Hewitt Mandeline, who goes on a gambling trip to Las Vegas. After returning home, Blacksad's last assignment is to accompany him to an art gallery, where he runs into Smirnov and his family. He finds a leaflet for a lecture given by his old school teacher, Otto Liebber, a nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize candidate. Also appearing is the wealthy philanthropist Samuel Gotfield, who heads a scientific research foundation; Blacksad takes an instant dislike for Gotfield, who makes a mockery of Otto's lecture. He also meets Gotfield's fiancée, the writer Alma Mayer. Gotfield invites Blacksad to a party at his luxurious coastal mansion along with twelve leftist intellectuals: Greenberg, a beat poet; the photographer Dora; the sculptor Klein; the actor Bill Ratcliff; the scriptwriter Jess Logan; the Russian painter Sergei Litvak; the accomplished chemist Laszlo Herzl; and Alma Mayer. After Blacksad grudgingly saves a drunken Gotfield from drowning, with the help of Otto's close friend Otero, Herzl angrily accuses Otto of promoting nuclear weapons. When Otero gets back home, he is killed by a mysterious assassin (a gavial). It seems he actually meant to kill Otto. Blacksad and Alma – who plans to spend her honeymoon with Gotfield at Niagara Falls – begin to have feelings for each other. Blacksad decides to follow Otto, saving him from a car bomb planted by the assassin. However, he fails to stop the goon from escaping or a traumatised Otto from leaving the scene. Smirnov informs Blacksad that the assassin is a highly regarded hit man known as Ribs, and that his bomb was chemically complex. Suspecting that Herzl might have hired Ribs, Blacksad confronts him. To his surprise, Herzl is a Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter who shows him photographic proof that Otto used to work for the Third Reich. Stricken with this new information, Blacksad seeks solace from Alma, only to learn that she has been arrested by the FBI after being inexplicably betrayed by Gotfield. When FBI agents visit Litvak in his studio, they accidentally kill him while using truth serum to ask about Otto's whereabouts. Otto, meanwhile, has returned to his old neighborhood – the same neighborhood where Blacksad grew up – only to find it overcome by poverty and his father's church a ruin. Suffering a personal crisis, Otto hides at the city aquarium, where Blacksad himself once hid as a child. Blacksad rescues Alma from the FBI,