The Rule of Four

by Ian Caldwell

  “Yes.”

  “He knew where Stein’s office was.”

  “They worked together. Yes.”

  “It was his idea to break into the art museum?”

  “He had keys. We didn’t break in.”

  “And it was his idea to go through Stein’s desk.”

  I know better than to keep responding. There are no right answers now.

  “He ran from the campus police outside of Dr. Taft’s office, Tom. Why would he do that?”

  But she wouldn’t understand, and doesn’t want to. I know where this is heading, but all I can think of is what she said about Charlie.

  If he pulls through this.

  “He’s a straight-A student, Tom. That’s his identity here. Then Dr. Taft found out about the plagiarism. Who do you suppose told Taft?”

  Brick by brick, as if it’s just a matter of building a wall between friends.

  “William Stein,” she says, knowing I’ve passed the point of helping her. “Imagine how Paul felt. How angry would he have been?”

  Suddenly a knock comes at the door. Before either of us can say a word, it swings open.

  “Detective?” says another officer.

  “What is it?”

  “There’s someone out here to talk to you.”

  “Who?”

  He glances down at a card in his hand. “A dean from the college.”

  The detective remains seated for a second, then rises toward the door.

  There’s a tight silence after she leaves. After long enough, when she doesn’t return, I sit up in bed, looking around for my shirt. I’ve had enough of hospitals, and I’m well enough to nurse this arm myself. I want to see Charlie; I want to know what they’ve said to Paul. My jacket is hanging from the coatrack, and I begin to shift my weight gingerly to get out of bed.

  Just then, the knob shifts and the door swishes open. Detective Gwynn returns.

  “You’re free to go,” she says abruptly. “The dean’s office will be contacting you.”

  I can only wonder what happened out there. The woman hands me her card and looks at me closely. “But I want you to think about what I said, Tom.”

  I nod.

  There seems to be something more she’d like to add, but she holds her tongue. Without another word, she turns around and leaves.

  When the door shuts, another hand reaches in to push it open. I freeze, waiting for the dean to enter. But this time it’s a friendly face. Gil has arrived, and he’s bearing gifts. In his left hand is exactly what I need right now: a clean change of clothes.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah. What’s going on?”

  “I got a call from Will Clay. He told me what happened. How’s your shoulder?”

  “Fine. Did he say anything about Charlie?”

  “A little bit.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “Better than when he got here.”

  There’s something to the way Gil says it.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” Gil says finally. “The cops talked to you?”

  “Yeah. Paul too. Did you see him out there?”

  “He’s in the waiting room. Richard Curry’s with him.”

  I fumble out of bed. “He is? Why?”

  Gil shrugs, eyeing the hospital food. “Need some help?”

  “With what?”

  “Getting dressed.”

  I’m not sure if he’s kidding. “I think I can handle it.”

  He smiles as I struggle to peel off the hospital gown. “Let’s check on Charlie,” I say, getting used to my own feet again.

  But now he hesitates.

  “What’s wrong?”

  An odd look comes over him, embarrassed and angry at the same time.

  “He and I got into it pretty deep last night, Tom.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean after you and Paul left. I said some things I shouldn’t have.”

  I remember how clean the room was this morning. This is why Charlie didn’t sleep.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. “Let’s go see him.”

  “He wouldn’t want to see me right now.”

  “Of course he would.”

  Gil runs a finger beneath his nose, then says, “The doctors don’t want him disturbed, anyway. I’ll come back later.”

  He pulls his keys out of his pocket and there’s something sad in his eyes. Finally, he puts a hand on the doorknob.

  “Give me a call at Ivy if you need anything,” he says, and when the door slides open, silent on its hinges, he steps out into the hallway.

  The officer is gone, and even the old woman in her wheelchair is nowhere to be seen. Someone has taken the yellow sandwich board away. I wait for Gil to look back, but he doesn’t. Before I can say another word, he turns the corner toward the exit and is gone.

  Charlie described to me once what epidemics did to human relationships in past centuries, how diseases made men shun the infected and fear the healthy, until parents and children wouldn’t sit at the same table with each other, and the whole body politic began to rot. You don’t get sick if you stay to yourself, I told him, sympathizing with those who took to the hills. Then Charlie looked at me, and in ten words made the best argument in favor of doctors that I’ve ever heard, which I think applies equally well to friendships. Maybe not, he said. But you don’t get well that way either.

  The feeling I got watching Gil leave—the one that made me think of what Charlie said—is the same one I feel as I walk into the waiting room and find Paul sitting by himself: we are each alone in this now, and for the worse. Paul cuts an odd figure there, solitary in a row of white plastic seats, holding his head as he stares at the floor. It’s a pose he always strikes when he’s deep in thought, leaning over with his fingers wrapped behind the base of his skull, both elbows on his knees. More nights than I can remember, I’ve woken up to find him sitting at his desk that way, a pen between his fingers, an old lamp casting light over the pages of his notebook.

  My first instinct, thinking of that, is to ask him what he found in the diary. Even after everything that’s happened, I want to know; I want to help; I want to remind him of an old partnership so that he doesn’t feel alone. But seeing him bent over the way he is, fighting with himself over an idea, I know better. I have to remember how he slaved over his thesis after I left, how many mornings he came to breakfast with red eyes, how many nights we brought him cups of black coffee from the WaWa. If someone could count the sacrifices he made for Colonna’s book, put a number to them the way a prisoner scratches marks on a wall, they would dwarf what little sweat of mine I’ve added to the balance. Partnership is what he wanted months ago, when I refused to give it. All I can offer now is my company.

  “Hey,” I say quietly, walking over to his side.

  “Tom . . .” he says, standing.

  His eyes are bloodshot.

  “You okay?” I ask.

  He rubs a sleeve across his face. “Yeah. How about you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  He looks at my arm.

  “It’ll be fine,” I say.

  Before I can tell him about Gil, a young doctor with a thin beard steps into the waiting room.

  “Is Charlie okay?” Paul asks.

  Watching the doctor, I feel a ghost impact, like standing at the tracks as a train hurtles by. He is wearing light green scrubs, the same color as the walls of the hospital where I did my rehabilitation after the accident. A bitter-looking color, like olives mashed with limes. The physical therapist told me to stop looking down, that I would never learn to walk again if I couldn’t stop staring at the pins in my leg. Look forward, she said. Always forward. So I stared at the green of the walls.

  “His condition is stable,” says the man in the scrubs.

  Stable, I think. A doctor’s word. For two days after they stopped the bleeding in my leg, I was stable. It just meant that I was dying less quickly than before.

  “Can
we see him?” Paul asks.

  “No,” the man says. “Charlie is still unconscious.”

  Paul hesitates, as if unconscious and stable ought to be mutually exclusive. “Is he going to be okay?”

  The doctor comes up with a look, something gentle but certain, and says, “I think the worst is over.”

  Paul smiles faintly at the man, then thanks him. I don’t tell Paul what it really means. In the emergency room they are washing their hands and mopping the floors, waiting for the next gurney off the ambulance. The worst is over, for the doctors. For Charlie, it’s just begun.

  “Thank God,” Paul says, almost to himself.

  And looking at him now, watching the way relief sets over his face, I realize something. I never believed that Charlie would die from what happened down there. I never believed that he could.

  Paul doesn’t say much as I check myself out, except to mumble something about the cruelty of what Taft said to me at his office. There’s hardly any paperwork to complete, just a form or two to sign, a campus ID to flash, and as I struggle to write my name with my bad hand, I sense that the dean has been here already, smoothing out the wrinkles in advance. I wonder again what she told the detective to get the two of us released.

  Then I remember what Gil told me. “Curry was here?”

  “He left just before you got out. He didn’t look good.”

  “Why not?”

  “He was wearing the same suit he wore last night.”

  “He knew about Bill?”

  “Yeah. It was almost like he thought . . .” Paul lets the thought trail off. “He said, ‘We understand each other, son.’ ”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I think he was forgiving me.”

  “Forgiving you?”

  “He told me I shouldn’t worry. Everything was going to be okay.”

  I’m floored. “How could he think you would do that? What did you say?”

  “I told him I didn’t do it.” Paul hesitates. “I didn’t know what else to say, so I told him what I found.”

  “In the diary?”

  “It’s all I could think of. He seemed so worked up. He said he couldn’t sleep, he was so worried.”

  “Worried about what?”

  “About me.”

  “Look,” I tell him, because I’m starting to hear it in his voice, the way Curry has affected him. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  “ ‘If I’d known what you were going to do, I would’ve done things differently.’ That’s the last thing he said.”

  I want to lay into Curry, but I have to remind myself that the man who said these things is the closest thing Paul has to a father.

  “What did the detective say to you?” he asks, changing the subject.

  “She tried to scare me.”

  “She thought the same thing Richard did?”

  “Yes. Did they try to get you to admit to it?”

  “The dean came in before they could ask and told me not to answer questions.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “She said I should find a lawyer.”

  He says it as if it would be easier to find a basilisk or a unicorn.

  “We’ll figure something out,” I tell him. After I finish up the discharge paperwork, we head out. There’s a police officer stationed near the entrance, who eyes us as we begin walking toward him. A cold wind sets over us the second we step from the building.

  We begin the short walk back to campus on our own. The streets are empty, the sky is dimming, and now a bicycle passes by on the sidewalk, carrying a delivery man from a pizza shop. He leaves a trail of smells behind him, a cloud of yeast and steam, and as the wind picks up again, kicking snow into the air like dust, my stomach rumbles, a reminder that we’re back among the living.

  “Come with me to the library,” Paul says as we approach Nassau Street. “I want to show you something.”

  He stops at the crosswalk. Beyond a white courtyard is Nassau Hall. I think of pant legs flapping from the cupola, of the clapper that wasn’t there.

  “Show me what?”

  Paul’s hands are in his pockets, and he walks with his head down, fighting the wind. We pass through FitzRandolph Gate, not looking back. You can walk through the gate into campus as often as you like, the legend goes, but if you walk out of it just once, you will never graduate.

  “Vincent told me never to trust friends,” Paul says. “He said friends were fickle.”

  A tour guide leads a small group across our path. They look like carolers. Nathaniel FitzRandolph gave the land to build Nassau Hall, the tour guide says. He is buried where Holder Courtyard now stands.

  “I didn’t know what to do when that pipe exploded. I didn’t realize Charlie only went into the tunnels to find me.”

  We cross toward East Pyne, heading for the library. In the distance sit the marble halls of the old debating societies. Whig, James Madison’s club, and Cliosophic, Aaron Burr’s. The tour guide’s voice carries through the air behind us, and I have the growing sensation that I am a visitor here, a tourist, that I have been walking down a tunnel in the dark since the first day I arrived at Princeton, the same way we did through the bowels of Holder Courtyard, surrounded by graves.

  “Then I heard you go after him. You didn’t care what was down there. You just knew he was hurt.”

  Paul looks at me for the first time.

  “I could hear you calling for help, but I couldn’t see anything. I was too scared to move. All I could think was, what kind of friend am I? I’m the fickle friend.”

  “Paul,” I say, stopping short. “You don’t have to do this.”

  We’re in the courtyard of East Pyne, a building shaped like a cloister, where snow falls through the open quad in the middle. My father has returned to me unexpectedly, like a shadow on the walls, because I realize he walked these paths before I was born, and saw these same buildings. I am walking in his footsteps without even knowing it, because neither of us has made the faintest impression on this place.

  Paul turns, seeing me stop, and for a second we are the only living things between these stone walls.

  “Yes, I do,” he says, turning toward me. “Because when I tell you what I found in the diary, everything else is going to seem small. And everything else isn’t small.”

  “Just tell me if it’s as big as we hoped.”

  Because if it is, then at least the shadow my father cast was a long one.

  Look forward, the physical therapist says between my ears. Always forward. But now, as then, I’m surrounded by walls.

  “Yes,” Paul says, knowing exactly what I mean. “It is.”

  There’s a spark in his face that brings those three words home, and I am blown back again, struck by the very sensation I’d hoped to find. It’s as if my father has pulled through something unthinkable, as if he has come back and been rehabilitated in a single stroke.

  I don’t know what Paul is about to tell me, but the idea that it could be bigger than I imagined is enough to give me a feeling that’s been missing for longer than I knew. It makes me look forward again and actually see something in front of me, something other than a wall. It makes me feel hope.

  Chapter 21

  On the way to Firestone we pass Carrie Shaw, a junior I recognize from an English class last year, who crosses in front of us and says hi. She and I traded glances across the seminar table for weeks before I met Katie. I wonder how much has changed for her since then. I wonder if she can see how much has changed for me.

  “It seems like such an accident that I got sucked into the Hypnerotomachia,” Paul says as we continue heading east toward the library. “Everything was so indirect, so coincidental. The same way it was for your dad.”

  “Meeting McBee, you mean.”

  “And Richard. What if they’d never known each other? What if they’d never taken that class together? What if I’d never picked up your dad’s book?”

  �
�We wouldn’t be standing here.”

  He takes it as a throwaway at first, then realizes what I mean. Without Curry and McBee and The Belladonna Document, Paul and I would never have met. We would’ve crossed paths on campus the same way Carrie and I just did, saying hello, wondering where we’d seen each other before, thinking in a distant way what a shame it was that four years had passed and there were still so many unfamiliar faces.

  “Sometimes,” he says, “I ask myself, why did I have to meet Vincent? Why did I have to meet Bill? Why do I always have to take the long way to get where I’m going?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did you notice how the portmaster’s directions don’t get straight to the point, either? Four south, ten east, two north, six west. They move in a big circle. You almost end up where you started.”

  Finally I understand the connection: the wide sweep of circumstance, the way his journey with the Hypnerotomachia has wound through time and place, from two friends at Princeton in my father’s day, to three men in New York, to a father and son in Italy, and back now to another two friends at Princeton—it all resembles Colonna’s strange riddle, the directions that curl back on themselves.

  “Don’t you think it makes sense that your father is the one that got me started on the Hypnerotomachia?” Paul asks.

  We arrive at the entrance, and Paul opens the library door for me, as we duck in from the snow. We are in the old heart of campus now, a place made of stones. On summer days, when cars streak by with their windows down and their radios up, and the whole student body wears shorts and T-shirts, buildings like Firestone and the chapel and Nassau Hall seem like caves in a metropolis. But when the temperature drops and the snow falls, no place is more reassuring.

  “Last night I started thinking,” Paul continues, “Francesco’s friends helped him design the riddles, right? Now our friends are helping to solve them. You figured out the first one. Katie answered the second one. Charlie knew the last one. Your dad discovered The Belladonna Document. Richard found the diary.”

  We pause at the turnstile, flashing our campus IDs to the guards at the gate. As we wait for the elevator to C-floor, all the way at the bottom, Paul points to a metal plate on the elevator door. There’s a symbol engraved on it that I’ve never noticed before.