The voice of the waiter trailed away. Everyone’s head had fallen down, either onto his arms or the back of his hands, or directly onto the table. Another moment went by. Kleen lifted his head up. “It’s not working,” he said; but then, seeing how dark it was, he changed his mind.

Not long afterward the Chairman arrived at Dworska Number 20 and, by the light of a match that he struck, saw what had happened to his Judenrat. Lifeless, the members were draped over the table, while a fly or two zoomed by their bodies. The match went out. Trumpelman stood on the table and screwed the loose bulb into the socket. He turned the fixture on. In the electrical glare he saw the vial. He picked it up, shook it, sniffed. Then, though it was hopeless, he began to smack the dead men on their backs.

“Up! Get up! Loafers! Bums!” Of course no one responded. So the physician put his arm around the neck of the Minister of Religious Affairs, precisely as he had done years before, in the first days of his practice, and cracked the bones.

“Ouch!” Nomberg declared.

Then the President moved quickly among the Council, snapping the necks of the members; with a gasp, a groan, each one returned to the land of the living. “Psst, Minister Verble,” said Minister Paradyz. “What’s going on?” Verble looked around. At the far end of the table he saw the white hair, the flashing eyeglasses, of the Elder of the Jews.

“Messiah!” he tailed.

Baggelman saw him too. “Giver of life!”

“I exist!” exclaimed Urinstein. “I am!”

The four rabbis held up their hands, to chant, to pray. Schpitalnik shouted over the din. “I knew it! I said so! A miracle has happened!”

But Rievesaltes, round-headed, was not celebrating. Shakily, he rose. He pointed at the Elder. “You gave those capsules. You dispensed them. Cyanide, you said. Dear cyanide! To kill us in one minute flat!”

The physician wrapped his cloak about his body. He raised his chin. “So you could run out? Escape? There is no escape! It is I, Trumpelman, only Trumpelman, who decides who lives and who dies.”

“But I’m the Police Chief! The Security Minister! I have a right to that power, too!”

“You? You? I made you sleep like a baby—with little pills!”

There was a loud wail from Philosoff. “Sleeping? Only sleeping? Does that mean we still have to make the list? We don’t know what to do!”

Nomberg: “We do whatever our President orders! The Almighty has sent him to guide us!”

In a low voice Trumpelman said, “The list has to be made.”

Immediately two of the rabbis—Kornischoner and Lunt—broke into heart-rending sobs. Their colleague, Wolf-Kitzes, touched each man on the shoulder. “Don’t cry. Don’t. We will pass a resolution: The Jew, Kornischoner; the Jew, Lunt; also the Jews Kleen, Paradyz, Popower and others hereby forbid the King of Heaven from punishing His people any longer. It’s enough! We demand that the suffering stop!”