Summary
Sylvia Martin’s trajectory is a visceral descent from the biting frost of domestic neglect into the corrosive machinery of the early 20th-century surveillance state. After escaping a paternal purgatory, her salvation via the criminal underworld proves to be a Faustian bargain. The suicide of her husband, the nefarious Louis Gordon, leaves her not only a widow but a pariah, her identity ossified within the 'Police Index'—a bureaucratic ledger of the damned. Even as she ascends to the rarified air of Washington diplomacy as the wife of David Maber, the specter of her past reemerges. The narrative pivots from a melodrama of social disgrace into a taut espionage thriller when the Secret Service weaponizes her history, forcing her into a perilous dance with Bolshevik insurgents. It is a narrative where the personal is relentlessly political, and the ink of the state is harder to wash away than blood.
Synopsis
Sylvia Martin runs away from her abusive father and almost succumbs to the cold on the doorstep of Louis Gordon, a crook. They marry, but later when faced with capture, Gordon kills himself. Gordon's gang accuses Sylvia of murder, and although she is acquitted for lack of evidence, her name is included in the Police Index. Years later, upon finding the Index on the shelf of her second husband, Washington diplomat David Maber, Sylvia fears exposure. Her fears heighten when her arresting officer, John Alden, now chief of the Secret Service, tries to induce her to entrap a Bolshevik agent, Hugo Declasse, who is attracted to her. When Alden appeals to patriotism, she acquiesces. Declasse finds the Index and threatens to expose her unless she cooperates in getting plans for an uprising to London agents, but Declasse is foiled when his trusted Japanese butler turns out to be a Secret Service agent. Maber, learning of Sylvia's past, forgives her.
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