It’s 1905 in Europe. Russia is losing the war with Japan and is now concentrating its forces in the West. Specifically, hundreds of Russian entrepreneurs head to Austria-Hungary and Prussia to establish business relationships, agents of the Russian Okhranka secret police and members of Russia’s criminal underworld disguised among them. Meanwhile, in the Austrian city of Lviv, the career of Criminal Police Commissar Adam Wistowicz advances. He’s one of the best investigators in Halychyna (Galicia), whose reputation is well known even in the empire’s capital, Vienna. Wistowicz’s ex-wife Anna Kalisch, an actress of the Berlin Shauspielhaus, unexpectedly finds herself in the middle of the ruthless whirlpool. In despair, she sends the commissar a telegram, begging for help. Between two fires, in foreign Prussia, Wistowicz takes on the most dangerous case of his life. He finds himself in the Royal Opera House, among communists in a German pub, in the luxury Great Prussia Hotel in Posen, then one on one with a maniac in the middle of an empty square… Teetering at knifepoint between life and death, winning crazy amounts of money and subsequently losing it, and confronting a powerful enemy with only intelligence and adroitness, the commissar from faraway Halychyna brilliantly brings the case to a close… and proves victorious.
