The countess is married, and the ghosts are still in the Spessart. Her husband becomes an astronaut and the story involved time travelling and space travelling starts.
When Emil travels by bus to Berlin to visit his grandmother and his cousin, his money is stolen by a crook who specializes in digging tunnels. Emil must get the money back as it is for his grandmother. While following the thief, Emil runs into Gustav, an enterprising young boy who gathers up all his friends to help Emil find the money. Emil's cousin also gets involved and they get into more trouble than they bargained for when Emil's pickpocket turns out to be mixed up with a couple of notorious bank robbers.
Supported avidly by his mother and more reluctantly at first by his father, a working-class Austrian boy joins the Vienna Choirboys, where he proves to be unusually talented.
Vienna, 1956. After Soviet tanks crush the Hungarian uprising, soldier-of-fortune Michael Reynolds is hired to help a threatened Hungarian scientist escape from Budapest.