On went Zam. The loose rubber slapped against the surface of the roadway. The rims of the wheels began to shoot out a stream of sparks. He was a quarter of the way across. Now a third. Spinning, skidding, the auto reached the halfway point. The Jews were holding their breath. Their hearts were pounding. But no mine exploded. Thus their comrades would know: the bridge was safe to cross! Far off the blinking bulb—taxi! taxi!—slid from one side of the roadway to the other, across all three lanes. Toot! Toot! Yes! Joyfully, triumphantly, Doctor Zam was sounding the Packard’s two-note horn. When the taxi was only a hundred meters from the eastern embankment, the Red Army responded. With a flash of light. With the zoom of a rocket. The auto stopped dead, turned over, and burned.

Inside the building the Jews were clutching their heads.

“They have killed him! Killed him!”

“This cannot be! How could this be?”

Faulhaber was sobbing. “What does it mean? It’s a tragedy!”

“Comrades,” said Einhorn, wet-eyed like the others, “there is room for doubt here. Perhaps they did not know who it was. Perhaps they thought it was the counterattack.”

At the radio, Kipnis was agitated. “Quiet! Quiet! A signal! The Red Army is going to speak.”

Instantly the room was silent. Pipe, from Odessa, grasped the earphones from the boy. He put them on.

Skolka eeshaw zheevee? The old man repeated what he had heard aloud. “This means, How many of you are still alive?”

Eight, they might have replied. Or maybe seven. Possibly six. But the brigade members, speechless, stunned, did not answer the question. No matter: the bombs which flew through the window, which rolled here and there among them, soon made any such figure invalid.

What happened was that the exploding grenades created a tremendous hole in the floor of the second story, and that half the resistance fighters fell through. Namely: Pipe, the cannibal woman, and—with his pug nose, his Tatar eyes—Hersh Einhorn. If they had survived the blast, if they had lived through the fall, then they were killed by the Blond Ones, who rushed into the ground floor and shot many more bullets than needed into their bodies.

The remainder—Bloomgarden, Kipnis, Faulhaber—were also blown from the room, into a smoky hallway. As best they could they crawled up the staircase to the top floor. They had no weapons. Kipnis’ spectacles were gone. And Faulhaber discovered that much of his blood was pouring from a wound in his side. At any moment, they thought, the Others would swarm up the stairs and shoot them, too. The stairs, however, collapsed, along with the rest of the second story. It took the Warriors ninety minutes to dig each other out, after which they simply withdrew. The building, though trembling, was still.

An hour went by. Then another. The sound of distant shooting kept coming in the front windows. There had never been a roundup that lasted so long. Two sounds came in at the rear: the splash of the little river waves and something—no one knew what—squeaking and squeaking. Then the sky began to glow, just faintly, like the light in a vacuum tube.