The Rule of Four (7 page)

I nodded.

“Then it was ’91. You were right.” He pulled out the book he’d been carrying with him. “And then there’s this.”

A first edition of
The Belladonna Document.

He weighed it deferentially. “His best work so far. You were there when he found it? The letter about Colonna?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I could’ve seen it. It must’ve been amazing.”

I looked over his shoulder, out a window on the far wall. The leaves were red. It had started to rain.

“It was,” I said.

Paul shook his head. “You’re very lucky.”

His fingers fanned the pages of my father’s book, gently.

“He died two years ago,” I said. “We were in a car accident.”

“What?”

“He died right after he wrote that.”

The window behind him was fogging up at the corners. A man walked by with a newspaper over his head, trying to keep dry.

“Someone hit you?”

“No. My father lost control of the car.”

Paul rubbed his finger against the image on the book’s dust jacket. A single emblem, a dolphin with an anchor. The symbol of the Aldine Press in Venice.

“I didn’t know . . .” he said.

“It’s okay.”

The silence at that moment was the longest there has ever been between us.

“
My
father died when I was four,” he said. “He had a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“What does your mother do?” I asked.

He found a crease in the dust jacket and began to smooth it out between his fingers. “She died a year later.”

I tried to tell him something, but all the words I was used to hearing felt wrong in my mouth.

Paul tried to smile. “I’m like Oliver,” he continued, forming a bowl with his hands.
“Please, sir, I want some more.”

I scraped out a laugh, unsure if he wanted one.

“I just wanted you to know what I meant,” he said. “About your dad . . .”

“I understand.”

“I only said it because—”

Umbrellas bobbed past the bottom of the window like horseshoe crabs in the tide. The murmur in the coffee shop was louder now. Paul began talking, trying to mend things. He told me how, after his parents died, he’d been raised at a parochial school that boarded orphans and runaways. How, after spending most of high school in the company of books, he’d come to college determined to make something better of his life. How he was looking for friends who could talk back. Finally he fell quiet, an embarrassed look on his face, sensing that he’d killed the conversation.

“So what dorm do you live in?” I asked him, knowing how he felt.

“Holder. Same as you.”

He pulled out a copy of the freshman face-book and showed me the dog-eared page.

“How long have you been looking for me?” I asked.

“I just found your name.”

I looked out the window. A single red umbrella floated past. It paused at the coffee shop window and seemed to hover there before going on.

I turned back to Paul. “Want another cup?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

And so it began.

What a strange thing, to build a castle in the air. We made a friendship out of nothing, because nothing was the heart of what we shared. After that night it seemed more and more natural, talking to Paul. Before long I even started to feel the way he did about my father: that maybe we shared him too.

“You know what he used to say?” I asked him one night in his bedroom when we talked about the accident.

“What?”

“The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.”

Paul smiled.

“There was an old Princeton basketball coach who used to say that,” I told him. “Freshman year in high school, I tried out for basketball. My dad would pick me up from practice every day, and when I would complain about how much shorter I was than everybody else, he would say, ‘It doesn’t matter how big they are, Tom. Remember:
The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.
’ Always the same thing.” I shook my head. “God, I got sick of that.”

“Do you think it’s true?”

“That the smart take from the strong?”

“Yeah.”

I laughed. “You’ve never seen me play basketball.”

“Well,
I
believe it,” he said. “I definitely do.”

“You’re kidding . . .”

He’d been stuffed in more lockers and browbeaten by more bullies during high school than anyone I’d ever known.

“No. Not at all.” He lifted his hands. “We’re here, aren’t we?”

He placed the faintest emphasis on
we.

In the silence, I looked at the three books on his desk. Strunk and White, the Bible,
The Belladonna Document.
Princeton was a gift to him. He could forget everything else.

Chapter 5
                           

Paul, Gil, and I continue south from Holder into the belly of campus. To the east, the tall, thin windows of Firestone Library streak the snow with fiery light. At dark the building looks like an ancient furnace, stone walls insulating the outside world from the heat and blush of learning. In a dream once, I visited Firestone in the middle of the night and found it full of insects, thousands of bookworms wearing tiny glasses and sleeping caps, magically feeding themselves by reading stories. They wriggled from page to page, journeying through the words, and as tensions grew and lovers kissed and villains met their ends, the bookworms’ tails began to glow, until finally the whole library was a church of candles swaying gently from left to right.

“Bill’s waiting for me in there,” Paul says, stopping short.

“You want us to come with you?” Gil asks.

Paul shakes his head. “It’s okay.”

But I hear the catch in his voice.

“I’ll come,” I say.

“I’ll meet you guys back at the room,” Gil says. “You’ll be back in time for Taft’s lecture at nine?”

“Yes,” Paul says. “Of course.”

Gil waves and turns. Paul and I continue down the path toward Firestone.

Once we’re alone, I realize that neither of us knows what to say. Days have passed since our last real conversation. Like brothers who disapprove of each other’s wives, we can’t even manage small talk without tripping over our differences: he thinks I gave up on the
Hypnerotomachia
to be with Katie; I think he’s given up more for the
Hypnerotomachia
than he knows.

“What does Bill want?” I ask as we approach the main entrance.

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say.”

“Where are we meeting him?”

“In the Rare Books Room.”

Where Princeton keeps its copy of the
Hypnerotomachia
.

“I think he found something important.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know.” Paul hesitates, as if he’s looking for the right words. “But the book is even more than we thought. I’m sure of it. Bill and I both feel like we’re on the cusp of something big.”

It’s been weeks since I’ve caught a glimpse of Bill Stein. Wallowing in the sixth year of a seemingly endless graduate program, Stein has slowly been assembling a dissertation on the technology of Renaissance printing. A jangling skeleton of a man, he aimed at being a professional librarian until larger ambitions got in his way: tenure, professorships, advancement—all the fixations that come with wanting to serve books, then gradually wanting books to serve you. Every time I see him outside Firestone he looks like an escaped ghost, a purse of bones drawn up too tight, with the pale eyes and strange curled-red hair of a half Jew, half Irishman. He smells of library mold, of the books everyone else has forgotten, and after talking to him I sometimes have nightmares that the University of Chicago will be inhabited by armies of Bill Steins, grad students who bring to their work a robotic drive I’ve never had, whose nickel-colored eyes see right through me.

Paul sees it differently. He says that Bill, impressive as he is, has one intellectual flaw: the absence of a living spark. Stein crawls through the library like a spider in an attic, eating up dead books and spinning them into fine thread. What he makes from them is always mechanical and uninspired, driven by a symmetry he can never change.

“This way?” I ask.

Paul leads me down the corridor. The Rare Books Room stands off in a corner of Firestone, easy to pass without noticing. Inside it, where some of the youngest books are centuries old, the scale of age becomes relative. Upperclassmen in literature seminars are brought here like children on field trips, their pens and pencils confiscated, their dirty fingers monitored. Librarians can be heard scolding tenure-track professors to look without touching. Emeritus faculty come here to feel young again.

“It should be closed,” Paul says, glancing at his digital watch. “Bill must’ve talked Mrs. Lockhart into keeping it open.”

We are in Stein’s world now. Mrs. Lockhart, the librarian time forgot, probably darned socks with Gutenberg’s wife in her day. She has smooth white skin draped on a wispy frame made for floating through the stacks. Most of the day she can be found muttering in dead languages to the books around her, a taxidermist whispering to her pets. We pass by without making eye contact, signing a clipboard with a pen chained to her desk.

“He’s in there,” she says to Paul, recognizing him. To me she gives only a sniff.

Through a narrow connecting area we arrive before a door I’ve never opened. Paul approaches, knocks twice, and waits for a sound.

“Mrs. Lockhart?” comes the reply in a high, shifting voice.

“It’s me,” Paul says.

A lock clicks on the other side, and the door opens slowly. Bill Stein appears before us, a half-foot taller than either Paul or me. The first thing I notice is the gunmetal eyes, how bloodshot they are. The first thing they notice is me.

“Tom came with you,” he says, scratching at his face. “Okay. Good, fine.”

Bill speaks in shades of the obvious, some stopgap between his mouth and mind gone missing. The impression is misleading. After a few minutes of the mundane you see flashes of his aptitude.

“It was a bad day,” he says, guiding us in. “A bad week. Not a big deal. I’m fine.”

“Why couldn’t we talk on the phone?” Paul asks.

Stein’s mouth opens, but he doesn’t answer. Now he’s scratching at something between his front teeth. He unzips his jacket, then turns back to Paul. “Has someone been checking out your books?” he asks.

“What?”

“Because someone’s been checking out mine.”

“Bill, it happens.”

“My William Caxton paper? My Aldus microfilm?”

“Caxton’s a major figure,” Paul says.

I’ve never heard of William Caxton in my life.

“The 1877 paper on him?” Bill says. “It’s only at the Forrestal Annex. And Aldus’s
Letters of Saint Catherine
—” He turns to me. “Not, as generally believed, the first use of italics—” Then back to Paul. “Microfilm last viewed by someone other than you or me in the seventies. Seventy-one, seventy-two. Someone put a hold on it
yesterday.
This isn’t happening to you?”

Paul frowns. “Have you talked to Circulation?”

“Circulation? I talked to Rhoda Carter. They know
nothing
.”

Rhoda Carter, head librarian of Firestone. Where the book stops.

“I don’t know,” Paul says, trying not to get Bill more excited. “It’s probably nothing. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“I don’t. I’m not. But here’s the thing.” Bill works his way around the far edge of the room, where the space between the wall and the table seems too narrow to pass. He slips through without a sound and pats at the pocket of his old leather jacket. “I get these phone calls. Pick up . . .
click.
Pick up . . .
click.
First at my apartment, now at my office.” He shakes his head. “Never mind. Down to business. I found something.” He glances at Paul nervously. “Maybe what you need, maybe not. I don’t know. But I think it’ll help you finish.”

From inside his jacket he pulls out something roughly the size of a brick, wrapped in layers of cloth. Placing it gently on the table, he begins to unwrap it. It’s a quirk of Stein’s I’ve noticed before, that his hands twitch until they have a book between them. The same thing happens now: as he unravels the cloth, his movements become more controlled. Inside the swaddling is a worn volume, hardly more than a hundred pages. It smells of something briny.

“What collection is it from?” I ask, seeing no title on the spine.

“No collection,” he says. “New York. An antiquarian shop. I found it.”

Paul is silent. Slowly he extends a hand toward the book. The animal-hide binding is crude and cracked, stitched together with leather twine. The pages are hand-cut. A frontier artifact, maybe. A book kept by a pioneer.

“It must be a hundred years old,” I say, when Stein doesn’t offer any details. “A hundred and fifty.”

An irritated look crosses Stein’s face, as if a dog has just fouled his carpet. “Wrong,” he says.
“Wrong.”
It dawns on me that I’m the dog. “
Five
hundred years.”

I focus back on the book.

“From Genoa,” Bill continues, focusing on Paul. “Smell it.”

Paul is silent. He pulls an unsharpened pencil from his pocket, turns it backward, and gently opens the cover using the soft nub of the eraser. Bill has bookmarked a page with a silk ribbon.

“Careful,” Stein says, splaying his hands out above the book. His nails are bitten to the quick. “Don’t leave marks. I have it on loan.” He hesitates. “I have to return it when I’m done.”

“Who had this?” Paul asks.

“The Argosy Book Store,” Bill repeats. “In New York. It’s what you needed, isn’t it? We can finish now.”

Paul doesn’t seem to notice the pronouns changing in Stein’s language.

“What is it?” I say more assertively.

“It’s the diary of the portmaster from Genoa,” Paul says. His voice is quiet, his eyes circling the script on each page.

I’m stunned. “Richard Curry’s diary?”

Paul nods. Curry was working on an ancient Genoese manuscript thirty years ago, which he claimed would unlock the
Hypnerotomachia.
Shortly after he told Taft about the book, it was stolen from his apartment. Curry insisted Taft had stolen it. Whatever the truth was, Paul and I had accepted from the beginning that the book was lost to us. We’d gone about our work without it. Now, with Paul pushing to finish his thesis, the diary could be invaluable.