Torn by personal guilt, Italian General Umberto Nobile reminisces about his 1928 failed Arctic expedition aboard the airship Italia.
A chemist by training, Alexandr Bochkin manages a Moscow dry-cleaning operation, but lives a very comfortable life, taking orders on the side for his speculative "private enterprise," run in conjunction with "Queen Margot". But when his old friend from the chemical institute, Yuri Lebedev arrives in Moscow from the Siberian city of Dalnegorsk, along with a traveling companion, Olga, Bochkin becomes uncomfortable with his job title.
The accountant of the commodity base discovers a small mistake in the documents, as told by the manager of the base. That night, someone hacked and robbed a safe with accounting documents, and committed the killing of an accountant. The case for the search for criminals was entrusted to police commissioner Krechetov and lieutenant Kasyanov.
