Contents
About the Book
About the Authors
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
Copyright
Tom Sullivan, about to graduate from Princeton, is haunted by the violent death of his father, an academic who devoted his life to studying one of the rarest, most complex and most valuable books in the world. Coded in seven languages, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an intricate mathematical mystery and a tale of love and arcane brutality, has baffled scholars since 1499.
Tom’s friend Paul is similarly obsessed and when a long-lost diary surfaces, they finally seem to make a breakthrough. But only hours later, a fellow researcher is murdered and the two friends suddenly find themselves in great danger. Working desperately to expose the book’s secret, they slowly uncover a Renaissance tale of passion and blood, a hidden crypt and a secret worth dying to protect.
For our parents
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
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.
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 The Adventures of Roderick Random on the grounds that it sounded 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 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.
“Take the money,” Gil says, never taking his eyes off Audrey Hepburn.
Gil is a banker’s son from Manhattan. Princeton has never been a destination for him, just a window seat with a view, a stopover on the way to Wall Street. He is a caricature of himself in that respect, and he manages a smile whenever we give him a hard time about it. He’ll be smiling all the way to the bank, we know; even Charlie, who’s sure to make a small fortune as a doctor, won’t hold a 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 water from the refrigerator.
“What’d they offer?” Charlie asks, ignoring the magnets for a second.
“Forty-one,” Gil guesses, and a few Elizabethan words tumble from the 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 expected to be earning with my lowly English degree, but compared to some of the deals I’ve seen classmates make, you’d think it was barely getting by.
I pick up the letter from Daedalus, an Internet firm in Austin that claims to have developed the world’s most advanced software for streamlining the corporate back office. I know almost nothing about the company, let alone what a back office is, but a friend down the hall suggested I interview with them, and as rumors circulated about high starting salaries at this unknown Texas start-up, I went. Daedalus, following the general trend, didn’t care that I knew nothing about them or their business. If I could just solve a few brainteasers at an interview, and seem reasonably articulate and friendly in the process, the job was mine. Thus, in good Caesarian fashion, I could, I did, and it was.
“Close,” I say, reading from the letter. “Forty-three thousand a year. 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 than it is to touch it. “Vanity of vanities.”
Charlie is shifting the magnets again. In a fulminating baritone he imitates the preacher at his church, a tiny black man from Georgia who just finished his degree at the Princeton Theological Seminary. “Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.”
“Be honest with yourself, Tom,” Paul says impatiently, though he never makes eye contact. “Any company that thinks you deserve a salary like that isn’t going to be around for long. You don’t even know 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, hearing the edge in Paul’s voice. He rubs a hand along the stubble on his chin, then says, “All right, everybody stop. I think it’s time to let off some steam.”
For the first time, Gil turns away from the movie. He must hear what I 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 about half an hour,” he says, and in a show of support he even turns off the television, letting Audrey fizzle into the tube.
Charlie flips his Fitzgerald shut, mischief stirring. The broken spine springs open in protest, but he tosses the book onto the couch.
“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, just when spring seemed perched on the tip of every tree branch. Now there are calls for a foot of accumulation, maybe more. The Easter weekend festivities on campus, which this year include a Good Friday lecture by Paul’s thesis advisor, Vincent Taft, have been reorganized. This is hardly the weather for what Charlie has in mind.
“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 more tonight.”
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 in touch 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, the fatigue returns to his eyes.
Charlie senses that he’s coming around. “We’ll be done by 7:45,” he says.
“What are the teams?” Gil asks.
Charlie thinks it over, then says, “Tom’s with me.”
The game we’re about to play is a new spin on an old favorite: a fast-paced match of paintball in a maze of steam tunnels below campus. Down there, rats are more common than lightbulbs, the temperature hits three digits in the dead of winter, and the terrain is so dangerous that even the campus police are forbidden to give chase. Charlie and Gil came up with the idea during an exam period sophomore year, inspired by an old map Gil and Paul found at their eating club, and by a game Gil’s father used to play in the tunnels with his friends as seniors.
The newer version gained popularity until nearly a dozen members of Ivy and most of Charlie’s friends from his EMT squad were in on it. It seemed to surprise them when Paul became one of the game’s best navigators; only the four of us understood it, knowing how often Paul used the tunnels to get to and from Ivy on his own. But gradually Paul’s interest in the game waned. It frustrated him that no one else saw the strategic possibilities of it, the tactical ballet. He wasn’t there when an errant shot punctured a steam pipe during a big midwinter match; the explosion stripped plastic safety casings off live power lines for ten feet in either direction, and might’ve cooked two half-drunk juniors, had Charlie not pulled them out of the way. The proctors, Princeton’s campus police, caught on, and within days the dean had rained down a spate of punishments. In the aftermath, Charlie replaced paint guns and pellets with something faster but less risky: an old set of laser-tag guns he picked up at a yard sale. Still, as graduation approaches, the administration has imposed a zero-tolerance policy on disciplinary infractions. Getting caught in the tunnels tonight could mean suspension or worse.
Charlie sidesteps into the bedroom he shares with Gil and pulls out a large hiking pack, then another, which he hands to me. Finally he pulls on his hat.
“Jesus, Charlie,” Gil says. “We’re only going down there for half an hour. I packed less for spring break.”
“Be prepared,” Charlie says, hitching the larger of the two packs over his shoulders. “That’s what I say.”
“You and the Boy Scouts,” I mumble.
“Eagle scouts,” Charlie says, because he knows I never made it past tenderfoot.
“You ladies ready?” Gil interrupts, standing by the door.
Paul breathes deeply, waking himself up, then nods. From inside his room he grabs his pager and hitches it to his belt.
At the front of Dod Hall, our dormitory, Charlie and I part ways with Gil and Paul. We will enter the tunnels at different locations, and be invisible to each other until one team finds the other underground.
“I didn’t know there was such a thing as a black Boy Scout,” I tell Charlie once he and I are on our own, heading down campus.
The snow is deeper and colder than I expected. I wrench my ski jacket around me, and force my hands into gloves.
“That’s okay,” he says. “Before I met you, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a white pussy.”
The trip down campus passes in a haze. For days, with graduation so near and my own thesis out of the way, the world has seemed like a rush of unnecessary motion—underclassmen hurrying to night seminars, seniors typing their final chapters in sweating computer labs, now snowflakes everywhere in the sky, dancing in circles before they find the ground.
As we walk down campus, my leg begins to ache. For years the scar on my thigh has been predicting bad weather six hours after the bad weather arrives. It’s a memento of an old accident, the scar. Not long after my sixteenth birthday I was in a car crash that laid me up in a hospital for most of my sophomore summer. The details are a blur to me now, but the one distinct memory I have of that night is my left femur snapping clean through the muscle of my thigh until one end of it was staring back at me through the skin. I had just enough time to see it before passing out from shock. Both bones in my left forearm broke as well, and three ribs on the same side. According to the paramedics, the bleeding from my artery was stopped just in time for them to save me. By the time they got me out of the wreckage, though, my father, who’d been driving the car, was dead.
The accident changed me, of course: after three surgeries and two months of rehab, and the onset of phantom pains with their six-hour weather delay, I still had metal pins in my bones, a scar up my leg, and a strange hole in my life that only seemed to get bigger the more time wore on. At first there were different clothes—different sizes of pants and shorts until I regained enough weight, then different styles to cover up a skin graft on my thigh. Later I realized that my family had changed too: my mother, who’d retreated into herself, first and most of all, but also my two older sisters, Sarah and Kristen, who spent less and less time at home. Finally it was my friends who changed—or, I guess, finally I was the one who changed them. I’m not sure if I wanted friends who understood me better, or saw me differently, or what exactly, but the old ones, like my old clothes, just didn’t fit anymore.
The thing people like to say to victims is that time is a great healer. The great healer is what they say, as if time were a doctor. But after six years of thinking on the subject, I have a different impression. Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it’s just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, usually isn’t much to see. I suspect that whoever buys that shirt, the one great patron of the everlasting theme park, whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it. We’re the paint in that analogy, as I tried to explain to Charlie when I mentioned it once. Time is what disperses us.
Maybe the best way to put it is the way Paul did, not long after we met. Even then he was a Renaissance fanatic, eighteen years old and already convinced that civilization had been in a nosedive since the death of Michelangelo. He’d read all of my father’s books on the period, and he introduced himself to me a few days into freshman year after recognizing my middle name in the freshman face-book. I have a peculiar middle name, which for parts of my childhood I carried like an albatross around my neck. My father tried to name me after his favorite composer, a slightly obscure seventeenth-century Italian without whom, he said, there could’ve been no Haydn, and therefore no Mozart. My mother, on the other hand, refused to have the birth certificate printed the way he wanted, insisting until the moment of my arrival that Arcangelo Corelli Sullivan was a horrible thing to foist on a child, like a three-headed monster of names. She was partial to Thomas, her father’s name, and whatever it lacked in imagination it made up for in subtlety.
Thus, as the pangs of labor began, she held a delivery-bed filibuster, as she called it, keeping me out of this world until my father agreed to a compromise. In a moment less of inspiration than of desperation, I became Thomas Corelli Sullivan, and for better or worse, the name stuck. My mother hoped that I could hide my middle name between the other two, like sweeping dust beneath a rug. But my father, who believed there was much in a name, always said that Corelli without Arcangelo was like a Stradivarius without strings. He’d only given in to my mother, he claimed, because the stakes were much higher than she let on. Her filibuster, he used to say with a smile, was staged in the marriage bed, not on the delivery bed. He was the sort of man who thought a pact made in passion was the only good excuse for bad judgment.
I told Paul all of this, several weeks after we met.
“You’re right,” he said, when I told him my little airbrush metaphor. “Time is no da Vinci.” He thought for a moment, then smiled in that gentle way of his. “Not even a Rembrandt. Just a cheap Jackson Pollock.”
He seemed to understand me from the beginning.
All three of them did: Paul, Charlie, and Gil.
Now Charlie and I are standing over a manhole at the foot of Dillon Gym, near the south of campus. The Philadelphia 76ers patch on his knit hat is hanging by a thread, fluttering in the wind. Above us, under the orange eye of a sodium lamp, snowflakes twitch in huge clouds. We are waiting. Charlie is beginning to lose patience because the two sophomores across the street are costing us time.
“Just tell me what we’re supposed to do,” I say.
A light pulses on his watch and he glances down. “It’s 7:07. Proctors change shifts at 7:30. We’ve got twenty-three minutes.”
“You think twenty minutes is enough to catch them?”
“Sure,” he says. “If we can figure out where they’ll be.” Charlie looks back over across the street. “Come on, girls.”
One of them is mincing through the drifts in a spring skirt, as if the snow caught her by surprise while she was dressing. The other, a Peruvian girl I know from an intramural competition, wears the trademark orange parka of the swim and dive team.
“I forgot to call Katie,” I say, as it dawns on me.
Charlie turns.
“It’s her birthday. I was supposed to tell her when I was coming over.”
Katie Marchand, a sophomore, has slowly become the kind of girlfriend I didn’t deserve to find. Her rising importance in my life is a fact Charlie accepts by reminding himself that sharp women often have terrible taste in men.
“Did you get her something?” he asks.
“Yeah.” I make a rectangle with my hands. “A photo from this gallery in—”
He nods. “Then it’s okay if you don’t call.” A grunting sound follows, sort of a half-laugh. “Anyway, she’s probably got other things on her mind right now.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Charlie holds his hand out, catching a snowflake. “First snow of the year. Nude Olympics.”
“Jesus. I forgot.”
The Nude Olympics is one of Princeton’s most beloved traditions. Every year, on the night of the first snowfall, sophomores gather in the courtyard of Holder Hall. Surrounded by dorms crawling with spectators from across campus, they show up in herds, hundreds upon hundreds of them, and with the heroic unconcern of lemmings they take their clothes off and run around wildly. It’s a rite that must have arisen in the old days of the college, when Princeton was a men’s institution and mass nudity was an expression of the male prerogative, like pissing upright or waging war. But it was when women joined the fray that this cozy little scrum became the must-see event of the academic year. Even the media turn out to record it, with satellite vans and video cameras coming from as far as Philadelphia and New York. Mere thought of the Nude Olympics usually lights a fire under the cold months of college, but this year, with Katie’s turn coming around, I’m more interested in keeping the home fires burning.
“You ready?” Charlie asks once the two sophomores have finally passed by.
I shift my foot across the manhole cover, dusting off the snow.
He kneels down and hooks his index fingers into the gaps of the manhole cover. The snow dampens the scrape of steel on asphalt as he drags it back. I look down the road again.
“You first,” he says, placing a hand at my back.
“What about the packs?”
“Quit stalling. Go.”
I drop to my knees and press my palms on either side of the open hole. A thick heat pours up from below. When I try to lower myself into it, the bulges in my ski jacket fight at the edge of the opening.
“Damn, Tom, the dead move faster. Kick around until your foot finds a step iron. There’s a ladder in the wall.”
Feeling my shoe snag the top rung, I begin to descend.
“All right,” Charlie says. “Take this.”
He pushes my pack through the opening, followed by his.
A network of pipes extends into the dark in both directions. Visibility is low, and the air is full of metallic clanks and hisses. This is Princeton’s circulatory system, the passageways pushing steam from a distant central boiler to dorms and academic buildings up north. Charlie says the vapor inside the pipes is pressurized at two hundred and fifty pounds per square inch. The smaller cylinders carry high-voltage lines or natural gas. Still, I’ve never seen any warnings in the tunnels, not a single fluorescent triangle or posting of university policy. The college would like to forget that this place exists. The only message at this entrance, written long ago in black paint, is LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH’INTRATE. Paul, who has never seemed to fear anything in this place, smiled the first time he saw it. Abandon all hope, he said, translating Dante for the rest of us, ye that enter here.
Charlie makes his way down, scraping the cover back onto its place after him. As he steps from the bottom rung, he pulls off his hat. Light dances across the beads of sweat on his forehead. The afro he’s grown after four months without a haircut barely clears the ceiling. It’s not an afro, he’s been telling us. It’s just a half-fro.
He takes a few whiffs of the stale air, then produces a container of Vick’s VapoRub from his pack. “Put some under your nose. You won’t smell anything.”
I wave him off. It’s a trick he learned as a summer intern with the local medical examiner, a way to avoid smelling the corpses during autopsies. After what happened to my father I’ve never held the medical profession in particularly high esteem; doctors are drones to me, second opinions with shifting faces. But to see Charlie in a hospital is another thing entirely. He’s the strongman of the local ambulance squad, the go-to guy for tough cases, and he’ll find a twenty-fifth hour in any day to give people he’s never met a fighting chance to beat what he calls the Thief.
Charlie unloads a pair of pin-striped gray laser guns, then the set of Velcro straps with dark plastic domes in the middle. While he keeps fiddling with the packs, I start to unzip my jacket. The collar of my shirt is already sticking to my neck.
“Careful,” he says, extending an arm out before I can sling my coat across the largest pipe. “Remember what happened to Gil’s old jacket?”
I’d completely forgotten. A steam pipe melted the nylon shell and set the filler on fire. We had to stomp out the flames on the ground.
“We’ll leave the coats here and pick them up on the way out,” he says, grabbing the jacket from my hand and rolling it up with his in an expandable duffel bag. He suspends it from a ceiling fixture by one of its straps.
“So the rats don’t get at it,” he says, unloading a few more objects from the pack.
After handing me a flashlight and a two-way hand radio, he pulls out two large water bottles, beading from the heat, and places them in the outer netting of his pack.
“Remember,” he says. “If we get split up again, don’t head downstream. If you see water running, go against the current. You don’t want to end up in a drain or down a chute if the flow increases. This isn’t the Ohio, like you got back at home. The water level down here rises fast.”
This is my punishment for getting lost the last time he and I were teammates. I tug at my shirt for ventilation. “Chuck, the Ohio doesn’t go anywhere near Columbus.”
He hands me one of the receivers and waits for me to fasten it around my chest, ignoring me.
“So what’s the plan?” I ask. “Which way are we going?”
He smiles. “That’s where you come in.”
“Why?”
Charlie pats my head. “Because you’re the sherpa.”
He says it as if sherpas are a magical race of midget navigators, like hobbits.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Paul knows the tunnels better than we do. We need a strategy.”
I mull it over. “What’s the nearest entrance to the tunnels on their side?”
“There’s one in back of Clio.”
Cliosophic is an old debating society’s building. I try to see each position clearly, but the heat is clogging my thoughts. “Which would lead straight down to where we’re standing. A straight shot south. Right?”
He thinks it over, wrestling with the geography. “Right,” he says.
“And he never takes the straight shot.”
“Never.”
I imagine Paul, always two steps ahead.
“Then that’s what he’ll do. A straight shot. Beat a path down from Clio and hit us before we’re ready.”
Charlie considers. “Yeah,” he says finally, focusing off into the distance. The edges of his lips begin to form a smile.
“So we’ll circle around him,” I suggest. “Catch him from behind.”
There’s a glint in Charlie’s eyes. He pats me on the back hard enough that I nearly fall under the weight of my pack. “Let’s go.”
We start moving down the corridor, when a hiss comes from the mouth of the two-way radio.
I pull the handset from my belt and press the button.
“Gil?”
Silence.
“Gil? … I can’t hear you….”
But there’s no response.
“It’s a bug,” Charlie says. “They’re too far away to send a signal.”
I repeat myself into the microphone and wait. “You said these things had a two-mile range,” I tell him. “We’re not even a mile from them.”
“A two-mile range through the air,” Charlie says. “Through concrete and dirt, not even close.”
But the radios are for emergency use. I’m sure it was Gil’s voice I heard.
We continue in silence for a hundred yards or so, dodging puddles of sludge and little mounds of scat. Suddenly Charlie grabs the neck of my shirt and pulls me back.
“What the hell?” I snap, almost losing my balance.
He runs the beam of his flashlight across a wooden plank bridging a deep trough in the tunnel. We’ve both crossed it in previous games.
“What’s wrong?”
He gingerly presses a foot down on the board.
“It’s fine,” Charlie says, visibly relieved. “No water damage.”
I wipe my forehead, finding it soaked with sweat.
“Okay,” he says. “Let’s go.”
Charlie walks across the plank in two great strides. It’s all I can do to keep my balance before landing safely on the other side.
“Here.” Charlie hands me one of the water bottles. “Drink it.”
I take a quick drink, then follow him deeper into the tunnels. We’re in an undertaker’s paradise, the same coffinlike view in every direction, dark walls tapering faintly toward a hazy point of convergence in the darkness.
“Does this whole part of the tunnels look like a catacomb?” I ask. The hand radio seems to be buzzing patches of static between my thoughts.
“Like a what?”
“A catacomb. A tomb.”
“Not really. The newer parts are in a huge corrugated pipe,” he says, moving his hands in an undulating pattern, like a wave, to suggest the surface. “It’s like walking on ribs. Makes you think you were swallowed by a whale. Sort of like …”
He snaps his fingers, searching for a comparison. Something biblical. Something Melvillian, from English 151w.
“Like Pinocchio.”
Charlie looks back at me, fishing for a laugh.
“It shouldn’t be much farther,” he says, when he doesn’t get one. Turning back, he pats the receiver on his chest. “Don’t worry. We’ll turn the corner, pop them a few times, and go home.”
Just then, the radio crackles again. This time there’s no doubt: it’s Gil’s voice.
Endgame, Charlie.
I stop short. “What does that mean?”
Charlie frowns. He waits for the message to repeat, but there’s no other sound.
“I’m not falling for that,” he says.
“Falling for what?”
“Endgame. It means the game’s over.”
“No shit, Charlie. Why?”
“Because something’s wrong.”
“Wrong?”
But he raises a finger, silencing me. In the distance I can hear voices.
“That’s them,” I say.
He lifts his rifle. “Come on.”
Charlie’s strides quickly get longer, and I have no choice but to follow. Only now, trying to keep up, do I appreciate how expertly he runs through the darkness. It’s all I can do to hold him in the ray of my flashlight.
As we near a junction, he stops me. “Don’t turn the corner. Kill your flashlight. They’ll see us coming.”
I wave him on, into the opening. The radio blasts again.
Endgame, Charlie. We’re in the north-south corridor under Edwards Hall.
Gil’s voice is much clearer now, much closer.
I begin toward the intersection, but Charlie pushes me back. Two flashlight beams jerk in the opposite direction. Squinting in the darkness, I can make out silhouettes. They turn, hearing our approach. One of the beams falls into our sight line.
“Damn!” Charlie barks, shielding his eyes. He points his rifle blindly toward the light and begins to press at its trigger. I can hear the mechanical bleating of a chest receiver.
“Stop it!” Gil hisses.
“What’s the problem?” Charlie calls out as we approach.
Paul is behind Gil, motionless. The two of them are standing in a trickle of light coming through the gaps in a manhole cover overhead.
Gil places a finger over his lips, then points up toward the manhole. I make out two figures standing above us in front of Edwards Hall.
“Bill’s trying to call me,” Paul says, holding his pager toward the light. He’s clearly agitated. “I have to get out of here.”
Charlie gives Paul a puzzled look, then gestures for him and Gil to step away from the light.
“He won’t move,” Gil says under his breath.
Paul is directly beneath the metal lid, staring at the face of his pager as melted snow drips through the holes. There is movement above.
“You’re going to get us caught,” I whisper.
“He says he can’t get reception anywhere else,” Gil says.
“Bill’s never done this before,” Paul whispers back.
I pull at his arm, but he jerks free. When he lights up the silver face of the pager and shows it to us, I see three numbers: 911.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Charlie whispers.
“Bill must’ve found something,” Paul says, losing patience. “I need to find him.”
Foot traffic in front of Edwards mashes fresh snow through the manhole. Charlie is getting tense.
“Look,” he says, “it’s a fluke. You can’t get reception down he—”
But he’s interrupted by the pager, which begins to beep again. Now the message is a phone number: 116-7718.
“What’s that?” Gil asks.
Paul turns the screen upside-down, forming text from the digits: BILL-911.
“I’m getting out of here now,” Paul says.
Charlie shakes his head. “Not using that manhole. Too many people up there.”
“He wants to use the exit at Ivy,” Gil says. “I told him it was too far. We can go back to Clio. It’s still a couple minutes before the proctors switch.”
In the distance, tiny sets of red beads are gathering. Rats are sitting on their haunches, watching.
“What’s so important?” I ask Paul.
“We’re onto something big—” he begins to say.
But Charlie interrupts. “Clio’s our best shot,” he agrees. After checking his watch, he starts to walk north. “7:24. We need to get moving.”
The shape of the corridor remains boxy as we keep north, but the walls, which were once concrete, are increasingly of stone. I can hear my father’s voice, explaining the etymology of the word sarcophagus.
From the Greek meaning “flesh-eating” … because Greek coffins were made of limestone, which consumed the entire body—everything but the teeth—within forty days.
Gil’s lead has grown to twenty feet. Like Charlie, he moves quickly, accustomed to the landscape. Paul’s silhouette blinks in and out of the uneven light. His hair is matted against his forehead, tamped down with sweat, and I remember that he’s hardly slept in days.
Thirty yards up, we find Gil waiting for us, his eyes shifting from place to place as he shepherds us toward the exit. He’s looking for a backup plan. We’re taking too long.
I close my eyes, trying to see a map of campus in my thoughts.
“Just fifty more feet,” Charlie calls to Paul. “A hundred at most.”
When we arrive below the manhole near Clio, Gil turns to us.
“I’ll pop the lid and look out. Get ready to run back the way we came.” He glances down. “I’ve got 7:29.”
He grips the lowest step iron, lifts himself into position, and raises his forearm against the manhole cover. Before applying pressure, he looks over his shoulder and says, “Remember, the proctors can’t come down here to get us. All they can do is tell us to come out. Stay down and don’t say anyone’s name. Got it?”
The three of us nod.
Gil takes a deep breath, shoves his fist upward, and pivots the cover against his elbow. It cracks open half a foot. He takes a quick inventory—then a voice comes from above.
“Don’t move! Stay right there!”
I can hear Gil hiss, “Shit.”
Grabbing his shirt, Charlie pulls him back, catching him as he loses his footing.
“Go! Over there! Turn your flashlight off!”
I stumble into the darkness, pressing Paul in front of me. I try to remember my way.
Stay to the right. Pipes on the left, stay to the right.
My shoulder glances the wall and tears my shirt. Paul is staggering, exhausted by the heat. We manage twenty paces stumbling over each other before Charlie stops us so Gil can catch up. In the distance a flashlight enters the tunnel through the open manhole. An arm descends after it, followed by a head.
“Come out of there!”
The beam twitches in both directions, sending a triangle of light sharking through the tunnel.
Now a second voice, a woman’s.
“This is your last warning!”
I look over at Gil. In the darkness I can see the contours of his head as he shakes it, warning us not to speak.
Paul’s breath is wet on the back of my neck. He leans against the wall, beginning to look faint. The woman’s voice comes again, deliberately loud as she speaks to her partner.