The next moment the same rescuers bolted from the doorway and began to vomit their double ration of stew. But they had the two sisters with them, the one, Madame Potash, without any eyebrows; smoke was coming from the bun of Madame Dickstein’s hair. Their brother ran to them, his tears frozen on his cheeks and nose. “But where is Potash?” he said.

As if in answer there was a tremendous crash, and ten thousand sparks flew into the air. The roof had caved in. The fourth floor was demolished. And now the flames were right over the Bloomgardens’ heads!

None too soon the hook and ladder came roaring out of the darkness, into the flickering light. At the wheel was Pfeffer and steering the rear, the way a dinosaur’s second brain steers its tail, was a Jew named Wax. Pfeffer turned his wheel left, onto Koscielny, but Wax, confused by the spectacle of the smoke and the flames, turned his to the right. The gigantic machine skidded in a huge semicircle, clearing the spectators off the sidewalk and running over the pumper’s limp hose.

The crew went into action. Two men unhooked a ladder and, since it had little wheels on one end, rolled it to the front wall of the building. The others ran with a net to just below the third-floor window. They spread it out, like spreading a fan, until it made a circle. Nor had the pumper been idle. Bloygrund, by pulling and tugging, managed to free the flattened hose. Immediately Faybush spun the hydraulic valve to send the water streaming through. But nothing came out of the end of the tube. Not a drop. Worse, it turned out that the ladder reached only halfway between the first and second stories, well below the spot where it was feared that Potash, the professor, was trapped. Most awful, the Bloomgardens seemed to have gone into shock. They stared straight down, at the round net, at the firemen arranged around it, and then they pulled back their heads. Bloygrund kicked the side of the pumper. “Frozen!” he shouted. “A block of ice!”

It was at this point, with little hope left for those inside the blazing house, that Isaiah Trumpelman arrived at Koscielny Place. Hasensprung, the new chauffeur, drove the black car—it was the old Daimler Double Six, with a new yellow star on the door—directly down the center of the street. Then Trumpelman got out and Lipiczany hopped off the jump seat. It was amazing, the effect the Elder had on everyone there. A cry went up. Tenants waved their towels from the roofs. And the members of the Smugowa Street Company, sick, demoralized, breathless, snapped to attention. “Greetings to Chairman Trumpelman!” they cried, and saluted.

The Elder stood erect, hatless in spite of the bitter cold. The flames, Nisel noticed, lit his face and were reflected in his spectacle lenses, so that for an instant it seemed that the fire itself was not occurring outside, in the building, but inside Trumpelman’s brain. Then, above them all, Number 80 visibly trembled, as if it meant to fall to its knees.