Summary
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.
Synopsis
A playwright, Wakefield, Jr., turns detective when his father is killed after nearly capturing two brothers in possession of four rubies belonging to the British Museum. An investigation suggests that "the Breen girl" is responsible for Wakefield's death, and the younger Wakefield pursues her across the ocean to the United States. The true identity of several characters, including the robbers and the girl, is in constant question, but Wakefield finally gets to the culprits; solves his case; and learns that Ruth Gregg, with whom he has fallen in love, is not only "the Breen girl," but actually was posing as a gang member for the Secret Service.
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