The Thumb Print

Summary

A velvet-gloved viper slithers into the marble atrium of high finance: the self-styled Comte de Varnèse—really Vico Morelli, gutter-king of the Parisian underworld—threads a diamond through the reluctant finger of Céleste, the banker Duvallier’s luminously naïve heiress, so that the very handshake sealing their betrothal becomes the skeleton key to a vault of secrets. Penniless titles, however, tarnish quickly; when the tycoon’s vigilance threatens to unmask the suitor as a fraud, the Count opts for the irreversible erasure of murder. On a rain-lacquered night he glides into the private study, chloroforms the old man, and leaves a single bloody thumbprint—deliberately smudged, a false constellation meant to mislead the gendarmerie. Yet the gods of evidence are capricious: a sliver of glazed-kid leather, flayed from his boot during the struggle, clings to the Axminster like a mute confession. Enter Inspector Joubert, part bloodhound, part metaphysician, who weighs scuffs and stitches with the gravity of Holy Scripture, while inside the bank a quisling secretary shreds ledgers on behalf of his clandestine paymaster. A second pair of boots—mirror-scarred, down-sized—are planted in a cobbler’s stall, bait that nearly snares the wrong feet. The Count, savoring the chase, presses his actual dactylogram into paraffin and gifts it to the prefecture; the ridges refuse to marry their crime-scene ghost, and the impostor’s grin widens. From Turin arrives the telegram that could cauterize the masquerade: the authentic countess, abandoned years earlier, recognizes newspaper portraits of her “husband” and sails to confront bigamy. Steel flashes in an alley; she collapses, voiceless, a paper-thin photograph of her kidnapped son pinned to her chemise like a death warrant. Joubert, now stalking corridors that reek of turpentine and treachery, steals the child from a brothel attic, trades silence for safety, and unspools the final reel in a candle-lit ossuary beneath Montmartre where masks melt and titles burn.

Synopsis

The head of a gang of thieves and criminals is posing as a count and becomes engaged to the daughter of the banker, his engagement being the means whereby he can work himself into the good graces of the banker's prominent friends. It is owing to a shortness of money and the possibility of the banker discovering his identity, that he decides to murder the banker, take his keys, rob the safe and leave a fingerprint behind that shall throw anybody off the scent of the real murderer. Whilst the murder is taking place, the criminal accidentally scrapes a piece of glace kid off his boot. This is discovered by the detective who has been called in upon the case. The criminal is well protected, inasmuch as the secretary of the banker is one of his own paid gang, and hearing of the discovery of the defective boot, to further throw the responsibility off the count, another pair of boots is obtained and identically torn. These boots are sold to a cobbler, who exposes them out for sale, where they are recognized by one of the detective's understudies. A search is made of the count's house and his boots examined, but they do not correspond in size with those that they bought at the cobbler. Still, the detective feels that the count is in some way responsible; yet, he is unable to fasten any evidence whatever upon him. In a sort of challenge, the count calls upon the detective and offers to put among his collections the true copy of his own fingerprint. This is immediately compared with the one the detective discovered on the day of the crime. It further baffles the detective, inasmuch as there is no similarity. Nevertheless, he decides to find out all he can of the count, and sends to Italy for description and particulars of his past life. He is fortunate enough to find that the real count deserted his wife some time back, since which time he had not been heard of. Incidentally, the wife also sees the announcement of the engagement of the supposed count to the banker's daughter and decides to look up her husband before he commits bigamy. On arrival, she finds that the count is not her husband, but an impostor. Before she has time to give the identity of the man she has come to see. She is stabbed, but not killed. While sick in bed, one of the accomplices of the criminal leaves a photo of her child and suggests that if she opens her mouth against the count, the child will be killed. The detective is still balked in his endeavors to get information, so decides to raid the apartments of the count and make comparisons of his boots and sundry other things. While doing this, he is heard and discovered. In his endeavor to run away, without being recognized, he takes the wrong passage and finds himself in a trap. Fortunately, he is strong and is able to escape from the house. His suspicions now are doubled, and he decides to obtain the child himself, with the view to making the mother speak. After this, the story ends pretty quickly, and conclusive proof soon found of the entire guilt of the supposed count and his confederates, all of whom are captured in their secret rendezvous.