Very interesting!
One thing I love about the Baroque Cycle is that the wierdest stuff often turns out to be based on fact. 
Oh god, that reminds me of the end of book 2 of Quicksilver - the most depressing ending of a story I have ever read. Seriously, I felt like bursting into tears when I read the final line.
Fortunately the Confusion came along and all was well again.
Enoch the Red is so called because of his red beard. His hair, at least in Crypto, is gray. What’s particularly great about the sentence is that it’s a European. Not a white guy, or a Caucasian, or a European-looking man. Just “a red-headed European”. Taken from Bischoff’s POV it’s a terrible sentence, it doesn’t keep the perspective that it should. It’s a straight description from the author to the reader. And I was wrong that they are never mentioned again; at Shaftoe’s funeral (or when Waterhouse confronts Rudy in the Phillipines?), a black man and an Indian-looking man appear again amongst the conspirators, minus the redhead. So it presumably wasn’t a brain fart on NS’s part.
As for other tidbits, I recall some but nothing leaps to mind as particularly awesome. Rudy outs Root as being called “the Red” and being part of a secret organization, Enoch suggesting that his Italian won’t useful to the Detachment because he’d probably sound like a 16th century alchemist or something, & etc. I drove myself mad(der) last week looking for an internal monologue by Shaftoe prior to his death, something to the effect that he knows now why he’s felt like a dead man walking ever since Guadalcanal. A seeming suggestion that Root my have raised him from the dead after his platoon was wiped out. Maybe I’ll try again today.
Sorry to hear you’re giving up on the Cycle, eleanorigby. But in fairness if you don’t like it now, you’ll be hating life during the last book, which even I, Stephenson nerd extraordinaire, found to be pretty damn weak.
How can I thank you? You just saved me much wondering and mulling over about forging ahead (the book has not yet been returned to the library). Now I can return it with a clear conscience. I tried. Now I’m looking for something else while I’m waiting for the Evelyn Waugh book to come ILL.
Oh, found it. Duh. It’s a 2 parter. First is from Bobby Shaftoe’s morphine-Hacklheber induced hallucination:
[spoiler]"Bobby’s lying on a cot in a thatched hut in Guadalcanal. Swedish tribesmen run around in loincloths, gathering food: every so often, a ship gets blown up out in the Slot, and fish-shrapnel rains down and gets hung up in the branches, along with the occasional severed human arm or hunk of skull. The Swedes ignore the human bits and harvest the fish, taking it off to make lutefisk in black steel drums.
Enoch Root has an old cigar box on his lap. Golden light is shining out of the crack around its lid."[/spoiler]
Later is the part where he takes the doctor and the Finns out for coffee while Rudi smuggles Enoch off his deathbed in a blanket:
“Later today I’m gonna get into that fucking Mercedes and drive into Stockholm like a fucking bat out of hell,” Shaftoe says. Though the Finns will never appreciate it, he has chosen the “bat out of hell” phrase for a good reason. He understands, now, why he has thought of himself as a dead man ever since Guadalcanal. “Anyway, I hope y’all have a nice boat ride.”
Just random internal duialogue from Bobby’s head, unless the reader has begun to suspect that something weird is going on.