Leni Kills the Black-Market Crime Boss and Is Shot

Leni’s killing of the black-market crime boss and her own death form the fatal climax of the film story Molina narrates. A plan to trade knowledge of a secret arsenal for access to the Maquis high command leaves her exposed among people she had mistaken for allies; she manages to kill the man who controls the criminal network, but is shot before she can escape. The film then recasts her death as patriotic martyrdom, leaving her boyfriend alone beneath a monument to national heroes.

The bargain and the lost trail

Leni insists that she will reveal the secret arsenal only if she is allowed to meet the Maquis high command. She is driven out of Paris to a castle, but the meeting is also the setting for a counterplan: she has arranged for her German officer boyfriend and some of his soldiers to follow, intending them to round up the Maquis from the black market. The proposed exchange therefore carries two opposing purposes—Leni’s apparent negotiation with the resistance and her officer’s effort to reach the people she is meeting.

The driver takes control of the journey’s outcome. He is the same man who used to drive Clubfoot, and he recognizes that their car is being followed. By changing direction, he makes the pursuers lose the trail, even as the Germans continue behind him with Leni’s boyfriend in the lead. At the castle, Leni is brought before the Maquis leader, whom she initially does not recognize. The delay separates her from the rescue she expects: her boyfriend and the patrol spend time trying to follow the other car’s tracks in the rain, while she remains at the castle.

Recognition and reversal

The man presented as the head of the Maquis is the Butler / maquis leader, who had worked in her boyfriend’s house and had spied on Leni there. Looking more closely, she also recognizes him as the bearded figure from a film about two criminals that she had seen in Berlin. The apparent meeting with a resistance leader thus turns into a confrontation with an established watcher and a criminal power whose reach she has not understood. She tells him the secret, convinced that her officer will arrive with soldiers to save her; as the expected rescue fails to materialize, that confidence becomes a liability.

Leni overhears the driver privately tell the boss that he suspects they were followed. Remembering that the Butler / maquis leader used to peer through her window at her boyfriend’s house, she tries to use his interest in her as a last means of protecting herself. The story places this attempt alongside the continuing search outside: the officer and patrol eventually find their way to the castle, but only after Leni has been left alone with the man she now understands to be the boss of a worldwide criminal operation.

The killing and its cost

In a curtained back room, where an intimate dinner has already been laid out, the boss comes at Leni. She seizes a carving fork and kills him. The ordinary object set on the dinner table becomes the means by which she reverses the immediate balance of power: the man who had controlled the meeting and its setting is dead, while she is still alive when her boyfriend and the young officer arrive.

Her escape remains incomplete. Leni opens a window, and the driver is below. Her boyfriend shoots him, but the dying driver gets off a shot at Leni. She catches hold of the curtain and does not fall; her boyfriend and the officer find her standing, and her boyfriend takes her in his arms. She tells him that she loves him and imagines that they will soon be together again in Berlin. Only then does he realize how gravely she has been wounded. He kisses her, and she dies as he draws back. Molina’s account does not settle whether the bullet struck her shoulder or chest, preserving the narrator’s uncertainty about that detail while making the outcome unmistakable.

Memorial and narrative frame

The film’s final scene moves from the castle to a Pantheon in Berlin, described as a Greek-temple-like monument with huge statues of heroes. Leni appears there as a life-size, idealized figure in a Greek tunic, her face powdered white and her arms extended. Her boyfriend places flowers on her arms and leaves in tears. An inscription says, approximately, that the fatherland will never forget its heroes; the road as he walks away is bathed in sunlight. The state’s monumental image of Leni as a hero stands in sharp contrast to the private loss of the man who has just held her as she died.

This action belongs to a story within the novel’s prison conversation: Molina recounts the film to Valentin after his abdominal pain returns during their discussion, and Valentin urges him to continue as a distraction. The embedded narration’s hesitations—about how the pursuers found the route and where Leni was hit—keep the climax in the register of a spoken recollection rather than a fully verified account. Even so, its sequence is clear: a bargain becomes a trap, a delayed rescue arrives too late, and Leni’s victory over the crime boss is followed almost immediately by her death and transformation into a public emblem.