The main hero of the story, Vasya Zlotkin, goes abroad on an important mission—to persuade the authorities of Turkey to “not notice” the intelligence services’ operation to eliminate a terrorist. Vasya suffers from a very strange obsession: from time to time he imagines that he is the State Child—the False Arkady—who conquered the Russian throne. The reader may hear here echoes of Sorokin’s “The Oprichnik.”