want to get a sandwich afterward?” the first man whispered to the second in French. “I hate this catering. They’re trying too hard to appeal to that bland country across the ditch.”
“You spoke my mind,” the second responded quietly. “Would you look at them? A bunch of unrefined peasants.”
Juliette had tensed, but with the remark about the ditch, it was clear that they were referring to the British, not the Scarlet Gang.
“They sip away on their tea and claim they invented it,” the second man continued. “Think again, fool. The Chinese were brewing tea before you even had a king.”
Juliette snorted suddenly—the irrelevant pettiness of the conversation completely taking her by surprise—then coughed to mask the sound. Lord Cai had nothing to worry about; bringing her here had been an unnecessary precaution. She turned her attention back to her father’s conversation.
“They are wary, my lord,” the Consul-General was saying. He spoke of his French businessmen, Juliette guessed. “The garde municipale keeps the French Concession safe for now, but if there is any trouble brewing, I need to know that I have the support of the Scarlet Gang.”
If there was a revolt from the common Chinese people, from the unpaid workers who decided Communism was the prime solution, the French needed a way to maintain their hold on Shanghai. They thought they could obtain it with the weaponry and resources of the Scarlet Gang. They didn’t quite realize that if there was a revolution, there would be no one left in Shanghai for them to do their business with.
But Lord Cai voiced none of that. He agreed easily, under the condition that the Scarlet Gang still had the jurisdiction to run their errands in the French Concession. The Consul-General of France exclaimed, in an attempt to mold his English with Americanisms, “Why, old friend, of course! That is not even in question,” and when the two men shook hands, it seemed all was settled.
Juliette thought the whole thing theatrical and ridiculous. She thought it preposterous that her father had to ask permission to run business on land their ancestors had lived and died on from men who had simply docked their boat here and decided they would like to be in charge now.
The Consul-General of France, as if he could detect the hostility of Juliette’s thoughts, at last turned his gaze to her.
“And how are you, Miss Juliette?”
Juliette smiled widely.
