Forever (45 page)
C
ormac picks up his mail from the box he keeps in the post office on
Vesey and Church. Big, ugly, solid stone post office, carrying the chiseled names of Robert Moses, master builder, and Fiorello La Guardia, master mayor, and the year of its unveiling, 1935. He riffles a sheaf of mail from his box. Bills. Time Warner cable service. Con Ed. The telephone company. A tax notice. And a plump brown envelope from the Argosy Clipping Service. He slips them into a cloth shopping bag, steps outside, smokes a cigarette. A Jamaican man is selling fruit from a cart. Messengers pedal by on bicycles. Men and women enter and leave the Jean Louis hair salon across Church Street. The sky is bright and traffic moves slowly from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, heading north. Bells toll in St. Peter’s on Barclay Street and are answered by the bells of St. Paul’s. Over everything, melding the sounds, he hears the murmuring, ceaseless drone of the city.
He crosses the street into the Borders bookstore, glances at the new books in paperback and the displays of bestsellers. On each visit, he hopes to be surprised. He seldom is. Today is Saint Patrick’s Day and so one table is stacked with Books of Irish Interest: Joyce, the McCourts, Seamus Heaney, Yeats. Along with cookbooks and guidebooks and songbooks. He moves past them, browsing, touching, his hands caressing covers, allowing images to flash into him: Mayan temples, Brazilian prostitutes, bombed-out London. He chooses a new translation of Dostoyevsky’s
Demons,
which he has always known as
The Possessed
. Paperback. Seventeen dollars. A week’s pay in the year the post office opened. Three times what he earned in a week in 1840. When he first read the novel a century earlier, he was reminded of his friends in the Fenian Brotherhood and its endless, sometimes hilarious debates about the use of terror against the English enemy. What if someone innocent dies? What do you mean by innocent? And suppose the fella is not in a state of grace? Will you follow him to Hell? One of their offices was on Cortlandt Street, up above a man who made barrels, the building plowed away in 1969 to make way for the Trade Center. He wrote for their newspaper. Or one of their newspapers. And wondered which of them worked for the police. There were good people among the Fenians, along with a few lunatic true believers. Thinking about them years later, he realized that certain Irish exiles were pure Dostoyevsky.
He pays for the book, adds it to his shopping bag, then goes down the escalator from Borders and out into the endless concourse until he finds an ATM. He has no personal credit cards, but he does have a bank card in the name of ABCDuane Real Estate and he takes two hundred dollars from the company checking account. People in personalized green bunting are hurrying in every direction, buying sandwiches and sushi, cold drinks and coffee. Green ties, green shirts, green slacks, green dresses. Buttons that say, “Kiss me, I’m Irish.” Many move down the escalators to the PATH trains, and Cormac wonders why anybody is going to New Jersey at one-thirty in the afternoon. Then thinks: Who am I to judge? I’ve never been there myself.
He heads south for the exit on Liberty Street, avoiding a hundred possible collisions in the frantic rush of the mall. One window of Sam Goody’s is filled with Irish music. The Chieftains. The Clancy Brothers. Luke Kelly. De Danann. U2. He goes in, wondering for a moment whether it’s time to buy a DVD player, to add one more piece of technology to his life. Come to my house, Delfina, and I’ll explain the journey from a blacksmith’s forge to the DVD version of
The French Connection
. Thinking: My life is absurd.
He buys a CD of the old music. Celtic music older than Saint Patrick. Along with Mozart’s
The Magic Flute.
The Berlin Philharmonic conducted by von Karajan. All about the Otherworld and the dark powers of the Queen of Night.
In the Liberty Street vestibule, four homeless men huddle near the doors. Filthy. Eyeless in Gaza. In the 1890s, there were Bed Lines, for men ruined by the collapse, and when the post office was built, there were breadlines. Now there are homeless shelters where nobody wants to sleep. These four men must sleep here, where Cortlandt Street used to be. One of them, his white beard sprouting from dark brown skin, wears a plastic shamrock.
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.
H
e 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 enlisted 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.