Victor Lavalle: The Ballad of Black Tom

Then Detective Thomas F. Malone got grabbed.

One powerful grip on the back of Malone’s coat. He fell from the window and back onto the grass. A pair of very young men in uniform stood over him. One officer kicked Malone in the ribs. The other squatted, brought a knee down on Malone’s chest, thrust a hand through Malone’s pockets. The officer found Malone’s service revolver but, in the rush of discovery, didn’t recognize it as such.

“Gun,” he said to his partner. “What else you got?” he shouted at Malone.

The second officer kicked Malone again, barked about “robbery,” “criminal trespass.” Then the other officer with his knee on Malone’s chest found Malone’s detective badge. This changed the tone of conversation. For instance, a conversation actually began. As did apologies.

The two patrolmen helped Malone to his feet. The one who’d done the kicking continued to apologize. But Malone only demanded a boost. The pair looked confused, but the kicker did as instructed. He hoisted Malone. Malone peered into the library. Not only was the figure in the chair gone, but the chair had disappeared, too.

The next morning Malone returned to Red Hook, but now he found only silence. When he showed himself, the streets went mum. A curtain of silence fell between him and the residents. The young men on the corners huddled closer, opened their mouths only when it was their turn to inhale. The women hanging out their windows shut their lips when Malone passed. When he sat at a diner booth, the men, daylong regulars, paid their bills and fled. Seemed like all of Red Hook had been warned away from Malone. Was this because he’d snooped at Suydam’s home?

This meant Malone had to do something he detested. He had to consult the other police who worked Red Hook. Malone liked being a policeman, but he felt himself quite distinct from almost all the other cops. He’d tried, in his first two years on the job, to make friends with the other men, but they cackled when he broached the subjects that mattered most to him. Some even tried to have him thrown off the force. Poets should be dreamers, cops should be rough. That kind of thinking. And so Malone had retreated into himself — a kind of shut-in’s existence — even as he attended roll call meetings, and occasionally shared information with other officers for a case. But after the denizens of Red Hook so clearly turned on him, Malone made his way back to the Butler Street station. He found the officers on foot patrol. He had every expectation they’d make him suffer humiliations before sharing any Red Hook news, but, in fact, the pair he found at the station — starting a shift — had been looking for him.

They looked scared as they spoke with Malone.

Robert Suydam had taken over three tenement buildings on Parker Place, one of the blocks facing the squalid seafront. Had he bought the buildings? Malone asked. And even if so, how could he take ownership so quickly? The patrolmen had no answers, only more startling news to share. In a single night every tenant fled these three buildings, fled or was put out. In their place arrived Robert Suydam, and enough books to fill four libraries. An army came, too, perhaps fifty of the worst Red Hook ever knew. All this moving done without a single truck on the street. Overnight, every window of each building had been blocked with heavy curtains. The property had been overtaken by the local demigods of crime and debauchery. Something worse than the patrolmen ever experienced brewed at those premises. All in the service of Mr. Robert Suydam.

Last, they added word of a second-in-command, Robert Suydam’s sergeant, a Negro heretofore unknown in the crime logs of Brooklyn. He acted as Suydam’s mouthpiece, giving orders when the old man wasn’t around.

“Black Tom is what they all call him,” one of the patrolmen said. “Everywhere he goes, he carries this bloodstained guitar.”

Malone didn’t realize he’d fainted until the patrolmen were helping him up.

Malone left the patrolmen and went directly to the waterfront. He knew Parker Place, perched himself on a stoop at the corner. But Malone forgot he was no longer the tall, gaunt detective the denizens of Red Hook tolerated in their crowds. Word had been spread. As soon as he sat on the stoop, took out his notepad, the tenants of that building shut themselves inside. Boys on the nearby corners darted away. The locals evacuated in the time it took for him to take out his ink pen. Nothing could be more conspicuous around here than a lone white man perched on a stoop. He stood, but before he’d even reached the bottom of the stairs, the groan of a wooden door opening played on the emptied street. The Negro from Harlem appeared from one of Suydam’s tenements. Malone leafed through his notepad. Charles Thomas Tester. That was the name.

Despite what the patrolmen said, he did not carry a bloodstained guitar now, and this relieved Malone more fully than he could explain.

“Mr. Suydam asked me to come greet you,” the Negro said. “Do you remember me?”

His demeanor, even his voice, was greatly changed from when they’d last met. The Negro spoke with open disdain and returned Malone’s stare so directly that it was Malone who looked away.

“Your father,” Malone said. “Have you buried him yet?”

“They wouldn’t release the body,” the Negro said. “Not until the investigation is completed.”

“It must be cleared by now,” Malone said. He looked down and realized he held the pen out like a weapon. He did not lower his hand.

“I stopped trying,” the Negro said.

Malone began to speak, but the Negro talked over him.

“Mr. Suydam wants you, and the other members of the police, to know that he has moved to this neighborhood permanently. He won’t be returning to Flatbush.”

Now the Negro watched Malone with the glass-eyed interest of a cat stalking a bird. Malone looked back to his notebook to escape that gaze.

“As he’s doing nothing illegal, he expects to be left alone,” the Negro said.

“We’ll decide when to leave him alone,” Malone said coolly. “And we’ll decide the same about you.”

There were faces in every window, in every building, on this block and the next, watching both men. Malone felt it important to assert his role, his position, for the benefit of the onlookers, if not himself.

“Charles Thomas Tester,” Malone said. “That’s your name. And you belong in Harlem, not Red Hook.”

“They call me something else now,” the Negro said. “And my birth name has no more power over me. It died with my daddy.”

“Black Tom? You expect me to call you that?”

The Negro didn’t respond. He simply watched Malone patiently.

“I don’t want to see you here anymore,” Malone said. “I’ll let the foot patrols know that if you’re found anywhere in Brooklyn, they’re to pick you up. I can’t promise you’ll be in good health by the time they put you down again.”

Black Tom looked up at the buildings on either side of the street.

“Mr. Suydam is in need of a book that can only be found in Queens,” he said, ignoring the detective’s threat. “I’m headed out there right now.”

“I told you where you’re allowed to be,” Malone tried, but his voice faltered.

“You shouldn’t be here when I get back,” Black Tom said.

What happened next was inexplicable, difficult to even remember. Black Tom did something; Malone heard something. A low tone suddenly played loudly, as if Black Tom had hummed a drone note inside Malone’s skull. The detective’s eyes lost focus. Malone became dizzy from the sound, and he lost his footing. He fell onto the nearby stoop as if he’d been slapped. His stomach seized; he was about to throw up. Then a tremendous breeze sent Malone’s hat off his head. The hat tumbled down Parker Place as if trying to escape. When Malone’s eyes finally focused, he was alone on the street. Black Tom had disappeared.