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

bloodshot they are. The first thing they notice is me.
    “Tom came with you,” he says, scratching at his face. “Okay. Good, fine.”
    Bill speaks in shades of the obvious, some stopgap between his mouth and mind gone missing. The impression is misleading. After a few minutes of the mundane you see flashes of his aptitude.
    “It was a bad day,” he says, guiding us in. “A bad week. Not a big deal. I’m fine.”
    “Why couldn’t we talk on the phone?” Paul asks.
    Stein’s mouth opens, but he doesn’t answer. Now he’s scratching at something between his front teeth. He unzips his jacket, then turns back to Paul. “Has someone been checking out your books?” he asks.
    “What?”
    “Because someone’s been checking out mine.”
    “Bill, it happens.”
    “My William Caxton paper? My Aldus microfilm?”
    “Caxton’s a major figure,” Paul says.
    I’ve never heard of William Caxton in my life.
    “The 1877 paper on him?” Bill says. “It’s only at the Forrestal Annex. And Aldus’s
Letters of Saint Catherine
—” He turns to me. “Not, as generally believed, the first use of italics—” Then back to Paul. “Microfilm last viewed by someone other than you or me in the seventies. Seventy-one, seventy-two. Someone put a hold on it
yesterday.
This isn’t happening to you?”
    Paul frowns. “Have you talked to Circulation?”
    “Circulation? I talked to Rhoda Carter. They know
nothing
.”
    Rhoda Carter, head librarian of Firestone. Where the book stops.
    “I don’t know,” Paul says, trying not to get Bill more excited. “It’s probably nothing. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
    “I don’t. I’m not. But here’s the thing.” Bill works his way around the far edge of the room, where the space between the wall and the table seems too narrow to pass. He slips through without a sound and pats at the pocket of his old leather jacket. “I get these phone calls. Pick up . . .
click.
Pick up . . .
click.
First at my apartment, now at my office.” He shakes his head. “Never mind. Down to business. I found something.” He glances at Paul nervously. “Maybe what you need, maybe not. I don’t know. But I think it’ll help you finish.”
    From inside his jacket he pulls out something roughly the size of a brick, wrapped in layers of cloth. Placing it gently on the table, he begins to unwrap it. It’s a quirk of Stein’s I’ve noticed before, that his hands twitch until they have a book between them. The same thing happens now: as he unravels the cloth, his movements become more controlled. Inside the swaddling is a worn volume, hardly more than a hundred pages. It smells of something briny.
    “What collection is it from?” I ask, seeing no title on the spine.
    “No collection,” he says. “New York. An antiquarian shop. I found it.”
    Paul is silent. Slowly he extends a hand toward the book. The animal-hide binding is crude and cracked, stitched together with leather twine. The pages are hand-cut. A frontier artifact, maybe. A book kept by a pioneer.
    “It must be a hundred years old,” I say, when Stein doesn’t offer any details. “A hundred and fifty.”
    An irritated look crosses Stein’s face, as if a dog has just fouled his carpet. “Wrong,” he says.
“Wrong.”
It dawns on me that I’m the dog. “
Five
hundred years.”
    I focus back on the book.
    “From Genoa,” Bill continues, focusing on Paul. “Smell it.”
    Paul is silent. He pulls an unsharpened pencil from his pocket, turns it backward, and gently opens the cover using the soft nub of the eraser. Bill has bookmarked a page with a silk ribbon.
    “Careful,” Stein says, splaying his hands out above the book. His nails are bitten to the quick. “Don’t leave marks. I have it on loan.” He hesitates. “I have to return it when I’m done.”
    “Who had this?” Paul asks.
    “The Argosy Book Store,” Bill repeats. “In New York. It’s what you needed, isn’t it? We can finish now.”
    Paul doesn’t