Foul Lady Fortune

There, by the bar: a target, standing.

Under the lights of the dance hall, one might think the women of this city resembled sea serpents: bright colors and formfitting qipao, the curve of a hip and the slope of a shoulder, slinking from wall to wall. A flash of a scale glinting when the lights flare bright, fading into the shadows when the spotlight drops low. Dancing legs and imported shoes gliding along the sticky floors.

Saxophone music reverberates through every corner of this establishment. No one cares much to remember where they are, to hold the venue’s name on their tongue and report it in the morning when the previous night’s events are rehashed over a game of cards. This dance hall is not one of the big ones, not Bailemen nor Peach Lily Palace nor the Canidrome’s ballroom, so it merely blends into one of the hundreds, another blinking light in a ceiling of electric fixtures. Some few years ago, it might never have survived. It would have been competing against a monopoly held by two gangs, but now those gangs have crumbled while the war outside still demands distraction. New dance halls and cabarets pop up every week like infestations on the city—a fast-spreading tumor that no one cares to cull.

There, out the doors: a target, walking.

Much as they are the focus in every establishment, the women of this city are not being watched tonight, here, now, by the eyes in the corner. Any other time, they are tracked everywhere they go; they are bombarded at every corner with posters that promise eternal youth and unwavering health. Chesterfield cigarettes, Nestlé chocolates, Tangee cosmetics. Hollywood starlets with their skirts billowing in the pencil-sketched wind. This is an age of consumption, time speeding by on American flavors and jazz, French literature and a sea of lost cosmopolitan love. If you are not careful, you will be swallowed.

There, by the tables: a predator, rising.

The killer follows their target out the doors. The killer is like every other occupant of this city because this city holds every soul under the sun. In that manner, perhaps no one is alike to anyone, but that only means that they are another one of the masses, another face that does not draw attention, another late-night wanderer trailing along the streets to the dun, dun! of the tram chugging on its tracks. They are your neighbor leaning off the balcony; they are a hawker selling peaches; they are that banker hailing the last rickshaw in the area to pursue the night in a different district. They are, quite simply, Shanghai.

Until they grab the man who walked out from the dance hall, throwing him against an alley wall as easily as one would toss a wad of gum.

The man gasps, scrambles. He had been buzzing pleasantly in his drunkenness, barely able to see two feet in front of him; he cannot summon his wits back fast enough to comprehend this attack, nor the blur of an assailant standing above him when he stumbles to the ground.

“Please,” he heaves, trying to scoot away. “You want money? I have money.”

There, in the alley: another victim, to be taken.

The glint of a needle flashes under the streetlight. Then its wicked sharpness, forced into the soft of the man’s elbow. He tries to escape, but the grip on his shoulder is iron, holding him down.

It burns. Like fire rushing through his veins in place of blood, pulsing through his heart and ravaging everything it passes. Though he fights it, though he screams and screams and screams, the noise is only one more added ruckus to Shanghai as the city beats on.

When the needle is tugged out, a single drop of its contents splatters onto the man’s clothes.

But the man won’t care.

He is already dead.