Kleinman is awakened by a loud vigilante mob that claims to be hunting a serial killer and says they need his help. The strange night unfolds around him as his landlady hands him a bag of pepper for protection, a small but practical detail in a city full of fear. In the meantime, Irmy and her boyfriend Paul, a pair of circus performers, argue about marriage and having a baby. Paul leaves to join another tent where he sleeps with Marie, another artist of the troupe, setting off a chain of desperate decisions. Witnessing this, [Irmy] runs to the city and enters a brothel. There, a young Jack, besotted with Irmy, offers her rapidly increasing sums to sleep with him, and she finally concedes when the price climbs to $700.
Kleinman visits a coroner’s house and shares a glass of sherry with him, but after he departs, the coroner is murdered by the killer. He later goes to the police station to protest a local family’s eviction, and the officers discuss the murder, noting fingerprints on the sherry glass as a possible clue. In the chaos, Irmy is arrested at the brothel for prostitution, protests being called a “whore,” and Kleinman, amid the confusion, confiscates the evidence. Irmy is released after a $50 fine, and the two leave the station together, beginning a quiet, observant walk through the city’s slices of life — a voyeur-window scene, a starving mother and child, a church — before deciding to return to their own paths.
Paul arrives in the city searching for Irmy and enters a bar where Jack sits, the student recounting his sword-swallowing tale and surprising Paul with the memory. Kleinman and Irmy head back toward his place but are turned away by his fiancée, so they head to the pier where they are ambushed by the vigilante mob who recognize the sherry glass in Kleinman’s pocket and mistake them for the killer. Fear gives way to a brutal moment as the group contemplates lynching, but Kleinman deploys pepper spray and the couple escapes.
Meanwhile, Irmy and Paul meet again, and Paul is initially ready to kill Irmy for sleeping with another man. The couple’s tense reunion shifts when they discover a starving woman murdered and a baby left alone on the ground, compelling them to take the child and return to the circus. Kleinman returns to the brothel in search of Irmy but cannot locate her; learning that the circus plans to leave town, he decides to follow.
At the circus, the admired magician Armstead arrives, and the danger escalates when the killer appears and tries to strike. Armstead helps thwart the attack, and the story threads toward a new life: Kleinman becomes Armstead’s assistant under the big top, while Irmy and Paul carry on with their circus careers and raise the child they’ve found together, their small, fragile family tucked into the folds of a nomadic life.
