Amigo - Bei Ankunft Tod (2010)

Experienced BKA investigator Fredo Kovacs is on his way to Italy with his young colleague Jupp Sauerland to arrest Amigo Steiger. An anonymous tip has led them to his whereabouts near Naples, where the former terrorist has been living unnoticed for twenty years in a country house as a market gardener. But Steiger, alerted by a suspicious noise, manages to evade the tactical team. Only Sauerland sees him escape through a drainage channel and follows him. When the officer tries to apprehend the fugitive on his own, a ricocheting bullet injures his spine. Steiger demands to know who gave Sauerland the tip. He threatens to leave the seriously injured man behind without calling an ambulance, but Sauerland assures him that the tip was anonymous. Meanwhile, in Hamburg, young graffiti artist Rio has been arrested. In addition to charges of property damage, assault, and resisting state authority, a pistol is found on him. It later turns out that the gun was used twenty years earlier to murder a bank chairman and his driver. Since Rio refuses to say where the weapon came from, he is initially held in pretrial detention. Rio Bosch is the son of Amigo and Maxime, who was once active in the militant underground herself. After Steiger was forced to go into hiding, Maxime married his friend and former comrade-in-arms, Alexander Bosch. The couple run a publishing house together, where a novel is due to be released soon—one whose content is regarded as provocative by Islamist groups. A man named Nazari offers Alex 50,000 euros to stop the publication of the controversial book, fully aware that the publishing house is in financial difficulty, but Alex turns him down. When Alex is attacked by unknown assailants one night and told to take it as a warning, he accepts Nazari’s offer at a subsequent meeting. Suddenly, Steiger, who has returned to Germany using a false passport, appears at their table and witnesses the deal. Amigo Steiger has come to Hamburg to find out who betrayed him, and confronts Alex. Through Carlotta Fortunato, a former sympathizer of the Red Brigades who is Steiger’s confidante and lover, he has learned that his farm in Italy is up for sale. Alex explains that he transferred the property to his friend, lawyer Fritz Declair, because he needed money to keep the publishing house afloat, and insists that he did not betray Amigo. Declair, for his part, has put the property up for sale on his own initiative, without consulting Alex, and for twice its original price. The successful criminal defense attorney acts as if he knows nothing, but in fact he informed the authorities about Amigo’s hideout. Amigo demands his share of the proceeds from three bank robberies, but when he and Alex visit the hiding place at night, the stash is gone. On the drive back, they are involved in a car accident in which Alex is seriously injured. Amigo takes the car of the other driver and brings Alex to the nearest hospital, but Alex dies shortly afterward. When the police try to get more details from him about how the accident happened, Steiger disappears. Meanwhile, Sauerland, who received medical attention in time thanks to a call from Steiger, is recovering in a clinic in Naples. He was operated on by Carlotta Fortunato, who once studied medicine in Germany and now works as a surgeon. An Italian police officer tells Sauerland that the kind doctor is Steiger’s partner and helped him go into hiding. Maxime asks Declair to help her pay her son’s bail, but when he makes his assistance conditional on sexual favors, she simply walks away. Back in Germany, Kovacs proposes a deal to Maxime: she should arrange a meeting between Steiger and his son, who have never met, and in return the charges against her son will be dropped. He also makes a point of bringing up Carlotta, Amigo’s longtime lover. Rio agrees to the meeting because he wants to know what happened in the accident. When father and son sit across from each other in a restaurant, Rio learns that Alex was riding the motorcycle and Amigo fired the shot during the attack. In tears, Rio begs his father to leave immediately. Realizing he has been lured into a trap, Amigo threatens Kovacs, who is sitting a few tables away, with a gun and thereby secures safe passage. When he boards a subway train with Kovacs, the BKA officer, who suffers from claustrophobia, escapes from the carriage at the last moment, and Amigo gets away once again. Before returning to Italy, he visits Mansour Nazari and violently makes it clear that even after Alex’s death, Nazari must honor their agreement. Kovacs’s Italian colleague Renzo Esposito, meanwhile, has been keeping an eye on Sauerland, who has not returned to Germany as expected. Esposito follows the young, impulsive man as he makes his way through Naples on crutches, but then loses sight of him. Only now does Kovacs realize why Sauerland has been so intensely interested in the Amigo case: he is the son of the driver who was murdered back then. Sauerland is now on his way to Carlotta’s apartment. When he encounters Amigo there and confronts him about what he did, Amigo tells the son of the murdered driver, who is now standing opposite him with a gun, that there is nothing to apologize for. By the time Esposito reaches Carlotta’s building, it is too late: Sauerland has shot Amigo in front of Carlotta.