III
It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the
heart of things in Red Hook. Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch
family, possessed originally of barely independent means, and inhabiting
the spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his grandfather had built
in Flatbush when that village was little more than a pleasant group of
colonial cottages surrounding the steepled and ivy-clad Reformed Church
with its iron-railed yard of Netherlandish gravestones. In his lonely house,
set back from Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam
had read and brooded for some six decades except for a period a generation
before, when he had sailed for the old world and remained there out of
sight for eight years. He could afford no servants, and would admit but
few visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships and
receiving his rare acquaintances in one of the three ground-floor rooms
which he kept in order - a vast, high-ceiled library whose walls were solidly
packed with tattered books of ponderous, archaic, and vaguely repellent
aspect. The growth of the town and its final absorption in the Brooklyn
district had meant nothing to Suydam, and he had come to mean less and
less to the town. Elderly people still pointed him out on the streets,
but to most of the recent population he was merely a queer, corpulent old
fellow whose unkempt white hair, stubbly beard, shiny black clothes, and
gold-headed cane earned him an amused glance and nothing more. Malone did
not know him by sight till duty called him to the case, but had heard of
him indirectly as a really profound authority on mediaeval superstition,
and had once idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the
Kabbalah and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory.
Suydam became a case when his distant and only relatives
sought court pronouncements on his sanity. Their action seemed sudden to
the outside world, but was really undertaken only after prolonged observation
and sorrowful debate. It was based on certain odd changes in his speech
and habits; wild references to impending wonders, and unaccountable hauntings
of disreputable Brooklyn neighbourhoods. He had been growing shabbier and
shabbier with the years, and now prowled about like a veritable mendicant;
seen occasionally by humiliated friends in subway stations, or loitering
on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of swarthy,
evil-looking strangers. When he spoke it was to babble of unlimited powers
almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing leers such mystical
words or names as 'Sephiroth', 'Ashmodai', and 'Samaël'. The court
action revealed that he was using up his income and wasting his principal
in the purchase of curious tomes imported from London and Paris, and in
the maintenance of a squalid basement flat in the Red Hook district where
he spent nearly every night, receiving odd delegations of mixed rowdies
and foreigners, and apparently conducting some kind of ceremonial service
behind the green blinds of secretive windows. Detectives assigned to follow
him reported strange cries and chants and prancing of feet filtering out
from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their peculiar ecstasy and
abandon despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden section.
When, however, the matter came to a hearing, Suydam managed to preserve
his liberty. Before the judge his manner grew urbane and reasonable, and
he freely admitted the queerness of demeanour and extravagant cast of language
into which he had fallen through excessive devotion to study and research.
He was, he said, engaged in the investigation of certain details of European
tradition which required the closest contact with foreign groups and their
songs and folk dances. The notion that any low secret society was preying
upon him, as hinted by his relatives, was obviously absurd; and shewed
how sadly limited was their understanding of him and his work. Triumphing
with his calm explanations, he was suffered to depart unhindered; and the
paid detectives of the Suydams, Corlears, and Van Brunts were withdrawn
in resigned disgust.
It was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and
police, Malone with them, entered the case. The law had watched the Suydam
action with interest, and had in many instances been called upon to aid
the private detectives. In this work it developed that Suydam's new associates
were among the blackest and most vicious criminals of Red Hook's devious
lanes, and that at least a third of them were known and repeated offenders
in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the importation of illegal immigrants.
Indeed, it would not have been too much to say that the old scholar's particular
circle coincided almost perfectly with the worst of the organized cliques
which smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely
turned back by Ellis Island. In the teeming rookeries of Parker Place -
since renamed - where Suydam had his basement flat, there had grown up
a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who used the Arabic
alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great mass of Syrians in
and around Atlantic Avenue. They could all have been deported for lack
of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving, and one does not disturb Red
Hook unless publicity forces one to.
These creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used
Wednesdays as a dance-hall, which reared its Gothic buttresses near the
vilest part of the waterfront. It was nominally Catholic; but priests throughout
Brooklyn denied the place all standing and authenticity, and policemen
agreed with them when they listened to the noises it emitted at night.
Malone used to fancy he heard terrible cracked bass notes from a hidden
organ far underground when the church stood empty and unlighted, whilst
all observers dreaded the shrieking and drumming which accompanied the
visible services. Suydam, when questioned, said he thought the ritual was
some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the Shamanism of
Thibet. Most of the people, he conjectured, were of Mongoloid stock, originating
somewhere in or near Kurdistan - and Malone could not help recalling that
Kurdistan is the land of the Yezidis, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.
However this may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it
certain that these unauthorised newcomers were flooding Red Hook in increasing
numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached by revenue officers
and harbour police, overrunning Parker Place and rapidly spreading up the
hill, and welcomed with curious fraternalism by the other assorted denizens
of the region. Their squat figures and characteristic squinting physiognomies,
grotesquely combined with flashy American clothing, appeared more and more
numerously among the loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section;
till at length it was deemed necessary to compute their numbers, ascertain
their sources and occupations, and find if possible a way to round them
up and deliver them to the proper immigration authorities. To this task
Malone was assigned by agreement of Federal and city forces, and as he
commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt poised upon the brink of nameless
terrors, with the shabby, unkempt figure of Robert Suydam as arch-fiend
and adversary.
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