At once the boy sprang for the window ledge. Then he squirmed through the open window. In the nick of time he unbolted the door from the inside. The brigaders rushed into the building and crouched by the street windows, holding their guns. The patrol reached the taxi. The trunk was open and so were the curbside doors. The courtesy light was burning inside. One of the Totenkopfers slammed down the trunk. Another closed the front and rear doors. The light went out. The patrol marched briskly off.

A match. The Soviet watch. Eleven twenty-one. Einhorn led the way across the marble floor. They could not stop their boots, in this large, open hallway, from making an echo. They went from room to room—bumping into furniture, into chairs—toward the back of the building. The Commander raised his hand: rear windows. On their hands and knees now, the Jews approached them. Even before they got there they heard what sounded like an audience coughing, whispering to each other. They peeked through. A hundred Warriors were gathered just beneath them. Here and there, plainly enough, came the gleam from a barrel of a gun. The coughing, the murmur—that was the rush and splash of the river, only thirty meters away.

The Jews deployed through the building in the following manner. On the ground floor, with the bazooka: the presser, Ignacy Bloomgarden, and Mister Pipe. Nachman Kipnis went to the second floor, to operate the transmitter-receiver. With him went Kleiderman, Chaffer, and the cannibal woman. Up top: Einhorn, Lipiczany, Faulhaber. Zam, because he was the doctor, and Miss Bibelnieks, his assistant, were free to roam where they were needed. In addition, it was their job to watch the front courtyard, so that the Others did not take the strike force by surprise. For the moment, everyone waited at one window or another. There was dust, from the dust cloud, on the windowsills. It was still falling.

Hersh Einhorn checked his watch. “Eleven twenty-nine,” he said. His voice, which had not been raised, carried all the way down to the first floor, where Pipe was slapping himself, like a person who wants to keep warm. “Comrades,” Einhorn said one minute later, “the operation has now begun.”

Across the river, approximately three hundred meters upstream, two portable rafts were slipping into the water. The Jews inside the boats started to row. The other Jews, the ones inside the building, leaned forward and back, forward and back, again and again. Do not think that at such a moment of danger the materialists had started to pray. Certainly not! Instinctively they felt themselves to be in the boats also, also pulling the oars.

Commander Einhorn: “Eleven thirty-two.”

The members of the Edmund Trilling Brigade stared and stared out the windows. They strained to hear. Little waves were slapping against the shore. On all three floors there was the click of the bullets going into the guns.

“Ha! Ha!” laughed the presser. “Nervous!”

“Eleven thirty-seven.” Seven minutes in the boats! Seven minutes on the water! Not quite halfway.