Doctor Nicholson and the Blue Diamond

A threadbare aristocrat, Count Jules de Barton—his coronet pawned, his patrimony devoured by phylloxera and roulette—crosses the Atlantic in steerage with nothing save a moth-eaten cloak and a crested signet. America, 1912, is a gaudy bazaar of moving pictures, trust titans, and nickelodeons; the Count, rechristening himself “Doctor Nicholson,” peddles phrenology lectures in boom-town lyceums while casing the social columns for a swifter fortune. In a Chicago salon perfumed by tuberoses and larceny he hears whispers of the Blue Diamond, a cursed Mughal stone smuggled West by an anarchist cell; its facets refract not only cobalt fire but the promise of enough liquidity to resurrect ruined vineyards outside Lyon. Edith Buemann’s character—part anarchist courier, part prima ballerina—glides into his orbit during a benefit for “striking silk-weavers,” her décolletage concealing the gem in a hollow stays-button. Anton de Verdier’s Pinkerton pursues both jewel and girl with sanctimonious fervor, while Holger Reenberg’s tycoon covets the stone to corner the anthracite market. The narrative corkscrews from ice-flecked Lake Michigan piers to a Wyoming rope-bridge at twilight, where the diamond, shot from a cannon into a snow-storm, becomes a falling star that may grant redemption, damnation, or merely another mirage to European exiles who mistook the New World for a blank ledger.