Soen Yanagi, the management director of Edmund Oliver, is an art dealer with an uncanny ability to identify forgeries. One day, a man who had stolen Vermeer's masterpiece from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna barricaded himself in a building with a bomb. At the request of the police, Soen Yanagi enters the room, appraises the painting, and discovers that it is a forgery based on information only he knows. When he scratched the picture with a knife, a sketch just like Soen Yanagi had said came out. The prisoner commits suicide out of despair...