FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast reluctantly agrees to investigate the case of the theft of a collection of rare wines and... discovers a niche with shackles in the cellar, and upon careful examination, a tiny human bone. A man was once walled up alive here. The robbery was clearly staged in order to remove the remains from here: someone really wants to hide the traces of a crime that was committed a long time ago - judging by the radiocarbon analysis of the bone, in the 1880s. For what? Pendergast manages to find out that in those same years, a steamship along with passengers, crew and cargo, including especially valuable ones, strangely disappeared off the local coast. No wreckage or corpses were found... except for the corpse of a visiting historian who was studying the history of the missing ship. The killer carved mysterious symbols on the dead body... The events of the past and present are woven into a tight knot, and as the investigation progresses, the agent realizes that some dark forces were involved here. For the first time in Russian!