A Modern Monte Cristo
Summary
A Modern Monte Cristo strips Dumas’ marble-carved revenge epic to its marrow, then re-inflates it with Prohibition-era bile. Dr. Emerson—charcoal-suited wunderkind of Bellevue—bleeds hubris at his own stag soirée, crowing over a twenty-grand inducement to let a gilded patient perish. One envious rival, nursing both wounded pride and a prior claim on the same woman, uncorks vintage poison until dawn; the scheduled scalpel becomes a drunken dream, the millionaire dies, and an unsigned epistle pins the corpse to Emerson’s lapel. Handcuffed, frog-marched toward a tomb of limestone and rust, the physician dives into the Hudson’s ink, surfaces only in rumor. Years calcify: the accuser commodifies grief, weds the forsaken fiancée, commands a mercantile armada. On a fog-loomed pier his flaxen child befriends a taciturn tar who signs the sickbay log with a surgeon’s flourish; days later she vanishes, spirited aboard a coffin-scow whose planks bear her father’s seal. Months dissolve until a barnstorming ace lands on the mansion lawn, returns the girl with a billet-doux: “She has been saved by your bitterest enemy. Beware. Some day he will strike through her.” The child prattles of shipwreck, of a bearded savior who stitched her lacerations with catgut and bedtime myths; the tycoon’s blood ices as he deciphers the signature stitched in merciless thread.
Synopsis
The conversation at Dr. Emerson's farewell bachelor dinner veered to the struggles in the medical world to achieve success legitimately. "Tomorrow," said Emerson, "I operate on a rich old man; one of his relatives offered me $20,000 if he dies." After the others had departed, the rejected suitor lingered, and kept Emerson up late, plying him with wine. The next day, he was unfit for the operation, and the patient died. The police arrested Emerson on evidence contained in an anonymous letter and statement of the rejected suitor that Emerson had confessed the crime. On the way to prison Emerson escaped by jumping into the river, and after a futile search was reported as drowned. Years passed, and the rival, who had married Emerson's former fiancée, became a successful ship owner. On visiting one of his ships his little daughter makes friends with a morose sailor, and a few days later she disappears. After several months an aviator brings her back to her father, with a note tucked in her dress, "She has been saved by your bitterest enemy. Beware. Some day he will strike through her." She tells of the trip on one of his own leaky boats, the wreck, and her rescue by the sailor "doctor man," and her father realizes with terror who his enemy is.
