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 bought 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.
The New York Light was not, to be sure, a thriving enterprise. It was a large dull broadsheet, full of Wall Street news and stories from the police blotter. It was the last afternoon newspaper in New York, with a loyal, aging readership that bought it at Grand Central and Penn Station for the long ride to the suburbs or had it delivered to their apartment buildings on the East Side. A few serious gamblers read it for news from West Coast racetracks, and businessmen trusted its closing stock prices and analyses of earnings reports. But its gray pages repelled many other New Yorkers, and reporters from the morning newspapers said that it bridged the generation gap between the living and the dead.
For eighteen years the Light had been owned by a foundation, whose members stated that they felt a civic obligation to subsidize the second-oldest newspaper in the United States. The staff was small, the advertising thin, the losses substantial, but after all the paper went back to 1835, the year that James Gordon Bennett started modern journalism with the New York Herald. Among the survivors, only the New York Post could trace its lineage back to an earlier time, the year 1801, when Alexander Hamilton assembled a group of New Yorkers to serve his interests and those of the Bank of New York. But as time passed, the clubby old-guard members of the Light Foundation began dying off, carrying what was left of noblesse oblige into their marble crypts, and their children preferred yachts and airplanes and houses in Southampton or Positano to civic duty in New York. One June morning in 1991, on page one of the Light, the board announced that if a new buyer was not found within two weeks, they would fold the paper. Other newspapers wrote mournful editorials, but their owners were rooting for the Light to die. It was a hindrance, another competitor for space on newsstands, and in the privacy of their offices they dismissed any hope for its survival as mere sentimentality. Several semi-insane owners of parking lots and grocery chains offered to buy the Light for a dollar and operate it for at least a year. Each got a few minutes on local television; but sane men knew that it was doubtful that even a one-dollar check from such men would clear at the bank. The surviving members of the foundation didn’t want to be remembered for selling the Light to a lunatic. In stepped William Hancock Warren.
“New York without the Light,” he said in a press release, “would be like New York without the Statue of Liberty.”
On the Fourth of July that year, Warren handed the foundation a check for one million dollars, which the surviving members promised would be used to study threats to the First Amendment. The fireworks on the Hudson seemed like acts of celebration for the newspaper. “Re-born on the 4th of July!” their page-one headline said the following day. And when the holiday ended, William Hancock Warren walked into the rat-infested building on West Street where the Light had been published since 1947, its fourth location since its foundation in a three-story building on Beaver Street. He uttered only one sentence to the assembled television cameras, and as Cormac watched that evening on channel 4, the words jolted his heart: “I’m a descendant of people who lived in New York before the Light was born! I hope to see it flourish and live to an even riper old age!”
Cormac thought that night: This cannot be. His most natural reflex, taught to him by living a very long life, was doubt. A wise old editor had said to him once, “If you want it to be true, it probably isn’t.” But then he saw Warren’s eyes and the familiar features (only marginally altered by the work of generations) and once more resumed a search that had lasted in some ways all his years. He read everything he could find about the man who, in print, was now being called Willie Warren. This wasn’t much, but he subscribed to the Argosy service anyway. Thinking: I don’t want it to be true, so it probably is. If this was the last of one branch of the Warren line, the old vows required him to act. He wished he had the sword. His father’s sword. He wished the sword were there to connect him to the younger man he once was, full of certainties. And there was something else pressing upon him now.
He wanted more than ever to find the dark lady marked by spirals. She had nothing to do with the Warrens and the curse of Ireland. She was part of a separate story. And yet her story and the story of the Warrens were coming together, forced into union by the pressure of time. He had found a dark lady. Delfina Cintron. But he did not yet know if she bore the markings, if she was the dark lady. Caution kept him from making the discovery. Caution, and a kind of fear. If she did not bear the markings, he would go on and on and on, like the North River. If she did, he could be entering his final days. At last. And he could not go to that ending without completing the unfinished business of the other story, the demand for completion imposed on him by family and tribe. My father first, he thought, and then, with any luck, Delfina Cintron, and finally release and a swift passage into the emerald light.