I crept into the wings of the great lost theater. The stage was lit by three strings of lanterns that stretched all the way from the lobby. They wound their way through the seats, over the pit, and onto the stage, where a long, ugly gash cut through the peeling boards—a hole in the floor big enough for a man to slither through. In the swaying lantern light, it looked like a pulsing golden wound. Here was the source of the Eastside breeze.

A bag soared out of the hole and landed at the footlights. A half-naked man followed it, climbing a ladder from the depths beneath the theater. More men followed, dragging their loads into the aisles, where the center block of seats had been ripped away, allowing an open space for the young men and children who opened the bags and sorted what they found inside. They worked in silence. It was quite a haul.

Crouched behind a crimson chaise, I saw oil paintings, china, candelabras, and jewels. There were bags of flour, summer dresses, textbooks, medicine, and enough sporting equipment to start a minor league baseball team. Everything was sorted, labeled, written down, and checked off. Here was the engine that powered Van Alen’s charity, that clothed his poor and delivered their babies and fed their children and granted all who bought breakfast at the bazaar a generous Westside discount. It was an empire of theft that made Rotgut Barbarossa’s bootlegging operation look positively amateurish, and all of it was overseen by Ida Greene. Trains can come in at all kinds of stations.

She watched from a box on the right side of the mezzanine, Ugly at her side. She smoked a cigarette, lowering the holder after every drag to take a precise sip of water from the glass at her elbow. Something in the orchestra caught her eye. She spoke, and all work stopped, her voice filling the theater despite being hardly louder than a whisper.

“That lamp,” she said, and the man holding the lamp froze, sweat dripping down his cheeks and into his gaping mouth. “It’s Tiffany. Set it aside. Mr. Van Alen will want it for his collection.”

The lamp was placed safely at the foot of the stage, and work went on.

The cramps in my calves were becoming unbearable when the curtain opened in Mrs. Greene’s box. Work stopped, and the men looked up in awe at the silhouette of a hunched giant. By the way Mrs. Greene bowed her head, I could only assume we had been graced by the presence of Van Alen himself. He spoke to her for several minutes, much too quiet to hear.