The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason Read Free Book Online Page A

claim to fame in all this was a document he found during the summer I turned fifteen. That year—the year before the car accident—he brought me with him on a research trip to a monastery in southern Germany, then later to the Vatican libraries. We were sharing an Italian studio apartment with two rollaway beds and a prehistoric stereo system, and each morning for five weeks, with the precision of a medieval punishment, he chose a new Corelli masterwork from the compilations he’d brought, then woke me to the sound of violins and harpsichords at exactly half-past seven, reminding me that research waited for no man.
    I would rise to find him shaving over the sink, or ironing his shirts, or counting the bills in his wallet, always humming along with the recording. Short as he was, he tended to every inch of his appearance, plucking strands of gray from his thick brown hair the way florists cull limp petals from roses. There was an internal vitality he was trying to preserve, a vivaciousness he thought was diminished by the crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, by the thinking man’s wrinkles across his forehead, and whenever my imagination was dulled by the endless shelves of books where we spent our days, he was always quick to sympathize. At lunchtime we would take to the streets for fresh pastries and gelato; every evening he would bring me into town for sight-seeing. One night in Rome, he led me on a tour of the city’s fountains, telling me to toss a lucky penny into each one.
    “One for Sarah and Kristen,” he said at the Barcaccia. “To help mend their broken hearts.”
    My sisters had each been in a painful breakup just before we left. My father, who never took much to their boyfriends, considered it a blessing in disguise.
    “One for your mother,” he said at the Fontana del Tritone. “For putting up with me.”
    When my father’s request for university funding had fallen through, my mother kept the bookstore open on Sundays to help pay for our trip.
    “And one for us,” he said at the Quattro Fiumi. “May we find what we’re looking for.”
    What we were looking for, I never really knew—at least, not until we stumbled onto it. All I knew was that my father believed scholarship on the
Hypnerotomachia
had reached a dead end, mainly because everyone was missing the forest for the trees. Thumping his fist on the dinner table, he would insist that the scholars who disagreed with him had their heads in the sand. The book itself was too difficult to understand from within, he said; a better approach was to search for documents that hinted at who the author really was, and why he’d written it.
    In reality, my father alienated many people with his narrow vision of the truth. If it hadn’t been for the discovery we made that summer, my family might soon have found itself relying entirely on the bookstore for its livelihood. Instead, Lady Fortune smiled on my father, hardly a year before she took his life.
    On the third-floor branch of one of the Vatican libraries, in a recessed aisle of bookshelves that even the monkish dusters had not dusted, as we stood back-to-back searching for the clue he’d been pursuing for years, my father found a letter inserted between the pages of a thick family history. Dated two years before the
Hypnerotomachia
was published, it was addressed to a confessor at a local church, and it told the story of a high-ranking Roman scion. His name was Francesco Colonna.
    It’s difficult to re-create my father’s excitement when he saw the name. The wire-frame glasses he wore, which slunk down his nose the longer he read, magnified his eyes just enough to make them the measure of his curiosity, the first and last thing most people ever remembered about him. At that moment, as he sized up what he’d found, all the light in the room seemed to converge inside those eyes. The letter he held was written in a clumsy hand, in broken Tuscan, as if by a man who was not accustomed to that