Vienna, 1900. Lawyer Karl Werthen is puzzling over the suicide of a local councilman when he is assigned by Karl Wittgenstein, a powerful industrialist with many enemies, to find his recently missing son, Hans. Werthen quickly discovers that the young man appears to be alive and well in another country. But when a friend of Hans - a journalist who wrote a number of articles claiming the councilman who committed suicide was corrupt - is found dead, also from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Werthen fears that sinister forces are at work.