Born to a poor Jewish family and orphaned as a child, Yakov Blumkin was a Socialist Revolutionary, a terrorist, the assassin of the German ambassador Wilhelm von Mirbach, a poet close to the avant-garde, a member of Cheka, a military strategist, a secret agent, and Leon Trotsky's secretary. Executed in 1929 on Stalin's orders at the age of only twenty-nine, he has continued to inspire curiosity, and wild rumours about his extraordinary life abound today. This novel sets out to reconstruct Blumkin's shadowy past with a trove of manuscripts, documents, rare photographs, and personal souvenirs.