Harry Caul is a nationally known expert on surveillance. The Director of a large company has hired him to record the conversations of two of the Director's employees. Some years previous, Harry's work directly led to the murder of three people, and now he has reason to fear that it will happen again.

A man no one has ever been able to photograph, the man without a face, until one day in 1973 someone manages to take his picture during holidays in the Caspian Sea. He turns out to be a very good-looking man, but is he the same man who has been in all these places through his life?

A man is arrested and incarcerated, and interrogated every day during six long years, and he never gets to know why. Only the frequent conversations with his cellmate confort him. After liberation he learns this cellmate was actually his main prosecutor.

A lady walks into the local Party headquarters and asks, "Who created socialism, the scientists or the workers?" The Party boss answered, "The workers, of course." "Oh, that makes sense," said the woman. "If it were scientists they would have tried it out on rats first."

One of the most glamorous figures of underground culture, a punk poet, a self-styled black leathered Rimbaud, turns out to have been and be an informant of the secret police, the Stasi. And this since he was in school.

Her own husband, father of her two sons, was an agent who had for years informed the Stasi about every detail of her life. He probably married her in order to do so.