On the beach near the estate of a Japanese secret service general, four people are having a picnic. Three of them are wearing gas masks. Ten years later, this meeting helps defeat the Germans near Moscow. Twenty years after the end of the war, the world's largest collection of Japanese pornography arrives in Brooklyn. And the old clown Geraghty sends the petty Brooklyn swindler Quinn to Japan to search for his parents. The last time they were seen before the war, at a certain legendary circus performance in Shanghai. For the first time in Russian - the debut novel of former CIA agent Edward Whitmore, a confident attempt at writing before the cult "Jerusalem" quartet."