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
then a pleasant group of Colonial cottages surrounding the steepled
and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of
Netherlandish gravestones. In this 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 medieval 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
neighborhoods. 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 of names as "Sephiroth," "Ashmodai" and
"Samael." 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 demeanor 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 showed 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. Clergy 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 Tibet. 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
Yezidees, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers. However
this may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it
certain that these unauthorized newcomers were flooding Red Hook in
increasing numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached
by revenue officers and harbor 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 number, 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 archfiend and adversary.