“What’s wrong with cooks?” the white-hatted Gutfreind wanted to know.

Mosk rose, blinking. “Nothing is wrong with cooks, except they should be in a kitchen. Just like actors should stay on the stage. We already heard who should be on the Council. Elect the smartest people, the best brains, the ones with the most to offer—that’s what Wohltat said. We mill owners have a head for business. What’s good for textiles is what’s good for the Jews. I control a hundred thousand spindles! Every day in my pockets I carry thousands and thousands of zlotys. Look! Here are two thousand in cash. That’s the kind of thing I have to offer!”

The room was in an uproar. Several young people shook their fists in Mosk’s direction. “It’s a bribe!” they were yelling. “He wants to buy his way onto the Judenrat!”

Putermilch, in his white shirt, was turning around and around. “Ladies and gentlemen. Friends! There are too many Jews for the Council. We have only fifteen places. How will we be able to choose?”

“Better to take the names from a hat!” Paradyz, the drum player, shouted.

“Why not have a rotating Council? First one group of sixteen serves for a month or two months, and then the next group has a turn. And so on. That way everybody will have a chance to be elected.” That was Bettsack, the schoolmaster’s, idea.

Philosoff: “But I thought it was a Council of Elders. Why not let the oldest on first?”

Pandemonium then. Everybody in the Astoria Café was on his feet, on chairs, on the tables. They all wanted Putermilch’s attention. But they came to order when Rievesaltes shot a bullet into the ceiling with his gun.

“Jews,” he said. “I don’t want to hear a sound.”

The storm ended. The patrons sat down in front of their plates. Rievesaltes, wearing a special shoe to make his legs even, stood on a tabletop.

“That’s democracy, my friends. All for one and one for all, pretty soon everybody is at everybody’s throat. I want to point out to you that while we have been throwing pitchai slices, and behaving like children, the moon has come up and the stars have risen. It’s already bedtime, Jews! Let’s put it this way: we have to settle our business.”

Odd that Rievesaltes should mention the moon. That was what the other kids called him, levune punim, moonface, man-in-the-moon, when he himself was a boy. It was the roundness of the head, and the neckless way it sat on his shoulders, that did it. Strange to say, not one of Rievesaltes’ associates—Mister Nodelman, Mister Pravenishkis, Mister Turski—had a neck either. Their heads lay on their shoulders like balls on a shelf. It is a type of body you often find on porters, on ritual butchers, on policemen. Rievesaltes, at age thirty-eight, was moonlike still. His hair had receded well up his bulging temples, and the habit of smoking had puffed the skin around his wide-set, narrow, browless eyes. His little ears seemed stuck flat to the side of his head. Where was his pistol? Disappeared. Vanished.