The Rule of Four (8 page)

“Richard told me there were references to Francesco Colonna in here,” Paul says. “Francesco was waiting for a ship to come into port. The portmaster made daily entries about him and his men. Where they stayed, what they did.”

“Take it for a day,” Bill says, interrupting. He stands up and moves toward the door. “Make a copy if you need to. A hand copy. Whatever will help finish the work. But I need it back.”

Paul’s concentration breaks. “You’re leaving?”

“I have to go.”

“We’ll see you at Vincent’s lecture?”

“Lecture?” Stein stops. “No. I can’t.”

It’s making me nervous, just watching how twitchy he is.

“I’ll be in my office,” he continues, wrapping a red tartan scarf around his neck. “Remember, I need it back.”

“Sure,” Paul says, drawing the little bundle closer to him. “I’ll go through it tonight. I can make notes.”

“And don’t tell Vincent,” Stein adds, zipping up his coat. “Just between us.”

“I’ll have it back for you tomorrow,” Paul tells him. “My deadline is midnight.”

“Tomorrow, then,” Stein says, flicking the scarf behind him and slinking off. His exits always seem dramatic, being so abrupt. In a few lanky strides he’s crossed the threshold where Mrs. Lockhart presides, and is gone. The ancient librarian places a wilted palm on a frayed copy of Victor Hugo, stroking the neck of an old boyfriend.

“Mrs. Lockhart,” comes Bill’s voice, fading from a place we can’t see. “Good-bye.”

“It’s really the diary?” I ask as soon as he’s gone.

“Just listen,” Paul says.

He refocuses on the little book and begins reading out loud. The translation proceeds haltingly at first, Paul struggling with the Ligurian dialect, the language of Columbus’s Genoa, fused with stray French-sounding words. But gradually his pace improves.

“High seas last night. One ship . . . broken on the shore. Sharks washed up, one very large. French sailors go to the brothels. A Moorish . . . corsair? . . . seen in close waters.”

He turns several pages, reading at random.

“Fine day. Maria is recovering. Her urine is improving, the doctor says. Expensive quack! The . . . herbalist . . . says he will treat her for half the price. And twice as quickly!”
Paul pauses, staring at the page.
“Bat dung,”
he continues,
“will cure anything.”

I interrupt. “What does this have to do with the
Hypnerotomachia
?”

But he keeps shuttling through the pages.

“A Venetian captain drank too much last night and began boasting. Our weakness at Fornovo. The old defeat at Portofino. The men brought him to the . . . shipyard . . . and strung him from a tall mast. He is still hanging there this morning.”

Before I can repeat my question, Paul’s eyes go wide.

“The same man from Rome came again last night,”
he reads.
“Dressed more richly than a duke. No one knows his business here. Why has he come? I ask others. Those who know anything will not speak. A ship of his is coming to port, the rumor goes. He has come to see that it arrives safely.”

I sit forward in my chair. Paul flips the page and continues.

“What is of such importance that a man like this comes to see it? What cargo? Women, says the drunkard Barbo. Turk slaves, a harem. But I have seen this man, called Master Colonna by his servants, Brother Colonna by his friends: he is a gentleman. And I have seen what is in his eyes. It is not desire. It is fear. He looks like a wolf that has seen a tiger.”

Paul stops, staring at the words. Curry has repeated the last phrase to him many times. Even I recognize it.
A wolf that has seen a tiger.

The cover folds shut in Paul’s hands, the tough black seed in its husk of cloths. A salty smell has thickened the air.

“Boys,” comes a voice from nowhere. “Your time is up.”

“Coming, Mrs. Lockhart.” Paul starts into motion, pulling the cloths over the book and wrapping it tight.

“What now?” I ask.

“We’ve got to show this to Richard,” he says, putting the little bundle beneath the shirt Katie lent him.

“Tonight?” I say.

As we find our way out, Mrs. Lockhart mumbles, but doesn’t look up.

“Richard needs to know Bill found it,” Paul says, glancing at his watch.

“Where is he?”

“At the museum. There’s an event tonight for museum trustees.”

I hesitate. I’d assumed Richard Curry was in town to celebrate the completion of Paul’s thesis.

“We’re celebrating tomorrow,” he says, reading my expression.

The diary peeks out from under his shirt, a wink of black leather in bandages. From above us comes an echoing voice, almost the sound of laughter.

“Weh! Steck ich in dem Kerker noch? Verfluchtes dumpfes Mauerloch, Wo selbst das liebe Himmelslicht Trüb durch gemalte Scheiben bricht!”

“Goethe,” Paul says to me. “She always closes up with
Faust
.” Holding the door on the way out, he calls back, “Good night, Mrs. Lockhart.”

Her voice comes curling through the mouth of the library.

“Yes,” she says. “A good night.”

Chapter 6
                           

From what I pieced together between my father and Paul, Vincent Taft and Richard Curry met in New York in their twenties, turning up at the same party one night in uptown Manhattan. Taft was a young professor at Columbia, a thinner version of his later self, but with the same fire in his belly and the same bearish disposition. The author of two books in the brief eighteen months since he’d finished his dissertation, he was the critics’ darling, a fashionable intellectual making his rounds in the social circles of choice. Curry, on the other hand, who’d been exempted from the draft for a heart murmur, was just beginning his career in the art world. According to Paul, he was cobbling together the right friendships, slowly building a reputation in the fast Manhattan scene.

Their first encounter came late in the party when Taft, who’d grown tipsy, spilled a cocktail on the athletic-looking fellow beside him. It was a typical accident, Paul told me, since Taft was also known as a drunk at the time. At first Curry took little offense—until he realized Taft didn’t intend to apologize. Following him to the door, Curry began to demand satisfaction; but Taft, stumbling toward the elevator, ignored him. As the two men descended ten stories it was Taft who did the talking, hurling a barrage of insults at the handsome young man, bellowing, as he staggered toward the street exit, that his victim was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

To his imaginable surprise, the young man smiled.

“Leviathan,”
said Curry, who’d written a junior paper on Hobbes while at Princeton. “And you’ve forgotten
solitary
. ‘The life of man is
solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ ”

“No,” replied Taft with a burbling grin, just before collapsing onto a streetlight, “I did not forget it. I simply reserve
solitary
for myself.
Poor, nasty, brutish,
and
short,
however, are all yours.”

And with that, Paul said, Curry hailed a cab, ushered Taft into it, and returned to his own apartment where, for the next twelve hours, Taft remained in a deep and crapulent stupor.

The story goes that when he awoke, confused and embarrassed, the two men struck up a clumsy conversation. Curry explained his line of work, as did Taft, and it seemed the awkwardness of the situation might undo the meeting, when, in a moment of inspiration, Curry mentioned the
Hypnerotomachia,
a book he’d studied under a popular Princeton professor named McBee.

I can only imagine Taft’s response. Not only had he heard of the mystery surrounding the book, but he must’ve noticed the spark it created in Curry’s eyes. According to my father, the two men began to discuss the circumstances of their lives, quickly realizing what they had in common. Taft despised other academics, finding their work shortsighted and trivial, while Curry saw his workaday colleagues as papery characters, dull and one-dimensional. Both detected an absence of full-bloodedness in others, an absence of purpose. And maybe that explained the lengths to which they went to overcome their differences.

For there
were
differences, and not small ones. Taft was a mercurial creature, hard to know and harder to love. He drank heavily in company, and just as much when he was alone. His intelligence was relentless and wild, a fire even he couldn’t control. It swallowed entire books at a sitting, finding flaws in arguments, gaps in evidence, errors in interpretation, in subjects far from his own. Paul said that it wasn’t a destructive personality Taft had, but a destructive mind. The fire grew the more he fed it, leaving nothing behind. When it had burned everything in its path, there was only one thing left for it to do. In time, it would turn on itself.

Curry, by contrast, was a creator, not a destroyer—a man of possibilities rather than facts. Borrowing from Michelangelo, he would say that life was like sculpture: a matter of seeing what others couldn’t, then chiseling away the rest. To him the old book was just a block of stone waiting to be carved. If no one in five hundred years had understood it, then the time had come for new eyes and fresh hands, and the bones of the past be damned.

For all these differences, then, it wasn’t long before Taft and Curry found their common ground. Besides the ancient book, what they shared was a deep investment in abstractions. They believed in the notion of greatness—greatness of spirit, destiny, grand design. Like twin mirrors placed face-to-face, their reflections doubling back, they had seen themselves in earnest for the first time, and a thousand strong. It was the strange but predictable consequence of their friendship that it left them more solitary than when they began. The rich human backdrop of Taft’s and Curry’s worlds—their colleagues and college friends, their sisters and mothers and former flames—darkened into an empty stage with a single spotlight. To be sure, their careers flourished. It wasn’t long before Taft was a historian of great renown, and Curry the proprietor of a gallery that would make his name.

But then, madness in great ones must not unwatched go. The two men led a slavish existence. Their only source of relief came in the form of weekly meetings on Saturday nights, when they would regroup at one or the other’s apartment, or at an empty diner, and transform the one interest they had in common into a shared diversion: the
Hypnerotomachia
.

Winter had fallen that year when Richard Curry finally introduced Taft to the one friend of his who’d never fallen out of touch—the one Curry had met long ago in Professor McBee’s class at Princeton, who harbored his own interest in the
Hypnerotomachia
.

Imagining my father in those days is difficult for me. The man I see is already married, marking the heights of his three children on the office wall, wondering when his only son will start to grow, fussing over old books in dead languages as the world pitches and turns around him. But that’s the man we made him into, my mother and sisters and I, not the one Richard Curry knew. My father, Patrick Sullivan, had been Curry’s best friend at Princeton. The two considered themselves the kings of campus, and I imagine they shared the kind of friendship that made it seem that way. My father played a season of junior varsity basketball, every minute of it on the bench, until Curry, as captain of the lightweight football team, recruited him onto the gridiron, where my father acquitted himself better than anyone expected. The two roomed together the following year, sharing almost every meal; as juniors, they even double-dated twin sisters from Vassar named Molly and Martha Roberts. The relationship, which my father once compared to a hallucination in a hall of mirrors, ended the following spring when the sisters wore identical dresses to a dance, and the two men, having drunk too much and having paid attention too little, made separate passes at the twin the other was dating.

I have to believe that my father and Vincent Taft appealed to different sides of Richard Curry’s personality. The laid-back, catholic-minded midwestern boy and the fearsome, focused New Yorker were different animals, and they must’ve sensed it from the first handshake, when my father’s palm was swallowed in Taft’s meaty butcher’s grip.

Of the three of them, it was Taft who had the darkest mind. The parts of the
Hypnerotomachia
that fascinated him were the bloodiest and most arcane. He devised systems of interpretation to understand the meaning of sacrifices in the story—the way animals’ necks were cut, the way characters died—to impose meaning onto the violence. He labored over the dimensions of buildings mentioned in the story, manipulating them to find numerological patterns, cross-checking them with astrological tables and calendars from Colonna’s time, hoping to find matches. From where he stood, the best approach was to confront the book head-on, match wits with its author, and defeat him. According to my father, Taft had always believed that he would one day outsmart Francesco Colonna. That day, as far as we knew, had never come.

My father’s approach could not have been more different. What fascinated him most about the
Hypnerotomachia
was its candid sexual dimension. In the more prudish centuries after its publication, pictures from the book were censored, blacked out, or torn up entirely, the same way many Renaissance nudes were repainted with fig leaves when tastes changed and sensibilities were offended. In the case of Michelangelo, it seems fair to cry foul. But even today, some of the prints from the
Hypnerotomachia
seem a little shocking.

Parades of naked men and women are only the beginning. Poliphilo follows a gaggle of nymphs to a springtime party—and there, hovering in the middle of the festivities, is the enormous penis of the god Priapus, the focal point of the entire picture. Earlier, the mythological queen Leda is caught in the heat of passion with Zeus, who is shown lodged between her thighs in the shape of a swan. The text is even more explicit, describing encounters too bizarre for the woodcuts. When Poliphilo is overcome with physical attraction to the architecture he sees, he admits to having sex with buildings. At least once, he claims the pleasure was mutual.