Winning with Wits

Mary Sudan, a fledgling tragedienne whose footlights have scarcely warmed, steps into the glare of a role that will either crown or crucify her just as her father is swallowed by the maw of a penitentiary for a theft he never touched. The proscenium of her life splinters; greasepaint turns to warpaint. Donning the mask of an opulent widow dripping with dividends, she infiltrates the walnut-and-brass sanctum of her father’s former firm, a place where ledgers perspire secrets and partners’ smiles click like safes. Inside this mausoleum of fiduciary incense she beguiles President Corday—an aesthete of embezzlement whose fingernails still itch for the company’s paper gold—until she lures him to a candle-struck séance where guilt itself becomes the poltergeist. Tables tilt, hearts capsize, and Corday’s confession leaks from his lips like ink from a cracked well. Yet the curtain does not fall: at dawn he skulks back to the iron vault to gorge on negotiable souls, unaware that Mary, the vice-president King, and two trench-coated nemeses are waiting in the wings to turn his final aria into a police blotter. Father is freed, lovers clasp hands, and the triumphant trio boards a honeymoon train toward a horizon scrubbed clean of scandal.