Dery is a grande dame actress of the Sarah Bernhardt school of big-gesture theater. Her beauty and popularity is fading, and a new school of acting which involves the use of one's own emotions (a-la Eleanora Duse) is emerging in the person of her younger Viennese rival. She thinks of retiring from the stage, and reunites briefly with her estranged husband in a newly-built manor in the country. Finding that life there is boring, she returns to town, the theater, and her old friends.

Blind luck ties the fate of two people together.

Lt. Kojak arrives in Budapest as a guest speaker for the 'International Crime Writers Conference'. Soon after he starts enjoying the pleasures that the city has to offer, he assists his old friends at the police department with a case. The case involves solving the murder of a noted scientist, unaware that a Mafia hit man and his female companion are targeting him.