Pete Hamill - Forever

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.