A murder in connection with illegal art trading leads - shortly after the fall of the Wall - to the first East-West contacts in the field of crime. Schimanski and Thanner investigate together with their popular colleagues Fuchs and Grawe from East Berlin: paintings owned by the GDR, which were extorted from museums and private individuals in the course of obtaining foreign currency, were put aside by former Stasi employees after the fall of the Wall and are now to be sold to the West via the old channels. The police suspect the Düsseldorf-based art dealer Schrader to be the key figure.