The Lure

Charlotte Baker’s betrothal becomes a velvet-lined trap when Paul—her ostensibly respectable fiancé—slips a narcotic into her champagne and delivers her, limp as a marionette, to an east-side brothel whose crimson wallpaper seems to bleed by candlelight. While her kin summon the celebrated sleuth Bob Macauley—a hawk-eyed investigator whose reputation glimmers like a gas-lamp in fog—his beloved Sylvia, a shop-girl juggling unpaid rent and a tubercular mother, is promised a promotion that evaporates into thin, perfumed air. Desperation leads her to a maternal-seeming patron whose visiting card smells of lilacs and menace; one cab ride later Sylvia finds herself incarcerated in the same gilded bordello, her name chalked onto a mahogany door. Bob, adopting the soot-streaked guise of a meter reader, prowls the corridors, only to confront Sylvia beneath a chandelier of crystal teardrops. Misapprehension flares, collapses, and gives way to a rescue that detonates the house’s mirrored halls—Paul is dragged away in manacles, while Charlotte and Sylvia emerge blinking into daylight like prisoners unaccustomed to the sun.