Late 19th century, Moscow. “The King of Reporters” Vladimir Gilyarovsky meets a young but already famous opera singer, Fyodor Shalyapin, who has very recently obtained a role in the opera “Boris Godunov.” To better understand his hero, Shalyapin, made up to look like a runaway convict, persuades Gilyarovsky to go down into the underworld of night-time Khitrovka and find the real murderer of a child!
Following the lead of a local music-box player, they discover the corpse of a boy who had undergone an operation on his vocal cords. Will the friends manage not only to find the deranged surgeon in the underworld labyrinths of Khitrovka, but also to stay alive?