Chapter Four. Ang Hor Tiap #3
While the other kongsi had begun as enclaves of men who hailed from the same origin, Red Butterfly gathered its members not by where they came from, but on their circumstances once they had left it.
It drew amahs and prostitutes and third daughters, dancers and serving girls, women with burning hearts seeking better company and more power.
In a Chinatown run by adults and men, Madam Butterfly had defied everything.
Lone young girls weren’t meant to survive on their own.
But the first Butterfly had the will to claim fire, and with the fire she claimed her place, and the place of all the girls after her.
That had been fifty years and eleven Madams ago. The kongsi life was short and often strenuous. It ran on hot blood.
“Your mother became Red Butterfly’s conduit eighteen years ago,” Tian said. “That’s the longest anyone has ever been Madam.”
Adeline was still struggling to take all this in. “And now she’s dead. In a fire. Someone set it.”
“No Butterfly would have killed your mother. It would have—” Tian stopped, something occurring to her.
Adeline held her tongue. There were times when silence was more productive than demands, and sure enough, Tian continued abruptly.
“There’s only ever been one Butterfly who went rogue.
It doesn’t happen now. It doesn’t happen,” she insisted, seeing Adeline’s expression.
“When?”
Tian set her jaw, drummed uneasily on the table. “Bukit Ho Swee.”
A fire legendary in itself. Adeline had only been six years old when Bukit Ho Swee burned, but you couldn’t escape the stories, even now.
Her mother pointed out the new flats as they drove past once, sitting on the land where three thousand squatter houses had caught ablaze, displacing sixteen thousand and killing a dozen.
The story was always that there was no story; no one knew how it had begun.
Her mother had used it as a warning for their own fire: We cannot be that.
Adeline almost remembered it differently now.
We cannot be her. “My mother killed her?” Why had she jumped right to that conclusion?
The stories were getting in her head, the radio scandals, fanciful bloody thrills she could never have imagined putting her mother into.
She felt like she was forcing her mother to fit.
Had to make her unrecognizable in order to make any sense.
Tian studied her with a closeness that Adeline had to look away from. It was too like curiosity. “You’re bleeding.” Tian cast around for a napkin, which she tried to dab at Adeline’s throat. Adeline snatched it first.
“Don’t touch me.”
Tian leaned away with her palms up, making a show of how not within touching distance she was.
Irritated, Adeline blotted at her neck where Tian had nicked her, which she hadn’t even realized was bleeding in the first place.
Behind Tian, Ah Wang was rolling up the grille. It was almost time to open.
“I know what it’s like to lose family,” Tian said.
“Did I ask?”
“You smell like fire,” Tian continued. “Were you there when your mother died?”
Adeline was caught off guard by the gentleness of the question. Had flashes, again, of fire—and then of everything blurring, of a white fire hotter than anything she’d ever summoned—remembered the smell. “I burned the butterfly off her.”
Tian blinked, perturbed now. “What?” she said, in a voice that indicated she had heard perfectly well, but wished she hadn’t.
Both of them unbalanced—good. “The police won’t find it,” Adeline continued, strings of sense finally knotting themselves together.
Whatever instinct had taken her over had perhaps saved them; saved everything her mother owned and saved Jenny’s.
She had no doubt that if the police connected her mother at all to these fire girls, nothing would be left unturned.
Tian shook her head. “Who did your tattoo?”
“I don’t have a tattoo.”
“That’s impossible. How do you have the fire if you don’t have the butterfly?”
So there was another piece. The tattoos, the magic. “Ask my mother.”
Tian grimaced, and Adeline took the opportunity to press her back. “That woman earlier said you burn shops down.”
Tian raised an eyebrow. For a moment Adeline was horrified again, that she’d believed some fanciful rumor.
But then Tian shrugged. “We threaten to. And they remember the days when Red Butterflies did, they remember what happened at Bukit Ho Swee, they know what we’re capable of.
But really … now, the police move too fast. They have new ways of getting evidence and witnesses.
We make the threat convincing and hope we never need to follow through. Big things like that are too risky.”
It certainly sounded like her mother’s principles. “So you don’t burn things?”
“Disappointed?” A smile crept onto Tian’s mouth. “You really are crazy. I wish we’d met sooner.” She lit her fingers again, with overwhelming easiness, and again Adeline couldn’t help but stare, reminding herself fire could be contained.
“But I can join you now, right?” She didn’t know exactly what that entailed, but suddenly it was the only thing that made sense. Her mother’s death could be worth it, if it gave her these other girls with fire. Something had to be worth it.
“Of course,” Tian said, almost eagerly. “You’re—” She stopped at a noise behind them, but it was just Ah Wang again, pulling stools off the tables and setting out ashtrays.
When she refocused, it was to look Adeline over.
“The fire isn’t supposed to be passed down, you know.
You have to go through the rites to earn it.
You should have been given the tattoo. Even the Butterflies who leave are stripped of the power.
If what you say is true, that you were born with it, maybe your mother was keeping other secrets, too. ”
“Secrets that got her killed?”
“There’s a triad, Three Steel, that’s been expanding aggressively recently.
They’re one of the biggest and oldest kongsi.
They run big business in drugs and things, not petty things like we do.
But in the past few months they’ve been expanding.
They took over two other gangs and killed one of the tang ki ko, took the other’s loyalty, took all their territory. ”
Adeline had never heard the title before, but she could figure it was referring to the conduit leaders of the gangs. It was the first thing anywhere near an explanation. It grounded her, wrestled her erratic thoughts back on a path. “So they made my mother the same offer?”
“Red Butterfly should be too small to be worth their time—we don’t interfere with their business. But maybe your mother was involved in something we didn’t know about. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”
“Stop that, Tian.” The older Butterfly—Tian had called her Pek Mun—strode up. She’d clearly been listening in for a while, and now she nudged Tian’s attention to the entrance of the shop. “The girls are here. We need to talk ourselves.”
They were no longer alone, and likely hadn’t been for some time, without Adeline noticing: a group of girls hovered on the coffee shop’s threshold, a murmuration of butterfly tattoos on wrists, ankles, collarbones. All of them were openly staring at Adeline.
“Tian,” one of them said, “is this the girl from the Orchid?”
Pek Mun cleared her throat and rapped on the nearest tabletop at Adeline.
“You need to leave.” Tian made a noise of protest, but Pek Mun ignored her.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” she continued, sounding genuinely kind, “but we will figure this out ourselves. Don’t mess with things you don’t understand.
Your guardians, your school, the police, everyone will be looking for you.
We don’t need the attention if they find you here. ”
Adeline’s panic rose. “No one cares where I am.”
“You’re a missing rich girl whose mother just got murdered. Of course they do.” When Adeline didn’t move, Pek Mun leaned forward. “You have fire; that doesn’t make you one of us. Go home.”
Adeline looked at Tian, who looked at Pek Mun. They had a silent glaring conversation. And then, with a twist in Adeline’s stomach, Tian backed down. “You’ll be safer there,” she told Adeline. “That’s what matters.”
That wasn’t it. It clearly wasn’t, but Adeline had nothing else to argue with. Tian flexed her fingers on the tabletop as though she wanted to clench them. Still, she said nothing more.
Though Adeline had no reason to expect Tian’s loyalty, somehow she’d come to want it. Not even want it—it ran deeper than that, down to the fiery pit of her—but demand it.
But she liked even less appearing desperate for their company.
“Go to Genevieve Hwang,” Pek Mun said abruptly. “Before they find you with us.”
Adeline walked into Jenny’s. It had just opened. She went in the front doors.
Go to Genevieve Hwang, Pek Mun had said, knowing so much in one sentence.
Who her mother’s close partners were. Who remained to clean up her affairs—and her daughter—now that she was dead.
The Butterflies knew her mother far more than she ever had.
It didn’t make sense that Jenny’s was still standing. It didn’t deserve to be there still.
But here it was: fluorescent lights and artificial air, vapid women with their hideous taste and their pointless squabbles and dreary husbands.
Her mother must have been with the Butterflies every time she had an odd secretive meeting, every time she claimed she had a call with Johor that ran too late. And the fire, and the lies.
Adeline got to the center of the store before sinking at the feet of a mannequin, tangling her fingers in its long skirt. The silk slid over her skin. Then it started to smoke.
A shadow fell over her. It was attached at the heels to a pair of glossy pumps, which led up to a fine blue skirt, and then up to a string of pearls and curled hair, and then Genevieve Hwang was kneeling next to her and pulling Adeline into a frantic hug.
Adeline didn’t return it. “Did you know about Red Butterfly?” she said in Genevieve’s ear.
Genevieve stiffened and drew back just enough to look her in the eyes, their expressions and words both concealed from any passersby. This close, Adeline could see the bumps of her face under the expensive powder. “How did you find out?” Genevieve whispered.
Adeline thought, So she really did tell you everything.
The first night in which Adeline’s mother had also betrayed her had been as fluid as this one, the stages blurring all together even as they occurred.
She had been young enough to be stirred by a nightmare, sidling off the edge of the mattress seeking her mother and finding, in the living room, her mother burning a palmful of fire with Genevieve cupping the hand under her.
They had been talking in low voices like they had a secret—the way Adeline’s mother was only supposed to talk to her.
“You said we couldn’t tell anyone,” Adeline had demanded, when her mother wrestled her back to bed.
“Auntie Genevieve is family.” Her mother had been rougher than usual, her color high. “We can tell family.”
Adeline had no other family to rebut this with. But she’d lain there, unable to fall asleep, staring at the tiniest flame she could balance on her pinkie and being careful not to let it touch the blanket. She’d hated Genevieve from that point on.
And yet here she was, in an unfamiliar bed in Genevieve’s guest room wearing a too-large nightdress, slowly combing out the last smudges of ash from her hair.
Every time she turned away from the mirror she saw in its withdrawing reflection her mother slashed in flame.
She switched the light off, tucked herself in, and breathed into her knees.
Another memory was shaking loose: her mother kissing her on the forehead, her lips so hot they left a red mark.
She had smelled like ash, and Adeline had dreamed that night of homes burning; perhaps she’d also dreamed the kiss, in hindsight.