After spending the latter part of World War II in a Soviet prisoner-of-war camp, 1947 sees Bernhard Gunther now married to a wife who is trading sex with U.S. Army officers for scarce goods.

An old colleague from Gunther's days in Berlin, a dirty cop, war criminal, and smuggler named Emil Becker, has been accused and jailed in Vienna for the killing of an American officer called Linden.

At approximately the same time, Gunther rescues a recent acquaintance, Veronika, a local prostitute he met as part of the investigation, from rape by two Russian soldiers.

As part of the intervention, Gunther gets knocked down and is himself rescued in extremis by John Belinsky, a man bearing identification associating him with the American Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) that had been covertly tailing him.

Gunther, with the help of Belinsky, oblige and as part of the operation discover that Heim was a dentist specializing in teeth extractions, visibly for the purpose of making Nazis escape identification through dental records.

To catch Müller, Gunther and Belinsky organize a sting operation at the vineyard estate of Nebe in Grinzing on the occasion of a formal meeting of the Org.