The Face in the Fog

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.