Last violent call, p.1
Last Violent Call, page 1
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FOR JULIETTE AND ROMA
1 SEPTEMBER 1931
Two knocks meant “all clear,” and three knocks meant “dorogaya, for the love of God, I’m holding something in my hands.” The announcement system had been put into place at the front door because Juliette Cai had a bad habit of launching herself at her husband each time he came back into the house, even if he had merely been away for a few hours getting groceries. It was by a combination of sheer luck and trained dexterity that Roma had once managed to catch her with one hand and not drop the bag of pears in his other.
The footsteps outside grew louder. In the kitchen, the sunflower-shaped clock struck four in the afternoon. Roma had estimated he would be arriving home today around this time. He had only gone to the next town over.
As Juliette peered up from her desk, however, she didn’t quickly push her chair back to await Roma’s knock. Their house was one of the many low-ceilinged residences in Zhouzhuang that pressed right to the edge of a thin canal. Some mornings, when there were boats moving along the thoroughfare, Juliette would be awoken by the soft echo of lapping water. She would pad outside still in her nightclothes, early enough that the sun was barely peeking over the houses on the other side of the canal, their ceramic roof tiles cast in gentle gold, curved slopes lit by refractions bouncing off the languid water. Chirping birds and brisk air, heightened by the absolute quiet permeating the township at such an hour.
But theirs was also the only residence on the outer side of the township’s farthest canal, before everything turned to water and wet forestry. Where the inner side comprised a row of houses with frequently open doors and chatty neighbors, it was a rare occasion that anyone would cross the tall stone bridge to walk along the outer path instead—unless it was to approach the house tucked beside the weeping willow tree, the house with the windows that had been refurbished with bulletproof glass, the house rumored to be owned by former city gangsters.
So when Juliette heard a scuffle against the house exterior, she unsheathed the knife strapped to her leg and marched to the door, swinging it right open.
The stranger barely had a second to flinch before she leveled the blade at his throat.
“I told you to walk behind me. I should let my wife slice you up just for being a nuisance.”
The voice rang from some distance away, a figure crossing the canal bridge with his hands in his pockets. He had started speaking long before he saw the scene in front of him, because Roma Montagov knew that Juliette could isolate the sound of his steps, and she wouldn’t take kindly to the ones that were not his.
“Thankfully”—Roma hopped off the bridge and walked over, then tapped Juliette’s elbow when he was close enough—“she is ever so peace-loving and benevolent.”
Graciously, Juliette withdrew her blade, giving the stranger a smile. He seemed young, surely no older than seventeen, wearing a gray shirt that was nicer than the usual quality around these parts.
“Tea?” she asked.
“Oh my God,” the boy whispered under his breath, eyes wide in shock. “You almost killed me.”
“Untrue.” Juliette was already retreating back into the house, turning her papers over as she passed her desk. She proceeded into the kitchen, kicking a log out of the way so that it pressed closer to the unlit fireplace. With the practiced swiftness of routine, she put the kettle on the stove and withdrew three teacups from the cupboard, setting them on the painted blue table. “You would be long dead if I were trying to kill you.”
Roma ushered the boy through the kitchen entryway. He pulled a chair out at the dining table; the boy sat down heavily. As the kettle started to whine, Juliette took the boiling water off the heat in tandem to Roma reaching for the tea leaves on the counter. He dropped them into the cups from the left as she poured from the right, the two crisscrossing in the middle, where Roma leaned in to press a kiss to her cheek.
“Did you have a good three days without me?” he asked, switching to Russian. At the other end of the table, the boy stayed quiet, but he had sat up straighter with a note of curiosity. It didn’t seem like he understood Roma’s words, but he was trying very hard to follow anyway.
“I was bored out of my mind,” Juliette replied, switching as well. “I think I finished all our invoice work within the first five hours and turned to organizing your socks.”
Roma held down the twitch of his smile. He was trying to appear serious in front of the stranger, because Roma hated having a sense of humor in front of strangers, and Juliette made it her mission to provoke him intentionally.
“I’m so very sorry. We ought to have more work for you next time.” He pulled her chair out too, then took the kettle from her hands and returned it to the stove. “We can’t have you wasting that brain on socks.”
In the years that they had been running their business—if an illegal weapons trading ring could be called a business—Juliette and Roma usually met with their contacts together, scampering out the door with a bag and piling into their car as if each drive out of the township was a big adventure. This time, however, there was a delivery coming from the city on the same day that they had a supplier wanting to meet, and so Juliette had stayed behind to make sure their stock was correct while Roma had driven out for the meeting. Roma was better at negotiations anyway, so she preferred it when he did the talking. According to one man whom they didn’t work with anymore, Juliette was “scary” and “too easily prone to making threats.”
He hadn’t been wrong, per se, but that still wasn’t very polite.
“Sock organizing wasn’t so bad once I got the hang of it,” Juliette said. “I didn’t realize you had such big feet.”
Roma choked on his tea. He scrambled to put his cup down before he spilled anything, coughing once to get the tea back into the right pipe. Juliette picked up her own cup innocently, taking a sip.
“You’ll be glad to hear that I didn’t have a particularly interesting time either,” Roma said when he recovered. Fortunately for him, he had managed to play off the cough. “Until I was driving back and Yulun here dove in front of the car.”
The boy, Yulun, perked up at the sound of his name. Now he knew he was being summoned into the conversation.
“Yes, I was wondering why you had picked up a stray.” Juliette returned to speaking Chinese, extending a hand in Yulun’s direction. They almost never brought anyone into their actual house, so this had to be something different from the usual clientele. “I’m Mrs. Mai.”
Mai. The easiest combination of “Cai” and “Montagov,” perhaps the least original method of creating an alias in the history of starting anew. Roma and Juliette had butted heads too much about whose name to begin with if they were to hyphenate… not because either wanted their own put first, but rather the other way around. Juliette wanted to be a Montagov; Roma insisted there was too much baggage attached. In her head, she still liked the sound of Juliette Montagova, because that was his name, and that was all that mattered. But it was better to use a Chinese name in Zhouzhuang, better for Roma to pass himself off as half-Chinese when his features ran close enough to be convincing, or else even more people might start getting suspicious about who they really were and what they had run from.
“Mai tàitài,” Yulun greeted politely, shaking her hand. “I need your help. I assume you make the big calls. Please.”
Juliette cast a glance over to Roma. “Did you hear that? He thinks I’m in charge.”
“Don’t pretend to be shocked.” Roma’s arm slid around the back of her chair. He yanked off one of the loose threads dangling from her dress—she had drastically toned down her wardrobe since fleeing Shanghai, but Juliette’s version of toned-down still involved complex embroidery—then turned back to Yulun and said, “Tell her what you told me.”
With some hesitance, Yulun shuffled forward in his seat. The chair leg scraped against the floorboards with a grating sound.
“I heard that you’re the people to go to for weapons,” he said. “I… I wanted to acquire some, but I don’t have the means to meet the prices.” He looked into his lap. “I was hoping that you might be open to an exchange of some sort. I’m great at running messages.”
Juliette blinked, tilting her head curiously. A wisp of hair fell into her eyes. She attempted to blow it back, only her hair was long these days, growing far past her shoulders, so the huff did nothing except stick the lock to the side of her cheek.
“We’re not really hiring right now,” Juliette replied. She felt Roma trail a finger along her arm, the contact unhurried, more an instinct than something he was consciously aware of doing. The silence drew out in the kitchen. Juliette shook her hair back into place. “But I do want to know why exactly you are trying to come into possession of weapons. You’re not our usual demographic.”
Yulun’s gaze flickered over to Roma. He must have divulged this already, if Roma was willing to bring him all the way here to get Juliette’s opinion.
“My fiancée is being threatened.”
Ah. Juliette let out a small sigh, leaning into her chair. Of course it was something like this that got Roma’s sympathy. Him and his soft heart. She adored him so much that it hurt.
“She’s not from around here,” Yulun went on. “She fled Vladivostok three years ago and entered Shanghai as a refugee before making her way farther inland.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a picture. Clearly Roma hadn’t seen this yet, because he leaned forward too and jolted immediately in surprise. His reaction was almost indiscernible, but he still had his hand against Juliette’s arm, and she felt his tension like it was her own.
Yulun’s fiancée looked just like Alisa, Roma’s little sister.
The differences were evident enough that they were clearly two different people, and yet upon first glance Juliette would have easily made the mistake, from the blond curls to the deep-set dark eyes crinkled in a smile.
“I’m all she has,” Yulun finished softly. “I was hoping you could help me. If not with weaponry, then…” The boy trailed off. When he slumped his shoulders, all his strength left him. “Someone from her past keeps contacting her. If weapons aren’t an option, I had hoped you might sell your safeguarding.”
Roma finally glanced away from the photo, one of his brows quirking up.
“You didn’t mention that part on the drive.” His tone had turned perplexed. “What sort of safeguarding could we possibly provide? We run a small business, not a security force.”
Yulun gulped tightly. He reached into his pocket again and this time pulled out what appeared to be a newspaper clipping.
“You once offered protection, didn’t you?” He unfolded the clipping slowly. The two portraits were revealed first, then the large-print headline above it:
Commemorating the Star-Crossed Lovers of Shanghai
Juliette Cai & Roma Montagov
1907–1927
“Juliette Cai and Roma Montagov, heir to the Scarlet Gang and heir to the White Flowers, the children of feuding families born into a bloody war, defying everything to end the cycle and be together.” Yulun uttered each word with intention. As if he had heard those lines from elsewhere long ago and was reciting them from memory. “I had hoped that, of all people, you would understand.”
The portrait sketches were uncannily accurate. Juliette picked up the newspaper clipping and held it to the afternoon light, looking for some sort of plausible deniability.
She found none. These were their faces, no doubt about it. Roma, however, didn’t even glance at the portraits.
“You must be mistaken,” he said. “I have never even heard the name Roma Montagov before. City gossip doesn’t make its way to Zhouzhuang.”
“What?” Yulun exclaimed, taken aback. “But you were just speaking Russian.”
“Was I? I can’t remember.”
Yulun turned to Juliette next, his mouth opening and closing in incredulity. He pointed behind her. “You have a painting back there of Shanghai’s wàitān.”
Juliette craned over her shoulder, squinting at the frame and acting like she had never realized what it contained. Her cousin, Celia, bought it for her after Juliette admitted she was starting to forget the Bund—the ocean salt smell, the creaking boardwalk under her feet. Shanghai was a coastal city, an open port that pulsated with constant activity, ships arriving without pause and movement tearing through its streets at such speed that the city delivered its highest highs in the same breath as its lowest lows. Zhouzhuang was the exact opposite. It held the promise of haven in its stillness, protective layers formed in every direction with the leisurely speed at which its waters flowed.
“What a neat coincidence,” she said, playing along with the bluff that Roma had started. “We hail from Harbin, though, not Shanghai.”
Slowly Juliette pushed the newspaper clipping back toward Yulun. He didn’t look like he believed her, but how could he possibly prove that they were lying, short of accusing them outright?
“If I’m reading this correctly, these people are long dead,” she said gently. “Here.” Pitying the boy, Juliette grabbed a pen from the counter behind her and quickly wrote a number on the paper edge: the communal telephone line in the township. “Give us a call for proper business when you have the means. But we’re not the ones you’re looking for. I’m sorry.”
Her apology was sincere. She had once believed that inheriting the Scarlet Gang would give her immense power, that she would be able to help the people who needed it and stomp down the people trying to hurt her. But that kind of power was never supposed to be concentrated in one place, and a position like that would only draw up an unending list of enemies trying to cause her harm. She preferred a life free from the Scarlet Gang to a magnitude that was beyond words, and yet there was always going to be the little pang in her heart when she couldn’t make things happen with a snap of her finger anymore.
Yulun took the newspaper clipping, returning it to his pocket alongside the photo of his fiancée. His lower lip wobbled. Before it could happen again, he steadied his expression, giving an accepting nod.
Roma stood and circled around the table. “I will walk you out,” he said, clapping his hand down on Yulun’s shoulder. “Are you able to get yourself back home?”
Yulun stood as well, looking dejected. “Yes, don’t worry about me. I’m sorry to be a bother.”
“Ah, we don’t mind being enlivened once in a while.” They disappeared into the living room, the murmur of conversation carrying on for a few more minutes before the front door opened and closed.
Juliette sighed, propping her elbows onto the table and resting her chin in her hands. She was still holding that pose when Roma returned to the kitchen, her eyes flicking up and latching onto him. He leaned against the archway, raising a brow as if to ask why she was staring, but she didn’t look away. She liked admiring him without being afraid of getting caught. She liked it when she spotted him at the open market unexpectedly, breaking into a run and surprise-attacking him from the back, getting a laugh in response instead of a gun pulled on her. Their past had made every moment of their future a novelty, and she would never get sick of peppering him with kisses when she woke him up in the mornings, waiting for him to draw away before she was willing to stop—only he always refused to draw away first, offering his face with the biggest grin.
She would have thought that the addictive thrill would wear off after the first year. Perhaps once they started getting used to living without fear, living without the weight of two families and a whole city on their shoulders. But the truth was that weight would never fully fade, so neither did the knowledge that they had achieved something unbelievable in finding peace. Sometimes Juliette still jumped if a restaurant owner dropped a metal bowl on the ground, convinced that there were gunshots in the distance and she needed to go break up a fight between gangsters. Even if she realized quickly that there was nothing to be afraid of, her thoughts would be foggy and her palms clammy all day long, unsettling her stomach until she managed to distract herself. Sometimes Roma still woke up panicked in the middle of the night, shouting Juliette’s name as if she had been pulled away in his dream, and though Juliette would be right beside him, her hands clasping his face, whispering, “I’m here, I’m right here, my love, it’s okay,” his heart wouldn’t stop thudding under her touch until morning, neither of them sleeping.
Juliette got out of her chair and walked toward him now. Put her arms around his neck without saying anything, letting him draw her closer until they were pressed flush.
“I’m sorry,” Roma murmured. “If I had known he was going to spring that on us, I wouldn’t have bothered.”
“No, I’m happy you wanted to see if we could help,” Juliette replied. She searched his gaze, trying to communicate how deeply she meant it. The very fact that he could afford to be kind, that they could try to be ordinary people extending a hand wherever possible, was a beautiful thing. It was only unfortunate that the boy had such high expectations, and Roma and Juliette could hardly meet them without exposing too much of themselves.
It had taken a tremendous amount of coordination to make use of every old contact they had in Shanghai without giving away their identities. Some contacts required blackmailing before they were willing to cooperate; others required a very roundabout series of white lies to convince them that they had been plugged into this trading ring all along. Either way, the information that Roma and Juliette clutched individually was worth its weight in gold when put together, and there was no denying the power of their pasts each time they reached out to reinforce a connection. While a few seemed to suspect some leak in the former innermost gang circles, no one would guess it was Roma and Juliette resurrected from the dead. So long as the ones who got close enough to see their faces didn’t start spreading rumors, it was a fine setup. Preservation of their identities was always going to be the highest priority. They hadn’t worked so hard for this new life only for it to shatter.
