The young man left. Karl sat in the dim light for an hour. Then he took out a pen.
"Who is 'they,' Frau Krauss?"
Karl read the article three times. A freight train carrying industrial steel had been rerailed onto a siding, causing no harm, just chaos. The note left at the scene was written in perfect High German, not the broken prose of leftist radicals. It said: "The real crime is not this act. The real crime is what you will do in response. This is only a provocation. Watch the autumn. Watch the mist." provocation 1972
The silence on the other end of the line was the sound of history holding its breath. The young man left
Karl knew Heinrich Krauss. Everyone in West German journalism did. Krauss was a relic, a once-great war correspondent who had spent the last twenty years as a cultural critic, writing bitter, elegant essays about the death of German soul. He was also a known provocateur—not the student kind with Molotov cocktails, but the old-school kind who wrote screeds against the Baader-Meinhof gang one week and against the police state the next. He was a man who made everyone angry. "Who is 'they,' Frau Krauss
Autumn Mist. Herbstnebel.
Every trail led back to Voss. But every witness recanted after a phone call. Every document was either classified or missing. And then, on a rainy Tuesday, Karl received a visitor at his hotel in Bonn. A young man in an expensive suit, no name, no smile.