The last leg of the journey to the Ripples’ mansion is the steepest. The Heights, a mountainous outcropping at the city’s northern tip, was once an exclusive enclave, a promontory from which the then-teeming entirety of Empire Island could be seen and observed, and upon which one’s own edifice stood as a monument, dwarfing those below. As the hired car progresses along the Lionel Roswell Expressway, Swanny cranes her neck, but can only glimpse a sheer, vertical sheet of rock, richly embellished with graffiti and the chiseled initials of the long dead. Atop this pedestal, her husband dwells. The hired car takes the next exit, into a tunnel encircled with spray-painted script and watched over by the peeping eyes of a faded leggy snake.*
Here the darkness is complete, the stillness perfect except for the clomping of the oxen’s hooves, until the driver flips on his grumbling generator and ignites the buzzing halogen brights he’s affixed to the limo’s grille. Then the tunnel reveals itself, a concrete cave with burnt-out sconces on the walls. Rats skitter across the pavement; a crumpled bag of BacoCrisps crunches under the wheel. Swanny holds her breath. Beside her in the darkness, Pippi seems to expand, to exert a gravitational pull the way objects do in the cold void of space. The two have never sat together so silently. The road tilts up beneath them. When Swanny speaks, her voice sounds disembodied.
“Mother? What if he doesn’t like me?”
“Then he’ll get used to you, darling.”
When light pours in the windows again, it is as though a night has passed.
Forty-eight high-definition face-recognition security cameras are positioned at various locations on the outside of the Ripples’ mansion, courtesy of HomeShield, the private security firm that monitors the property remotely. Some cameras stare out from the mouths of gargoyles, some perch atop the battlements, some crouch at ground level, behind the tough iron lattices that line the basement windows. As the hired car pulls up to the barred entrance to the grand inner courtyard, all forty-eight cameras swivel furiously in its direction. And when the Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg rolls down her window and presents her round, uneasy visage to the crisp autumn afternoon air, all forty-eight cameras beep and click and whizz and scan in a flurry of electronic desperation until, at last grudgingly satisfied, they confirm the arrival of the family’s honored guest to the staff, the Locksure alarm system, and the robotic hinges of the impenetrable metal gates, which regally, deliberately, swing inward. The Dahlbergs park and disembark in the circular drive.
The Ripple mansion is a medieval castle with a spaceship crashed into it. The east wing is gothic, all spires and flamboyant arches, windowpanes the colors of gemstones, flying buttresses ornately carved in bas-relief. The west is Romanesque, fortressy and unadorned, almost surly beneath its battlements. But the central fa?ade and entryway is an angular, crystalline entity: all jutting steel and planes of glass slicing like merciless razors into the stones of the past, mirrored sharply in the courtyard’s limpid, silvery reflecting pool. It takes Swanny’s breath away. Pippi frowns up at it, putting on her oversized suncheaters to get a better look.
“Generations of bluebloods, and yet they build like this. Money doesn’t care whose pocket it’s in.”
Swanny couldn’t disagree more: “It’s bold. And modern.”
“Post-modern, darling.” Pippi turns back to the limo for her crocodile briefcase.
“Mother, the driver wants his tip.”
Pippi pats the pockets of her fox fur coat for change. But the moment is already past: a stream of butlers is issuing from the spaceship’s portal, uniformed and white-gloved, to seize the Dahlbergs’ luggage.
“Just charge it!” Pippi calls airily, and then she’s hustling Swanny inside.
Once in the lobby of the Ripple mansion, Pippi Dahlberg shrugs off her fox fur and lets it fall unhindered to the floor. She drops the hatbox she has tucked under one arm and strides toward the visitor desk, where she immediately presses the large gold buzzer, despite the fact a butler is already stepping forward to man the station.
“We are the Baroness Swan Lenore Dahlberg,” she explains, gesturing vaguely behind her. “We have arrived.”
Swanny stands back awkwardly, uncertain if she should be embarrassed or relieved that she apparently won’t be doing any of the talking. It’s difficult even to think: the entry hall is working its spell on her. The ceiling is so high, she doesn’t feel like she’s inside of anything. The stone floor rings beneath her feet. Before her, a grand two-sided marble stairway swoops upward, half-encircling an indoor fountain of a naked male colossus, stabbing the belly of a kraken with his trident. Here, as in the reflecting pool outside, the water has a metallic gleam, which Swanny realizes now comes from money: the water shimmers with tossed coins. Spent wishes. But here in the Ripple mansion, what need would one have to wish for anything at all?
Beneath the vertex of the staircase, an elevator chimes open, revealing an unlikely trio: one fat man in an obvious hairpiece and a sweatsuit; a second, fatter man in a wheelchair, guzzling a viscous, night-dark elixir from a tulip glass…and the tallest woman Swanny’s ever seen, whose sequined minidress does little to conceal the skyward ascent of her endless golden legs.
“Mother,” says Swanny, interrupting Pippi’s litany of requests to the butler as the strangers make their way toward them across the lobby’s vast expanse. Pippi turns and her expression of momentary irritation transforms into a starburst of ecstatic delight.
“Hum-phrey!”
And before Swanny can even recoil in horror, her mother and the first fat man are embracing. He swings her through the air in a half-circle; her witchy stilettos punctuate the air with little kicks.
“Pippi,” he says, flushed, straightening his skull merkin. “There’s a portrait of you rotting in an attic somewhere.”
“No, wrong pact: I promised my firstborn instead. Speaking of which—” She grips Swanny’s shoulder through the soft gray fur of her coat. “Darling?”
“The pleasure’s all mine.” Swanny curtseys.
“Enchanté,” says the second fat man around a burp. He grabs Swanny by the hand and drags her toward his wheelchair to kiss her wetly on the knuckles.
“And this must be your daughter,” Pippi tells Humphrey. She laughs uproariously; shrill echoes hail from the vaulted ceiling. “Oh, you scandalous rascal, wherever did you find her?”
“I first traveled to this city with my modeling company,” Katya says stiffly.
“Why, of course you did. I’m absolutely famished. Could we sneak a bite before dinner, something very light, don’t trouble yourself.”
Katya glances at Humphrey, who makes shooing motions.