The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  “The Aldine Press,” I say, recognizing it from my father’s old office at home.

  Colonna’s printer, Aldus Manutius, took his famous dolphin and anchor emblem, one of the most famous in printing history, from the Hypnerotomachia.

  Paul nods, and I sense this is part of his point. Everywhere he’s turned, in this four-year spiral back toward the beginning, he’s felt a hand at his back. His whole world, even in the silent details, has been nudging him on, helping him to crack Colonna’s book.

  The elevator doors open, and we step in.

  “Anyway, I was thinking about all that last night,” he says, pressing the button for C-floor as we begin our descent. “About how everything seemed to be coming full circle. And it hit me.”

  A bell dings above our heads, and the doors open onto the bleakest landscape of the library, dozens of feet underground. The ceiling-high bookshelves of C-floor are so tightly packed that they seem designed to shoulder the weight of the five floors above us. To our left is Microform Services, the dark grotto where professors and grad students huddle in clusters of microfilm machines, squinting at panels of light. Paul begins leading me through the stacks, running his finger along the dusty spines of books as we pass them. I realize he’s taking me to his carrel.

  “There’s a reason everything returns to where it started in this book. Beginnings are the key to the Hypnerotomachia. The first letter of every chapter creates the acrostic about Fra Francesco Colonna. The first letters of the architectural terms spell out the first riddle. It’s not a coincidence that Francesco made everything come back to beginnings.”

  In the distance I can see the long rows of green metallic doors, spaced almost as closely as high school lockers. The rooms they guard are no bigger than closets. But hundreds of seniors shut themselves inside for weeks on end to write their theses in peace. Paul’s carrel, which I haven’t seen in months, sits near the farthest corner.

  “Maybe I was just getting tired, but I thought, what if he knew exactly what he was doing? What if you could figure out how to decipher the second half of the book by focusing on something in the very first riddle? Francesco said he didn’t leave any solutions, but he didn’t say he left no hints. And I had the directions from the portmaster’s diary to help me.”

  We arrive in front of his carrel, and he begins to twist the combination lock on the door. A sheet of black construction paper has been taped to the little rectangular window, making it impossible to see inside.

  “I thought the directions had to be about a physical location. How to get from a stadium to a crypt, measured in stadia. Even the portmaster thought the directions were geographical.” He shakes his head. “I wasn’t thinking like Francesco.”

  Paul opens the lock and swings the door wide. The little room is filled with books, piles upon piles of them, a tiny version of the President’s Room at Ivy. Food wrappers litter the floor. Sheets of paper are taped to the walls, thick as feathers, each one scrawled with a message. Phineus son of Belus wasn’t Phineus king of Salmydessus, says one. Check Hesiod: Hesperethousa or Hesperia and Arethousa? says another. Buy more crackers, says a third.

  I lift a stack of photocopies from one of the two chairs crammed into the carrel, and try to sit down without knocking anything over.

  “So I came back to the riddles,” he says. “What was the first riddle about?”

  “Moses. The Latin word for horns.”

  “Right.” He turns his back to me to shut the door behind us. “It was about a mistranslation. Philology, historical linguistics. It was about language.”

  He begins searching through a column of books atop the hutch of his desk. Finally he finds what he wants: Hartt’s History of Renaissance Art.

  “Why did we get lucky with the first riddle?” he says.

  “Because I had that dream.”

  “No,” he says, finding the page with Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, the picture that began our partnership. “We got lucky because the riddle was about something verbal, and we were looking for something physical. Francesco didn’t care about actual, physical horns; he cared about a word, a mistranslation. We got lucky because that mistranslation eventually manifested itself physically. Michelangelo carved his Moses with horns, and you remembered that. If it hadn’t been for the physical manifestation, we would never have found the linguistic answer. But that was the key: the words.”

  “So you looked for a linguistic representation of the directions.”

  “Exactly. North, south, east, and west aren’t physical clues. They’re verbal ones. When I looked at the second half of the book, I knew I was right. The word stadia shows up near the beginning of the very first chapter. Look,” he says, finding a sheet of paper where he’s worked something out.

  There are three sentences written on the page: Gil and Charlie go to the stadium to watch Princeton vs. Harvard. Tom waits as Paul catches up. Katie takes photographs while winsomely smiling and mouthing, I love you, Tom.

  “Winsomely?” I say.

  “Doesn’t look like much, right? It just sort of rambles, like Poliphilo’s story. But plot it out in a grid,” he says, turning the piece of paper over. “And you get this:”

  I’m waiting for something to jump out at me, but it doesn’t.

  “That’s it?” I ask.

  “That’s it. Just follow the directions. Four south, ten east, two north, six west. De Stadio—‘from stadium.’ Start with the ‘s’ in ‘stadium.’ ”

  I find a pen on his desk and try it out, moving down four, right ten, up two, and left six.

  I write down the letters S-O-L-U-T.

  “Then repeat the process,” he says, “starting with the last letter.”

  I begin again from T.

  And there it is, laid out on the page: S-O-L-U-T-I-O-N.

  “That’s the Rule of Four,” Paul says. “It’s so simple once you understand how Colonna’s mind works. Four directions within the text. Just repeat it over and over again, then figure out where the word breaks are.”

  “But it must’ve taken Colonna months to write.”

  He nods. “The funny thing is, I’d always noticed there were certain lines in the Hypnerotomachia that seemed even more disorganized than others—places where words didn’t really fit, where clauses were in strange places, where the weirdest neologisms turned up. It makes sense now. Francesco had to write the text to fit the pattern. It explains why he used so many languages. If the vernacular word didn’t fit in the spaces, he would have to try the Latin word, or make one up himself. He even made a bad choice with the pattern. Look.”

  Paul points to the line where O, L, and N appear.

  “See how many cipher letters are on that one line? And there’ll be another one once you go six west again. The four-south, two-north pattern doubles back on itself, so every other line in the Hypnerotomachia, Francesco had to find text that fit four different letters. But it worked. No one in five hundred years picked up on it.”

  “But the letters in the book aren’t printed that way,” I say, wondering how he applied the technique to the actual text. “Letters aren’t spaced evenly in a grid. How do you figure out what’s exactly north or south?”

  He nods. “You can’t, because it’s hard to say which letter is directly above or below another. I had to work it out mathematically instead of graphically.”

  It still amazes me, the way he teases simplicity and complexity out of the same idea.

  “Take what I wrote, for example. In this case there are”—he counts something—“eighteen letters per line, right? If you work it out, that means ‘four south’ will always be four lines straight down, which is the same as seventy-two letters to the right of the original starting point. Using the same math, ‘two north’ will be the same as thirty-six letters to the left. Once you know the length of Francesco’s standard line, you can just figure out the math and do everything that way. After a while, you get pretty quick at counting the letters.”

  In our par
tnership, it occurs to me, the only thing I ever had that could compare to the speed of Paul’s reasoning was my intuition—luck, dreams, chance associations. It hardly seems fair to him that we worked together as equals.

  Paul folds the sheet of paper and places it in the trash can. For a second he looks around the carrel, then lifts a stack of books and places it in the crook of my arm, followed by a stack for himself. The painkiller must still be working, because my shoulder doesn’t buckle under the heft.

  “I’m amazed you figured it out,” I tell him. “What did it say?”

  “Help me put these away back on the shelves first,” he answers. “I want to empty this place out.”

  “Why?”

  “Just to be safe.”

  “From what?”

  He half-smiles at me. “Library fines?”

  We exit the carrel and Paul guides me toward a long corridor extending far into the darkness. There are bookshelves on either side, branching off into aisles of their own, dead ends begetting dead ends. We are in a corner of the library visited so rarely that the librarians keep the lights off, letting visitors flick the switch on each shelf when they come.

  “I couldn’t believe it, when I finished,” he says. “Even before I was through decoding, I was shaking. It was done. After all this time, done.”

  He stops at one of the rearmost shelves, and I can make out only the silhouette of his face.

  “And it was worth it, Tom. I never even saw it coming, what was in the second half of the book. Remember what we saw in Bill’s letter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Most of that letter was a lie. You know that work is mine, Tom. The most Bill ever did was translate a few Arabic characters. He made some copies and checked out some books. Everything else I did on my own.”

  “I know,” I say.

  Paul covers his mouth with his hand for a second.

  “That’s not true. Without everything your father and Richard found, and everything the rest of you solved—you, especially—I couldn’t have done it. I didn’t do it all on my own. The rest of you showed me the way.”

  Paul invokes my father’s name, and Richard Curry’s, as if they are a pair of saints, two martyrs from the paintings in Taft’s lecture. For a moment I feel like Sancho Panza, listening to Don Quixote. The giants he sees are nothing but windmills, I know, and yet he’s the one who sees clearly in the dark, and I’m the one doubting my eyes. Maybe that’s been the rub all along, I think: we are animals of imagination. Only a man who sees giants can ever stand upon their shoulders.

  “But Bill was right about one thing,” Paul says. “The results will cast a shadow over everything else in historical studies. For a long time.”

  He takes the stack of books from my hands, and suddenly I feel weightless. The corridor behind us extends toward a light in the distance, open aisles verging off into space on each side. Even in the darkness, I can see the way Paul smiles.

  Chapter 22

  We begin making trips back and forth from the carrel, replacing dozens of books, most of them on shelves where they don’t belong. Paul only seems to care that they’re out of sight.

  “Do you remember what was going on in Italy just before the Hypnerotomachia was published?” he asks.

  “Just what was in the Vatican tour book.”

  Paul lifts another pile of books into my arms as we walk back into the darkness.

  “The intellectual life of Italy during Francesco’s day revolves around a single city,” he says.

  “Rome.”

  But Paul shakes his head. “Smaller than that. The size of Princeton—the campus, not the town.”

  I see how enchanted he is by what he’s found, how real it’s become for him already.

  “In that town,” he says, “you’ve got more intellectuals than anyone knows what to do with. Geniuses. Polymaths. Thinkers who are gunning for the big answers to the big questions. Autodidacts who have taught themselves ancient languages no one else knows. Philosophers who are combining religious points from the Bible with ideas from Greek and Roman texts, Egyptian mysticism, Persian manuscripts so old nobody knows how to date them. The absolute cutting edge of humanism. Think of the riddles. University professors playing Rithmomachia. Translators interpreting Horapollo. Anatomists revising Galen.”

  In my mind’s eye the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore comes into focus. My father liked to call it the mother city of modern scholarship. “Florence,” I say.

  “Right. But that’s only the beginning. In every other discipline, you’ve got the biggest names in Europe. In architecture you’ve got Brunelleschi, who engineered the largest cathedral dome in a thousand years. In sculpture you’ve got Ghiberti, who created a set of reliefs so beautiful that they’re known as the doors of paradise. And you’ve got Ghiberti’s assistant, who grows up to become the father of modern sculpture—Donatello.”

  “The painters weren’t bad either,” I remind him.

  Paul smiles. “The single greatest concentration of genius in the history of Western art, all in this little town. Applying new techniques, inventing new theories of perspective, transforming painting from a craft into a science and an art. There must’ve been three dozen of them, like Alberti, who would’ve been considered first-class anywhere else in the world. But in this town, they’re second-rate. That’s because they’re competing with the giants. Masaccio. Botticelli. Michelangelo.”

  As the momentum of his ideas increases, his feet move faster down the dark hallways.

  “You want scientists?” he says. “How about Leonardo da Vinci. You want politicians? Machiavelli. Poets? Boccaccio and Dante. And a lot of these guys were contemporaries. On top of it all, you have the Medici, a family so rich it could afford to patronize as many artists and intellectuals as the town could produce.

  “All of them, together, in the same small city, at basically the same time. The greatest cultural heroes in all of Western history, crossing each other in the streets, knowing each other on a first-name basis, talking to each other, working together, competing, influencing and pushing each other to go further than they could’ve gone alone. All in a place where beauty and truth are king, where leading families fight over who can commission the greatest art, who can subsidize the most brilliant thinkers, who can own the biggest library. Imagine that. All of that. It’s like a dream. An impossibility.”

  We return to his carrel and he finally takes a seat.

  “Then, in the last few years of the fifteenth century, just before the Hypnerotomachia is written, something even more amazing happens. Something that every Renaissance scholar knows about, but that no one has ever connected with the book. Francesco’s riddle kept talking about a powerful preacher in the land of his brethren. I just couldn’t figure out what the connection could be.”

  “I thought Luther wasn’t until 1517. Colonna was writing in the 1490s.”

  “Not Luther,” he says. “In the late 1400s, a Dominican monk was sent to Florence to join a monastery called San Marco.”

  Suddenly it dawns on me. “Savonarola.”

  The great evangelical preacher, who galvanized Florence at the turn of the century, trying to restore the city’s faith at any cost.

  “Exactly,” Paul says. “Savonarola’s a straight arrow—the straightest you’d ever meet. And when he gets to Florence, he begins to preach. He tells people that their behavior is wicked, their culture and art are profane, their government is unjust. He says God looks unkindly on them. He tells them to repent.”

  I shake my head.

  “I know how it sounds,” Paul goes on, “but he’s right. In a way, the Renaissance is a godless time. The Church is corrupt. The pope’s a political appointee. Prospero Colonna, Francesco’s uncle, allegedly dies of gout, and some people think Pope Alexander poisoned him because he came from a rival family. That’s the kind of world it is, where people suspect the pope of murder. And that was only the beginning—they suspected him of sadism, incest, you name it.

&nbs
p; “Meanwhile, for all of its cutting-edge art and scholarship, Florence is in constant upheaval. Factions fight each other in the streets, prominent families plot against each other to gain power, and even though the city is supposedly a republic, the Medici control everything. Death is common, extortion and coercion are even more common, injustice and inequality are a rule of life. It’s a pretty disturbing place, considering all the beautiful things that come out of it.

  “So Savonarola arrives in Florence and sees evil wherever he looks. He urges the citizens to clean up their lives, to stop gambling, to start reading the Bible, to help the poor and feed the hungry. At San Marco he begins to gain a following. Even some of the leading humanists admire him. They realize he’s well read and conversant about philosophy. Little by little, Savonarola’s on the rise.”

  I stop him. “I thought this was still while the Medici controlled the city.”

  Paul shakes his head. “Unfortunately for them, their newest heir, Piero, was a fool. He couldn’t run the city. The people began to clamor for liberty, a hallowed cry in Florence, and finally the Medici were expelled. Remember the forty-eighth woodcut? The child in the chariot, butchering the two women?”

  “The one Taft showed in his lecture.”

  “Right. That’s how Vincent always interpreted it. The punishment was supposed to be for treason. Did he say what he thought it meant?”

  “No. He wanted the audience to solve it.”

  “But he asked about the child in it. Why does he have a sword—something like that?”

  I can picture Taft standing beneath the image, his shadow cast onto the screen. “Why does he make the women pull his chariot through the forest, then kill them that way?” I say.

  “Vincent’s theory was that the Cupid figure was supposed to be Piero, the new Medici heir. Piero behaved like a child, so that’s how the artist represented him. Because of him, the Medici lost their hold on Florence and were thrown out. So the woodcuts show him retreating through the woods.”