In Paris, small-time crook Ginger meets Marie C leste. She is a middle-aged woman, the essence of the Paris streets, who is dying on her feet. They form an amoral yet oddly touching liaison, and plan a fraud that takes them to England.But among the shires nothing is as they expected and their plan falls to pieces. Ginger cannot shake his impressions of the murder that he watched Marie C leste commit in Paris, and in the end he follows its grim pattern to his own destruction.