An ex-soldier, completing a five-year prison term for a crime committed by his army buddy but for which he accepted guilt, gets a shock when he goes to New York to look up his "true" friend.
A homeless half-wit, grateful even for the insulting, bullying attention of a lout at a neighborhood bar, meets up with a gangster's long-suffering kept woman at a city park one evening.
An American writer loses his passport abroad and discovers that it had been stolen by another young American, a suspected murderer who was married to an Italian girl and wanted to effect passage from France through Switzerland to Italy.
A garage mechanic, desperate for money, tries his luck at a shabby, gangster-owned gambling den with what he thinks is a sure formula for predicting dice throws.
A street-wise kid who begs in a museum sneaks into the building and meets a man who identifies himself as a Secret Service Agent. In fact, the older man is a thief who needs the boy's help to escape when his exit plan is scuppered.