Peter (Mark Keller) and Gwen (Jasmin Gerat) are small-time crooks who sense the chance of a lifetime when they accidentally learn about the desperate attempts of the rich and terminally ill Walter Ekland (Maximilian Schell) to find his illegitimate son Alexander. What Ekland doesn’t know is that Alexander already died quite a while ago, so Peter manages to gain the old man’s trust by pretending to be his offspring. The two criminal lovers aren’t the only ones interested in the money, though.