After his mother's funeral at
Islington Cemetery, while waiting for her ashes, London bank manager Henry Pulling meets eccentric Augusta Bertram, a woman who claims to be his aunt and announces that the woman who raised him was not his biological mother. She invites him back to her apartment, where her lover, an African fortune teller named Zachary Wordsworth, is waiting for her. Shortly after, she receives a package allegedly containing the severed finger of her true love, Ercole Visconti, with a note promising the two will be reunited upon payment of $100,000. Augusta asks Henry to accompany her to Paris, and he agrees, unaware she actually is smuggling £50,000 out of England and transporting it to Turkey for a gangster named Crowder in exchange for a £10,000 fee she can put toward the ransom. The two board the
Orient Express, where Henry meets Tooley, a young American hippie who takes a liking to him and gets him to smoke marijuana with her in her compartment. When the train reaches Milan, Augusta is greeted at the station by Visconti's son Mario, who presents her with a bouquet of flowers and an ear that supposedly belongs to Visconti. When they arrive at the Turkish border, officials confiscate the money Augusta is carrying and send her and Henry back to Paris. Augusta attempts to secure the money she needs from her former lover Achille Dambreuse, but the wealthy Frenchman dies of a heart attack in her hotel suite. Efforts to extort 1 million francs from Dambreuse's widow in return for their silence about the circumstances of his death fail. Augusta takes a portrait of herself she claims was painted by
Amedeo Modigliani from Dambreuse's home, which she plans to sell to raise the money. After a furious argument with Henry, Augusta lets slip that he is Visconti's "other son". Once the painting is sold to Crowder, they join Wordsworth on a fishing boat to North Africa, where they pay the ransom and are reunited with Visconti. He removes his bandages, revealing ear and finger intact, indicating he has been the mastermind of a plot to separate Augusta from her money. After Visconti and his collaborators take the boat and leave, Henry reveals that he deduced Augusta is his biological mother and that, suspicious of Visconti from the start, he and Wordsworth exchanged "neatly cut pages of the Barcelona telephone directory" for the money in the package they delivered. He wants to use the cash he kept to purchase back the portrait of Augusta, but she tells him she would prefer to use it to finance more travels. Henry decides the matter should be decided with the toss of a coin and chooses 'heads'. Wordsworth tosses the coin, and the film ends on a
freeze frame shot of Augusta, Henry and Wordsworth as they await the fall of the coin. ==Cast==