The plot is based on a conflict situation that arose during the delivery of a new building.

Barley Scott Blair, a Lisbon-based editor of Russian literature who unexpectedly begins working for British intelligence, is commissioned to investigate the purposes of Dante, a dissident scientist trapped in the decaying Soviet Union that is crumbling under the new open-minded policies.

The young girl Olga Vasilyeva grew up in an orphanage. She never knew her mother and wants to find her. The only trace she has is a preserved letter from her mother from her personal file, which she managed to get from the administration of the orphanage. For a short vacation at her factory school, she travels from Sverdlovsk to Moscow following the unreliable traces of this letter. Yelena Alekseyevna — the woman she finds when she arrives at the address turns out to be a teacher in a ballet school, the wife of an ordinary senior teacher at the Moscow Technical Institute (who didn't defend his dissertation and is complacent about this) and an old-Moscow intellectual. She kindly meets her, but she is not the person Olga is looking for, she only has the same last name and first name and consonant middle name. She is kind and hospitable, ready to help the girl find her real mother and offers Olga to visit her house during a short stay in Moscow.