“Yes, I know him! Szpilfogel!” The speaker was the former orphan Nellie Brilliantstein. How greatly in the last years she had changed. Heavy set, a rumbly voice, a steady smoker. And her eyes, which had been wide, were now deep, narrow, and green. She went to Trumpelman’s guard. “Tell us! Has it happened? Or is the old man still alive?”

Rievesaltes swayed just a little. “Now who is the Elder? Him? Or me?”

The Elite Guardsman did not answer this question directly. Instead he lowered his arms, as well as his voice, and said to the head of the Jewish police, “My message is for your ears, nobody else’s.” Then to Rievesaltes he whispered a thing so astonishing, yet so delightful, that the Minister’s mouth at first dropped open, then spread in a beaming smile.

We know precisely what the Police Chief found out from Szpilfogel. This: that at midnight, at Tsarskoye Selo, the terrorist Lipsky could be caught in the act of smuggling contraband guns. Unfortunately what Rievesaltes did not discover was that at that very moment, Bass, also a Guardsman, was revealing to Obergruppenführer Grundtripp that the Security Minister, up to then such a trustworthy Jew, might be observed just after midnight at Tsarskoye Selo, plotting with the traitor Lipsky.

Is the old man still alive? What a question! Who else could have thought up such an ingenious plot? Here was a miraculous recovery. First he is in his bed, his deathbed, with not enough breath to make a mark on a mirror, and then he’s smarter than Machiavelli!

Now who is the Elder? Are there any doubts? Trumpelman still! Even the Others, the High and Mighty, were nothing more than puppets in the puppetmaster’s hands.

III

Midnight then. A light rain. Just enough to make you wipe your eyeglass lenses. Chilly, too. Smoke came from the chimney at Tsarskoye Selo, lingering at the top. Inside the mansion, Trumpelman, the Elder, was sitting on a chair. His hands were tied in back of the frame. On the floor in front of him, a man with a nose and a mustache and glasses was examining a crate of guns. That is when Fried Rievesaltes, with a pistol in his hand, stepped through the unbolted door.

Rievesaltes: “You can take off the rubber nose. For I know it is you, Attorney Lipsky.”

Lipsky was armed as well. “Hands up, traitor.”

“Not true,” Rievesaltes remarked. “Everyone knows that I save hundreds of doomed Jews each day. I don’t shoot them, the way you do.”

“We execute only those who have grown rich and powerful on the sufferings of their own people. The ones who enjoy their jobs.”

“The money I make is spent inside the Ghetto. Isn’t there a reward for your capture, Lipsky? Fifty thousand zlotys from the Judenrat? Thus we take from the rich and give to the poor. Hands up, Mister Smuggler, please.”

But neither man raised his hands. Each pointed his weapon at the other.

“It’s a stalemate,” said the old man in the chair. Then he began to issue sharp commands. “Rievesaltes, back up ten paces. You too, Lipsky—in the other direction. Back, back, near the door. Don’t point your guns, idiots! Not until the Chairman gives the command. He will say, Get ready! He will tell you, Aim! Don’t shoot until you hear the word Fire!” Thus the Elder arranged the duel.