Jada Versailles and Ayano Ilanescu

Book One of the Cheshire Trilogy

CHESHIRE

Jada Versailles was an easy woman to hate. Her hair looked like she got up early to wash, blow dry, and curl it. Her nails weren’t chipped. Her clothes looked expensive. How could she walk in heels that high all day? She appeared, to most people in Gotham City, like a beautiful, professional woman of exotic ancestry who had never suffered any hardship in her entire life and never would.

Her father had been Japanese and her mother was Brazilian. Jada’s skin was a light tan color, which darkened during many trips to the beach in the summer. She had long black hair that she liked to wear down in waves. People asked her if she was Filipina or Native American all the time. It was probably her eyes. Her eyes looked sort of Asian but they were green. Yes, she’d say, latinas can have green eyes. In 1997, people in the States were more politically correct and culturally aware than in the 80s, but she still got a lot of strange questions about latin culture and Brazil. Gisele Bundchen was emerging as a popular model, inadvertently helping to spread the existing stereotype over time that all Brazilian women were Sex objects.

Parts of her appearance couldn’t be helped, or at least, weren’t meant to inspire envy. Without shoes, she was 5′ 9″. She was fit because she actually liked the exercise she did. She had been doing capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art, from an early age, having found the dance groups too catty and the sports groups too teamwork oriented for her taste. The expensive ensemble, though? Part of her knew that expensive things were just things and that money should be spent on necessities because of all the poverty in the world. She knew this better than most, growing up in Brazil. But another part knew that beautiful people were treated better and she had had enough maltreatment in her lifetime.

When she was younger and saved up enough to buy the right shoes and the right clothes, the tourists, police officers, store owners– everyone– treated her like a person. If she tried to take a shortcut home through the grounds of a nice hotel while wearing her work clothes, someone would invariably shoo her away. Out-of-towners would give her that simpering smile while thinking “poor thing.” Her mother spent her spending money on nice clothes, too. Even when they could use a new stove or it was the second notice for the electric bill. Jada and her mother knew that a new stove might make cooking easier, but they would still be in their social caste- the working poor who were scraping by. Brand name clothes, purses, and jewelry, that was how to make it feel like they weren’t constantly struggling living in their neighborhood.

Jada had discovered clothes as a status symbol by fashion show photos in Vogue Magazine. She considered her life at home with her mom in their cramped apartment to be behind the scenes, like backstage at a fashion show. When she left, she had to project an image to the world that she was happy, confident, and not poor. Some people in her life would be able to see the goings-on backstage, but most would not.

And television! Television was also an effective way to be taken out of the neighborhood. It sucked having to plan her walk home from school to avoid things like gang members, drug addicts, or thieves. She loved to escape into romantic telenovelas or joyful singers on the stage. This is where she learned how to behave around people. Her mother wasn’t exactly negligent, but she was very interested in finding a husband most of the time, leaving Jada to develop her own ideas about men and sexuality and everything else. But the example was clear- men are important. Do everything for them so they don’t run away, like her father had.

Her father used to swear up and down that he was going to marry her mother. That was, until the Japanese members of his family threatened to cut him off financially if he married “the latina.” Apparently, when given the choice, a child out of wedlock was preferable to a latina in the family. A combination of her mother’s emotional distance and her father’s guilt got her sent to the best boarding school in Brazil at age 14. She got into a reputable art school in Gotham City, in os Estados Unidos. All these environments and factors were what constructed Jada’s idea about how to look, act, and date.

Sometimes, Jada wanted a boyfriend so badly, above all else. Other times, she sort of stumbled into these things. She vamped because you were supposed to vamp. She wore risque outfits because that’s what starlets wore. And if a man wanted to fool around with her, she may as well go along with it. She could say no sometimes, but she had hooked up with guys that she had no interest in. How she felt about the guy wasn’t as important as the innate masculine authority he possessed. Jada was so accustomed to having her feelings ignored that she often didn’t take them into account when making decisions.

As an Adult, she ran a successful art gallery. She could tell you how much most paintings in the gallery were worth off the top of her head, or what the latest Van Gogh sold for at auction. When she was bored on the subway, she would guess how much people’s shoes and purses cost. She knew the value of a lot of things, but she gave herself away too often because of the exchange rate: the right kind of Love and affection from a man was so valuable to her that she would pay almost anything offered in exchange. If she had to deal with her partner’s difficult family, their financial problems, advice on what to wear– anything like that, it was worth it. Love was the only thing she wanted, the rest was gravy.

Women disliked women that looked like her, but her disadvantage was that she had no idea what was acceptable behavior from a loved one. Men got away with a lot. She had intimacy problems with her friends, too. In art school, her closest friend was her roommate, Grace. Grace walked in on Jada naked with another woman. They had been dating for months. Why hadn’t she told Grace? For Jada, everything was on a need-to-know basis. Her guest star father off in Japan was so secretive, it made Jada secretive, and assume everyone else was being secretive as well. Maybe sneaking around was thrilling, or just a guarded practice of not putting all her eggs in one basket. No one person should know everything about her, right?

There were more secrets. Being the boss at the gallery gave her a lot of flexibility in her schedule. Sometimes, by night, she was known as Cheshire. She wore a mask and cowl, green armor, and advanced weaponry. The alias Cheshire referred to the green smoke she could summon from devices on her wrists and disappear like the Cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland. The smoke was always a different kind of poison and almost never fatal. When gangs in her neighborhood talked about gunshot wounds, Jada had always heard about trying to scare a guy and shooting him dead by accident or an enemy escaping with just a slug in the arm. Guns were clearly too unreliable. Poisons, when well studied, were predictable.

At her father’s funeral, an uncle she had only met in passing approached her about looking after her now that her father was gone. This uncle was always referred to as a chemist, and maybe he was, but it was also apparent that he was involved with organized crime. It was only after her gallery was struggling that she took her uncle up on his offer. He helped her to create Cheshire.

The Cheshire identity was a criminal one, designed mainly to supplement her income. Jada would be damned if she was going to struggle financially ever again. She carefully researched valuable items to steal and sell– or collect for herself. As a fighter, she was a force to be reckoned with, but lately Jada had lost one too many encounters with other criminals and law enforcement. This training had taken her as far as it could; she would need to update her skill set if she were to continue in her new secret life as a criminal/collector.

UMBRELLAS

Tokyo, 1983

A ten-year-old girl named Jada Luciana Martines Kaneko ducked behind a vending machine at a Tokyo subway station. Peering around the corner, she saw that she wasn’t being pursued by anyone. Trying to appear cool and collected, she grabbed her heavy pink and white shopping bag and walked to the platform to take the train home.

After she entered the gates of her father’s estate, Jada went off the path into a wooded area a few meters away. She emptied the contents of her bag into a trunk behind a gardening shed: five different umbrellas. They joined dozens of others. She had been visiting her father for two weeks now, she had plenty of time to discover a way to act out and get good at it. Naturally, Jada didn’t need dozens of umbrellas, but children begin to steal or shoplift during times of significant emotional upset.

Jada’s father was dating a Japanese woman and thought he had concealed this from Jada. No such luck. She was sharp. Posing as just work friends, Yamashiro Kaneko and his colleague Mariko spent little time in the same room together when Jada would visit the office. However, when Jada and her father were walking his dog, they ran into Mariko and stopped to chat. As the wind picked up, Yamashiro lectured his daughter about zipping her jacket. When she fumbled with the zipper, he handed the dog’s leash to Mariko without a word to help Jada with her jacket. If they had really been work friends, he would have politely asked “Could you hold this leash for a minute, Ms. Sumi?” The fact that he just handed it to her suggested a level of familiarity that he had not displayed with any other female Jada had met.

It was no surprise to most people that Yamashiro would be dating. After all, he and Jada’s mother, Aurélia, had broken up nearly seven years ago. But Jada saw this woman Mariko as a threat to her fleeting closeness with her father. She only got to see him once a year–maybe twice– since she lived far away, in Brazil. When he went out for the evening, she knew he was out with her on a date.

And what was she supposed to do with this information? Her mother had been so heartbroken when she understood that Yamashiro was not coming back to Brazil and was not going to marry the mother of his child. Jada was too young to remember that, but Aurélia really only mentioned Jada’s father as the man who broke her heart. Aurélia had also been dating for years now, but Jada felt like she was carrying a secret that would upset her fragile mother.

She was split between two worlds and didn’t feel safe, secure, or loved in either one. Acting out and inevitably getting in trouble would only make her life even harder, so she found ways to express her frustration. She would do “bad” stuff, both praying that she wouldn’t get caught and hoping she would.

In Japan, kids took the subway by themselves all the time. People were sort of expected to do the right thing there, but Jada started stealing things from people. Umbrellas proved to be the easiest thing to snatch and she might not get in too much trouble if she were caught. She was hooked, becoming enthralled with the sneakiness of her daring conquests.

This time, when she came back to her stash, her father’s younger brother Tanjiro had seen her and approached from behind.

“<What are you up to, Jada?>” he asked in Japanese. She jumped.

“<I… I found them…>” she stuttered, wishing her lie weren’t so lame. Tanjiro kneeled to look through the trunk and smiled.

“<You should try stealing bicycles. Better resale value.>” he told her, standing up once more. “<When I was your age, I’d steal bicycles. I got pretty good at it.>”

“<Are you going to tell my dad?>” she asked suspiciously.

“<I’m going to tell your dad to get you some Judo lessons to keep you occupied. If you got caught doing this, he would not be pleased. It would bring him great shame. You don’t want to do that, do you?>” he asked.

“<No.>” she conceded.

“<Let’s go back to the house, Jada.>” he said, taking her hand even though she considered herself way too old for hand holding. Didn’t he know anything?

Over the years, Jada would see her uncle even less frequently than her father. If Tanjiro’s visits to Yamashiro’s house coincided with Jada’s visit, he made a point to spend quality time with her while everyone else was fawning over Yamashiro and Mariko’s new babies. Those stupid half-brothers got so much attention and they were 100% Japanese, not half Brazilian like her. They were always treated better in her mind and occasionally in reality.

Tanjiro encouraged her to keep going with Judo lessons and praised her progress in capoeira, a martial art she did back home in Brazil. Her uncle didn’t spend all that much time with her, nor did he make an extraordinary effort to be kind to her. The little he did was enough to make a meaningful impression because in the area of male affection, Jada was a low-hanging fruit.

Yamashiro died young, at the age of forty, from a heart condition that he told no one but Mariko about. It was even more evidence for Jada that they weren’t close. Jada was only twenty years old, still just a student at an art school in America. At the funeral, Tanjiro took Jada aside for a talk. He rolled up his sleeves. His arms were covered in Yakuza tattoos.

“Do you know what these are?” he asked her, now an English speaker, too.

“Yakuza?” she guessed. Everyone in Tokyo knew about the Yakuza, even little girls that only visited once or twice a year.

“Have you thought about your future? Your career?” he questioned her.

“I’m in school.” she said dismissively.

“Very few people make a living doing paintings, Jada. If you ever need guidance, some career counseling, come see me. I will always take care of you.” Tanjiro told her. It seemed like a decent, noble offer at the time, but Jada said she’d think about it. At the reading of her father’s will, Jada received a large amount of money from her father. It was completely surprising. Tanjiro was the only extended family who showed an interest in her well-being before he knew about the money.

Jada used the money to buy an art gallery in Gotham City, where she had been attending art school. It became successful, but Jada wanted every hour of every day to be packed with something. She had a hole in her soul. She needed projects, goals, hobbies, relationships, anything to stay busy. If she stood still for too long, the grief would catch her. The loneliness would catch her. What else could she do?

One night, after a few drinks, she called Tanjiro to take him up on his offer. For the next few years, she did jobs for her uncle. She wasn’t Yakuza, per se, but rather a liaison between Yakuza and organizations that require a beautiful young woman to access. Some projects were in Tokyo, but most were in Gotham City as she kept the gallery running. Eventually, he developed an alias for her thieving interests: Cheshire. She got a costume and learned about poisons. He helped her become an excellent thief capable of defending herself in dangerous situations.

Jada didn’t harbor any delusions of Tanjiro being a good person. She just knew it was an opportunity to develop skills and work for a powerful man who would never try to sleep with her and that was good enough. The jobs she did for him were highly exciting, dangerous, and illegal. She harmed people all the time and always criminals. No one innocent. Only on one occasion did Jada have to kill someone. Tanjiro was there for her, helping her hide the body and telling her about his first kill and the distress it had caused him. It wasn’t an altogether terrible experience for her. After all, it was the first time an Adult male spoke to her about her emotional experience.

For the two years that she worked for Tanjiro, he warned her constantly about getting romantically involved with the Yakuza.

“If you accept a date, accept a gift, accept a kiss with one of them- you will be theirs. You will either be disposed of in a dumpster when he is done with you or you will marry him and all of your little boys and girls will be Yakuza, and their children after them. As your oyabun, some have asked me if they can court you and I have said no. Please, if you must disobey something that I tell you, don’t let it be this.” Tanjiro told her. Jada did not make a habit of dating in Japan.

After working with Tanjiro for two years, he released her. She could go on however she chose. Tanjiro had taught her how to hide money, too, so she was living a comfortable life in Gotham City without the government taxing her very much. Her gallery was immensely successful, but her income was nicely supplemented. But also, while in Tokyo, she had discovered some very unusual Japanese artists. At this time, many young American men were reading manga and ogling geisha girls- Japan was Hot. So was her gallery.

Reflecting back on her time in Japan, Jada had no regrets. She was sure that some of the projects she helped with resulted in bad things and people getting hurt, but she also helped on disaster relief and public works. If Tanjiro had not released her, she knew she would have been trapped in the Yakuza life forever. Organized crime wasn’t all bad and wasn’t all good, it just needed to be no-strings-attached for her to get involved. When she chose her independent criminal projects, she was mindful to ask herself: “How bad is this? Will I ever be able to get out once I get in?” This philosophy would take years to seep into her personal life.

RAZ-NEVA

It was the end of winter in 1997. Jada’s gallery was getting more successful each year and her other life as Cheshire was getting really exciting. She had been robbing small museums, the homes of private collectors, and corporate offices that displayed art that was a little too appealing. During these heists, she had encountered superheroes only three times. And, while she managed to escape Green Lantern and Geo-Force without too much trouble, her encounter with Katana was a sobering experience. This woman, a member of a team called The Outsiders, was a martial arts expert and had nearly apprehended Jada. So, she decided that her skills needed a little upgrading. She wanted something obscure that these cape-and-mask assholes wouldn’t see coming.

Over a few months, she started to hear about many different martial arts and training techniques through her faceless acquaintances on the internet, capoeira class, her gym, elite cocktail parties, and not-so-elite parties with rich college students. Everyone always claimed that their class or retreat was life-changing, but one caught Jada’s attention. She ended up choosing an athletic retreat in Marseilles, France after exploring many different options. Young and old, rich and well, less rich: all of Jada’s acquaintances said that this “Health and Power” retreat was totally life changing.

The professional instruction in swimming, running, acrobatics, and martial arts was appealing. If she didn’t like one class, she could jump to another. And if they were all bad, she’d be in the south of France. Although she hadn’t heard of it before, their featured martial art this year was called Războinic nevăzut, or Răz-nevă. It meant “unseen warrior” and it was practiced in tournaments around the world, although it originated somewhere in Eastern Europe. The idea was to disarm and surprise aggressors with elements of many different fighting styles.

For six weeks, she would learn with thirty men and women from a local entrepreneur of some sort who had studied it for years and won a few championship belts. The retreat seemed to be marketed toward bored, rich adrenaline junkies with whom she hoped to blend in. The workouts would be challenging enough for her and the setting was fabulous enough that wouldn’t be too unusual for an art gallery owner to attend anything there.