In his retirement at the Vatican, emeritus pope Benedict XVI is hard at work on his magnum opus: a high-school comedy screenplay. At a grimy pub in North London, a doctoral researcher is abducted by gangsters peddling William Wordsworth's handwritten account of drug-fueled sex orgies. In the West African state of Benin, a politician's daughter inherits a large cash sum which she can only launder with the help of a random Englishman...