by Pete Hamill
He has lunch in a sushi place, his eyes wandering from laminated views of Kyoto to the swift hands of the chef. He sits at the bar, those hands in front of him, clipping, trimming, carving. Like a great swordsman.
He doesn’t look at the bills or the envelope full of press clippings. They can wait. He opens the Dostoyevsky. By the time he finishes his platter, he’s laughing.
87.
He spreads the clippings on the dining table on the lower floor. Cindy Adams. Liz Smith. Mitchell Fink. Some scraps from Page Six. Others from Rush & Malloy. There’s a spread in Town & Country, with handsome photography and views of a Hamptons beach, and a talk with William Hancock Warren across three pages in Editor & Publisher. Most of the stories he has read in the local newspapers, but there are odd clippings from the Rocky Mountain News (about a charity event in Aspen) and a sarcastic column from the Guardian, about Willie Warren’s most recent trip to London, where he met with his tailor, the editor of the Times, and Tony Blair, in that order.
Cormac pushes them around on the polished mahogany table, as if trying to make a collage that will reveal their meaning. He sighs. There is no meaning beyond the one that brought him to New York across the ocean sea. The ancient vow. The oldest contract. He feels sludge congealing inside his skull.
He turns away from the clippings, imagines himself telling Bill Tweed the story. “What?” Tweed says. “You made a promise two hundred and sixty fucking years ago—and you’re going to keep it?” His belly rolls and heaves. “You are a lunatic, Cormac. You’re living some insane dream. Forget this nonsense and jump on a woman, or order a steak!”
Cormac laughs too. And then he sees his father’s body in the doorway and his mother in the mud. And the words come back, the words that have never left him. His father: They must be brought to the end of the line. And Mary Morrigan on the people who are barred from the Otherworld: Those who fail to avenge injustice. For want of courage. For want of passion. If an unjust act is done in the family of a man or woman, it must be avenged.
Such words have shaped his life, he thinks, and he can’t roll them back. He gazes out through the windows, then takes a deep breath and returns to the clippings. There, smiling and a bit suety in excellent reproduction, is William Hancock Warren. He is not the last of the Warren line, perhaps, but he’s the most recent Warren to come to New York. He will have to stand for all the rest, scattered as they are around the world. He appears, he’s here, I must act, or… Warren has an eighty-one-foot yacht in the North River, a Fifth Avenue apartment, an eight-bedroom mansion in Southampton, designed (so they say) on the back of an envelope by Stanford White, and a thirty-one-room compound in Palm Beach. The chalet in Aspen is a minor property, and the place in Klosters is merely leased. Willie Warren: newspaper publisher supreme. Now courted, always photographed in public places. A fresh young prince of New York. Cormac smiles and thinks: How can I think of killing a man called Willie?
In many of the pictures, and most of the texts, there is also Elizabeth. The standard British trophy wife, with a vague genealogy and an untested claim to bloodlines going back to the Battle of Hastings. A model for a few years, adored by French and Italian photographers for her high cheekbones, long neck, elegant shoulders, and sleek black hair. She was on seven Vogue covers in two years and featured in spreads in Majorca and Rio, Cancun and Istanbul, all of them now in a separate folder in the file cabinet in the cubicle at the rear of the upstairs Studio.
The modeling is over, a phase, she explained to one interviewer, exciting and rewarding and educational, but a phase. She has not modeled for anyone since meeting Willie Warren. The stories imply that she has one responsibility now: to be lean and perfect. To be perfect at dinner and (Cormac supposes) perfect in bed. To be perfect when doing her charity work, campaigning against land mines, visiting the poor, the crack babies, the homeless in Thanksgiving Day shelters, where she exudes a luminous perfection that keeps everyone at bay, except, of course, the paparazzi. She visits the maimed, injured, luckless casualties of life, the flashbulbs flutter, and she’s gone.
Cormac slides the clips around one final time, then assembles them like cards and gets up, thinking: They have no children. Why? Don’t they have the usual dynastic ambitions of the rich? Are they free of the need to pass on their things and their houses to another generation, to be sure there will be no end to this branch of the line? Or are they merely waiting, like yuppies, until all is secure in life and business? Cormac walks to the spiral staircase and winds around the steps to the upper Studio. He flicks on lights, opens the door to the small office he calls the Archive, and goes in. The wall to the right is completely covered with corkboard, most of it occupied by the Warren family tree. He drops the fresh clips into a wire basket, to be filed later, then pauses.
“The other curse of my twice-cursed life,” he says, and laughs, gazing at the family tree. “Jesus Christ…”
For more than a century, he has been gathering the documents in the Archive, the whole long saga of the Warrens who were the descendants and other relatives of the Earl of Warren. Certificates of births and deaths; newspaper clippings; obscure memoirs; yellowing hand-scrawled letters, real estate transactions, accounts printed in private; regimental histories. They have been retrieved through correspondence or through serendipity (in auction rooms, on the shelves of antiquarian booksellers) and in a flood these past ten years through the Internet. My hobby, Cormac often tells himself. My demented obsession. What I collect instead of stamps or coins.
On the far wall, the known faces of the Warrens exist in drawings and old engravings, crude woodcuts and reproductions of paintings, along with one photograph of a Warren made in the 1930s by Horst. On a map of the world, Cormac has placed flags in all the places they are known to have gone: India and Afghanistan and Nepal, Syria and Palestine, places where they preached the Christian virtues of British civilization to Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists, raising holy British rifles against heathen scimitars, dividing one religion against another, one province, one tribe, one family: dividing and dividing, while helping themselves to plunder.
The Warrens didn’t invent that world, Cormac knew, but they did not struggle very hard against it. They went to Shanghai and Hong Kong, where some of their ships carried opium from the British fields of Burma to the Chinese. “We are surely doing God’s work,” one Warren wrote home. “They cannot be permitted to resist us, or they will be resisting Christ.” This one joined the patriotic killing spree called the Opium Wars to force their drugs on an endless supply of heathen customers. Beijing, where a mad Warren missionary, his head full of God and sin and the redemption of the poor pagans (as well as of himself), walked out bravely to face the Boxers in 1900 with only a cross and a Bible. His head ended up on a pike, and the rebels wiped their asses with his Bible.
Here on the wall is the American branch, budding and tentative in Philadelphia after the Revolution, flowering in the coal mines of Pennsylvania, where years later its members employed Pinkertons against Molly McGuires, using gunshot and ambush to keep the anthracitic cash flowing, eventually giving way to the harder, more modern, more ruthless will of the Rockefellers. One of the Warrens entered steamboat manufacture along the Mississippi after the Louisiana Purchase, building a grand mansion in the Garden District of New Orleans, investing in cotton and helping finance the Confederacy. Another burrowed mines in Colorado and then, as thousands of factories opened across the Northeast and the first automobiles from Detroit rattled comically on lumpy American streets, his children discovered the black liquid pleasures of oil. Out there, in the lands stolen from Mexico, was the true El Dorado, filled with black gold. More lucrative than the slave trade and free of any moral qualms.
Not all of them were parasites or predators. Two died at Gettysburg, and one at Antietam, fighting for the Union, helping free the ancestors of men and women brought to America by the earl and his friends. One of the remaining British Warrens, Richard Benoit Warren, died trying to save an Irish enli
sted man in the second Battle of the Somme (and his great-grandfather had fed the starving Irish during the Famine, without asking them to become soupers). A young man whose legs were broken in a barroom brawl—his name was Charles Asquith Warren—became a Communist, worked in the slums of the New England mill towns (in spite of his limping gait), joined the Lincoln Brigade to fight in Spain in 1936, and was killed in the Battle of the Jarama. One Warren was killed at Anzio. One died on Iwo Jima.
Some simply vanished, of course, to die in failure or brawls or forgotten wars in strange places. But the known ones are here on the wall, and their tales are here in the Archive. There is very little about the earl and nothing about the son who died during the American Revolution. None of the narratives mention Cormac Samuel O’Connor.
Cormac couldn’t kill them all, of course, and didn’t want to. Even if he’d had the desire, as a prisoner of the blessing of Africa he couldn’t leave Manhattan to track them down. Very early, he decided that the Warrens would only matter to him if they invaded this place, this granite island, this Manhattan. If they entered these turreted castle grounds (he said, mocking himself as the Irish Edmund Dantes), he would send them off to join the sea-scoured bones of the earl.
But after Cormac killed the earl’s son, the Warrens did not try again to establish themselves in New York. It was as if they believed that some invincible curse hovered in the New York streets, mysterious, spooky, fatal. And besides, America was big enough. None of them tried to drive roots here until the arrival of William Hancock Warren. Who is here now, defying family superstition and ancient history. The first Warren in more than two centuries to take up residence in Manhattan. There are seven photographs of the man here, including one as a boy and one taken at his wedding. The man smiles. The man’s eyes twinkle. In one image, dressed in a tuxedo, he is juggling three balls. Cormac thinks: He doesn’t know I exist. He doesn’t know he is my quarry.
88.
Cormac dials Delfina’s number, but there is no answer. Her answering machine gives only a number, no name, but it’s her voice, hoarse and whispery. He leaves his name and number. He walks around the Studio in the gray afternoon light and begins to sing. Each time I see a crowd of people… just like a fool I stop and stare… He loves to sing. He sits at the piano and sings. He walks the streets and sings. Thousands of songs are parked in memory, from Bowery theaters to Prohibition speakeasies, from vaudeville to Rodgers and Hart, many of them fragments, some of them complete, and when he plays Sinatra or Tony Bennett, Johnny Hartman or Lady Day, they are all duets. I know it’s not the proper thing to do… He sings to Miles Davis CDs too, and to Ben Webster. He sings French with Piaf and Becaud and in Spanish with Tito Rodriguez… but he never dances. He can’t dance. Or he won’t risk it. Never in public, seldom when alone. Long ago, in the time when Master Juba and John Diamond were inventing tap-dancing in the Five Points, in an exuberant collision of Africa and Ireland, he decided that white people had no gift for dancing. At least not for American dancing. The waltz, perhaps. The minuet. But it was better when the rhythms moved more quickly, when drums and bass came in a rush, to sit this one out. And perhaps it wasn’t white people, for after all, there were Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse. It wasn’t white people, it was Cormac Samuel O’Connor. He could not dance. It was as simple as that. He yearned to dance, but had been taught by life that every man has his limitations. Dancing was as far from him as basketball.
Now he goes downstairs to the living area, to the book-lined walls, the dark bedroom. He is bound for his daily nap. Since the 1890s, this has been his indulgence, his pleasure, his necessity. The siesta (he always insists to his friends) is the most civilized of all institutions sent to us from the Mediterranean. The gift of Spain and Italy, and perhaps of Islam. The siesta gives him two mornings. The siesta allows his worries to marinate in his brain, where solutions can be found for riddles, and always grants him on awaking a refreshed clarity. In the back bedroom, thick drapes seal off light and muffle sound. The daily routine is almost always the same: lunch, then a siesta, and then down to the streets for his walk, which he calls his Wordsworth.
He traces this ambulatory habit to reading the great poet when he was young. One variation on the Wordsworth were the years in the 1890s that he spent trying to photograph every building on the island. The years he spent trying to freeze a city that could not be frozen. Now most of those buildings exist only as photographs, and almost every leafy glade in Manhattan has been paved, but he continues walking. Sometimes he takes the subway to some distant stop and does the Wordsworth all the way home. On weekends, when trucks are gone from the streets, along with thousands of suburban cars, he takes his bicycle to the streets and pedals for miles. He never walks fewer than twenty blocks and never pedals less than sixty. In the 1970s, he began riding the bicycle late on summer nights, when the asphalt had cooled, and there he would see mysterious black riders, each a solitary, each on a ten-speed, each with shorts and helmet and backpack, all, like him, indulging the loneliness of the long-distance rider. One night, pedaling into Central Park after midnight, he saw one of these riders and was certain it was Quaco. They glanced at each other. He saw Quaco’s eyes, his nose and mouth and line of jaw, and Cormac said hello in Yoruba, hello and nice night, and the man said yes in Ashanti, yes, a nice night. They pedaled away, and he never saw the man again.
He can’t go more than three days without the Wordsworth. He needs the regular flushing of blood and lungs, particularly in the years when he smokes. But he also wants the multiple layered visions of the changing city and the provocations of memory. A bar called Grogan’s becomes Farrelly’s and then Mangan’s, and then the Flowing Tide, and then Chapo’s, and then the Quisqueya Lounge, and never stops being a bar. One spring, an entire block vanishes from Chelsea to be replaced by white-brick humming apartment houses. A factory is turned into lofts. He needs to see it all, to be in the city as it is and not a prisoner of the city as it was. To watch the change as it happens helps him combat the sludge.
He never gets tired, even during the years when he smokes. The trick he has learned is a simple one: focus only on the twenty feet directly in front of him. Move with willed looseness through that closed space (eating time along with space), and avoid looking at any point in the distance. That imposing hill will exhaust you, he says to himself. You will never get past that dense warren of factories. Twenty feet: That’s the immediate goal. The habits of the Wordsworth mirror the habits of his life.
Now he removes his clothes and takes an old cotton night-shirt from a wall peg. He lies on the bed, but sleep does not come easily on this afternoon.
The quarry rises in his mind.
89.
Twelve years earlier, nobody in New York knew the name of William Hancock Warren. Now Cormac is thinking about him each day and seeing him in dreams. He must have been known, of course, by bankers and brokers, by a few well-tipped headwaiters, by the manager of the Plaza or the Pierre, the Stanhope or the Sherry-Netherland. But he didn’t live here and was not yet a public figure. His name was buried in the middle of the Forbes and Fortune lists, among the largely anonymous people who had more money than they could ever spend but not so much that they faced curiosity and scrutiny. Those who knew him well enough to call him Willie lived in Houston and London and the endless Arab emirates. He was as comfortable in the desert cities of Saudi Arabia as he was in the deserts near Palm Springs. Some of his older friends, including those from the House of Saud, had known his father, a man who’d risen from the oil fields of Oklahoma during the Great Depression and hammered together his own security and wealth with judicious bribes to politicians of both parties and a passion for anonymity. For the first thirty-two years of his life, William Hancock Warren was true to his father’s style.
Nine months after his father died in Texas, aged eighty-one, and buried discreetly, with two of his pallbearers retired officers of the Central Intelligence Agency, the son moved to Manhattan with his wife. They bou
ght a seven-bedroom triplex one block north of the Frick, but this caused no sensation. Such men arrive periodically in New York, tarry awhile, and then leave. William Hancock Warren was among those who stayed, who found life and purpose in Manhattan. But he was here for a year before Cormac saw his name in a gossip column and another three years before the public became aware of his presence. He bought real estate in deals that attracted little attention. A Chelsea warehouse here, some West Side apartment houses there, an ancient office building on William Street, which he quietly closed for rehab. He avoided the fashionable restaurants, the charity ball circuit, the seasonal cycle of opera and theater openings. He stayed away from politicians and so eluded those prying journalists who inspected campaign contributions. He wasn’t part of anyone’s A list for dinner parties. He invested in Internet companies, to be sure, but in those years such companies were not covered by the general press. Occasionally he lunched with a business acquaintance at the Century Association, but he did not become a member. His name did not appear in the columns of Liz Smith, Cindy Adams, or Rush & Malloy, and Page Six did not seem to know of his existence. In the style of his father, William Hancock Warren preferred to be a member of the anonymous rich.
Then, only nine years ago, he emerged as a public figure as if visiting from the planet Krypton. That was when Cormac first saw his photograph. The occasion was an acquisition that he must have known would put him in the public eye. No baseball team was for sale that year and the football teams were prisoners of long leases in New Jersey. So William Hancock Warren did what so many other rich young American men do when they want more than money: He bought a newspaper.