Freshly landed in Paris, Daniel Laurençon, who calls himself Netchaïev, who was believed dead five years ago in Gibraltar, warns a commercial center of a bomb attack a few minutes before its completion.

An unemployed investor creates a fictious business partner to attempt to improve business. Eventually, his creation gets out of control as his business becomes successful and his wife announces that she is in love with the partner and his son wishes the partner was his father -- although no one has ever seen him. To regain control, the man decides to "kill" his imaginary partner and is arrested for the murder.

In this sardonic comedy, after an executive is killed in a mysterious automobile accident, the French offices of his multinational company is inundated with mysteriously threatening be-ribboned anti-capitalist tracts, delivered overnight to everyone's desks. Later, the executive's body is brought to company offices for an official wake -- only no one at the company has ordered that such a thing be done. A mysterious prankster, who is able to imitate the voice of the company's president, has arranged these things. When Americans from the head office get wind of these developments, they institute a search for the perpetrator which leads to mysterious subterranean passages under the company's skyscraper.