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.