The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  Paul pulled a single sheet of paper from between the pages of a book. On it was written, in two distinct blocks, the text of a passage written in code, and below it the shorter decoded message. How one became the other, I couldn’t see.

  “After a while, I started thinking it could work. Maybe the acrostic with the Hypnerotomachia’s chapter letters was just a hint. Maybe it was there to tell you what sort of interpretation would work on the rest of the book. A lot of humanists were interested in kabala, and the idea of playing games with language and symbols was popular in the Renaissance. Maybe Francesco had used some kind of cipher for the Hypnerotomachia.

  “The problem was, I had no idea where to look for the algorithm. I started inventing ciphers of my own, just to see if one might work. I was fighting with it, day after day. I would come across something, spend a week rummaging through the Rare Books Room for an answer—only to find out it didn’t make sense, or it was a trap, or a dead end.

  “Then, at the end of August, I spent three weeks on a single passage. It’s at the point in the story where Poliphilo is examining a set of temple ruins, and he finds a hieroglyphic message carved on an obelisk. To the divine and always august Julius Caesar, governor of the world is the opening phrase. I’ll never forget it—it almost drove me crazy. The same few pages, day after day. But that’s when I found it.”

  He opened a binder on his desk. Inside was a reproduction of every page of the Hypnerotomachia. Turning to an appendix he’d created at the end, he showed me a sheet of paper on which he’d clipped the first letter of each chapter into what looked like a ransom note, spelling the famous message about Fra Francesco Colonna. Poliam Frater Franciscus Columna Peramavit.

  “My starting assumption was simple. The acrostic couldn’t just be a parlor trick, a cheap way to identify the author. It had to have a larger purpose: first letters wouldn’t just be important for decoding that initial message, they would be important for deciphering the entire book.

  “So I tried it. The passage I’d been looking at happens to begin with a special hieroglyph in one of the drawings—an eye.” He flipped several pages, finally arriving at it.

  “Since it was the first symbol in that woodcut, I decided it must be important. The problem was, I couldn’t do anything with it. Poliphilo’s definition of the symbol—that the eye means God, or divinity—led me nowhere.

  “That’s when I got lucky. One morning I was doing some work at the student center, and I hadn’t slept much, so I decided to buy a soda. Only, the machine kept spitting my dollar back. I was so tired, I couldn’t figure out why, until I finally looked down and realized I was putting it in the wrong way. The back side was up. I was just about to turn it over and try again, when I saw it. Right in front of me, on the back of the bill.”

  “The eye,” I said. “Right above the pyramid.”

  “Exactly. It’s part of the great seal. And that’s when it hit me. In the Renaissance there was a famous humanist who used the eye as his symbol. He even printed it on coins and medals.”

  He waited, as if I might know the answer.

  “Alberti.” Paul pointed to a small volume on the far shelf. The spine read De re aedificatoria. “That’s what Colonna meant by it. He was about to borrow an idea from Alberti’s book, and he wanted you to notice it. If you could just figure out what it was, the rest would fall into place.

  “In his treatise, Alberti creates Latin equivalents for architectural words derived from Greek. Francesco does the same replacement all over the Hypnerotomachia—except in one place. I’d noticed it the first time I translated the section, because I started hitting Vitruvian terms I hadn’t seen in a long time. But I never thought they were significant.

  “The trick, I realized, was that you had to find all the Greek architectural terms in that passage and replace them with their Latin equivalents, the same way they appear in the rest of the text. If you did that, and used the acrostic rule—reading the first letter of each word in a row, the same way you do with the first letter of each chapter—the puzzle unlocks. You find a message in Latin. The only problem is, if you make just one mistake converting the Greek to Latin, the whole message breaks down. Replace entasi with ventris diametrum instead of just venter, and the extra ‘D’ at the beginning of diametrum changes everything.”

  He flipped to another page, talking faster. “I made mistakes, of course. Luckily, they weren’t so big that I couldn’t still piece together the Latin. I took me three weeks, right up to the day before you guys came back to campus. But I finally figured it out. You know what it says?” He scratched nervously at something on his face. “It says: Who cuckolded Moses?”

  He gave a hollow laugh. “I swear to God, I can hear Francesco laughing at me. I feel like the whole book just boiled down to one big joke at my expense. I mean, seriously. Who cuckolded Moses?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “In other words, who cheated on Moses?”

  “I know what a cuckold is.”

  “Actually, it doesn’t literally say cuckold. It says, ‘Who gave Moses the horns?’ Horns, as early as Artemidorus, are used to suggest cuckoldry. It comes from—”

  “But what does that have to do with the Hypnerotomachia?”

  I waited for him to explain, or to say that he’d read the riddle wrong. But when Paul got up and started pacing, I could tell this was more complicated.

  “I don’t know. I can’t figure out how it fits with the rest of the book. But here’s the strange thing. I think I may have solved the riddle.”

  “Someone cuckolded Moses?”

  “Well, sort of. At first, I thought it had to be a mistake. Moses is too major a figure in the Old Testament to be associated with infidelity. As far as I knew, he had a wife—a Midianite woman named Zipporah—but she barely appeared in Exodus, and I couldn’t find any reference to her cheating on him.

  “Then in Numbers 12:1, something unusual happens. Moses’ brother and sister speak against him because he marries a Cushite woman. The details are never explained, but some scholars argue that because Cush and Midian are completely different geographical areas, Moses must’ve had two wives. The name of the Cushite wife never appears in the Bible, but a first-century historian, Flavius Josephus, writes his own account of Moses’ life, and claims that the name of the Cushite, or Ethiopian, woman he married was Tharbis.”

  The details were beginning to overwhelm me. “So she cheated on him?”

  Paul shook his head. “No. By taking a second wife, Moses cheated on her, or on Zipporah, whichever one he married first. The chronology is hard to figure out, but in some usages, cuckold’s horns appear on the head of the cheater, not just the cheater’s spouse. That must be what the riddle’s getting at. The answer is Zipporah or Tharbis.”

  “So what do you do with that?”

  His excitement seemed to dissipate. “That’s where I’ve hit a wall. I tried to use Zipporah and Tharbis as solutions every way I could think of, applying them as ciphers to help crack the rest of the book. But nothing works.”

  He waited, as if expecting me to contribute something.

  “What does Taft think about it?” was all I could think to ask.

  “Vincent doesn’t know. He thinks I’m wasting my time. As soon as he decided Gelbman’s techniques weren’t yielding breakthroughs, he told me I should go back to following his lead. More focus on the primary Venetian sources.”

  “You’re not going to tell him about this?”

  Paul looked at me as if I misunderstood.

  “I’m telling you,” he said.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Tom, it can’t be an accident. Not something this big. This is what your father was looking for. All we have to do is figure it out. I want your help.”

  “Why?”

  Now a curious certainty entered his voice, as if he understood something about the Hypnerotomachia that he’d overlooked before. “The book rewards different kinds of thought. Sometimes patience works, atte
ntion to detail. But other times it takes instinct and inventiveness. I’ve read some of your conclusions on Frankenstein. They’re good. They’re original. And you didn’t even break a sweat. Just think about it. Think about the riddle. Maybe you’ll come up with something else. That’s all I’m asking.”

  There was a simple reason why I rejected Paul’s offer that night. In the landscape of my childhood, Colonna’s book was a deserted mansion on a hill, a foreboding shadow over any nearby thought. Every unpleasant mystery of my youth seemed to trace its origins to those same unreadable pages: the unaccountable absence of my father from our dinner table so many nights as he labored at his desk; the old arguments he and my mother lapsed into, like saints falling into sin; even the inhospitable oddness of Richard Curry, who fell for Colonna’s book worse than any man, and never seemed to recover. I couldn’t understand the power the Hypnerotomachia exerted over everyone who read it, but in my experience that power always seemed to play out for the worse. Watching Paul struggle for three years, even if it culminated in this breakthrough, had only helped me keep my distance.

  If it seems surprising, then, that I changed my mind the next morning, and joined Paul in his work, chalk it up to a dream I had the night after he told me about the riddle. There is a woodcut in the Hypnerotomachia that will always stay in the stowage of my early childhood, a print that I bumped into many times after sneaking into my father’s office to investigate what he was studying. It’s not every day that a boy sees a naked woman reclining under a tree, looking up at him as he returns the favor. And I imagine no one, outside the circle of Hypnerotomachia scholars, can say he has ever seen a naked satyr standing at the feet of such a woman, with a horn of a penis extended like a compass needle in her direction. I was twelve when I saw that picture for the first time, all alone in my father’s office, and I could suddenly imagine why he sometimes came to dinner late. Whatever this was, strange and wonderful, beef potluck had nothing on it.

  It returned to me that night, the woodcut of my childhood—woman lounging, satyr stalking, member rampant—and I must have done a lot of turning in my bunk, because Paul looked down from his and asked, “You okay, Tom?”

  Coming to, I rose and shot through the books on his desk. That penis, that misplaced horn, reminded me of something. There was a connection to be made. Colonna knew what he was talking about. Someone had given Moses horns.

  I found the answer in Hartt’s History of Renaissance Art. I’d seen the picture before, but never made anything of it.

  “What are these?” I asked Paul, tossing the book up to his bunk, pointing at the page.

  He squinted. “Michelangelo’s statue of Moses,” he said, staring at me as if I’d lost my mind. “What’s wrong, Tom?”

  Then, before I even had to explain, he stopped short and turned on his bedside light.

  “Of course . . .” he whispered. “Oh my God, of course.”

  Sure enough, in the photo I’d shown him, two little nubs stuck out the top of the statue’s head, like goatish satyr horns.

  Paul jumped down from the bunk, loudly enough that I waited for Gil and Charlie to appear. “You did it,” he said, eyes wide. “This must be it.”

  He continued like that for a while, until I started to feel an uncomfortable sense of dislocation, wondering how Colonna could’ve put the answer to his riddle on a Michelangelo sculpture.

  “So why are they there?” I asked finally.

  But Paul was already far ahead. He yanked the book off his bunk and showed me the explanation in the text. “The horns have nothing to do with being a cuckold. The riddle was literal: who gave Moses horns? It’s from a mistranslation of the Bible. When Moses comes down from Mount Sinai, Exodus says, his face glows with rays of light. But the Hebrew word for ‘rays’ can also be translated as ‘horns’—karan versus keren. When Saint Jerome translated the Old Testament into Latin, he thought no one but Christ should glow with rays of light—so he advanced the secondary translation. And that’s how Michelangelo carved his Moses. With horns.”

  In all the excitement, I don’t think I even sensed what was happening. The Hypnerotomachia had slunk back into my life, ferrying me across a river I never intended to cross. All that stood in our way was figuring out the significance of Saint Jerome, who had applied the Latin word cornuta to Moses, thus giving him horns. But for the following week, that was a burden Paul happily took upon himself. Beginning that night, and continuing for some time, I was only a hired gun, his last resort against the Hypnerotomachia. I thought it was a position I could keep, a distance I could maintain from the book, letting Paul play the middleman. And so, as he returned to Firestone, white-hot with the possibilities of what we’d found, I went off and made another discovery of my own. Still strutting after my encounter with Francesco Colonna, I can only imagine the impression I made on her.

  We met where neither of us belonged, but where both of us felt at home: Ivy. For my part, I’d spent as many weekends there as I had at my own club. For hers, she was already one of Gil’s favorites, months before bicker for her sophomore class began, and it was his first thought to introduce us.

  “Katie,” he said, after getting both of us to the club on the same Saturday night, “this is my roommate, Tom.”

  I gave a lazy smile, thinking I didn’t have to flex much muscle to charm a sophomore.

  Then she spoke. And like a fly in a pitcher plant, expecting nectar and finding death, I realized who was hunting who.

  “So you’re Tom,” she said, as if I met the description of a convict from a post office wall. “Charlie told me about you.”

  The best part about being described to someone by Charlie is that things can only get better from there. Apparently he’d met Katie at Ivy several nights earlier, and when he realized that Gil intended to make the match, he eagerly chipped in with details.

  “What did he tell you?” I asked, trying not to look concerned.

  She thought for a second, searching for his exact words.

  “Something about astronomy. About stars.”

  “White dwarf,” I told her. “It’s a science joke.”

  Katie frowned.

  “I don’t get it either,” I admitted, trying to undo my first impression. “I’m not much for that kind of stuff.”

  “English major?” she asked, as if she could tell.

  I nodded. Gil had told me she was into philosophy.

  She eyed me suspiciously. “Who’s your favorite author?”

  “Impossible question. Who’s your favorite philosopher?”

  “Camus,” she said, even though I meant it rhetorically. “And my favorite author is H. A. Rey.”

  The words came out like a test. I’d never heard of Rey; he sounded like a modernist, a more obscure T. S. Eliot, an uppercase e. e. cummings.

  “He wrote poetry?” I ventured, because I could imagine her reading Frenchmen by firelight.

  Katie blinked. Then for the first time since we’d met, she smiled.

  “He wrote Curious George,” she said, and laughed out loud when I tried not to blush.

  That was the recipe of our relationship, I think. We gave each other what we never expected to find. In my earliest days at Princeton I had learned never to talk shop with my girlfriends; even poetry will kill romance, Gil had taught me, if you mistake it for conversation. But Katie had learned the same lesson, and neither of us liked it. Freshman year she dated a lacrosse player I’d met in one of my literature seminars. He was smart, taking to Pynchon and DeLillo in a way I never did, but he refused to speak a word about them outside of class. It drove her crazy, the lines he drew through his life, the walls he put up between work and play. In twenty minutes of conversation that night at Ivy, we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing. It pleased Gil that he’d made such a good match. Before long I found myself waiting for the weekends, hoping to run into her between classes, thinking of her before bed, in the shower, in t
he middle of tests. Within a month, we were dating.

  As the senior in our relationship, I imagined for a while that it was my job to apply the wisdom of my experience to everything we did. I made sure we kept to familiar places and friendly crowds, having learned from past girlfriends that familiarity always arrives in the wake of infatuation: two people who think they’re in love can find out, when left alone, exactly how little they know about each other. So I insisted on public places—weekends at eating clubs, weeknights at the student center—and agreed to meet at bedrooms and library nooks only when I thought I detected something more in Katie’s voice, the come-hither registers I flattered myself I could hear.

  As usual, it was Katie who had to straighten me out.

  “Come on,” she told me one night. “We’re going to dinner together.”

  “Whose club?” I asked.

  “A restaurant. Your choice.”

  We’d been together for less than two weeks; there were still too many parts of her I didn’t know. A long dinner alone sounded risky.

  “Did you want to ask Karen or Trish to come along?” I asked. Her two roommates in Holder had been fail-safe company. Trish, in particular, who never seemed to eat, dependably talked through any meal.

  Katie’s back was turned to me. “We could ask Gil to come too,” she said.

  “Sure.” It struck me as an odd combination, but there was safety in numbers.

  “What about Charlie?” she asked. “He’s always hungry.”

  Finally I realized she was being sarcastic.

  “What’s the problem, Tom?” she said, turning back to me. “You’re afraid other people will see us alone?”

  “No.”

  “I bore you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then what? You think we’ll find out we don’t know each other very well?”

  I hesitated. “Yes.”

  Katie seemed amazed that I meant it.

  “What’s my sister’s name?” she said finally.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Am I religious?”