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Roma said nothing as he was hauled from her sight. Juliette watched him, eyes narrowed, and only when she was certain he had been pushed out the door of the burlesque club did she focus on the mess in front of her, stepping forward with a sigh and kneeling gingerly beside the dying man.
There was no saving with a wound like this. It was still spurting blood, pulsating red puddles onto the floor. Blood was certainly seeping into the fabric of her dress, but Juliette hardly felt it. The man was trying to say something. Juliette couldn’t hear what.
“You’d do well to put him out of his misery.”
Walter Dexter had found his way near the scene and was now peering over Juliette’s shoulder with an almost quizzical expression. He remained unmoving even when the waitresses started pushing the crowd back and cordoning the area off, yelling for the onlookers to scatter. Irritatingly, none of the Scarlet men bothered to haul Walter away—he had a look to him that made it seem like he needed to be here. Juliette had met plenty of men like him in America: men who assumed they had the right to go wherever they wished because the world had been built to favor their civilized etiquette. That sort of confidence knew no bounds.
“Hush,” Juliette snapped, leaning her ear closer to the dying man. If he had last words, he deserved to be heard—
“I’ve seen this before; it’s the lunacy of an addict. Perhaps methamphetamine or—”
“Hush!”
Juliette focused until she could hear the sounds coming from the dying man’s mouth, focused until the hysteria around her faded to background noise.
“Guài. Guài. Guài.”
Guài?
Head spinning, Juliette ran through every word that resembled what the man was chanting. The only one that made sense was—
“Monster?” she asked him, gripping his shoulder. “Is that what you mean to say?”
The man stilled. His gaze was startlingly clear for the briefest second. Then, in a fast garble, he said, “Huò bù dan xíng.” After that one breath, one exhale, one warning, his eyes glazed over.
Juliette reached out, numb, and brushed his eyelids closed. Before she could quite register the dead man’s words, Kathleen had already stepped forward to cover him with a tablecloth. Only his feet were sticking out, in those tattered shoes that Roma had been staring at.
They’re mismatched, Juliette noted suddenly. One shoe was sleek and shined, still glinting with its last polish; the other was far too small and a different color entirely, the fabric held together by a thin piece of string wrapped thrice around the toes.
Strange.
“What was that? What did he say?”
Walter was still lurking at her elbow. He didn’t seem to understand that this was his cue to remove himself. He didn’t seem to care that Juliette was staring forward in a state of stupefaction, wondering how Roma had timed his visit to coincide with this death.
“Misfortunes tend to come all at once,” Juliette translated when she finally jolted back to the frenzy of the situation. Walter Dexter only looked at her blankly, trying to understand why a dying man would say something so convoluted. He didn’t understand the Chinese and their love for proverbs. His mouth was opening, likely to give another spiel about his extensive knowledge regarding the world of drugs, another plug about the dangers of purchasing products from those he deemed untrustworthy, but Juliette held up a finger to stop him. If she was certain of anything, it was that these weren’t the last words of a man who took too many drugs. This was the final warning of a man who had seen something he shouldn’t have.
“Let me correct myself. You British already have an appropriate translation,” she said. “When it rains, it pours.”
* * *
High above the leaky pipes and moldy carpeting of the White Flower house, Alisa Montagova was perched upon a wooden beam in the ceiling rafters, her chin pressed against the flat of her knees as she eavesdropped on the meeting below.
The Montagovs didn’t live in a big, flashy residence like their money bags could afford. They preferred to stay in the heart of it all, one and the same with the dirt-smeared faces picking up trash on the streets. From the outside, their living space looked identical to the row of apartments along this bustling city street. On the inside, they had transformed what used to be an apartment complex into one big jigsaw puzzle of rooms and offices and staircases, maintaining the place not with servants or maids but with hierarchy. It wasn’t just the Montagovs who lived here, but any White Flower who held some role in the gang, and among the assortment of people coming and going in this house, within the walls and outside them, there was an order. Lord Montagov reigned at the top and Roma—at least in name—stood second, but below, roles were constantly changing, determined by will rather than blood. Where the Scarlet Gang depended on relationships—on which family went the farthest back before this country crumbled from its imperial throne—the White Flowers operated on chaos, on constant movement. But the climb to power was one of choice, and those who remained low within the gang did so by their own desire. The point of becoming a White Flower wasn’t power and riches. It was the knowing that they could walk at any point if they didn’t like the orders given by the Montagovs. It was a fist to the chest, a lock of eyes, a nod of understanding—like that, the Russian refugees filing into Shanghai would do anything to join the ranks of the White Flowers, anything to reunite with the sense of belonging they had left behind when the Bolsheviks came knocking.
For the men, at least. The Russian women unfortunate enough not to be born into the White Flowers picked up jobs as dancers and mistresses. Just last week, Alisa had overheard a British woman crying about a state of emergency in the International Settlement—of families being broken up by pretty faces from Siberia who had no fortune, only face and figure and a will to live. The refugees had to do what they must. Moral compasses meant nothing in the face of starvation.
Alisa jolted. The man she had been eavesdropping on had suddenly started whispering. The abrupt change in volume drew her attention back to the meeting below.
“The political factions have made one too many snide remarks,” a gruff voice muttered. “It is almost certain that the politicians are engineering the madness, but it’s hard to say at this point in time whether the Kuomintang or the Communists are responsible. Many sources say Zhang Gutai, though… well, I hesitate to believe it.”
Another voice added wryly, “Please, Zhang Gutai is so bad at being Secretary-General of the Communist Party that he printed the wrong date on one of their meeting posters.”
Alisa could see three men seated opposite her father through the thin mesh that lined the ceiling space. Without risking a fall from the rafters, she couldn’t quite pick out their features, but the accented Russian gave away enough. They were Chinese spies.
“What do we know of their methods? How does this madness spread?”
That was her father now, his slow voice as distinctive as nails against a ch
