Page 114 of Our Violent Ends
At the very least, Marshall hadn’t missed anything. He had heard all he needed in the other meetings. The Communists needed to go. Shanghai was theirs. The Northern Expedition would succeed.Blah, blah, blah—
“No campaigns to rush off to?” Marshall remarked, dropping into a seat.
General Shu didn’t seem amused. The door closed after the final Nationalist, and Marshall’s father returned to the table, selecting the seat two away from Marshall.
“You are not being forced to remain here.”
Marshall snorted. “Given the soldiers stationed around this house, you and I have very different definitions of what being forced means.”
“Mere precautions.” General Shu rapped his knuckles on the table surface. Marshall’s eyes shot to the sound immediately, stiffening at the move. It was how his father used to get his attention at the dinner table on the rare occasions he came to visit.Visit, as if it weren’t his own family. “You are young. You don’t know what is best yet. What I must do is keep you within the most ideal conditions, even if I must compel it, and only then can you—”
“Stop,” Marshall pleaded. They had had enough low-toned, mean-spirited back-and-forth yesterday. He was hardly in the mood to start hashing out again how exactly a childhood kept out in the countryside qualified as an “ideal condition.” “Get to the point. What am I doing here? Why do youcare?”
For several long moments, General Shu said nothing. Then: “This country is going to war. I was content to let you run yourself wild as a gangster when there seemed no harm, but it is different now. The city is dangerous. Your place is here.”
Marshall resisted the urge to laugh out loud. Not in humor—in belly-deep, stinking resentment.
“I survived as a gangster in Shanghai for years. I can manage, thanks.”
“No.” General Shu turned to his side, looking across the top of the chair between them. “You didn’t, did you? At the merest provocation, the Scarlet heir asked you to play dead, and you did.”
Marshall was so tired of this being some crime. What waswrongwith hiding? What waswrongwith retreating and lying low, if only to survive and recoup, if only to fight another day?
“I bear no ill will to the Scarlet heir.”
“Maybe you should. She is reckless and volatile. She is everything wrong with this city.”
“I ask again,” Marshall repeated through gritted teeth. “Is there a point to this?”
His father could say that it was for his own good. He could pull up the city’s every obituary, could show Marshall the sheer numbers that had been lost in these recent few years to the blood feud, a bullet through the chest for no reason other than wandering too close to the wrong territory. It didn’t matter. It was all an excuse.
The Nationalists shunned the imperial monarchy, but when they marched into this city and took it, they acted just as conquering kings and empires did. Different titles, the same idea. Power was only long-lasting if it were a reign, and reigns needed heirs. Marshall’s father never cared to find him when he was a child surviving off scraps. It was only now, when appearances became key, that he remembered Marshall existed.
General Shu sighed, dropping the brewing argument. Instead, he reached into his jacket, his hands brushing past the flashing medals pinned to his lapel, and retrieved a small, square card.
“I divulge this information because I care.” The card landed upon the table, faceup. “There is an execution order from the Kuomintang on the Montagovs.”
In a flash, Marshall shot to his feet, lunging for the small card and scanning the telegram.The stroke of midnight. No prisoners left alive.
“Call it off,” Marshall demanded. His voice turned to steel. He hated when he sounded like this. It wasn’t him. “Call it offnow.”
“I can delay it,” General Shu said evenly. “I can continue delaying it. But I cannot call it off. No one has that power alone.”
Marshall’s fists tightened. He imagined marching out right now, through the line of soldiers, past the tall, tall walls bordering the mansion....
“So you tell me as if I should be grateful?” he asked. “You tell me as if I should bless the Kuomintang that they are onlysoon to bedead?”
General Shu was not bothered by Marshall’s outburst. He never was. “I tell you so you realize what is left out there. Your former gangsters whose lives hang on a thread. Your Scarlet heir under her father’s thumb, your White Flower heir with nothing left under his command. What remains for you? The only place where you are needed is here. As the Kuomintang leadership flock into the city, as the number of meetings rise, as they look to see where the next generation of capable leaders may stem from—you are needed.”
The telegram crinkled under Marshall’s fingers. He was biting the inside of his cheeks so hard that he could taste the metallic tang of blood. The White Flowers were crumbling. The White Flowers hardly qualified as a gang any longer, never mind an empire that could exert power against the city.
“You cannot help your friends by running out,” General Shu continued. “But you can help by staying with me. I am willing to train you in your studies, your potential for leadership. I am willing to bring you up the chain of command, to be my son in proper public view.”
A Nationalist prodigy. An obedient son, one who had stayed in the house that day he found his mother dead, who hadn’t fled the very second he envisioned living only with his stranger of a father. He wondered how much of his past he needed to erase, whether it was his history as a gangster or his history flirting with boys that would be more of a scandal.
“Do you promise?” Marshall asked hoarsely. “We can save my friends? You will help me?”
You will not abandon me? You will not leave me to fend for myself?
