The Rule of Four (11 page)

“Why would Bill lie about where he got the diary?” I ask once we’re in the snow again.

“I don’t think he would,” Paul says.

“Then what was Curry talking about?”

“If he knew more, he would’ve told us.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to tell you while I was there.”

Paul ignores me. There’s a pretense he likes to keep up, that we are equals in Curry’s eyes.

“What did he mean when he said he’d help you get excavation permits?” I ask.

Paul looks over his shoulder nervously at a student who has fallen in behind us. “Not here, Tom.”

I know better than to push him. After a long silence I say, “Can you tell me why all the paintings had to do with Joseph?”

Paul’s expression lightens. “Genesis thirty-seven.” He pauses to call it up.
“Now Jacob loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age. And he made him a coat of many colors.”

It takes me a second to understand. The gift of colors. The love of an aging father for his favorite son.

“He’s proud of you,” I say.

Paul nods. “But I’m not done. The work isn’t finished.”

“It’s not about that,” I tell him.

Paul smiles thinly. “Of course it is.”

We make our way back to the dorm, and I notice an unpleasant quality to the sky: it’s dark, but not perfectly black. The whole roof of it is shot with snow clouds from horizon to horizon, and they are a heavy, luminous gray. There isn’t a star to be seen.

At the rear door to Dod, I realize we have no way in. Paul flags down a senior from upstairs, who gives us an odd look before lending us his ID card. A small pad registers its proximity with a beep, then unlocks the door with a sound like a shotgun being shucked. In the basement, two junior women are folding clothes on an open table, wearing T-shirts and tiny boxer shorts in the swelter of the laundry room. It never fails: walking through the laundry room in winter is like entering a desert mirage, air shivering with heat, bodies fantastic. When it’s snowing outside, the sight of bare shoulders and legs is better than a shot of whiskey to get the blood pumping again. We’re nowhere near Holder, but it feels like we’ve stumbled onto the waiting room for the Nude Olympics.

I climb to the first floor and head toward the north flank of the building, where our room is the final quad. Paul trails behind me, silent. The closer we get, the more I find myself thinking of the two letters on the coffee table again. Even Bill’s discovery isn’t enough to distract me. For weeks I’ve fallen asleep to the thought of what a person could do with forty-three thousand dollars a year. Fitzgerald wrote a short story once about a diamond the size of the Ritz, and in the moments before I doze off, when the proportions of things are in flux, I can imagine buying a ring with that diamond in it, for a woman just on the other side of the dream. Some nights I think of buying enchanted items, the way children do in games they play, like a car that would never crash, or a leg that would always heal. Charlie keeps me honest when I get carried away. He says I ought to buy a collection of very expensive platform shoes, or put a down payment on a house with low ceilings.

“What are they doing?” Paul says, pointing down the hall.

Standing side by side at the end of the corridor are Charlie and Gil. They’re looking into the open doorway of our room, where someone is pacing inside. A second glance tells me everything: the campus police are here. Someone must’ve seen us coming out of the tunnels.

“What’s going on?” Paul says, quickening his steps.

I hurry to follow him.

The proctor is sizing up something on our floor. I can hear Charlie and Gil arguing, but can’t make out the words. Just as I start to prepare excuses for what we’ve done, Gil sees us coming and says, “It’s okay. Nothing was taken.”

“What?”

He points toward the doorway. The room, I see now, is in disarray. Couch cushions are on the floor; books are thrown off shelves. In the bedroom I share with Paul, dresser drawers hang open.

“Oh God . . .” Paul whispers, pushing between Charlie and me.

“Someone broke in,” Gil explains.

“Someone
walked
in,” Charlie corrects. “The door was unlocked.”

I turn to Gil, the last one out. For the past month Paul has asked us to keep the room tight while he finished his thesis. Gil is the only one who forgets.

“Look,” he says defensively, pointing at the window across the room. “They came in through there. Not through the door.”

A puddle of water has formed beneath a window by the north face of the common room. Its sash is thrown wide, and snow is gathering on the sill, swimming on the back of the wind. There are three huge slashes through the screen.

I step forward into my bedroom with Paul. His eyes are running along the edge of his desk drawers, rising toward the library books mounted on a wall shelf Charlie built him. The books are gone. His head shifts back and forth, searching. His breathing is loud. For an instant we’re back in the tunnels; nothing is familiar but the voices.

It doesn’t matter, Charlie. That’s not how they got in.

It doesn’t matter to you, because they didn’t take anything of yours.

The proctor is still pacing through the common room.

“Someone must’ve known . . .” Paul mumbles to himself.

“Look down here,” I say, pointing at the lower mattress on the bunk.

Paul turns. The books are safe. Hands shaking, he begins to check the titles.

I pad through my own belongings, finding almost everything untouched. The dust has hardly been disturbed. Someone rifled through my papers, but only a framed reproduction of the
Hypnerotomachia
’s title page, a gift from my father, has been taken off the wall and opened. One corner is bent, but otherwise it’s undamaged. I hold it in my hands. Looking around, I spot a single book of mine out of place: the galley proof of
The Belladonna Letter,
before my father decided
The Belladonna Document
had a nicer ring to it.

Gil steps into the foyer between the bedrooms and calls to us. “They didn’t touch anything of Charlie’s or mine. What about you guys?”

There’s a spot of guilt in his voice, a hopefulness that despite the mess, nothing is gone.

When I look in his direction, I notice what he means. The other bedroom is pristine.

“My stuff’s fine,” I tell him.

“They didn’t find anything,” Paul says to me.

Before I can ask what he means, a voice interrupts from the foyer.

“Could I ask you two a few questions?”

The proctor, a woman with leathery skin and curled hair, takes a slow look at us as we appear, snow-soaked, from the corners of the room. The sight of Katie’s sweatpants on Paul, and of Katie’s synchronized swimming shirt on me, catches her attention. The woman, identified as Lieutenant Williams by the tag on her breast pocket, pulls a steno pad from her coat.

“You two are . . . ?”

“Tom Sullivan,” I say. “He’s Paul Harris.”

“Was anything of yours taken?”

Paul’s eyes are still searching his room, ignoring the proctor.

“We don’t know,” I say.

She glances up. “Have you looked around?”

“We haven’t noticed anything missing yet.”

“Who was the last person to leave the room tonight?”

“Why?”

Williams clears her throat. “Because we know who left the door unlocked, but not who left the window open.”

She lingers over the words
door
and
window,
reminding us of how we brought this on ourselves.

Paul notices the window for the first time. His color fades. “It must’ve been me. It was so hot in the bedroom, and Tom didn’t want the window open. I came out here to work and I must’ve forgotten to shut it.”

“Look,” Gil says to the proctor, seeing she’s not trying to help, “can we finish this up? I don’t think there’s anything else to see.”

Without waiting for an answer, he forces the window shut and leads Paul to the couch, sitting beside him.

The proctor makes a final scribble in her pad. “Window open, door unlocked. Nothing taken. Anything else?”

We’re all silent.

Williams shakes her head. “Burglaries are hard to resolve,” she says, as if she’s wrestling with our high expectations. “We’ll report it to the borough police. Next time, lock up before you leave. You might save yourself some trouble. We’ll be in touch if we have any more information.”

She trudges toward the exit, boots squeaking at each step. The door swings shut on its own.

I walk over to the window for another look. The melted snow on the floor is perfectly clear.

“They’re not going to do a thing,” Charlie says, shaking his head.

“It’s okay,” Gil says. “Nothing was stolen.”

Paul is silent, but his eyes are still scanning the room.

I raise the sash, letting the wind rush into the room again. Gil turns to me, annoyed, but I’m staring at the cuts in the screen. They follow the border of the frame on three sides, leaving the material to flap in the wind like a dog door. I look down at the floor again. The only mud is from my shoes.

“Tom,” Gil calls back to me, “shut the damned window.” Now Paul turns to look as well.

The flap is pushed out, as if someone left through the window. But something’s wrong. The proctor never bothered to notice it.

“Come look at this,” I say, running my fingers over the fibers of the screen at the edge of each cut. Like the flap, all of the incisions point outward. If someone had cut the screen to get in, the sliced edges would point toward us.

Charlie is already glancing around the room.

“There’s no mud either,” he says, pointing to the puddle on the floor.

He and Gil exchange a look, which Gil seems to take as an accusation. If the screen was cut from inside, then we’re back to the unlocked door.

“That doesn’t make sense,” Gil says. “If they knew the door was open, they wouldn’t leave through the window.”

“It doesn’t make sense anyway,” I tell him. “Once you’re inside, you can always leave through the door.”

“We should tell the proctors about this,” Charlie says, gearing up again. “I can’t believe she didn’t even look for it.”

Paul says nothing, but runs a hand across the diary.

I turn to him. “You still going to Taft’s lecture?”

“I guess. It doesn’t start for almost an hour.”

Charlie is placing books back on the top shelves, where only he can reach. “I’ll stop by Stanhope on the way,” he says. “To tell the proctors what they missed.”

“It was probably a prank,” Gil says to no one in particular. “Nude Olympians having some fun.”

After a few more minutes of picking up, we all seem to decide that enough is enough. Gil begins changing into a pair of wool trousers, throwing Katie’s dress shirt into a bag of dry cleaning. “We could get a bite to eat at Ivy on the way.”

Paul nods, leafing through his copy of Braudel’s
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II
, as if pages might’ve been stolen. “I need to check on my stuff at the club.”

“You guys might want to change,” Gil adds, looking us over.

Paul is too preoccupied to hear him, but I know what Gil means, so I return to the bedroom. Ivy isn’t the sort of place I’d be caught dead dressed like this. Only Paul, a shadow in his own club, lives by different rules.

What dawns on me as I check my drawers is that nearly all of my clothes are dirty. Rummaging in the far back of my closet, I find a rolled-up pair of khakis and a shirt that’s been folded for so long that the folds have become creases, and the creases pleats. I search for my winter jacket, then realize it’s still hanging from Charlie’s duffel bag in the steam tunnels. Settling for the coat my mother bought me for Christmas, I head into the common room, where Paul is sitting by the window, eyes on the bookshelves, puzzling something out.

“Are you bringing the diary with you?” I ask.

He pats the bundle of rags in his lap and nods.

“Where’s Charlie?” I say, looking around.

“Already gone,” Gil tells me, guiding us out to the hall. “To see the proctors.”

He takes the keys to his Saab and places them inside his coat. Before closing the door behind us, he checks his pockets.

“Room keys . . . car keys . . . ID . . .”

He’s so careful, it makes me uneasy. It isn’t Gil’s way to concern himself with details. Staring back into the common room, I see my two letters sitting on the table. Then Gil locks the door with the same odd precision, rolling the knob in his palm twice afterward to be sure that it yields nothing. We walk toward his car, and now the silence is heavy. As he revs the engine, proctors shift in the distance, shadows of shadows. We watch them for a second, then Gil jerks the gearshift and brings us gliding into the darkness.

Chapter 8
                           

Past the security kiosk at the north entrance to campus, we turn right onto Nassau Street, Princeton’s main drag. At this hour it’s lifeless, prowled by two plows and a salt truck that someone has roused from hibernation. Stray boutiques glow in the night, snow gathering below their storefront windows. Talbot’s and Micawber Books are closed at this hour, but Pequod Copy and the coffee shops manage a small bustle, filled with seniors rushing to complete their theses in the eleventh hour before departmental deadlines.

“Glad to be done with it?” Gil asks Paul, who has retreated into himself again.

“My thesis?”

Gil looks into the rearview mirror.

“It’s not finished yet,” Paul says.

“Come on. It’s
done
. What do you have left to do?”

Paul’s breath frosts the rear window. “Enough,” he says.

At the stoplight, we turn onto Washington Road, then toward Prospect Avenue and the eating clubs. Gil knows better than to ask more questions. As we approach Prospect, I know his thoughts are gravitating elsewhere. Saturday night is the Ivy Club’s annual ball, and it has been left to him, as club president, to oversee the arrangements. After falling behind while finishing his thesis, he’s gotten into the habit of making little trips to Ivy just to convince himself that everything is under control. According to Katie, by the time I arrive to escort her tomorrow night, I’ll barely recognize the inside of the club.