Free The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason

drunkard Barbo. Turk slaves, a harem. But I have seen this man, called Master Colonna by his servants, Brother Colonna by his friends: he is a gentleman. And I have seen what is in his eyes. It is not desire. It is fear. He looks like a wolf that has seen a tiger.”
    Paul stops, staring at the words. Curry has repeated the last phrase to him many times. Even I recognize it.
A wolf that has seen a tiger.
    The cover folds shut in Paul’s hands, the tough black seed in its husk of cloths. A salty smell has thickened the air.
    “Boys,” comes a voice from nowhere. “Your time is up.”
    “Coming, Mrs. Lockhart.” Paul starts into motion, pulling the cloths over the book and wrapping it tight.
    “What now?” I ask.
    “We’ve got to show this to Richard,” he says, putting the little bundle beneath the shirt Katie lent him.
    “Tonight?” I say.
    As we find our way out, Mrs. Lockhart mumbles, but doesn’t look up.
    “Richard needs to know Bill found it,” Paul says, glancing at his watch.
    “Where is he?”
    “At the museum. There’s an event tonight for museum trustees.”
    I hesitate. I’d assumed Richard Curry was in town to celebrate the completion of Paul’s thesis.
    “We’re celebrating tomorrow,” he says, reading my expression.
    The diary peeks out from under his shirt, a wink of black leather in bandages. From above us comes an echoing voice, almost the sound of laughter.
    “Weh! Steck ich in dem Kerker noch? Verfluchtes dumpfes Mauerloch, Wo selbst das liebe Himmelslicht Trüb durch gemalte Scheiben bricht!”
    “Goethe,” Paul says to me. “She always closes up with
Faust
.” Holding the door on the way out, he calls back, “Good night, Mrs. Lockhart.”
    Her voice comes curling through the mouth of the library.
    “Yes,” she says. “A good night.”

Chapter 6
                           
     
    From what I pieced together between my father and Paul, Vincent Taft and Richard Curry met in New York in their twenties, turning up at the same party one night in uptown Manhattan. Taft was a young professor at Columbia, a thinner version of his later self, but with the same fire in his belly and the same bearish disposition. The author of two books in the brief eighteen months since he’d finished his dissertation, he was the critics’ darling, a fashionable intellectual making his rounds in the social circles of choice. Curry, on the other hand, who’d been exempted from the draft for a heart murmur, was just beginning his career in the art world. According to Paul, he was cobbling together the right friendships, slowly building a reputation in the fast Manhattan scene.
    Their first encounter came late in the party when Taft, who’d grown tipsy, spilled a cocktail on the athletic-looking fellow beside him. It was a typical accident, Paul told me, since Taft was also known as a drunk at the time. At first Curry took little offense—until he realized Taft didn’t intend to apologize. Following him to the door, Curry began to demand satisfaction; but Taft, stumbling toward the elevator, ignored him. As the two men descended ten stories it was Taft who did the talking, hurling a barrage of insults at the handsome young man, bellowing, as he staggered toward the street exit, that his victim was “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
    To his imaginable surprise, the young man smiled.
    “Leviathan,”
said Curry, who’d written a junior paper on Hobbes while at Princeton. “And you’ve forgotten
solitary
. ‘The life of man is
solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ ”
    “No,” replied Taft with a burbling grin, just before collapsing onto a streetlight, “I did not forget it. I simply reserve
solitary
for myself.
Poor, nasty, brutish,
and
short,
however, are all yours.”
    And with that, Paul said, Curry hailed a cab, ushered Taft into it, and returned to his own apartment where, for the next twelve hours, Taft remained in a deep and crapulent stupor.
    The