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 unlicensed peddlers, though
frequently serving in Greek restaurants and tending corner
newsstands. 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 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 reason for their presence. Gangsters of other breeds were
equally taciturn, and the 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 harboring 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 bruskly 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 folk-lore 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 investigation 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 demeanor to match the new tradition, and showed
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 few 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 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 dancehall 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, Gorge, Mormo, thousand-faced
moon, look favorably 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 neighborhood. 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 clamored
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 cabalistic
enough. One frequently repeated motto was in a sort of Hebraized
Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible demon-evocations
of the Alexandrian decadence:
HEL. HELOYM. SOTHER. EMMANVEL. SABOATH. AGLA. TETRAGRAMMATION.
AGYROS. OTHEOS. ISCHYROS. ATHANATOS. IEHOVA. VA. ADONAL. SADY.
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 this 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
protegés in view of the growing public clamor.
V
Then came the June wedding and the great sensation; Flatbush was gay
for the hour about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the
street near the old Dutch church where an awning stretched from door
to highway. No local event ever surpassed the Suydam-Gerritsen
nuptials in tone and scale, and the party which escorted the bride
and groom to the Cunard pier was, if not exactly the smartest, at
least a solid page from the Social Register! At 5 o'clock adieux was
waved, and the ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly
turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for widening
water spaces that led to Old World wonders. By night the outer
harbor was cleared, and late passengers watched the stars twinkling
above an unpolluted ocean.
Whether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention,
no one can say. Probably they were simultaneous, but it is of no use
to calculate. The scream came from the Suydam stateroom, and the
sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful
things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad--as it is, he
shrieked more loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran
simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons. The ship's
doctor who entered the stateroom and turned on the lights a moment
later did not go mad, but told nobody what he saw till afterward,
when he corresponded with Malone in Chepachet. It was
murder--strangulation--but one need not say that the claw-mark on
Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any
other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an
instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory,
seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of
the word "LILITH." One need not mention these things because they
vanished so quickly--as for Suydam, one could at least bar others
from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has
distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole,
just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a
certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the
night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; but no
real outline met the eye. As proof, the doctor points to his
continued sanity.
Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention. A boat put off, and a
horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard
the temporarily halted Cunarder. They wanted Suydam or his
body--they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons were sure
he would die. The captain's deck was almost a pandemonium; for at
the instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom and the
demands of the men from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest
seaman could think what to do. Suddenly the leader of the visiting
mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a
dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain. It was signed by
Robert Suydam, and bore the following odd message:
_In case of sudden or unexpected accident or death on my part, please
deliver me or my body unquestioningly into the hands of the bearer
and his associates. Everything, for me, and perhaps for you, depends
on absolute compliance. Explanations can come later--do not fail me
now._
_Robert Suydam._
Captain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered
something to the former. Finally they nodded rather helplessly and
led the way to the Suydam stateroom. The doctor directed the
captain's glance away as he unlocked the door and admitted the
strange seamen, nor did he breathe easily, till they filed out with
their burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation. It
was wrapped in bedding from the berths, and the doctor was glad that
the outlines were not very revealing. Somehow the men got the thing
over the side and away to their tramp steamer without uncovering it.
The Cunarder started again, and the doctor and ship's undertaker
sought out the Suydam stateroom to perform what last services they
could. Once more the physician was forced to reticence and even to
mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened. When the undertaker
asked him why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he
neglected to affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the
vacant bottle-spaces on the rack, or to the odor in the sink which
showed the hasty disposition of the bottles' original contents. The
pockets of those men--if men they were--had bulged damnably when they
left the ship. Two hours later, and the world knew by radio all that
it ought to know of the horrible affair.