The action concerns the shady dealing and possible expensive pimping of one Monsieur Datt against a background of espionage.

This is the fifth novel in the "unnamed hero" series, but unlike the previous ones, it includes chapters and sections in the third person.

M Datt, posing as a psychologist, believes he is working for the Chinese by accumulating compromising film of the sexual activities of various influential people.

He then escorts Kuang to a pirate radio station ship moored in international waters off Ostend and returns to the harbour, where Datt, trying to flee, is shot by a Belgian paratrooper.

A sub-plot concerns Datt's illegitimate daughter Maria, who had been married to the French policeman Loiseau and had also fallen for the narrator.