He picks up a commission to write a pastiche of Strindberg's The Red Room, updating its political satire to mark the centenary of its publication.

In a local boxing club he meets the elegant and charismatic Henry Morgan, a boxer, pianist and an ebullient if unreliable raconteur.

Henry persuades Klas to move into his apartment, where he lives with his mentally unstable brother Leo.

A picaresque story of Henry as, among other things, a smuggler of false passports to East Berlin, and Leo who finds out about a political scandal concerning Swedish sales of weapons to nazi-Germany during World War II.

In the third part of the novel, Henry and Leo both mysteriously disappear, and Klas finds himself living alone in the apartment.