Bruno Fioretti, known as "Mandrake", is an inveterate gambler who never misses a day at the horse racing track in Rome. He is doubly unlucky: he bets too much on one horse, and his wife is sleeping with his best friend because Mandrake is always at the track. Penniless and cuckolded, Mandrake decides to make one last bet.
Following a bungled robbery, three violent criminals take a young woman, a middle-aged man, and a child hostage and force them to drive them outside Rome to help them make a clean getaway.
A middle-aged man meets a young woman who is waiting on a canal bridge for her lover's return.
