Beginning in 1930s Berlin and spanning the grubbiness and glamour of pre-War Paris and L.A., we follow Loeser's obsessive quest to re-create the perfect stage trick, the great Lavacini's Extraordinary Mechanism for the Almost Instantaneous Transport of Persons from Place to Place (better known as the Teleportation Device) - and to screw the perfect woman, one Adele Hitler. Aside from Loeser's olympically dull friends, we'll meet Scramsfield, a dissembling Bostonian recovering from a botched suicide pact; Colonel Gorge, who suffers from a bizarre condition known as ontological agnosia; and Bailey, a distinguished physicist working on a Teleportation Device of a different, and much more sinister, nature.