Summary
Amid the gas-lit labyrinth of a city that never quite exhales, Boston Blackie Dawson—gentleman cracksman, midnight philosopher, collector of other men’s guilt—slips through a velvet-black alley clutching a cigarette-case of Romanov fire: cabochon sapphires fat as thumbnails, diamond garlands once warmed by a czarina’s clavicle, rubies that remember the 1917 snow before the snow remembered blood. Word of the hoard leaks like absinthe through floorboards; suddenly every rooftop seems to sprout a leather-aproned bomb-thrower with a grudge against history. The Red ghosts want the jewels to bankroll a worldwide reprisal; Blackie wants them because they are beautiful and because beauty is the only revolution he still believes in. What follows is a moonlit chase across cathedrals, freight yards, and rooftop pagodas of laundry, a danse macabre scored by trolley bells and the wet thunk of throwing knives. Along the way a monocled cinematograph magnate (Lowell Sherman, all teeth and treachery) barters celluloid for secrets, a Russian countess in exile (Seena Owen) trades her last pearl for a ticket to anywhere, and Lionel Barrymore’s wheezing police inspector—half bloodhound, half Hamlet—haunts every station-house like a conscience with a badge. The climax detonates inside an abandoned East Boston aquarium where moonlight drips through broken skylights onto shattered tanks: Blackie, cornered by anarchists and law alike, tosses the jewels into a pool of phosphorescent jellyfish, letting history sink where memory cannot follow, then vanishes into the fog, pockets empty but conscience oddly full.
Synopsis
Boston Blackie Dawson gets some jewels that belonged to the imperial family of Russia. A gang of terrorists is after the jewels.
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