It is no wonder that the cashier of a large bank, a native of Finland, Rautapää, took advantage of such an opportunity. There is nothing to the Finnish border. And there, in Helsingfors, blown by icy winds, the Russian police are powerless. And everything is run by local guardians of order, for whom the orders of the imperial authorities are an empty phrase. Using forged documents, Mr. Rautapää stole almost three hundred thousand rubles and was like that... One day in August 1913, State Councilor Lykov went to the cold and rainy Finnish capital. The order is to find, catch and return the thief along with the money. But the search for the criminal quickly came to a standstill. The cashier was found murdered, and the money he stole disappeared without a trace. There was only one small and almost hopeless clue left: near the corpse lay a strange note that brought down all previous versions of Lykov and turned the case from a criminal to a political one...