The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  Paul serves himself quickly. Watching him eat, I think of the Oliver Twist impression he did the first time we met, the little bowl he made with his hands. Sometimes I wonder if Paul’s first memory of childhood is of hunger. At the parochial school where he was raised, he shared the table with six other children, and meals were always first come, first served, until the food ran out. I’m not sure he ever escaped that mentality. One night our freshman year, back when we all took meals together in the dining hall of our residential college, Charlie joked that Paul ate so fast you’d think food was going out of style. Later that night Paul explained why, and none of us joked about it again.

  Now Paul extends his arm for a piece of bread, caught up in the joy of eating. The smell of food wrestles with the old mildew stink of books and the smoke of the fire, in a way I might’ve enjoyed under different circumstances. But here, now, it feels uncomfortable, different memories sewn together. As if he can read my mind, Paul becomes conscious of his reach and looks bashful.

  I push the basket toward him. “Eat up,” I say, scraping at the food.

  Behind us, the fire sputters. Over in the corner is an opening in the wall, the size of a large dumbwaiter: the entrance to the steam tunnels, the one Paul prefers.

  “I can’t believe you still crawl through that.”

  He puts down his fork. “It’s better than dealing with everyone upstairs.”

  “It feels like a dungeon down here.”

  “It didn’t bother you before.”

  I sense an old argument reviving. Paul quickly wipes his mouth with a napkin. “Forget it,” he says, putting the diary onto the table between us. “This is what matters now.” He taps the cover with two fingers, then pushes the little book toward me. “We have a chance to finish what we started. Richard thinks this could be the key.”

  I rub at a stain on the desk. “Maybe you should show it to Taft.”

  Paul gapes at me. “Vincent thinks everything I found with you is worthless. He’s been pushing me for progress reports twice a week, just to prove I haven’t given up. I’m tired of driving to the Institute every time I need his help, and having him say this is derivative work.”

  “Derivative?”

  “And he threatened to tell the department I’m stalling.”

  “After everything we found?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I don’t care what Vincent thinks.” He taps the diary again. “I want to finish.”

  “Your deadline is tomorrow.”

  “We did more together in three months than I did alone in three years. What’s one more night?” Under his breath, he adds, “Besides, the deadline isn’t what matters.”

  I’m surprised to hear him say it, but the jab of Taft’s rejection is what lingers. Paul must’ve known it would. I feel more pride in the work I did on the Hypnerotomachia than in all the work I did on my own thesis.

  “Taft’s out of his mind,” I tell him. “No one’s ever found that much in the book before. Why didn’t you request an advisor change?”

  Paul’s hands begin shredding the bread into little pellets, rolling them between his fingers. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing,” he says, looking away. “Do you know how many times he’s bragged to me about ruining the academic career of ‘some moron’ with his peer reviews or tenure recommendations? He never mentioned your father, but there were others. Remember Professor Macintyre from Classics? Remember his book about Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’?”

  I nod. Taft wrote an article on what he perceived to be the declining quality of scholarship at major universities, using Macintyre’s book as a primary example. In three paragraphs Taft identified more factual errors, misattributions, and oversights than two dozen other scholars had found in their own book reviews. Taft’s implicit criticism seemed to be aimed at the reviewers, but it was Macintyre who became such a laughingstock that the university pruned him from the departmental ranks at the next tenure review. Taft later admitted that he was just getting even with Macintyre’s father, a Renaissance historian who’d given one of Taft’s own books a mixed review.

  “Vincent told me a story once,” Paul continues, voice growing quieter. “About a kid he knew growing up, named Rodge Lang. Kids at school called him Epp. One day a stray dog followed Epp home from school. Epp ran, but the dog kept following him. Epp threw part of his lunch to the dog, but the dog wouldn’t leave him alone. Finally he tried to scare the animal off with a stick, but the dog just kept following.

  “After a few miles, Epp started to wonder. He led the dog through a briar patch. The dog followed. He threw a rock at the dog, but the dog wouldn’t back away. Finally Epp kicked the dog. The dog didn’t run off. Epp kicked it again, and again. The dog wouldn’t move. Epp kicked the dog until it was dead. Then he picked it up and brought it to his favorite tree, and buried it there.”

  I’m almost too stunned to answer. “What the hell’s the moral of that?”

  “According to Vincent, that’s when Epp knew he’d found a loyal dog.”

  A silence unfolds.

  “Was that Taft’s idea of a joke?”

  Paul shakes his head. “Vincent told me a lot of stories about Epp. They’re all like that.”

  “Jesus. Why?”

  “I think they’re supposed to be some kind of parable.”

  “Parables he made up?”

  “I don’t know.” Paul hesitates. “But Rodge Epp Lang also happens to be an anagram. A rearrangement of the letters in ‘doppelganger.’ ”

  I feel sick. “Do you think Taft did those things?”

  “To the dog? Who knows. He might’ve. But his point was that he and I have the same relationship. I’m the dog.”

  “So why the hell are you still working with him?”

  Paul begins fidgeting with the bread again. “I made a decision. Staying with Vincent was the only way I could finish my thesis. I’m telling you, Tom, I’m convinced this is even bigger than we thought. Francesco’s crypt is this close. No one has made a find like this in years. And after your father, no one had done more work on the Hypnerotomachia than Vincent. I needed him.” Paul throws the crust onto his plate. “And he knew it.”

  Gil arrives in the doorway. “I’m done upstairs,” he says, as if we’ve been waiting for him to finish. “We can go now.”

  Paul seems glad to end the conversation. Taft’s behavior is a reproach to him. I rise and begin to bus my plates.

  “Don’t worry about those,” Gil says, waving me off. “They’ll send someone down.”

  Paul wipes his hands together briskly. Strings of the bread roll up on his palms, and he sloughs them like old skin. We both follow Gil out of the club.

  The snow is coming down much harder than before, so thick that I feel I’m watching the world through patches of static. As Gil navigates the Saab westward, approaching the auditorium, I look in the side mirror at Paul, wondering how long he’s been keeping all this to himself. We pass between streetlights in the dark, and for short pulses of time I can’t see him at all. His face is just a shadow.

  The fact is, Paul has always kept secrets from us. For years he hid the truth about his childhood, the details of his parochial school nightmare. Now he’s been hiding the truth about his relationship with Taft. Close as he and I are, there’s a certain distance now, a feeling that while we have a lot in common, good fences still make good neighbors. Leonardo wrote that a painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Most painters do the opposite, starting with a whitewash and adding the shadows last. But Paul, who knows Leonardo so well you’d think the old man slept in our bottom bunk, understands the value of starting with the shadows. The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see.

  I might not have grasped this very well, except that an interesting thing happened on campus just a few years before we arrived, which caught both Paul’s attention and mine. A twenty-nine-year-
old bicycle thief named James Hogue got into Princeton by claiming to be someone he wasn’t: an eighteen-year-old ranch hand from Utah. Hogue said he’d taught himself Plato under the stars, and trained himself to run a mile in just over four minutes. When the track team flew him out to campus for a recruiting trip, he said it was the first time he’d slept indoors in a decade. The admissions office was so captivated that it accepted him on the spot. When he deferred for a year, no one gave it a second thought. Hogue said he was tending to his sick mother in Switzerland; in fact, he was serving a term in prison.

  What made the hoax so intriguing was that, while roughly half of it was an outrageous lie, the other half was more or less true. Hogue was as good a runner as he let on, and for two years at Princeton he was a star on the track team. He was also a star in the classroom, shouldering a course load you couldn’t pay me to take, and getting straight A’s to boot. He was even so charming that Ivy tapped him for membership in the spring of his sophomore year. It almost seems a shame that his career ended the way it did. By sheer accident a spectator at a track meet recognized him from a previous life. When word spread, Princeton conducted an investigation and had him arrested in the middle of a science lab. Charges were pressed, and Hogue pled guilty to fraud. Within a matter of months he was in prison again, where he slowly faded back into obscurity.

  To me the Hogue story was the news event of that summer; the only thing to rival it was my discovery that Playboy had run a Women of the Ivy League issue the previous spring. To Paul, though, it was much more. As someone who always insisted on a varnish of fiction in his own life, pretending he’d eaten well when he hadn’t, or pretending not to own a computer because he didn’t like using one, Paul could identify with a man who felt bullied by the truth. One of the only advantages of coming from nothing, as James Hogue and Paul both did, is having the freedom to reinvent yourself. In fact, the better I got to know Paul, the more I understood it was less a freedom than a kind of obligation.

  Still, seeing what became of Hogue, Paul had to rethink the line between reinventing himself and fooling everyone else. Beginning the day he arrived at Princeton, he walked that line very carefully, keeping secrets rather than telling lies. An old fear returns to me when I consider that. My father, who understood the way the Hypnerotomachia had seduced him, once compared the book to an affair with a woman. It makes you lie, he said, even to yourself. Paul’s thesis may be exactly that lie: after four years with Taft, Paul has danced and danced for the book, left his bed and lost sleep for the book, and for all his sweat, the book has given up very little.

  Looking back in the mirror again, I can see him watching the snow. There is a blank look in his eyes and his face seems pale. In the distance a traffic light is flashing yellow. My father taught me something else without ever saying a word: never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness. Paul would sell his last cow for a handful of magical beans. Only now is he beginning to wonder if the beanstalk will grow.

  Chapter 9

  I think it was my mother who told me that a good friend stands in harm’s way for you the second you ask—but a great friend does it without being asked at all. There are so few times in a person’s life when a single great friend comes around that it almost seems unnatural when three come around all at once.

  The four of us met on a cool night during the fall of our freshman year. Paul and I were already spending much of our time together, and Charlie—who’d introduced himself on the first day of school by barging into Paul’s room and offering to help him unpack—was living in a single room down the hall. Thinking nothing could be worse than being alone, Charlie was always on the prowl for new friends.

  Paul immediately had misgivings about this wild, imposing character who never stopped pounding at his door with new adventures in mind. Something about Charlie’s athletic build seemed to conjure a spell of fear in him, as if he’d been tortured by a bully of that description as a child. For my part, I was surprised that Charlie hadn’t gotten tired of us, sedate as we were. Most of that first semester, I was convinced that he would abandon us for companions more like himself. I pegged him for a wealthy minority jock—the kind who had a neurosurgeon mother and an executive father, who eased through a regional prep school with more tutors than trouble, and who arrived at Princeton with nothing particular in mind except to have some fun and graduate in the solid middle of the class.

  That all seems funny now. The truth was, Charlie grew up in the heart of Philadelphia, riding with the volunteer ambulance squad through the worst crime districts in the city. He was a middle-class kid from a public school, whose father was a regional sales rep for an East Coast chemical manufacturer, and whose mother taught seventh-grade science. When he applied to college, his parents made it clear that anything beyond in-state tuition was a burden he would shoulder himself. The day Charlie arrived on campus, he’d taken on more student loans, and was more deeply in debt, than the rest of us would be when we graduated. Even Paul, who came from less, had been given a full scholarship because his need was so great.

  Maybe that was why, other than Paul during his month of insomnia as thesis deadlines approached, none of us did more and slept less than Charlie. He expected great things for his money, and to justify his sacrifice, he sacrificed even more. It wasn’t an easy thing to maintain a sense of identity at a school where only one in fifteen students was black, and only half of those were men. But identity for Charlie never ran along completely conventional lines anyway. He had a world-beating personality and an irresistible sense of purpose, and from the beginning I felt it was his world we were living in, not ours.

  Of course, we didn’t know all that on the late October night, only six weeks after we first met him, when he came to Paul’s door with his most daring plan to date. Since roughly the Civil War, students at Princeton had been in the habit of stealing the clapper from the bell atop Nassau Hall, the oldest building on campus. The original idea was that if the bell couldn’t toll the beginning of a new academic year, then the new academic year couldn’t begin. Whether anyone actually believed that, I don’t know, but I do know that stealing the clapper became a tradition, and that students tried everything from picking locks to scaling walls to do it. After more than a hundred years, the administration got so tired of the stunt, and so worried about a lawsuit, that it finally announced the clapper had been removed. Only, Charlie had information to the contrary. The removal was a hoax, he said; the clapper was intact. And tonight, with our help, he was going to steal it.

  I don’t need to explain that breaking into a historic landmark with a set of stolen keys and then fleeing from proctors on my bad leg, all in the name of a worthless bell clapper and fifteen minutes of campus fame, didn’t strike me as a world-class idea. But the longer Charlie argued his case, the more I saw his point: if juniors and seniors have their research papers and theses, and sophomores choose their majors and eating clubs, then all that’s left for freshmen is to take risks or get caught trying. The deans will never be more forgiving, he argued, than they will now. And when Charlie insisted it would take three people—no fewer—he and I decided that the only fair way to resolve things was to take a vote. In a reassuring test of democracy, we held a slim majority over Paul, and Paul, never being one to rock the boat, gave in. We agreed to be lookouts for Charlie, and after planning our course of attack, the three of us assembled what we could in the way of black clothing and set out for Nassau Hall at midnight.

  Now, I’ve said before that the new Tom—the one who survived the terrible car wreck and lived to fight another day—was made of braver, more adventurous stuff than the shrinking violet who was old Tom. But let’s be clear. Old or new, Evel Knievel I am not. For an hour after we arrived at Nassau Hall, I stood at my post in a tense sweat, fearing every shadow and twitching at every sound. Then, shortly after one o’clock, it happened. As the first of the eating clubs closed their taprooms for the night, a westward migration began of s
tudents and security officers retreating to campus. Charlie had promised that we would be well clear of Nassau Hall by then, but now he was nowhere to be seen.

  I turned and hissed at Paul, “What’s taking so long?”

  But there was no response.

  Taking a step toward the darkness, I called out again, squinting into the shadows.

  “What’s he doing up there?”

  But when I peered around the corner, there was no sign of Paul. The front door to the building was ajar.

  I ran to the entrance. Sticking my head inside, I could make out Paul and Charlie in a distant conversation. “It’s not up there,” Charlie was saying.

  “Hurry up!” I said. “They’re coming.”

  Suddenly a voice rose from the darkness behind me. “Campus police! Stop right there!”

  I turned in terror. Charlie’s voice choked into silence. I must have misheard, because I thought Paul swore.

  “Put your hands on your hips,” came the voice again.

  My mind fogged up. I imagined probation; dean’s warnings; expulsion.

  “Put your hands on your hips,” the voice repeated, louder now.

  I obeyed.

  For a moment there was silence. I strained to make out the proctor in the darkness, but I could see nothing.

  The next sound I heard was his laughter.

  “Now shake it, baby. Dance.”

  The figure who emerged from the shadows was a student. He laughed again and did a tipsy rumba thrust as he approached. He was about halfway between my height and Charlie’s, with dark hair that fell over his face. His tailored black blazer covered a starched white shirt with too many buttons undone.

  Charlie and Paul crept warily from the building behind me, empty-handed.

  The young man walked up to them, smiling. “So it’s true?” he said.

  “What is?” Charlie growled, glaring at me.

  The young man pointed at the bell tower. “The clapper. They really took it out?”