Requiem für einen Freund (2021)

One afternoon, lawyer Joachim Vernau is visited without an appointment by a man named Harry Fischer, who is supposed to review his tax accounts. Vernau lets him get on with his work and meets his old friend Marquardt that evening. During their conversation, Marquardt says he is having serious problems with the Chinese Mafia, to whom he owes money. A short time later, Fischer calls Vernau from the office and asks him about a four-year-old hospitality-expense receipt he has found. When Vernau returns to the office, he finds Fischer dead at his desk. That same day, Marquardt flees the country. Vernau is threatened by thugs from an Arab clan. They are looking for Marquardt, who also owes their clan leader, Adil Kalaman, money: two and a half million euros. Kalaman gives Vernau 48 hours to find Marquardt. As Vernau begins searching, his employee Marie-Luise Hoffmann calls him. She has looked into Fischer and discovered that he did not work for the tax office; for years, he had been investigating large-scale bribery and money laundering. The question about the expense receipt now makes sense: on that day, a prosecutor had taken her own life after unsuccessfully trying for a long time to take action against shady dealings in Berlin’s real-estate industry. Marquardt’s law firm, where Vernau worked at the time, had also been involved in those investigations. While searching for Marquardt, Vernau contacts Marquardt’s main client, Andreas Hartmann, one of Berlin’s biggest property dealers. There he is surprised to encounter Marquardt’s secretary and mistress, Tatjana Wolgast, who is evidently very close to Hartmann. Later, Tatjana visits Vernau and explains that the matter is not directly about money laundering, but about account data from a Swiss bank that serves influential Berlin clients. Four years earlier, her then husband, who worked at the bank, had wanted to sell the data to the Berlin prosecutor’s office, and he had sent a small preview to the prosecutor then in charge. The data concerned tax fraud by Berlin property developers such as Hartmann and Sprengler, and even Interior Senator Schweiger, against whom the prosecutor had also tried to initiate proceedings. Because of money problems, Tatjana’s husband eventually offered the data to Hartmann for five million and met with Hartmann’s lawyer, Marquardt, about it. Later, he was found dead. To spy on Hartmann and Marquardt and gather evidence of their fraud, Tatjana even began an affair with Marquardt. After their meeting, Vernau is followed on his way back to the office by a member of the Chinese Mafia, but Adil Kalaman rescues him from the dangerous situation. Kalaman also seems interested in the account data and suspects that Marquardt has used it to flee abroad. Although Tatjana says she no longer has the data herself, Vaasenburg and Vernau plan, with her help, to arrest Interior Senator Schweiger in a staged handover of a USB stick, after contacting him through Hartmann. During the operation, Tatjana confesses to Vernau over the phone that she has had the data they are looking for all along and secretly slipped the stick into his jacket pocket, where he finds it. In the end, the police operation fails: Schweiger never shows up, and both Hartmann and Tatjana are murdered. Four weeks later, Vernau receives word that Marquardt has had a fatal accident in Mexico. The car was completely burned out, but his dental records make it absolutely certain that Marquardt was the accident victim. Vernau has doubts and goes to Marquardt’s villa, where he finds that Marquardt’s wife is no longer there either. It seems she has also left the country, so Vernau immediately travels to Mexico. He has an idea of how he might find Marquardt, and it works. On a secured private estate, he finds his old friend playing golf. Marquardt admits that he has the data, which is his lifeline: he has threatened his enemies with publishing it online if necessary. Vernau is disappointed in his friend and intends to send the copy of the data he received from Tatjana to the Berlin prosecutor’s office.