The Rule of Four (28 page)

I decide how large I wish the human figures in the foreground of the painting to be. I divide the height of this man into three parts, which will be proportional to the measure commonly called a “braccio”; for, as can be seen from the relationship of his limbs, three “braccia” is just about the average height of a man’s body. The proper position for the centric point is no higher from the base line than the height of the man to be represented in the painting. I then draw a line through the centric point, and this line is a limit or boundary for me, which no quantity exceeds. This is why men depicted standing furthest away are a great deal smaller than the nearer ones.

Alberti’s centric line, as the accompanying illustrations made clear, was the horizon. According to this system, it was placed at the same height as a man drawn standing in the foreground, who in turn was three
braccia
tall. The solution to the riddle—the number of
braccia
from the man’s feet to the horizon—was just that: three.

It took Paul only a half hour to figure out how to apply it. The first letter of every third word in the following chapters, when placed in a row, spelled out the next passage from Colonna.

Now, reader, I will tell you the nature of the composition of this work. With the help of my brethren, I have studied the code-making books of the Arabs, Jews, and ancients. I have learned the practice called gematria from the kabalists, according to which, when it is written in Genesis that Abraham brought 318 servants to help Lot, we see that the number 318 signifies only Abraham’s servant Eliezer, for that is the sum of the Hebrew letters of Eliezer’s name. I have learned the practices of the Greeks, whose gods spoke in riddles, and whose generals, as the Mythmaker describes in his History, disguised their meanings cunningly, as when Histiaeus tattooed a message on his slave’s scalp, so that Aristagoras might shave the man’s head and read it.

I will reveal to you now the names of those learned men whose wisdom forged my riddles. Pomponio Leto, master of the Roman Academy, pupil of Valla and old friend of my family’s, instructed me in matters of language and translation, where my own eyes and ears did fail me. In the art and harmonies of numbers, I was guided by the Frenchman Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples, admirer of Roger Bacon and Boethius, who knew all manner of numeration which my own intellect could not illuminate. The great Alberti, who learned his art in turn from the masters Masaccio and Brunelleschi (may their genius never be forgotten), instructed me long ago in the science of horizons and paintings; I praise him now and always. Knowledge of the sacred writing of the descendants of Hermes Thrice-Great, first prophet of Egypt, I owe to the wise Ficino, master of languages and philosophies, who is without equal among the followers of Plato. Finally it is to Andrea Alpago, disciple of the venerable Ibn al-Nafis, that I am indebted for matters yet to be disclosed; and may this contribution be looked upon even more favorably than all the rest, for it is in man’s study of himself, wherein all other studies find their origin, that he most closely contemplates perfection.

These, reader, are my wisest friends, who among them have learned what I have not, knowledge that in prior times was foreign to all men. One by one they have agreed to my single demand: each man, unbeknownst to the others, devised a riddle to which only I and he know the solution, and which only another lover of knowledge could solve. These riddles, in turn, I have placed within my text in fragments, according to a pattern I have told to no man; and the answer alone can produce my true words.

All this I have done, reader, to protect my secret, but also to transmit it to you, should you find what I have written. Solve but two more riddles, and I will begin to reveal the nature of my crypt.

Katie didn’t wake me up the next morning to go running. The rest of that week, in fact, I spoke to her roommates and to her answering machine, but never to Katie herself. Blinded by the progress I was making with Paul, I didn’t see how the landscape of my life was eroding. The jogging paths and coffee shops fell away as our distance grew. Katie didn’t eat with me at Cloister anymore, but I hardly noticed, because for weeks I rarely ate there myself: Paul and I traveled like rats through the tunnels between Dod and Ivy, avoiding daylight, ignoring the sounds of bicker above our heads, buying coffee and boxed sandwiches at the all-night WaWa off campus so that we could work and eat on our own schedule.

The whole time, Katie was only one floor removed from me, trying not to bite her nails as she moved from clique to clique, searching for the right balance between assertiveness and compliance so that upperclassmen would look on her favorably. That she wouldn’t have wanted my interference in her life at that moment was a conclusion I’d come to almost from the beginning, another excuse for spending long days and late nights with Paul. That she might’ve appreciated some company, a friendly face to return to at night, a companion as her mornings grew darker and colder—that she would’ve expected my support even more now that she’d come to the first important crossroads in her time at Princeton—was something I was too preoccupied to consider. I never imagined that bicker might’ve been a trial for her, an experience that tested her tenacity much more than her charm. I was a stranger to her; I never knew what she went through on those Ivy nights.

The club accepted her, Gil told me the following week. He was bracing himself for a long night of breaking the news, good and bad, to each candidate. Parker Hassett had thrown some roadblocks in Katie’s way, fixing on her as a special object of his anger, probably because he knew she was one of Gil’s favorites; but even Parker came around in the end. The induction ceremony for the new section was the following week, after initiations, and the annual Ivy ball was slated for Easter weekend. Gil listed the events so carefully that I realized he was telling me something. These were my chances to fix things with Katie. This was the calendar of my rehabilitation.

If so, then I was no better a boyfriend than I’d been a Boy Scout. Love, deflected from its proper object, had found a new one. In the weeks that ensued, I saw less and less of Gil, and nothing at all of Katie. I heard a rumor that she had taken an interest in an upperclassman at Ivy, a new version of her old lacrosse player, a man in a yellow hat to my Curious George. But by then Paul had found another riddle, and we’d both started to wonder what secret lay in Colonna’s crypt. An old mantra, long dormant, rose up from its slumber and prepared for another season of life.

Make no friends, and kick the old.

All I want is silver and gold.

Chapter 17
                           

I wake in daylight to the sound of a phone. The clock reads half-past nine. Stumbling out of bed, I get to the cordless before it can wake Paul.

“Were you sleeping?” is the first thing Katie says.

“Sort of.”

“I can’t believe that was Bill Stein.”

“Neither can we. What’s going on?”

“I’m at the newsroom. Can you come over?”

“Now?”

“You’re busy?”

There’s something I don’t like in her voice, a touch of distance I’m awake just enough to notice.

“Let me jump in the shower. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

I’m already undressing when she hangs up the phone.

While I get ready, I’ve got two things on my mind: Stein and Katie. They toggle in my thoughts like someone flicking a switch to check a bulb. In the light I see her, but in the dark I see Dickinson courtyard, canvassed in snow, in the silence after the ambulance has left.

Back at our quad, I throw my clothes on in the common room, trying not to rouse Paul. Searching for my watch, I notice something: the room’s even cleaner than when I went to bed. Someone has straightened the rugs and emptied the trash cans. A bad sign. Charlie didn’t sleep last night.

Then I catch sight of a message written on the whiteboard.

Tom—

Couldn’t sleep. Gone to Ivy for more work. Call when you’re up.

—P.

Back in the bedroom, Paul’s bunk is empty. Looking at the whiteboard again, I spot the numbers above the text: 2:15. He’s been gone all night.

I raise the receiver again, about to dial the President’s Room, when I hear the voicemail tone.

Friday,
the automated voice says when I punch in the digits.
Eleven fifty-four
P. M
.

What follows is the call I missed, the one that must have come while Paul and I were at the museum.

Tom, it’s Katie.
A pause.
I’m not sure where you are. Maybe you’re already on your way over. Karen and Trish want to serve birthday cake now. I told them to wait for you.
Another pause.
I guess I’ll see you when you get here.

The phone is hot in my hand. The black-and-white photo I bought for her birthday looks dull in its frame, a cheaper thing than it was yesterday. To name a photographer other than Ansel Adams and Mathew Brady, I’d had to ask around. I never learned enough about Katie’s pastime to feel confident about her taste. Thinking it over, I decide not to bring the photo with me.

On the walk to the
Prince
office, I keep a brisk pace. Katie meets me at the entrance and leads me toward the darkroom, locking and unlocking doors as we go. She’s dressed the same way she was at Holder: in a T-shirt and an old pair of jeans. Her hair is pulled back crookedly, as if she wasn’t expecting company, and the neck of her shirt is bent out of shape. I can see a gold necklace crossing her collarbone on one side, and near the thigh of her jeans my eyes linger on a tiny hole where the white of her skin peeks through.

“Tom,” she says, pointing to someone at a computer in the corner, “there’s someone I want you to meet. This is Sam Felton.”

Sam smiles as if she knows me. She’s dressed in field hockey–issue sweatpants and a long-sleeve shirt that says
IF JOURNALISM WERE EASY,
NEWSWEEK
WOULD DO IT.
After reaching for a button on the microrecorder beside her, she pulls the bud of an earphone out of one ear.

“Your date tonight?” she says to Katie, just to make sure she heard right.

Katie says yes, but doesn’t add what I expect:
my boyfriend
.

“Sam’s working on the Bill Stein story,” she says instead.

“Have fun at the ball,” Sam tells me, before reaching for the recorder again.

“You’re not coming?” Katie asks.

I gather they also know each other from Ivy.

“I doubt it.” Sam motions back at the computer, where rows of words scramble across the screen, an ant farm behind the glass. She already reminds me of Charlie in his lab: inspired by how much remains to be done. There will always be more news to write, more theories to prove, more phenomena to observe. The delicious futility of impossible tasks is the catnip of overachievers.

Katie gives a sympathetic look, and Sam returns to transcribing.

“What did you want to talk about?” I ask.

But Katie leads me back to the darkroom.

“It’s little hot in here,” she says, opening a door and forcing back a thick set of black curtains. “You might want to take off your coat.”

I do, and she hangs it from a hidden hook by the door. I’ve avoided the inside of this room since I met her, terrified of ruining her film.

Katie walks over to a clothesline strung along one wall. Photographs are clipped to it with clothespins. “It’s not supposed to get above seventy-five in here,” she says, “or the soup reticulates the negatives.”

She might as well be speaking Greek. There’s an old rule my sisters taught me: whenever you go on a date with a girl, always meet at a place you know well. French restaurants aren’t impressive when you can’t read the menu, and highbrow movies backfire when you don’t understand the plot. Here, in the darkroom, the possibilities for failure seem spectacular.

“Give me a second,” she says, shuttling from one side of the room to the other, quick as a hummingbird. “I’m almost done.”

She opens the cover to a small tank, brings the film inside it to a spigot, then places it under running water. I start to feel crowded. The darkroom is small and cluttered, counters overrun with pans and trays, shelves lined with stop bath and fixer. Katie seems to have almost perfect dexterity here. It reminds me of the way she did her hair at the reception, tying it around pins as if she could see what she was doing.

“Should I turn out the lights?” I ask, starting to feel useless.

“Not unless you want to. The negatives have fixed.”

So I stand like a scarecrow in the center of the room.

“How’s Paul holding up?” she asks.

“Okay.”

A respectful silence ensues, and Katie seems to lose the thread of the conversation, attending to another set of photos.

“I stopped by Dod just after 12:30,” she begins again. “Charlie said you were with Paul.”

There’s an unexpected sympathy in her voice.

“It was good of you to stay with him,” she says. “This must be terrible for Paul. For everyone.”

I want to tell her about Stein’s letters, but realize how much explaining it would take. She returns to my side now with a handful of pictures.

“What are these?”

“I developed our film.”

“From the movie field?”

She nods.

The movie field is a place Katie brought me to see, an open plot in Princeton Battlefield Park that seems to extend farther and flatter than any stretch of land east of Kansas. A single oak tree stands in the middle of it like a sentinel who won’t leave his post, echoing the last gesture of a general who died beneath the tree’s branches during the Revolutionary War. Katie first saw the spot in a Walter Matthau movie, and ever since then the tree has been an enchantment for her. It became one in a small string of places she visited over and over again, a rosary of sights that anchored her life the more she returned to them. Within a week of her first night at Dod, she took me to see it, and it was as if the old Mercer Oak were a relative of hers, all three of us making an important first impression. I brought a blanket, a flashlight, and a picnic basket; Katie brought film and a camera.