I found what I was looking for on Fortieth Street: a dusty old shop whose display cases were two stories high and filled to bursting with music of every kind. Thousands of rolls of sheet music nestled into small cubbyholes, and the air was heavy with dust. It was like some lost library of the ancient world, and the shopkeeper was just as much an artifact. Tall, grinning, and skeletally thin, he looked like death, and he was happy to see me.

“Where are your phonograph records?” I said.

“Don’t sell ’em. Ain’t a working phonograph on the Westside. No demand.”

“All you have is sheet music?”

“Instruments too, in the back. You looking for something particular?”

“It’s an old song.”

“All I got is old.”

“‘We’ll skin your back, make your bones crack, and burn your face with lye,’” I sang, as best I could.

“That’s not how it goes.”

“You know it?”

“I know every song the Westside ever sang. That one I don’t like.”

“What’s it called?”

“‘The Bloody Fist Dirge.’ Awful number. Just awful. But the lyrics—they go a little different. Let me find it,” he said, and he climbed slowly up his ladder, to the top of the western wall, and he flitted his fingers from sheet to sheet until he found the one that would save Brass Aiken from the music in his head—and give me a chance to inspect the man Van Alen claimed had killed my father.

I tapped my foot on Forty-Eighth Street. I knew where I had to go, but the thought didn’t thrill me. At the end of the block was the fence, and a gate I had passed through once before. Now, I had no license, and no way out. But there was an alternate route.

“All right, Alice,” I said. “Perhaps I’ll see you soon.”

The doors to the Longacre swung open. No noise came from inside. But then, when your workers have been relieved of their tongues, noise is never a problem. As I crept across the faded rose lobby carpet, I wondered if I believed Van Alen’s story about discovering those mutilated workers at a crooked boys’ home. I eased open the orchestra door, saw the theater was deserted, and decided he had probably lied.

The aisle sloped down to the orchestra pit, where the walls had been removed to allow easier passage of stolen goods. From there, a steep ramp led up to the gash in the Longacre stage. The string of lanterns dangled overhead, extinguished. I lit a match and climbed down into the dark.