“Lives? What lives? Today there will be a big transport. That is true. But the Jews on it will be trained as farmhands. I swear it.”

I. C. Trumpelman started shouting. He banged the tip of his cane on the sodden boards. “Don’t insult me! I’m not a shit-wagon puller! This is no rabbi with a nose in a book! I know all about it! The forest! The motor fumes in the buses! The mattresses with ladies’ hair! You can’t fool the Elder of the Jews the way you can a needle threader He’s too smart for you!”

Wohltat leaned forward, plump as a pillow. “What forest? What motor fumes?”

A different voice rolled off the rounded walls. “Why continue the charade? Obviously he knows.” Trumpelman could not determine which way to look. The benches in the steam-bath went around the entire room. They rose, one ring above the other, like the seats in an anatomy theater. The speaker could be anywhere.

“Tell him about the roundup in Warsaw. One-third of the Jews! And Czerniakow swallowed poison. The Elder of Warsaw is dead! Why keep these things a secret? We should announce it to the world! Do you think anyone will object? They’ll thank us. They’ll applaud. A thousand years from now people will remember us precisely for this, the way they remember Pasteur.”

Softly our Elder said, “And Czerniakow’s son?”

Wohltat answered. “Escaped! Long ago! An officer in the Red Army now!”

Everything on Trumpelman was by then wilting. The brim of his hat drooped down. His cane felt rubberized. Dizzily he reached out his hand for something to hold to, but nothing was there. “Please, please,” he called weakly. “Cancel the roundup. My children! My Jews.”

“Ha, ha! Here’s an idea!” Now Chaim recognized that laugh, that voice. The Obergruppenführer’s. Then he saw, higher up, thin-legged, sharp-nosed, Grundtripp himself. He crossed his arms over his rib cage. “With every corpse we bury a bronze tablet, on which is carved: In such and such a place, on such and such a date, we alone had the courage to deal with Mister Feinberg or Steinberg or Weinberg, whatever the name of the Jew.”

Trumpelman wrung his hands. “But this was our grand premiere!”

From somewhere, from everywhere, a new voice, high-pitched, excited, began to expound. “No! No tablets! No statues! Not a single sign. It was a mistake to bury them in the first place. Now they will have to be dug up again. So bone crushers can smash up their bones. The whole population must vanish without a trace. As if they had been dropped in the ocean. Or shot in a rocket to space.”

The Judenrat President followed Grundtripp’s gaze, far up, into the thick of the steam. There was a red-skinned person there. Boiled-looking. With spectacles and a double chin. “Making them disappear, that’s easy! The hard part is to perform the task, without reward, without recognition, and still remain good human beings. That takes toughness! Toughness! Toughness like Genghis Khan!” The man was beating himself with twigs, like a Finn. Trumpelman knew him. HH! The Schoolmaster! Reichsführer of the SS!