The fates of emigrants are strange, the air of a foreign land is bitter, but it is even more terrible when everything in the world goes out of its place and the homeland turns out to be a prison, colleagues turn out to be traitors, and the best girls in the world spy on those with whom it is high time to marry. Surgeon Alexander Voronin, a fourth-generation emigrant, has long been accustomed to the idea that he is an American, not a Russian. But it is he who will have to unravel the knot that tightened almost a hundred years ago, when another Alexander Voronin, his great-grandfather, received from the last of the Persian Shahs a destructive and honorable gift - a silver trinket, for which it is allowed to kill, betray, execute...