The Wakefield Case

A velvet-curtained London dusk, crimson footlights guttering against the Thames fog, ushers us into the spectral proscenium where Arthur Wakefield, Jr.—ink still drying on his latest melodrama—learns that his father has been murdered for four Burmese rubies wrenched from the British Museum’s reliquary. The gems, whispered to pulse like dying suns, become a compass of grief; the son, once content to conjure fictive villains, now stalks real shadows across Whitechalleles, Liverpool docks, and finally the sodium-lit canyons of Manhattan. Florence Billings’ Ruth Gregg—alias “the Breen girl,” alias a clandestine Secret Service operative—materializes as both siren and cipher, her cigarette ember mapping Morse code on the dark. Every identity is a palimpsest: the two ruby-thieving brothers swap names like cravats; a dockside medium reads tarot in which every card bears Wakefield’s face; a transatlantic steamer becomes a floating interrogation chamber where love and espionage waltz in 3/4 time. When Wakefield corners the last impostor in a Coney Island fun-house of shifting mirrors, the reflected rubies fracture into kaleidoscopic guilt, revealing that justice is merely another script waiting for its final rewrite.