Endeavoring to decipher a five-hundred-year old text that weaves a mathematical labyrinth within a love story, researchers Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris obtain a diary that may contain the key to the code, but when a fellow researcher is killed, they realize that the book contains a dangerous secret.

El Enigma del Cuatro / The Rule of Four

By Ian Caldwell

Roca Editorial

Copyright © 2004 Ian Caldwell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9788496284159

Chapter One

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

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

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

Gil glances over at us and smiles. He's been pretending to study foran economics exam, but Breakfast at Tiffany's is on, and Gil has athing for old films, especially ones with Audrey Hepburn. His adviceto Charlie was simple: if you don't want to read the book, then rentthe movie. They'll never know. He's probably right, but Charlie seessomething dishonest in that, and anyway it would prevent him fromcomplaining about what a scam literature is, so instead of DaisyBuchanan we're watching Holly Golightly yet again.

I reach down and rearrange some of Charlie's words until thesentence at the top of the fridge says to fail or not to fail: thatis the question. Charlie raises his head to give me a disapprovinglook. Sitting down, he's almost as tall as I am on the couch. Whenwe stand next to each other he looks like Othello on steroids, atwo-hundred-and-fifteen-pound black man who scrapes the ceilings atsix-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 redgiant is a star that's unusually large and bright, while a whitedwarf is small and dense and dull. I have to remind him thatNapoleon was only five-foot-two, even if Paul is right that when youconvert French feet to English, the emperor was actually taller.

Paul is the only one of us who isn't in the room now. He disappearedearlier in the day, and hasn't been seen since. Things between himand me have been rocky for the past month, and with all the academicpressure on him lately, he's chosen to do most of his studying atIvy, the eating club where he and Gil are members. It's his seniorthesis he's working on, the paper all Princeton undergrads mustwrite in order to graduate. Charlie, Gil, and I would be doing thesame ourselves, except that our departmental deadlines have alreadycome and gone. Charlie identified a new protein interaction incertain neuronal signaling pathways; Gil managed something on theramifications of a flat tax. I pasted mine together at the lastminute between applications and interviews, and I'm sureFrankenstein 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 rememberanything more enjoyable than writing one-hundred-page researchpapers while taking classes and choosing their professional futures.In reality, a senior thesis is a miserable, spine-breaking thing towrite. It's an introduction to adult life, a sociology professortold Charlie and me once, in that annoying way professors have oflecturing after the lecture is over: it's about shoulderingsomething so big, you can't get out from under it. It's calledresponsibility, he said. Try it on for size. Never mind that theonly thing he was trying on for size was a pretty thesis adviseenamed Kim Silverman. It was all about responsibility. I'd have toagree with what Charlie said at the time. If Kim Silverman is thesort 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 questionthat his will be the best of the bunch. In fact, his may be the bestof our entire graduating class, in the history department or anyother. The magic of Paul's intelligence is that he has more patiencethan anyone I've ever met, and with it he simply wears problemsdown. To count a hundred million stars, he told me once, at the rateof one per second, sounds like a job that no one could possiblycomplete in a lifetime. In reality, it would only take three years.The key is focus, a willingness not to be distracted. And that isPaul's gift: an intuition of just how much a person can do slowly.

Maybe that's why everyone has such high expectations for histhesis-they know how many stars he could count in three years, buthe's been working on his thesis for almost four. While the averagestudent comes up with a research topic in the fall of senior yearand finishes it by the next spring, Paul has been struggling withhis since freshman year. Just a few months into our first fallsemester, he decided to focus on a rare Renaissance text entitledHypnerotomachia Poliphili, a labyrinthine name I can pronounce onlybecause my father spent most of his career as a Renaissancehistorian studying it. Three and a half years later, and barelytwenty-four hours from his deadline, Paul has enough material tomake even the most discriminating graduate programs salivate.

The problem is, he thinks I ought to be enjoying the fanfare too. Weworked on the book together for a few months during the winter, andmade good progress as a team. Only then did I understand somethingmy mother used to say: that men in our family had a tendency to fallfor certain books about as hard as they fell for certain women. TheHypnerotomachia may never have had much outward charm, but it has anugly woman's wiles, the slow addictive tug of inner mystery. When Icaught myself slipping into it the same way my father had, I managedto pull myself out and throw in the towel before it could ruin myrelationship with a girlfriend who deserved better. Since then,things between Paul and me haven't been the same. A graduate studenthe knows, Bill Stein, has helped with his research since I beggedoff. Now, as his thesis deadline approaches, Paul has becomestrangely guarded. He's usually much more forthcoming about hiswork, but over the past week he's withdrawn not only from me butfrom Charlie and Gil too, refusing to speak a word of his researchto anyone.

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

Charlie glances up from the fridge. "Yeah," he says, "we're all ontenterhooks."

Gil and I groan. Tenterhooks is one of the words Charlie missed onhis midterm. He attributed it to Moby-Dick instead of TobiasSmollett's Adventures of Roderick Random on the grounds that itsounded more like a kind of fishing lure than 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 insidethe bedroom I share with Paul. Suddenly, standing before us at thedoor, wearing only boxers and a T-shirt, is Paul himself.

"Just one?" he asks, rubbing his eyes. "Tobias Smollett. He was asurgeon."

Charlie glances back at the magnets. "Figures."

Gil chuckles, but says nothing.

"We thought you went to Ivy," Charlie says, when the pause becomesnoticeable.

Paul shakes his head, backtracking into his room to pick up hisnotebook. His straw-colored hair is pressed flat on one side, andthere 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 moredocumentation every week-and unlike most advisors, who are happy tolet seniors hang by the rope of their own expectations, Taft haskept a hand at Paul's back from the start.

"So, what about it, Tom?" Gil asks, filling the silence. "What'syour decision?"

I glance up at the table. He's talking about the letters in front ofme, which I've been eyeing between each sentence in my book. Thefirst letter is from the University of Chicago, offering meadmission to a doctoral program in English. Books are in my blood,the same way medical school is in Charlie's, and a Ph.D. fromChicago would suit me just fine. I did have to scrap for theacceptance letter a little more than I wanted to, partly because mygrades at Princeton have been middling, but mainly because I don'tknow exactly what I want to do with myself, and a good graduateprogram can smell indecision like a dog can smell fear.

"Take the money," Gil says, never taking his eyes off AudreyHepburn.

Gil is a banker's son from Manhattan. Princeton has never been adestination for him, just a window seat with a view, a stopover onthe way to Wall Street. He is a caricature of himself in thatrespect, and he manages a smile whenever we give him a hard timeabout it. He'll be smiling all the way to the bank, we know: evenCharlie, who's sure to make a small fortune as a doctor, won't holda candle to the kind of paychecks Gil will see.

"Don't listen to him," Paul says from the other side of the room."Follow your heart."

I look up, surprised that he's aware of anything but his thesis.

"Follow the money," Gil says, standing up to get a bottle of waterfrom the refrigerator.

"What'd they offer?" Charlie asks, ignoring the magnets for asecond.

"Forty-one," Gil guesses, and a few Elizabethan words tumble fromthe fridge as he closes it. "Bonus of five. Plus options."

Spring semester is job season, and 1999 is a buyer's market.Forty-one thousand dollars a year is roughly double what I expectedto be earning with my lowly English degree, but compared to some ofthe deals I've seen classmates make, you'd think it was barelygetting by.

I pick up the letter from Daedalus, an Internet firm in Austin thatclaims to have developed the world's most advanced software forstreamlining the corporate back office. I know almost nothing aboutthe company, let alone what a back office is, but a friend down thehall suggested I interview with them, and as rumors circulated abouthigh starting salaries at this unknown Texas start-up, I went.Daedalus, following the general trend, didn't care that I knewnothing about them or their business. If I could just solve a fewbrainteasers at an interview, and seem reasonably articulate andfriendly in the process, the job was mine. Thus, in good Caesarianfashion, I could, I did, and it was.

"Close," I say, reading from the letter. "Forty-three thousand ayear. Signing bonus of three thousand. Fifteen hundred options."

"And a partridge in a pear tree," Paul adds from across the room.He's the only one acting like it's dirtier to talk about money thanit is to touch it. "Vanity of vanities."

Charlie is shifting the magnets again. In a fulminating baritone heimitates the preacher at his church, a tiny black man from Georgiawho just finished his degree at the Princeton Theological Seminary."Vanity of vanities. All is vanities."

"Be honest with yourself, Tom," Paul says impatiently, though henever makes eye contact. "Any company that thinks you deserve asalary like that isn't going to be around for long. You don't evenknow what they do." He returns to his notebook, scribbling away.Like most prophets, he is fated to be ignored.

Gil keeps his focus on the television, but Charlie looks up, hearingthe edge in Paul's voice. He rubs a hand along the stubble on hischin, then says, "All right, everybody stop. I think it's time tolet off some steam."

For the first time, Gil turns away from the movie. He must hear whatI hear: the faint emphasis on the word steam.

"Right now?" I ask.

Gil looks at his watch, taking to the idea. "We'd be clear for abouthalf an hour," he says, and in a show of support he even turns offthe television, letting Audrey fizzle into the tube.

Charlie flips his Fitzgerald shut, mischief stirring. The brokenspine springs open in protest, but he tosses the book onto thecouch.

"I'm working," Paul objects. "I need to finish this."

He glances at me oddly.

"What?" I ask.

But Paul remains silent.

"What's the problem, girls?" Charlie says impatiently.

"It's still snowing out there," I remind everyone.

The first snowstorm of the year came howling into town today, justwhen spring seemed perched on the tip of every tree branch. Nowthere are calls for a foot of accumulation, maybe more. The Easterweekend festivities on campus, which this year include a Good Fridaylecture by Paul's thesis advisor, Vincent Taft, have beenreorganized. This is hardly the weather for what Charlie has inmind.

"You don't have to meet Curry until 8:30, right?" Gil asks Paul,trying to convince him. "We'll be done by then. You can work moretonight."

Richard Curry, an eccentric former friend of my father's and Taft's,has been a mentor of Paul's since freshman year. He has put Paul intouch with some of the most prominent art historians in the world,and has funded much of Paul's research on the Hypnerotomachia.

Paul weighs his notebook in his hand. Just looking at it, thefatigue returns to his eyes.

Continues...

Excerpted from El Enigma del Cuatro / The Rule of Fourby Ian Caldwell Copyright © 2004 by Ian Caldwell. Excerpted by permission.
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