IV
Police methods are varied and ingenious. Malone, through
unostentatious rambles, carefully casual conversations, well-timed offers
of hip-pocket liquor, and judicious dialogues with frightened prisoners,
learned many isolated facts about the movement whose aspect had become
so menacing. The newcomers were indeed Kurds, but of a dialect obscure
and puzzling to exact philology. Such of them as worked lived mostly as
dock-hands and unlicenced pedlars, though frequently serving in Greek restaurants
and tending corner news stands. Most of them, however, had no visible means
of support; and were obviously connected with underworld pursuits, of which
smuggling and 'bootlegging' were the least indescribable. They had come
in steamships, apparently tramp freighters, and had been unloaded by stealth
on moonless nights in rowboats which stole under a certain wharf and followed
a hidden canal to a secret subterranean pool beneath a house. This wharf,
canal, and house Malone could not locate, for the memories of his informants
were exceedingly confused, while their speech was to a great extent beyond
even the ablest interpreters; nor could he gain any real data on the reasons
for their systematic importation. They were reticent about the exact spot
from which they had come, and were never sufficiently off guard to reveal
the agencies which had sought them out and directed their course. Indeed,
they developed something like acute fright when asked the reasons for their
presence. Gangsters of other breeds were equally taciturn, and she most
that could be gathered was that some god or great priesthood had promised
them unheard-of powers and supernatural glories and rulerships in a strange
land.
The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at
Suydam's closely guarded nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police
soon learned that the erstwhile recluse had leased additional flats to
accommodate such guests as knew his password; at last occupying three entire
houses and permanently harbouring many of his queer companions. He spent
but little time now at his Flatbush home, apparently going and coming only
to obtain and return books; and his face and manner had attained an appalling
pitch of wildness. Malone twice interviewed him, but was each time brusquely
repulsed. He knew nothing, he said, of any mysterious plots or movements;
and had no idea how the Kurds could have entered or what they wanted. His
business was to study undisturbed the folklore of all the immigrants of
the district; a business with which policemen had no legitimate concern.
Malone mentioned his admiration for Suydam's old brochure on the Kabbalah
and other myths, but the old man's softening was only momentary. He sensed
an intrusion, and rebuffed his visitor in no uncertain way; till Malone
withdrew disgusted, and turned to other channels of information.
What Malone would have unearthed could he have worked
continuously on the case, we shall never know. As it was, a stupid conflict
between city and Federal authority suspended the investigations for several
months, during which the detective was busy with other assignments. But
at no time did he lose interest, or fail to stand amazed at what began
to happen to Robert Suydam. Just at the time when a wave of kidnappings
and disappearances spread its excitement over New York, the unkempt scholar
embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it was absurd. One day he
was seen near Borough Hall with clean-shaved face, well-trimmed hair, and
tastefully immaculate attire, and on every day thereafter some obscure
improvement was noticed in him. He maintained his new fastidiousness without
interruption, added to it an unwonted sparkle of eye and crispness of speech,
and began little by little to shed the corpulence which had so long deformed
him. Now frequently taken for less than his age, he acquired an elasticity
of step and buoyancy of demeanour to match the new tradition, and shewed
a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye. As the
months passed, he commenced to dress less and less conservatively, and
finally astonished his new friends by renovating and redecorating his Flatbush
mansion, which he threw open in a series of receptions, summoning all the
acquaintances he could remember, and extending a special welcome to the
fully forgiven relatives who had so lately sought his restraint. Some attended
through curiosity, others through duty; but all were suddenly charmed by
the dawning grace and urbanity of the former hermit. He had, he asserted,
accomplished most of his allotted work; and having just inherited some
property from a half-forgotten European friend, was about to spend his
remaining years in a brighter second youth which ease, care, and diet had
made possible to him. Less and less was he seen at Red Hook, and more and
more did he move in the society to which he was born. Policemen noted a
tendency of the gangsters to congregate at the old stone church and dance-hall
instead of at the basement flat in Parker Place, though the latter and
its recent annexes still overflowed with noxious life.
Then two incidents occurred - wide enough apart, but both
of intense interest in the case as Malone envisaged it. One was a quiet
announcement in the Eagle of Robert Suydam's engagement to Miss Cornelia
Gerritsen of Bayside, a young woman of excellent position, and distantly
related to the elderly bridegroom-elect; whilst the other was a raid on
the dance-hall church by city police, after a report that the face of a
kidnapped child had been seen for a second at one of the basement windows.
Malone had participated in this raid, and studied the place with much care
when inside. Nothing was found - in fact, the building was entirely deserted
when visited - but the sensitive Celt was vaguely disturbed by many things
about the interior. There were crudely painted panels he did not like -
panels which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and sardonic
expressions, and which occasionally took liberties that even a layman's
sense of decorum could scarcely countenance. Then, too, he did not relish
the Greek inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an ancient incantation
which he had once stumbled upon in Dublin college days, and which read,
literally translated,
'O friend and companion of night, thou who
rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst
of shades among the tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to
mortals, Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favourably on our sacrifices!'
When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the
cracked bass organ notes he fancied he had heard beneath the church on
certain nights. He shuddered again at the rust around the rim of a metal
basin which stood on the altar, and paused nervously when his nostrils
seemed to detect a curious and ghastly stench from somewhere in the neighbourhood.
That organ memory haunted him, and he explored the basement with particular
assiduity before he left. The place was very hateful to him; yet after
all, were the blasphemous panels and inscriptions more than mere crudities
perpetrated by the ignorant?
By the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic
had become a popular newspaper scandal. Most of the victims were young
children of the lowest classes, but the increasing number of disappearances
had worked up a sentiment of the strongest fury. Journals clamoured for
action from the police, and once more the Butler Street Station sent its
men over Red Hook for clues, discoveries, and criminals. Malone was glad
to be on the trail again, and took pride in a raid on one of Suydam's Parker
Place houses. There, indeed, no stolen child was found, despite the tales
of screams and the red sash picked up in the areaway; but the paintings
and rough inscriptions on the peeling walls of most of the rooms, and the
primitive chemical laboratory in the attic, all helped to convince the
detective that he was on the track of something tremendous. The paintings
were appalling - hideous monsters of every shape and size, and parodies
on human outlines which cannot be described. The writing was in red, and
varied from Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters. Malone could not
read much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabbalistic
enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a Sort of Hebraised Hellenistic
Greek, and suggested the most terrible daemon-evocations of the Alexandrian
decadence:
'HEL · HELOYM · SOTHER ·
EMMANVEL · SABAOTH · AGLA · TETRAGRAMMATON ·
AGYROS · OTHEOS · ISCHYROS · ATHANATOS · IEHOVA
· VA · ADONAI · SADAY · HOMOVSION ·
MESSIAS · ESCHEREHEYE.'
Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably
of the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly
here. In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was found - a pile of
genuine gold ingots covered carelessly with a piece of burlap, and bearing
upon their shining surfaces the same weird hieroglyphics which also adorned
the walls. During the raid the police encountered only a passive resistance
from the squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door. Finding nothing
relevant, they had to leave all as it was; but the precinct captain wrote
Suydam a note advising him to look closely to the character of his tenants
and protégés in view of the growing public clamour.
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