The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  Remembering the dates on Stein’s letters, I see the long provenance of this idea, the months of suspicion between Stein and Taft over who would steal Paul’s research first.

  “But he has his conclusions,” I say, when it doesn’t seem to dawn on Paul. “He hasn’t told anyone.”

  I expect Taft to react badly, but he seems amused. “Conclusions so soon, Paul?” he says. “To what do we attribute this sudden success?”

  He knows about the diary.

  “You let Bill find it,” Paul says.

  “You still don’t know what he found,” I insist.

  “And you,” Taft says, turning to me, “are as deluded as your father was. If a boy can puzzle out the meaning of that diary, you think I can’t?”

  Paul is dazed, eyes darting around the room.

  “My father thought you were a fool,” I say.

  “Your father died waiting for a Muse to whisper in his ear.” He laughs. “Scholarship is rigor, not inspiration. He never listened to me, and he suffered for it.”

  “He was right about that book. You were wrong.”

  Hatred dances in Taft’s eyes. “I know what he did, boy. You shouldn’t be so proud.”

  I glance over at Paul, not understanding, but he’s taken several steps away from the desk, toward the bookshelf.

  Taft leans forward. “Can you blame him? Failed, disgraced. The rejection of his book was the coup de grâce.”

  I turn back, thunderstruck.

  “And he did it with his own son in the car,” Taft continues. “How pregnant.”

  “It was an accident. . . .” I say.

  Taft smiles, and there are a thousand teeth in it.

  I step toward him. Charlie puts a hand against my chest, but I shake it off. Taft slowly rises from his chair.

  “You did it to him,” I say, vaguely aware that I’m shouting. Charlie’s hand is on me again, but I pull away, stepping forward until the edge of the desk is knifing into my scar.

  Taft turns the corner, bringing himself into reach.

  “He’s goading you, Tom,” Paul says quietly, from across the room.

  “He did it to himself,” Taft says.

  And the last thing I remember, before pushing him as hard as I can, is the smile on his face. He falls, the weight of him collapsing onto itself, and there is a thunder I feel in the floorboards. Everything seems to splinter, voices shouting, sights blurring, and Charlie’s hands are on me again, yanking me back.

  “Come on,” he says.

  I try to jerk free, but Charlie’s grip is stronger.

  “Come on,” he repeats to Paul, who’s still staring at Taft on the floor.

  But it’s too late. Taft staggers to his feet, then lumbers toward me.

  “Stay away from him,” Charlie says, extending a hand in Taft’s direction.

  Taft glares at me from across the span of Charlie’s arms. Paul is looking around the room, oblivious to them, searching for something. Finally, Taft’s senses return and he reaches for the phone.

  A stab of fear registers on Charlie’s face. “Let’s go,” he says, stepping back. “Now.”

  Taft punches three numbers, ones Charlie has seen too often to mistake. “Police,” he says, staring directly at me. “Please come immediately. I’m being attacked in my office.”

  Charlie is pushing me out the door. “Go,” he says.

  Just then, Paul darts over to the open safe and pulls out the balance of what remains inside. Then he starts pulling papers and books from the shelves, uprooting bookends, turning over everything in his reach. When he’s got a pile of Taft’s papers in hand, he backs away and dashes out the door, without so much as a glance at Charlie or me.

  We bolt after him. The last thing I hear from the office is the sound of Taft on the phone, announcing our names to the police. His voice carries through the open door, echoing down the hallway.

  We dart through the corridor to the dark cellar stairs, when a rush of cold descends from overhead. Two campus police officers have arrived at the foot of the steps on the ground floor above us.

  “Stay right there!” one of them calls down the narrow staircase.

  We stop short.

  “Campus police! Don’t move!”

  Paul is looking over my shoulder toward the far end of the hall, clutching the papers in his left hand.

  “Do what they say,” Charlie tells him.

  But I know what’s caught Paul’s eye. There’s a janitor’s closet down there. Inside is an entrance to the tunnels.

  “It’s not safe down there,” Charlie says under his breath, edging toward Paul to keep him from running. “They’re doing construct—”

  The proctors mistake the movement for flight, and one comes barreling down the stairs, just as Paul makes for the door.

  “Stop!” the proctor cries. “Don’t go in there!”

  But Paul is already at the entrance, pulling the wood panel open. He disappears inside.

  Charlie doesn’t hesitate. Before either of the cops knows it, he’s two steps ahead, moving fast toward the door. I hear a thud as he jumps to the tunnel floor, trying to stop Paul. Then his voice, shouting Paul’s name, echoes up from below.

  “Come out!” the proctor booms, nudging me forward.

  The officer leans in and calls again, but only silence follows.

  “Call it in—” the first one begins to say, when a thunderous noise comes roaring up from the tunnels, and the boiler room beside us begins to hiss. Immediately I know what’s happened: a steam pipe has burst. And now I can hear Charlie screaming.

  In an instant, I’m at the threshold of the janitor’s closet. The manhole is pure darkness, so I take a wild leap. When I hit the ground, adrenaline is forking through me, live as lightning, and the pain from landing fades before it spreads. I force myself up. Charlie is moaning in the distance, leading me toward him, even as the proctor yells overhead. One of the officers has the sense to realize what’s going on.

  “We’re calling an ambulance,” he calls into the tunnel. “Can you hear me?”

  I’m moving through a soupy mist. The heat intensifies, but the only thing on my mind is Charlie. For seconds at a time the hiss of the pipe drowns out everything else.

  Charlie’s groans are clearer now. I push forward, trying to get to him. Finally, at a turn in the pipes, I find him. He’s buckled over himself, motionless. His clothes are ragged, and his hair is matted to his head. In the distance, as my eyes adjust, I can see a gaping hole in a barrel-size pipe near the floor.

  “Hum,” Charlie groans.

  I don’t understand.

  “Hum . . .”

  I realize he’s trying to say my name.

  His chest is soaked. The steam hit him right in the gut.

  “Can you stand?” I ask, trying to put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Hum . . .” he mumbles, losing consciousness.

  Clenching my teeth, I try lifting him, but it’s like trying to move a mountain.

  “Come on, Charlie,” I plead, jerking him up a little. “Don’t fade on me.”

  But I sense I’m talking to less and less of him. There’s more and more dead weight.

  “Help!” I bark into the distance. “Please help me!”

  There are gashes in his shirt where the pressure shredded the fabric, soaking him to the skin. I can hardly feel him breathing.

  “Mmm . . . ” he gurgles, trying to curl a finger around my hand.

  I grab his shoulders and shake him again. Finally I hear footsteps. A beam of light knifes through the fog and I can see a medic—two of them—rushing toward me.

  In a second they’re close enough for me to see their faces. But when the beams of their flashlights finally cross Charlie’s body, I can hear one of them say, “Oh, Jesus.”

  “Are you hurt?” the other says to me, padding at my chest with his hands.

  I stare back at him, uncomprehending. Then, as I look down at the circle of my stomach lit by his flashlight, I under
stand. The water sprayed across Charlie’s chest wasn’t water at all. I’m covered in his blood.

  Both of the EMTs are with him now, trying to raise him up. A third medic arrives and tries to move me, but I fight him off, trying to stay at Charlie’s side. Slowly I feel myself beginning to slip away. In the heat and the darkness, I’m losing my hold on reality. A pair of hands guides me out of the tunnels, and I see the two officers, with two other policemen behind them now, all watching as the ambulance team drags me above ground.

  The last thing I remember is the look on the proctor’s face as he stands there, watching me rise from the darkness, bloody from my face to the tips of my fingers. At first he looks relieved, to see me stumble out of the wreckage. Then his expression changes, and the relief disappears from his eyes, as he realizes the blood isn’t mine.

  Chapter 20

  I come to my senses in a bed at Princeton Medical Center several hours after the accident. Paul is sitting beside me, glad to see me awake, and a policeman is standing outside the door. Someone has changed me into a paper gown that crunches like a diaper when I sit up. There is blood beneath my fingernails, dark as dirt, and there’s a familiar smell in the air, something I remember from my old hospital past. The smell of sickness mopped over with disinfectant. The smell of medicine.

  “Tom?” Paul says.

  I prop myself up to face him, but pain shoots through my arm.

  “Careful,” he says, leaning over. “The doctor says you injured your shoulder.”

  Now, as I’m becoming more aware, I can feel pain beneath the bandage. “What happened to you down there?”

  “It was stupid. I just reacted. I couldn’t get back to Charlie once the pipe exploded. All of the steam was coming in my direction. I came back through the nearest exit and the police drove me here.”

  “Where’s Charlie?”

  “In the emergency room. They won’t let anyone see him.”

  His voice has gone flat. After rubbing at his eye, he glances out the door. An old woman skids past in a wheelchair, nimble as a kid in a go-cart. The cop watches her, but doesn’t smile. There’s a little yellow sandwich board on the tile floor that says CAUTION: WET SURFACE.

  “Is he okay?” I ask.

  Paul keeps his eyes on the door. “I don’t know. Will said he was right beside the broken pipe when they found him.”

  “Will?”

  “Will Clay, Charlie’s friend.” Paul places a hand on the rail of the bed. “He pulled you out.”

  I try to think back, but all I remember are silhouettes in the tunnels, lit up around the edges by flashlights.

  “He and Charlie switched shifts when you guys went looking for me,” Paul adds.

  There’s a great sadness in his voice. He traces this all back to himself.

  “Do you want me to call Katie and tell her you’re here?” he asks.

  I shake my head, wanting to feel more grounded first. “I’ll call her later.”

  The old woman rolls past a second time, and now I spot the cast on her left leg, running from her knee to her toes. Her hair is mussed, and her pants are rolled up above the knee, but there’s a twinkle in her eyes, and she gives the officer a defiant smile when she passes by, as if it’s a law she’s broken, rather than a bone. Charlie told me once that geriatric patients are relieved sometimes to take a little fall, or have a minor illness. Losing a battle reminds them that they’re still winning the war. I am struck suddenly by Charlie’s absence, by the emptiness where I expect to hear his voice.

  “He must’ve lost a lot of blood,” I say.

  Paul looks at his hands. In the silence, I can hear wheezing across the partition between my bed and the next. Just then, a doctor enters the room. The officer at the door touches the elbow of her white lab coat, and when she stops, the two of them exchange quiet words.

  “Thomas?” she says, coming to the bedside with a clipboard and a frown.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m Dr. Jansen.” She walks to the opposite side of the bed to examine my arm. “How are you feeling?”

  “Fine. How’s Charlie doing?”

  She prods my shoulder a little, just enough to make me squirm. “I don’t know. He’s been in the ER since he got here.”

  I’m not clearheaded enough to know what it means that she recognizes Charlie by his first name.

  “Will he be okay?”

  “It’s too early to tell,” she says, without looking up.

  “When can we see him?” Paul asks.

  “One thing at a time,” she says, placing a hand between my back and the pillow, then raising me up. “How does this feel?”

  “Fine.”

  “And this?”

  She presses two fingers over my collarbone.

  “Fine.”

  The poking continues across my back, elbow, wrist, and head. She tries the stethoscope for good measure, then finally sits back. Doctors are like gamblers, always looking for the right combinations. Patients are like slot machines: twist their arms long enough and you’re bound to hit the jackpot.

  “You’re lucky it wasn’t worse,” she says. “There’s no fracture, but the soft tissue is bruised. You’ll feel it when the painkiller wears off. Ice it twice a day for a week, then you’ll have to come back so we can take another look.”

  She has an earthy smell to her, like sweat and soap. I wait for her to pull out a prescription pad, remembering the cabinet of drugs I collected after the car accident, but she doesn’t.

  “There’s someone outside who’d like to talk to you,” she tells me instead.

  For a second, because she says it so pleasantly, I imagine a friend out in the hall—Gil maybe, returned from the eating clubs, or even my mother, flown in from Ohio. Suddenly, I’m unsure how much time has passed since they dragged me out of the ground.

  But a different face appears in the doorway, one I’ve never seen before. Another woman, but not a doctor, and definitely not my mother. She’s heavyset and short, tucked into a round black skirt down to her calves, and opaque black stockings. A white blouse and red suit-jacket give her a maternal air, but my first thought is that she’s a university administrator.

  The doctor and the woman exchange a look, then switch places, one leaving as the other comes. The black-stockinged woman stops short of the bed and makes a gesture to Paul, beckoning him over. They have a conversation out of earshot—then, unexpectedly, he asks if I’m okay, waits for me to nod, and walks out with another man standing near the door.

  “Officer,” the woman says, “would you close that behind you?”

  To my surprise he nods and shuts the door, leaving us alone.

  The woman waddles over to the bedside, pausing to glance at the bed beyond the curtain.

  “How are you feeling, Tom?” She sits down in the chair where Paul was, making it disappear. She has squirrelly cheeks. When she talks, they seem full of nuts.

  “Not so good,” I say warily. I tilt my right side toward her, showing her the bandage.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “My son was here last month,” she says absently, searching for something in her jacket pocket. “Appendectomy.”

  I’m just about to ask who she is, when she pulls a little leather wallet out of her breast pocket. “Tom, I’m Detective Gwynn. I’d like to talk to you about what happened today.”

  She unfolds the wallet to show me her badge, then flips it back in her pocket.

  “Where’s Paul?”

  “Speaking with Detective Martin. I’d like to ask you some questions about William Stein. Do you know who he was?”

  “He died last night.”

  “He was killed.” She lets a silence punctuate the last word. “Did any of your roommates know him?”

  “Paul did. They worked together at the Institute for Advanced Study.”

  She pulls a steno pad from her jacket pocket. “Do you know Vincent Taft?”

  “Sort of,” I say, sensin
g something bigger on the horizon.

  “Did you go to his office earlier today?”

  Pressure is building in my temples. “Why?”

  “Did you get into a fight with him?”

  “I wouldn’t call it a fight.”

  She makes a note.

  “Were you and your roommate in the museum last night?” she asks, rummaging through a file in her hand.

  The question seems to have a thousand outcomes. I think back. Paul covered his hands with his shirt cuffs when he touched Stein’s letters. No one could’ve seen our faces in the dark.

  “No.”

  The detective rolls her lips, the way some women even their lipstick. I can’t read her body language. Finally, she produces a sheet of paper from the folder and passes it to me. It’s a photocopy of the log-in sheet Paul and I signed for the museum guard. The date and time are stamped beside each entry.

  “How did you get into the museum library?”

  “Paul had the punch code,” I say, giving up. “He got it from Bill Stein.”

  “Stein’s desk was part of our crime scene. What were you looking for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The detective gives me a sympathetic look. “I think your friend Paul,” she says, “is getting you into more trouble than you realize.”

  I wait for her to give it a name, something legal, but she doesn’t. Instead she says, “It’s your name on this security sheet, isn’t it?” She lifts the paper, taking it back. “And you’re the one who assaulted Dr. Taft.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Odd, that your friend Charlie was the one who tried to resuscitate William Stein.”

  “Charlie’s a medic . . .”

  “But where was Paul Harris?”

  For a moment the façade disappears. A curtain rises over her eyes, and the gentle matron is gone.

  “You need to start looking out for yourself, Tom.”

  I can’t tell if it’s a threat or a caution.

  “Your friend Charlie is in the same boat,” she says. “If he pulls through this.” She waits, letting it sink in. “Just tell me the truth.”

  “I did.”

  “Paul Harris left the auditorium before Dr. Taft’s lecture was over.”