He is to visit his uncle there, a disciplinarian schoolteacher whose task it is to keep wayward Nonny on the straight and narrow. Nonny is a motherless boy who has been raised largely by his father's secretary, Gabi. She is in love with the charmless and somewhat bumbling father. The boy, now within days of his bar mitzvah, cannot seem to satisfy the old man's expectations. Part of Nonny resists the order and rigidity of his father's existence, and it is this wild side of himself that he must discover and learn to accept.
Rescue arrives in the nick of time.
On the train, an elegant old man named Felix Glick more or less kidnaps Nonny. Felix is an aging con man, a suave and high-rolling crook who takes young Nonny on a reckless and imaginative adventure that leads him to discover who he really is. Nonny is, of course, really a police detective's son. It was in her nature not to be bound by laws and conventions. She embodied the imagination.