Lee Goldberg: McGrave

Maria groans, but Torsten grins with pleasure. "I run the Schwerstkriminalitat, our Major Crimes Unit. You only arrived hours ago and I'm already stunned by how much you've accomplished."

"I think you mean demolished, sir," Maria says.

Torsten gives her a sharp look. "I know what I mean, Frau Kommissar. You didn't have a court order to search Schmidt's car. However, thanks to Detective McGrave's decisive action, we have Schmidt and the cocaine, which we can use as leverage to get him to testify against the rest of the cartel." He turns now to McGrave. "How can we assist you in return, Detective?"

"You could find my suitcase, for starters."

Torsten glances at Stefan and Heinrich. "Do you have it?"

"It's gone, Herr Hauptkommissar," Stefan says. "Stolen in the chaos at the club."

"Then we must recover it," Torsten says.

Heinrich takes out a notepad and looks at McGrave. "Were there any identifiable belongings of value in your suitcase?"

"Just my lucky jockstrap," McGrave says. They stare at him. They have no clue what he is talking about. "Never mind. What can you tell me about Hans Beimler?"

Maria extracts a file from underneath the McDonald's wrappers on her desk, shakes some ketchup off of it, and opens it.

"When obscenely wealthy collectors find something they want that can't be bought, they go to Herr Beimler. He finds the right thief for the heist and takes a commission."

"You got a mug shot on this guy?" he asks.

She opens the file and hands him a photo, which he glances at, then puts in his pocket. "What do you intend to do with that?"

"I'm going to the beach to see Beimler and convince him to lead me to the mastermind behind the LA job," McGrave says, then turns to Torsten. "I could use your best man, someone who really knows the streets, to act as my driver, translator, and guide to the Berlin underworld."

Torsten claps Maria on the back. "Done!"

Maria is in hell. She'd rather be assigned as bait for the pickpockets and perverts at the train station than spend another hour with John McGrave.

She's known him only a few hours and already hates him.

Maria and McGrave emerge from the back of the building into the parking lot, where there is a fleet of green-and-white patrol cars, all of them BMW 5 Series sedans.

"Damn." McGrave stops and admires one of the patrol cars. "Now, this is a country that truly appreciates their police force."

"You haven't seen my paycheck," she says.

"You don't know how lucky you are." McGrave peers in the driver's-side window of the BMW. "Where I come from, a cop can only dream of owning a car like this, and you get to drive one every day."

"I don't. Only the uniformed patrol officers do."

"So what's a detective drive?" McGrave asks. "A Maserati? A Ferrari? A Bentley?"

"I'll show you." She leads him to the other side of the building to a lot containing compact Opel Astras and Volkswagen Passats. "Take your pick."

"You're kidding me," McGrave says, clearly disappointed. "These aren't much more than golf carts."

She goes to a Passat and opens the trunk. "Before we go to the beach, there's something you need to understand."

"Yeah, why taxi drivers have Mercedes, patrolmen have BMWs, and detectives drive soup cans."

She has no patience for his shit.

"It has been a long, difficult, and painful struggle to get where I am. Now I have a good chance at being promoted to Oberkommissar and I will not let you or your case ruin that for me. Do we understand each other?"

She gives him a hard look. He holds up his hands in surrender.

"I'll be on my very best behavior," he says.

"Great," she says. "You can begin by giving me your gun."

"It's in my sock drawer in LA," McGrave says.

"I'm referring to the one that you took at the club," she says, "and that is now hidden under your jacket."

"Oh. That gun." He reaches under his jacket, and behind his back, and hands the gun to her. "I thought of it more as a souvenir."

"You can have this instead." She puts the gun in a locker in the trunk and hands him a teddy bear dressed in a green Polizei uniform and cap.

"What's this?" he asks.

"Bulli the Bear. We keep them in our vehicles to give to children involved in car accidents. You definitely qualify."

Maria slams the trunk closed and gets in the car. McGrave tosses the bear and gets in the passenger side.

Mьhlenstrasse is a wide street that runs along the industrial, east side of the Spree River, a waterway that neatly divided Berlin seven hundred years ago and then again when the wall went up along the shore.

Although the wall fell nearly thirty years ago, the two sides of the rivers are still worlds apart.

On the western side, there are gleaming new office towers and, just as tall and rising out of the water, there are three enormous statues of male silhouettes riddled with holes.

By comparison, the eastern shore is lined with empty warehouses, empty lots, and bleak, boxy, Communist-era apartment houses.

The only cultural contribution the east bank has to offer is a half-mile, mural-covered remnant of the Berlin Wall that separates Mьhlenstrasse from the river. The murals are faded, peeling, and covered with graffiti.

Maria parks a few yards away from the most famous mural, depicting Brezhnev and Honecker in a lip-mashing kiss. McGrave has no idea who the old men in suits are or why they are kissing, which tells you all you need to know about the state of the education system in California in the 1980s.

She and McGrave get out of the car. She's thankful for the fresh air. He smells like a homeless person and looks like one, too.

McGrave surveys the dismal boulevard and the wall that blocks his view of the river.

"This doesn't look like much of a resort."

"It's not," she says. "This is the former East Germany. You're looking at the longest surviving section of the Berlin Wall. Now it's an outdoor art gallery."

"So where's the beach?"

She gestures to a doorway cut into the wall and leads him through it.

They emerge onto a narrow strip of sand on the riverbank that's littered with cigarette butts and bottle caps and cluttered with folding picnic tables under yellow Corona beer umbrellas. Several ratty canvas-and-wood lawn chairs are scattered about, occupied by a dozen pale people sunning themselves.

Tequila's is a snack shack made of weathered timber and corrugated metal and festooned with banners, a poor but enthusiastic attempt to evoke a Mexican cantina.

A short jetty leads to a rusted barge carpeted with Astroturf and covered with plastic chaise lounges, picnic tables, and beach umbrellas, where a handful of people are drinking beers and eating bowls of tortilla chips.

McGrave grimaces as if the sight is causing him physical pain. "You call this a beach?"

"It is more than that," she says.

"It looks like a lot less to me."

"Before the wall fell, this was a no-man's-land between repression and freedom, watched over by guards in gun towers and patrol boats," she says. "Now it is a place where people can play and relax. Surely you can appreciate the symbolic value."

"Sure. Its mud with some sand spread on top. Very moving."

McGrave scans the pale bodies and spots Beimler on the barge.

Beimler is shirtless, wearing a pair of loud, floral board shorts and sitting alone at a table, sipping a beer and talking on his cell phone. He looks like Jabba the Hutt after gastric bypass surgery.

McGrave marches down the gangplank to the barge, Maria right behind him.

He strides up to Beimler's table. "Hey, Hans, how's it hanging?"

Beimler ends his call and says, "Ich spreche nicht Englisch."

McGrave has no idea what that means and doesn't care. "There's a Rembrandt I saw over in the Louvre that I think would look just fabulous hanging in my apartment. You know anybody who can steal it for me?"