The Rule of Four Read online

  THE DIAL PRESS

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Historical Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Authors’ Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Copyright Page

  For our parents

  Historical Note

  The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is one of the most treasured and least understood books of early Western printing. Fewer copies of it survive today than do copies of the Gutenberg Bible. Scholars continue to debate the identity and intent of the Hypnerotomachia’s mysterious author, Francesco Colonna. Only in December of 1999, five hundred years after the original text was printed, and months after the events depicted in The Rule of Four, did the first complete English translation of the Hypnerotomachia appear in print.

  Gentle reader, hear Poliphilo tell of his dreams,

  Dreams sent by the highest heaven.

  You will not waste your labour, nor will listening irk you,

  For this wonderful work abounds in so many things.

  If, grave and dour, you despise love-stories,

  Know, I pray, that things are well ordered herein.

  You refuse? But at least the style, with its novel language,

  Grave discourse and wisdom, commands attention.

  If you refuse this, too, note the geometry,

  The many ancient things expressed in Nilotic signs . . .

  Here you will see the perfect palaces of kings,

  The worship of nymphs, fountains and rich banquets.

  The guards dance, dressed in motley, and the whole

  Of human life is expressed in dark labyrinths.

  —Anonymous Elegy to the Reader,

  Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

  Prologue

  Like many of us, I think, my father spent the measure of his life piecing together a story he would never understand. That story began almost five centuries before I left for college, and ended long after he died. On a night in November of 1497, two messengers rode on horseback from the shadows of the Vatican to a church named San Lorenzo, outside the city walls of Rome. What happened that night changed their fortunes, and my father believed it might change his own.

  I never made much of his beliefs. A son is the promise that time makes to a man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him. But my father, a Renaissance scholar, was never shy about the possibility of rebirth. He told the story of the two messengers so often that I could never forget it, try as I might. He sensed, I see now, that there was a lesson in it, a truth that would finally bind us.

  The messengers had been sent to San Lorenzo to deliver a nobleman’s letter, which they were warned under pain of death not to open. The letter was sealed four times in dark wax, and purported to contain a secret my father would later spend three decades trying to discover. But darkness had fallen on Rome in those days; her honor had come and gone, and not yet come again. A starry sky was still painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and apocalyptic rains had flooded the Tiber River, on whose shores had appeared, old widows claimed, a monster with the body of a woman and the head of an ass. The two greedy horsemen, Rodrigo and Donato, did not heed their master’s warning. They heated the wax seals with a candle, then opened the letter to learn its contents. Before leaving for San Lorenzo, they resealed the letter perfectly, copying the nobleman’s stamp with such care that the tampering must have been impossible to see. Had their master not been a much wiser man, the two couriers would surely have survived.

  For it wasn’t the seals that would undo Rodrigo and Donato. It was the heavy black wax in which those seals had been pressed. When they arrived at San Lorenzo, the messengers were met by a mason who knew what was in the wax: an extract from a poisonous herb called deadly nightshade, which, when applied to the eyes, dilates the pupils. Today the compound is used medicinally, but in those days it was used by Italian women as a cosmetic drug, because large pupils were considered a mark of beauty. It was this practice that earned the plant its other name: “beautiful woman,” or belladonna. As Rodrigo and Donato melted and re-melted each seal, then, the smoke from the burning wax took hold. Upon their arrival at San Lorenzo, the mason brought them to a candelabra near the altar. When their pupils failed to contract, he knew what they had done. And though the men struggled to recognize him through their unfocused eyes, the mason did as he’d been told: he took his sword and beheaded them. It was a test of trust, his master said, and the messengers had failed.

  What became of Rodrigo and Donato, my father learned in a document he discovered just before he died. The mason covered the men’s bodies and drew them from the church, sopping up their blood with cheesecloth and rags. The heads he placed in two saddlebags on either side of his mount; the bodies he slung across the backs of Donato’s and Rodrigo’s own horses, and hitched them in tow to his own. He found the letter in Donato’s pocket, and burned it, for it was a fake, and there was no true recipient. Then, before leaving, he crouched in penitence before the church, horrified by the sin he had committed for his master. In his eyes, the six columns of San Lorenzo formed black teeth from the openings in between, and the simple mason admitted that he trembled when he saw this, for as a child at the widows’ knees he had learned how the poet Dante had seen hell, and how the punishment of the greatest sinners was to be chewed forever in the jaws of lo ’mperador del doloroso regno.

  Maybe old Saint Lawrence stared up from his grave finally, seeing the blood on the poor man’s hands, and forgave him. Or maybe there was no forgiveness to be had, and like the saints and martyrs of today, Lawrence was inscrutably silent. Later that night the mason followed his master’s orders and brought the bodies of Rodrigo and Donato to a butcher. The fate of their carcasses, it’s probably best not to guess. Their parts were tossed into the streets and collected by the dustcarts, I hope, or eaten by dogs before they could find themselves baked into a pie.

  But the butcher found another use for the two men’s heads. A baker in town, a man with a touch of the devil in him, bought the heads from the butcher and placed them in his own oven as he left for the night. It was a custom in those days for the local widows to borrow the bakers’ ovens after dark, while the day’s embers were still hot; and when the women arrived, they shrieked and nearly fainted at the sight of what they found.

  At first it seems a low fate, to be used as fodder for a trick on old crones. But I imagine a much greater fame came to Donato and Rodrigo in the way they died than ever would’ve come to them in life. For the widows in every civilization are the keepers of its memory, and the ones who found the heads in the baker’s oven surely never forgot. Even when the baker confessed to what he’d done, the widows must’ve kept telling the story of their discovery to Rome’s children
, who, for a generation, remembered the tale of the miraculous heads as vividly as they did the monster coughed up by the Tiber floods.

  And though the story of the two messengers would eventually be forgotten, a single thing remains beyond doubt. The mason did his job well. Whatever his master’s secret was, it never left San Lorenzo. The morning after Donato and Rodrigo were murdered, as the dustcart men heaped filth and innards into their barrows, little notice was taken that two men were dead. The slow progress of beauty into decay into beauty continued, and like the serpent’s teeth that Cadmus sowed, the blood of evil watered Roman earth and brought about rebirth. Five hundred years would elapse before anyone discovered the truth. When those five centuries passed, and death found a new pair of messengers, I was finishing my last year of college at Princeton.

  Chapter 1

  Strange thing, time. It weighs most on those who have it least. Nothing is lighter than being young with the world on your shoulders; it gives you a feeling of possibility so seductive, you know there must be something more important you could be doing than studying for exams.

  I can see myself now, the night it all began. I’m lying back on the old red sofa in our dorm room, wrestling with Pavlov and his dogs in my introductory psychology book, wondering why I never fulfilled my science requirement as a freshman like everyone else. A pair of letters sits on the coffee table in front of me, each containing a vision of what I could be doing next year. The night of Good Friday has fallen, cold April in Princeton, New Jersey, and with only a month of college left I’m no different from anyone else in the class of 1999: I’m having trouble getting my mind off the future.

  Charlie is sitting on the floor by the cube refrigerator, playing with the Magnetic Shakespeare someone left in our room last week. The Fitzgerald novel he’s supposed to be reading for his final paper in English 151w is spread open on the floor with its spine broken, like a butterfly somebody stepped on, and he’s forming and re-forming sentences from magnets with Shakespearean words on them. If you ask him why he’s not reading Fitzgerald, he’ll grunt and say there’s no point. As far as he’s concerned, literature is just an educated man’s shell game, three-card monte for the college crowd: what you see is never what you get. For a science-minded guy like Charlie, that’s the height of perversity. He’s headed for medical school in the fall, but the rest of us are still hearing about the C-plus he found on his English midterm in March.

  Gil glances over at us and smiles. He’s been pretending to study for an economics exam, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s is on, and Gil has a thing for old films, especially ones with Audrey Hepburn. His advice to Charlie was simple: if you don’t want to read the book, then rent the movie. They’ll never know. He’s probably right, but Charlie sees something dishonest in that, and anyway it would prevent him from complaining about what a scam literature is, so instead of Daisy Buchanan we’re watching Holly Golightly yet again.

  I reach down and rearrange some of Charlie’s words until the sentence at the top of the fridge says to fail or not to fail: that is the question. Charlie raises his head to give me a disapproving look. Sitting down, he’s almost as tall as I am on the couch. When we stand next to each other he looks like Othello on steroids, a two-hundred-and-fifteen-pound black man who scrapes the ceilings at six-and-a-half feet. By contrast I’m five-foot-seven in shoes. Charlie likes to call us Red Giant and White Dwarf, because a red giant is a star that’s unusually large and bright, while a white dwarf is small and dense and dull. I have to remind him that Napoleon was only five-foot-two, even if Paul is right that when you convert French feet to English, the emperor was actually taller.

  Paul is the only one of us who isn’t in the room now. He disappeared earlier in the day, and hasn’t been seen since. Things between him and me have been rocky for the past month, and with all the academic pressure on him lately, he’s chosen to do most of his studying at Ivy, the eating club where he and Gil are members. It’s his senior thesis he’s working on, the paper all Princeton undergrads must write in order to graduate. Charlie, Gil, and I would be doing the same ourselves, except that our departmental deadlines have already come and gone. Charlie identified a new protein interaction in certain neuronal signaling pathways; Gil managed something on the ramifications of a flat tax. I pasted mine together at the last minute between applications and interviews, and I’m sure Frankenstein scholarship will forever be the same.

  The senior thesis is an institution that almost everyone despises. Alumni talk about their theses wistfully, as if they can’t remember anything more enjoyable than writing one-hundred-page research papers while taking classes and choosing their professional futures. In reality, a senior thesis is a miserable, spine-breaking thing to write. It’s an introduction to adult life, a sociology professor told Charlie and me once, in that annoying way professors have of lecturing after the lecture is over: it’s about shouldering something so big, you can’t get out from under it. It’s called responsibility, he said. Try it on for size. Never mind that the only thing he was trying on for size was a pretty thesis advisee named Kim Silverman. It was all about responsibility. I’d have to agree with what Charlie said at the time. If Kim Silverman is the sort of thing adults can’t get out from under, then sign me up. Otherwise, I’ll take my chances being young.

  Paul is the last of us to finish his thesis, and there’s no question that his will be the best of the bunch. In fact, his may be the best of our entire graduating class, in the history department or any other. The magic of Paul’s intelligence is that he has more patience than anyone I’ve ever met, and with it he simply wears problems down. To count a hundred million stars, he told me once, at the rate of one per second, sounds like a job that no one could possibly complete in a lifetime. In reality, it would only take three years. The key is focus, a willingness not to be distracted. And that is Paul’s gift: an intuition of just how much a person can do slowly.

  Maybe that’s why everyone has such high expectations for his thesis—they know how many stars he could count in three years, but he’s been working on his thesis for almost four. While the average student comes up with a research topic in the fall of senior year and finishes it by the next spring, Paul has been struggling with his since freshman year. Just a few months into our first fall semester, he decided to focus on a rare Renaissance text entitled Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a labyrinthine name I can pronounce only because my father spent most of his career as a Renaissance historian studying it. Three and a half years later, and barely twenty-four hours from his deadline, Paul has enough material to make even the most discriminating graduate programs salivate.

  The problem is, he thinks I ought to be enjoying the fanfare too. We worked on the book together for a few months during the winter, and made good progress as a team. Only then did I understand something my mother used to say: that men in our family had a tendency to fall for certain books about as hard as they fell for certain women. The Hypnerotomachia may never have had much outward charm, but it has an ugly woman’s wiles, the slow addictive tug of inner mystery. When I caught myself slipping into it the same way my father had, I managed to pull myself out and throw in the towel before it could ruin my relationship with a girlfriend who deserved better. Since then, things between Paul and me haven’t been the same. A graduate student he knows, Bill Stein, has helped with his research since I begged off. Now, as his thesis deadline approaches, Paul has become strangely guarded. He’s usually much more forthcoming about his work, but over the past week he’s withdrawn not only from me but from Charlie and Gil too, refusing to speak a word of his research to anyone.

  “So, which way are you leaning, Tom?” Gil asks.

  Charlie glances up from the fridge. “Yeah,” he says, “we’re all on tenterhooks.”

  Gil and I groan. Tenterhooks is one of the words Charlie missed on his midterm. He attributed it to Moby-Dick instead of Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Roderick Random on the grounds that it sounded more like a kind of fishing lure th
an a word for suspense. Now he won’t let it go.

  “Get over it,” Gil says.

  “Name me one doctor who knows what a tenterhook is,” Charlie says.

  Before either of us can answer, a rustling sound comes from inside the bedroom I share with Paul. Suddenly, standing before us at the door, wearing only boxers and a T-shirt, is Paul himself.

  “Just one?” he asks, rubbing his eyes. “Tobias Smollett. He was a surgeon.”

  Charlie glances back at the magnets. “Figures.”

  Gil chuckles, but says nothing.

  “We thought you went to Ivy,” Charlie says, when the pause becomes noticeable.

  Paul shakes his head, backtracking into his room to pick up his notebook. His straw-colored hair is pressed flat on one side, and there are pillow creases on his face. “Not enough privacy,” he says. “I’ve been working in my bunk again. Fell asleep.”

  He’s hardly gotten a wink in two nights, maybe more. Paul’s advisor, Dr. Vincent Taft, has pressed him to produce more and more documentation every week—and unlike most advisors, who are happy to let seniors hang by the rope of their own expectations, Taft has kept a hand at Paul’s back from the start.

  “So, what about it, Tom?” Gil asks, filling the silence. “What’s your decision?”

  I glance up at the table. He’s talking about the letters in front of me, which I’ve been eyeing between each sentence in my book. The first letter is from the University of Chicago, offering me admission to a doctoral program in English. Books are in my blood, the same way medical school is in Charlie’s, and a Ph.D. from Chicago would suit me just fine. I did have to scrap for the acceptance letter a little more than I wanted to, partly because my grades at Princeton have been middling, but mainly because I don’t know exactly what I want to do with myself, and a good graduate program can smell indecision like a dog can smell fear.