Summary
A sepia-toned parable of metallurgical destiny: Peggy Muldoon, born amid the clatter of tumblers and the ozone scent of blown safes, inherits her father’s auric genius—ears tuned to the faint lisp of brass pins yielding to steel. Emerson’s essays drift into her cell-like garret like contraband starlight; transcendentalist cadences corrode the patina of larceny until she resolves, with almost monastic contrition, to renounce lock-picking forever. A final, ironic heist—an exhalation of acetylene and nostalgia—lands her in striped penitential twilight. Two calendars later she surfaces in a sun-bleached California nowhere, trading iron bars for domestic linen, marrying genial banker Robert whose glass-bricked temple of credit promises absolution. Yet the past, wearing fedoras and smelling of gun oil, arrives to blackmail: crack your husband’s vault or kiss the illusion of respectability goodbye. Between the Scylla of betrayal and the Charybdis of return, Peggy must decide whether identity is forged or merely picked.
Synopsis
Patrick "The Ear" Muldoon, a professional safecracker, passes on his skills to his daughter Peggy. However, after reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's books, Peggy decides to forego a life of crime, after pulling one last job. Unfortunately, she's arrested for that crime and sent to prison for two years. When she gets out of prison she moves to California and meets Robert Benton, who works in a local bank. Theu marry and are living happily--until Peggy's old gang shows up and threatens to tell her husband about her past unless she helps them crack the safe in his bank.
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