When Odile Mével, a French clothing designer, agrees to smuggle ceremonial May Day banners out of the former Soviet Union, she thinks she's trading a few days' inconvenience for a quick thirty thousand francs. Yet when she returns home to Paris to deliver the contraband to the American art expert behind this scheme, her fellow courier has disappeared, her apartment is ransacked for no discernible reason, and she has already set in motion a chain of events that will put those closest to her in jeopardy.