The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  Cameras whirred at each pass, and the world waited in fascination. The photos that resulted were as clear and sharp as anyone could wish, showing the Hand in monochrome precision.

  And yet …

  Nothing was really answered. The summit, even from this new overhead angle, still looked uncannily like a giant human hand, and the curl of the fingers completely hid the hollow that lay beneath them. And even though the second of the Blackbird’s passes was to the west of the summit, so as to look sidelong into this apparent cave, still there was only darkness at the mouth of the cavity, a shadow cast by the hand’s thumb, and its inner recesses remained beyond view.

  The Hand of God, said the conspiracy nuts and the true believers, was giving the US military the finger.

  There was great demand for another over-flight, and for a photo to be taken at the right time of day for the sun to be shining into the recess, but the US authorities somewhat huffily refused. They had wasted enough hours on a militarily insignificant mountaintop; it was time they got back to the serious business of Cold War spying. Not to be outdone, the Russians carried out their own over-flight six months later (unauthorised but monitored by US radar) with a MiG-25, but few properly developed versions of their photos ever made it to the West, and those that did were no more definitive than the American shots.

  And so, the myth-making could continue, for seven more years at least, until Walter Richman stood upon the Palm of God in person.

  How he came to be there alone is itself an extraordinary story, covered elsewhere. All that matters for now is that he was seen, by those watching from below, to leave the Palm and to disappear briefly into the cavity beneath the fingers, before emerging again. Which should have settled the matter. But when Richman came down from the peak, to everyone’s amazement he refused to reveal what he had seen there. And though he had taken plenty of photos of the view looking out from the Palm, he took no images at all of the Hand itself, or of the cave.

  Why not? Why his enduring secrecy, when so many are so eager to know the truth? Through his many interviews in the years since, and in his own published writings, Richman has given the same answer. He maintains he keeps silent out of respect for the mountain. He says that whatever he saw within the cave—and he confirms it really is a cave—will forever remain between himself and the Wheel. ‘The mountain has been defeated,’ is his typical summation on the matter, ‘but I think we owe it the honour of keeping its last secret.’

  Thus, the mystery remains, and to this day fantasy has been left free to populate the Hand of God as it sees fit.

  The truth, of course, is no doubt perfectly mundane. Any serious thinker knows there is no Hand on the Moon, and no alien message waiting on the Wheel. There are no gods or goddesses or hidden treasures there either. Almost certainly, there is nothing in the cave within the Hand of God other than frozen, sterile rock.

  But the other truth, infuriating as it may be, is that only one man in all the world can say so with total certainty.

  And he won’t.

  11

  INTRODUCTIONS

  Rita left her room at five minutes past seven. She had showered and changed and then waited an uneasy hour, flicking unseeing through cable channels on the living room TV as night fell outside, and mercifully (but why did she think of it as merciful?) the Wheel faded from orange to grey and then to no more than a shadow, a wall beyond the wall of glass.

  Now, in the deserted corridor outside her apartment, she was struck once more by the quiet of the Observatory. She deliberately paused a moment to listen. It was not in fact a total silence: a barely perceptible hum hovered at just the audible threshold, the murmur, no doubt, of air conditioning and heating, the vibration of distant equipment in kitchens and lift shafts and generator rooms, no matter how well insulated and dampened. No active building could be noiseless.

  And yet, the quiet, it seemed to her, was surely the best that money could buy. She had visited many great houses in her youth, in company with her father attending to his wealthy clients, and most of those buildings had possessed, when they were not hosting parties or large gatherings, the same awful quality: emptiness. A hollowness rang in the ear, footsteps echoed on wooden floors, voices floated ghostlike from distant rooms. There was a sense of unused and unwanted space all about, and an inhibition about making any noise oneself.

  But here … here the quiet was a more assured one, a more carefully designed one. There was no hollow ringing in the air, no distracting echoes of voices or footsteps or clatter from some other place, no sense indeed that there were other places, or that there was anyone at all beyond this single corridor to disturb, even if she yelled out.

  Rita was enough of an architect’s daughter to note the subtle baffles built as decoration into the ceiling and walls to break up reflective surfaces and deaden echoes, and the use of carpeting and wall hangings to dampen noise. But no doubt this rich silence (yes, that was the word, rich) was due mostly to the buried nature of the structure, to the mountain itself that enfolded the building, that had swallowed it …

  She shook her head at herself, set off down the hall. Not swallowed. The mountain had done nothing of the kind. It was men who had burrowed into it, not the other way around.

  And that was another question: in all this excavated vastness, did she feel lost at all, did she feel small? Did she feel intimidated, wandering about on her own within the belly of such a beast? It would signal a failure in the design if she did. But no, the hallway, as she walked down it, was sized just right, not so narrow as to feel tube-like or claustrophobic, not so large as to feel impersonal and cold. The colours of the carpet and the wall hangings were warm, the lighting was intimate. Her clever father had made this tunnel in the rock feel human-sized and safe.

  But then she came to the hallway’s end, and the well of the Double Helix Staircase. She had known it was coming, of course, but even so the vertigo beat dizzyingly in her chest as she stepped out onto the landing and the walls swept suddenly away from her, both up and down, rising from and falling into the awesome central bore.

  Here was no comfort or intimacy; here was awe and inspiration, the staircase seeming to twist itself up from the depths, supported only by the sheer dynamism of its shape. Far below was a pool of darkness; high above, the windows of the Atrium dome were black with night. But up and down the walls of the well a thousand points of light burned, tiny stars that formed serene galaxies floating around the stairs. It was, Rita could not help but think, beautiful. Whatever it was her father had wrought within the mountain—even be it monstrous, indulgent, a crime against nature—there was beauty here, first and foremost.

  Eschewing the lift, she crossed the bridge to reach the closest arm of the Helix Staircase. Below, the spirals descended into the glowing darkness, but she turned her eyes to the night sky above, and climbed.

  Beautiful, yes … but beauty that was to be seen by so few people. After all, this was not a public monument, nor a church, nor even the foyer of some corporate headquarters monolith that the public could at least peer into through the glass. This was a private home.

  Why did they do it, she wondered, climbing slowly up the winding way. Why did the rich build things like this staircase, live in places like the Observatory? No lifestyle, no matter how exalted, truly called for a private home bigger than say four or five times the size of an average family house. So why did the super wealthy construct these vast palaces with their entry halls and ballrooms and guest wings, most of which would sit idle for ninety-nine per cent of the building’s life?

  Were they that insecure? That desperate to display their money and their power? And that tasteless to think that a big building was the best way to do it? Surely a secure billionaire would never bother. Why, even Richman himself, for most of his life, had derided the very concept of a grand home, refusing to build himself a single mansion despite the fact that he could have afforded dozens. Surely that was the wiser path. And yet, here in his senior years, even h
e had succumbed …

  No. As she had before, Rita thought it again: she did not understand the rich. And as she would never be rich, not billionaire rich, she never would understand them. Maybe the very condition that enabled a person to make billions also made it irresistible to them, or necessary, to build grandly. Maybe the fact that she couldn’t understand mansion-building was the very flaw in her that prevented her from becoming rich. Maybe one could never exist without the other.

  And maybe that was nonsense. Twenty metres up, and slightly out of breath, Rita emerged into the Atrium.

  Music had come floating down the stairs to her—jazz, mellow—and she had half expected to be greeted by the sight of a live quartet. She had even been disappointed that Richman would opt for such a vulgarity at what was meant to be a casual dinner. But no, there were no musicians in sight, the music was merely playing from unseen speakers.

  She turned to the Saloon. Behind the gleaming wooden bar, a white-shirted barman was assiduously engaged in the perfect cliché of polishing glasses. In a huge hearth a fire was blazing warmly. And there, arranged upon a cluster of couches set before the fire, were three people, two of whom Rita knew: Clara, and the IT expert Eugene, who had tampered with her phone. The third was a woman of middle age.

  ‘Rita,’ called the major-domo, seeing her and rising from the couch. ‘Come and join us. Eugene you’ve already met, but let me introduce Madelaine Reynard, our chief interior designer.’

  Rita took the woman’s extended hand. Though stylishly attired in a black dress and shawl, she was not quite what Rita would have imagined as an interior designer, for her frame was squat and solid, and her large face was dourly frowning.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Rita said.

  ‘Oh no,’ the designer returned, with a frank stare, ‘it’s my pleasure to meet you, Ms Gausse.’ Her sombre gaze flicked briefly to the major-domo, as if to share some ironic point, then returned to Rita. ‘My sympathies upon your father’s passing. We worked closely together in the last few years, as designer and architect always must.’ She had a notable accent: French, beneath an American-style English. ‘He was a great man.’

  Rita bowed her head politely.

  ‘A drink?’ asked Clara.

  A fresh round was ordered for everyone from the bar; Eugene drinking beer, the three women selecting various white wines.

  ‘Your work here is beautiful,’ Rita ventured to Madelaine, for the designer kept staring at her.

  ‘Thank you,’ was the unsmiling reply. ‘I am very happy with the result. Indeed, as far as I was concerned, my work here was finished. Done. Yet here I am again, at Mr Richman’s request.’

  Clara hastened to explain to Rita. ‘Well, yes, of course, the work is finished. And this weekend is mostly just a celebration of that. Still, Madelaine and Kushal—Kushal, as chief builder on the project—have also been invited in somewhat of a professional capacity. You might say this gathering is the final handing over of the house, an inspection tour to sort out any last niggles, before the grand opening a month from now. There might be a couple of things yet that need some reworking. Your father, too, of course would have been here, if he’d been able.’

  ‘But instead of your father,’ commented the designer, addressing Rita, ‘we have you.’ The tone of the observation was too formal to tell if disapproval lay beneath it, or something else. ‘The daughter, who has a certain fame of her own, though not for architecture. I have read your book, Ms Gausse.’

  Rita flushed in surprise. It was the last thing she had expected. ‘That was all long ago.’

  ‘Now, now, Maddie,’ Clara was smiling. ‘We promised we wouldn’t bring up Rita’s book if it’s not something she wants to talk about.’

  ‘Of course,’ nodded the designer. ‘We have only just met,’ she added, with the directness of a second language, ‘and I am being rude.’

  There had been discussions about her book? How strange. And yet, after all, these people had been friends of her father’s, it wasn’t so fantastic that they would look up a book written by his daughter.

  Still, it was embarrassing.

  To cover her unease, Rita asked of Madelaine, ‘Do you work full time for Richman, or was this just one contract?’

  The designer’s expression did not change. ‘I have maintained my own company for many years now, but in truth I no longer have any clients other than Mr Richman. There is no time, I am too busy. As you may understand, Mr Richman owns many buildings, private and corporate, all around the world, and is always constructing more.’ She glanced up and about at the great space around them. ‘But this Observatory, of course, was of a different scale.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that,’ Rita said. ‘Yet you’ve managed to make it feel very welcoming and comfortable on the inside.’

  The designer looked surprised. ‘But why not? Comfort is everything!’ And finally some warmth touched her lips. ‘As long as comfort is not mistaken for clutter. That I will not stand.’

  ‘Did you also do the interior decoration then, as well as the interior design?’ Rita enquired.

  ‘Oh yes, down to the last detail of furnishing, be it a footstool or the cutlery or the soap holders in the showers. Some architects consider even such minor trivialities as their province, but thankfully your father was not such a one, and was happy to leave the interiors entirely to me. And thankfully too, Mr Richman is not one for ostentation. He may have chosen the most extravagant location in the world—a mountaintop, for the good lord’s sake, in this terrible wilderness—but he is a sensible man when it comes to his bathroom fittings.’

  Rita nodded, glanced up to the high dome. ‘All this blank stone. It must have presented some unique challenges.’

  Madelaine’s gaze was more approving now. ‘The worst part was the outdoor areas. How do you humanise a space so cold, and so windy? The gales up here, Ms Gausse, you would not believe! The balconies, the upper deck, they were fiendish to design in any usable fashion—and then to have to put up with those hideously ugly airlock doors!’

  Her indignation was so forlorn, and her pout so childlike on such a stern face, that everyone had to laugh.

  ‘And here’s Kushal at last,’ noted Clara, her eyes going to the stairs.

  Rita turned to see a large middle-aged man of sub-continental appearance striding towards them, dressed in a casual suit and a red shirt. He had a full head of swept grey hair, and a toothy smile.

  ‘My friends,’ he declared, arms outspread. ‘How good to see you all again.’ And coming up, he lowered his arms to extend a hand to Rita. ‘And this must be the esteemed Ms Rita Gausse.’

  Rita accepted the handshake as Clara made the formal introduction. ‘Rita, this is Kushal Mangalam Ambini, chief of construction for this and many other of Mr Richman’s building projects.’

  ‘Just Kushal,’ the man reassured Rita. ‘And may I say it is an honour to meet the daughter of the father. Richard was a wonderful fellow, and of course brilliant, we had many fine days working together. And creativity runs in the family. I have read your book, Rita—if I may call you Rita—and I was most fascinated by it. Most intrigued.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she replied, taken aback again. Had everyone read her book?

  ‘Kushal,’ warned Clara, ‘I’ve already reminded Maddie that Rita is not to be pestered about ancient history. This is a social gathering.’

  ‘Of course! I only say it to let her know that we are not all’—and here he tipped a wink to the designer sitting stoically by—‘sceptics on such matters. But in any case, a whisky or I shall die!’

  He whirled away to the bar, leaving Rita to take her seat again, disconcerted. What possible interest could her book—her delusional manifesto upon the otherworldly, written eighteen years ago—have to people like these, to hard-headed construction professionals?

  But when the builder returned, all smiles and with a large whisky in hand, he made no further mention of Rita’s past beliefs. ‘Tell me,’ he said, collapsing on the couch
beside her, his eyes, slightly reddened, twinkling mischief, ‘what do you think of your father’s work here, if you can forgive its shoddy construction for my part, and also Maddie’s awful paint scheme and terrible carpets?’ His English was typically Indian in its properness. ‘The Observatory itself, I mean in its raw form before we all ruined it, as your father first conceived it, do you like it?’

  ‘It’s … it’s a little beyond an off-hand opinion, to be honest.’

  He seemed to understand. ‘Exactly! A building like this—how do you judge? Oh, I know there were millions of fools out there doing exactly that. The protests! The abuse I suffered during construction! “Leave that precious mountain alone!” A pile of rock! I ask you? But of course, once anyone is here, once they see it, well, their tongues are stilled.’

  Rita could only nod.

  Kushal pointed towards the great wedge of glass that divided the Saloon from the Dining Hall: the lower depths of the Terrace pool. The water within was illuminated by recessed lights of many colours, and streams of bubbles were rising from the bottom: as they rose they glimmered red and green, before disappearing into a darkness overhead, as if they were sinking into an abyss rather than rising towards the open air.

  ‘You see that? That pool? That’s what I mean about my terrible vandalism of your father’s design. I did that, not him.’

  ‘It wasn’t in the original design?’ Rita asked, relieved in a way, because it was a touch that hardly seemed like her father.

  ‘Not like this! Not as deep. It was shallow at first, and there was only solid rock down here. But I said, Richard, please, allow this. I’m no swimmer, I just float, you know, I don’t go underwater, so I need a way to watch beautiful women when they go bathing.’

  ‘And my father agreed?’

  ‘Oh no! He was horrified. But Mr Richman saw the joke, and I got my way. But oh, the trouble we had over that damned pool and the ice up there—I tell you, a bad dream. Even heating the water isn’t enough, it kept freezing over. We had to put in those bubble streams to keep the surface agitated at night—though at least they look nice in the lights.’