The Rule of Four (22 page)

“I told you. He wanted to give Paul a book he found. I can’t believe this, Charlie.”

“He didn’t say anything else? Where he was going? Who he was going to see?”

I shake my head. Then, slowly, it returns to me, what I’d mistaken for paranoia: the phone calls Bill had gotten, the books someone else was checking out. A wave of fear descends on me as I tell them.

“Shit,” Charlie grumbles. He reaches for the phone.

“What are you doing?” Gil asks.

“The police are going to want to talk to you,” Charlie tells me. “Where’s Paul?”

“Jesus. I don’t know, but we’ve got to find him. I keep trying Taft’s office at the Institute. There’s no answer.”

Charlie looks at us impatiently.

“He’ll be fine,” Gil says, and I can hear the wine talking. “Calm down.”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Charlie snaps.

“Maybe he’s at Taft’s house,” I suggest. “Or Taft’s office on campus.”

“The cops will find him when they need to,” Gil says, face hardening. “We should stay out of this.”

Charlie turns. “Two of us are already
in
this.”

Gil scoffs. “Give me a break, Charlie. Since when are you in this?”

“Not me, you prick. Tom and Paul. There’s more to
us
than just
you
.”

“Don’t get sanctimonious on me. I’m sick of you butting into everyone else’s problems.”

Charlie leans forward, lifts the bottle from the table, and throws it in the trash. “You’ve had enough.”

For a second I’m afraid the wine is going to make Gil say something we’ll all regret. But after glaring at Charlie, he rises from the couch. “Christ,” he says. “I’m going to bed.”

I watch him retreat into the bedroom without another word. A second later, the light beneath the door falls dark.

Minutes pass, and they feel like hours. I try the Institute again, but with no luck, so Charlie and I sit in the common room for the duration, neither one speaking. My mind is moving too quickly to make sense of my own thoughts. I stare out the window, and Stein’s voice climbs back into my thoughts.

I get these phone calls. Pick up . . .
click.
Pick up . . .
click.

Finally Charlie rises. Finding a towel in the closet, he starts to put his bathroom caddy in order. Without a word he heads out the door in his boxer shorts. The men’s bathroom is down the hall, and there are half a dozen upperclass women living between it and our quad, but Charlie marches out anyway, towel wrapped around his neck like an oxbow, caddy in hand.

Sitting back on the couch, I reach for today’s
Daily Princetonian.
To distract myself, I flip through the pages, searching for a photo credit of Katie’s somewhere in the nether corners of the paper, where underclass contributions go to die. I’m always curious about the pictures she takes, the new subjects she chooses, the ones she thinks are too unimportant to mention. After dating someone long enough, you start to imagine she sees everything the same way you do. Katie’s photos are a corrective, a glimpse of the world through her eyes.

Before long a sound comes at the door, Charlie returning from the shower. But when a key strikes in the outside lock, I realize it’s someone else. The door swings open and it’s Paul who enters the room. His face is pale, and his lips are blue from the cold.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

Charlie arrives back just in time. “Where have you
been
?” he demands.

It takes us fifteen minutes to get the details from Paul, given his state. After leaving the lecture, he went to the Institute and searched for Bill Stein in the computer lab there. An hour later, when Stein failed to appear, Paul decided to go back to the dorm. He started the trip in his car, only to have it quit at a stoplight about a mile from campus; then he had to walk back in the snow.

The rest of the night, he says, is a blur. He arrived at the north of campus to find police cars near Bill’s office at Dickinson. After asking enough questions, he was driven to the medical center, where someone asked him to identify the body. Taft showed up at the hospital not long after, giving a second identification, but before he and Paul could speak, officers separated them for questioning. The police wanted to know about his relationship with Stein and Taft, about the last time he saw Bill, about where he was at the time of the murder. Paul cooperated in a daze. When they finally released him, they asked him not to leave campus, and said they’d be in touch. Eventually he made his way toward Dod, but stayed on the outside steps for a while, just wanting to be alone.

Finally, we discuss the conversation we had with Stein in the Rare Books Room, which Paul says the police took down in full. As he talks about Bill, about how agitated Stein was at the library, about the friend he’s lost, Paul gives little sign of emotion. He still hasn’t recovered from the shock.

“Tom,” he says finally, when we’re back in our bedroom, “I need a favor.”

“Of course,” I say. “Name it.”

“I need you to come with me.”

I hesitate. “Where?”

“The art museum.”

He’s changing into a dry set of clothes.

“Now? Why?”

Paul rubs at his forehead, working out an ache. “I’ll explain on the way.”

When we return to the common room, Charlie looks at us like we’ve lost our minds. “At this hour?” he asks. “The museum’s closed.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Paul says, already making for the hallway.

Charlie gives me a heavy look, but says nothing as I follow Paul out the door.

The art museum sits like an old Mediterranean palace across the courtyard from Dod. From the front, where we entered a few hours earlier, it’s just a stumpy modern building with a Picasso sculpture on the front lawn that looks like a glorified birdbath. When you approach from the side, though, the newer elements give way to older ones, pretty windows in little Romanesque arches, and red roof-tiles that peek out beneath tonight’s canopy of snow. Under different circumstances, the view from here would be charming. Under different circumstances, it might be a picture Katie would take.

“What are we doing?” I ask.

Paul is trudging a path before me in his old workman’s boots.

“I found what Richard thought was in the diary,” he says.

It sounds like the middle of a thought whose beginning he’s kept to himself.

“The blueprint?”

He shakes his head. “I’ll show you when we get inside.”

I’m walking in his footsteps now to keep the snow out of my pant legs. My eyes keep returning to his boots. Paul worked at the museum loading docks our freshman summer, moving incoming and outgoing exhibits onto trucks. The boots were a necessity then, but tonight they leave dirty tracks in the moon-white of the courtyard. He looks like a boy in men’s shoes.

We arrive at a door by the west face of the museum. Beside it is a tiny keypad. Paul dials in his docent’s password and waits to see if it works. He used to give tours at the art museum, but finally had to take a job in the slide library because the docents weren’t paid.

To my surprise, the door opens with a beep and a whisper of a click. I’m so used to the medieval-sounding bolts of the dorm doors, I almost don’t hear it. He leads me into a small antechamber, a security room supervised by a guard behind a plate-glass window, and suddenly I feel trapped. After signing a visitation form on a clipboard, though, and pressing our university IDs against the glass, we’re cleared to enter the docent’s library beyond the next door.

“That’s it?” I say, expecting more of a shakedown at this hour.

Paul points to a video camera on the wall, but says nothing.

The docent’s library is unimpressive—a few shelves of art history books donated by other guides to help prepare for tours—but Paul continues toward an elevator around the corner. A large sign posted on the sliding metal doors says
FACULTY, STAFF, AND SECURITY ONLY. STUDENTS AND DOCENTS NOT PERMITTED WITHOUT ESCORT
. The words
students
and
docents
have both been underlined in red.

Paul is looking somewhere else. He pulls a key ring from his pocket and plugs one of them into a slot in the wall. When he turns it to the right, the metal doors slide open.

“Where’d you get that?”

He leads me into the elevator, then presses a button. “My job,” he says.

The slide library gives him access to archival rooms in the museum. He is so careful about his work that he has earned almost everyone’s trust.

“Where are we going?” I say.

“Up to the image room. Where Vincent keeps some of his slide carousels.”

The elevator discharges us on the main floor of the museum. Paul guides me across it, ignoring the paintings he’s pointed out to me a dozen times before—the vast Rubens with its dark-browed Jupiter, the unfinished
Death of Socrates
with the old philosopher reaching for his cup of hemlock. Only when we pass the paintings Curry brought for the trustees’ exhibit do Paul’s eyes wander.

We reach the door to the slide library, and he produces the keys again. One of them shifts quietly into place, and we enter the darkness.

“Over here,” he says, pointing toward an aisle of shelves lined with dusty boxes. Each box contains a slide carousel. Behind another locked door, in a large room I’ve seen only once, rests much of the university’s collection of art slides.

Paul finds the set of boxes he’s been searching for, then lifts one from the stack and places it on the shelf before him. A note taped to the side, written in a sloppy hand, says
MAPS: ROME.
He takes the top off and carries the box to the small open space near the entrance. From another shelf he produces a slide projector, which he plugs into a wall socket near the ground. Finally, with the flick of a switch, a blurry image appears on the opposite wall. Paul adjusts the focus until it sharpens into position.

“Okay,” I say. “Now tell me what we’re doing here.”

“What if Richard was right?” he says. “What if Vincent stole the diary from him thirty years ago?”

“He probably did. What does it matter now?”

Paul brings me up to speed. “Imagine you’re in Vincent’s position. Richard keeps telling you the diary is the only way to understand the
Hypnerotomachia.
You think he’s blowing smoke, just a college kid with an art history degree. Then someone else shows up. Another scholar.”

Paul says it with a certain respect. I gather he’s referring to my father.

“Suddenly you’re the odd man out. Both of them say the diary is the answer. But you’ve painted yourself into a corner. You’ve told Richard the diary is useless, that the portmaster was a charlatan. And more than anything, you hate being wrong. What do you do now?”

Paul is trying to convince me of a possibility I’ve never had trouble accepting: that Vincent Taft is a thief.

“I get it,” I say. “Go on.”

“So you somehow steal the diary. But you can’t make anything of it, because you’ve been looking at the
Hypnerotomachia
all wrong. Without the ciphered messages from Francesco, you don’t know what to do with the diary. What then?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re not going to throw it away,” he says, ignoring me, “just because you don’t understand it.”

I nod my agreement.

“So you keep it. Somewhere safe. Maybe the lockbox in your office.”

“Or in your house.”

“Right. Then, years later, this kid comes along, and he and his friend start making progress on the
Hypnerotomachia.
More than you expected. In fact, more than
you
made in your prime. He starts finding the messages from Francesco.”

“You start thinking the diary might be useful after all.”

“Exactly.”

“And you don’t tell the kid about it, because then he would know you stole it.”

“But,”
Paul continues, arriving at his point, “say one day someone found it.”

“Bill.”

Paul nods. “He was always in Vincent’s office, at Vincent’s house, helping with all the little projects Vincent made him do. And he
knew
what the diary meant. If he’d found it, he wouldn’t have just put it back.”

“He would’ve brought it to you.”

“Right. And we turned around and showed it to Richard. Then Richard confronted Vincent at the lecture.”

I’m skeptical. “But wouldn’t Taft have realized it was gone before that?”

“Of course. He
had
to know Bill took it. But what do you think his reaction was when he realized Richard knew about it too? The first thing on his mind would’ve been to go find Bill.”

Now I understand. “You think he went to Stein’s office after the lecture.”

“Was Vincent at the reception?”

I take it as a rhetorical question until I remember Paul wasn’t there; he’d already left to find Stein.

“Not that I saw.”

“There’s a hallway connecting Dickinson and the auditorium,” he says. “Vincent didn’t even have to leave the building to get there.”

Paul lets it sink in. The possibility drifts through my thoughts clumsily, tethered to a thousand other details. “You really think Taft killed him?” I ask. A strange silhouette forms from the shadows of the room, Epp Lang burying a dog beneath a tree.

Paul stares at the black contours projected on the wall. “I think he’s capable of it.”

“Out of anger?”

“I don’t know.” But he already seems to have been through all of the scenarios in his mind. “Listen,” he says, “when I was waiting for Bill at the Institute, I started reading the diary more carefully, looking for every mention of Francesco.”

He flips it open and inside the front cover is a page of notes he’s made on Institute stationery.

“I found the entry where the portmaster records the set of directions the thief copied from Francesco’s papers. Genovese says they were written on an empty scrap of paper, and must’ve formed some kind of nautical route, something about the path Francesco’s ship took. The portmaster tried to figure out where the cargo must’ve come from by working backward from Genoa.”

When Paul unfolds the stationery, I can see a pattern of arrows drawn near a compass.