The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason Page A

Genovese found his wife weeping. She explained that her brother, Antonio, had been poisoned at dinner in his own home, his body discovered by an errand boy. A similar fate had befallen the pickpocket: while drinking at a tavern, the illiterate thief had been stabbed in the thigh by a passing stranger. Almost before the tavern keeper noticed, the man had bled to death, and the stranger had disappeared.
    Genovese lived the following days in a sweat, hardly able to perform his duties at the docks. He never returned to Colonna’s lodgings, but in his diary he recorded every useful detail of what the thief had found, and he waited nervously for the arrival of Colonna’s ship, hoping the nobleman would depart with his cargo. His concerns became so dire that large merchant vessels came and went with hardly a mention. When Francesco’s ship finally did come to port, old Genovese could hardly believe his eyes.
    Why would a nobleman trouble himself over such a trivial little bark,
he wrote,
this grubby runt-duckling of a boat? What could it be carrying that a man of quality would possibly give a dirty damn about?
    And when he learned that it had come around Gibraltar, carrying goods from the north, Genovese was nearly apoplectic. He filled his little book with filthy swears, saying that Colonna was a syphilitic madman, and that only a dunce or a lunatic would believe that anything of value had ever come from a place like Paris.
    According to Richard Curry, only two other entries referred to Colonna. In the first, Genovese recorded a conversation he overheard between Colonna and a Florentine architect who was the Roman’s only regular visitor. In it, Francesco alluded to a book he was writing, in which he chronicled the turmoil of recent days. Genovese, still gripped with fear, made a careful note of it.
    The second entry, made three days later, was more cryptic, but even more reminiscent of the letter I found with my father. By then, Genovese had convinced himself that Colonna was truly mad. The Roman refused to let his men unload the ship in daylight, insisting that the freight could only be moved safely at dusk. Many of the wooden cargo cases, the portmaster observed, were light enough to be carried by a woman or an old man, and he taxed himself to think of a spice or metal that would be shipped in this way. Gradually Genovese began to suspect that Colonna’s associates—the architect and a pair of brothers, also from Florence—were henchmen or mercenaries in some dark plot. When a rumor seemed to confirm his fear, he feverishly wrote it down.
    It is said that Antonio and the thief are not this man’s first victims, but that Colonna has had two other men killed at his whim. I do not know who they are, and have not yet heard their names spoken, but I am sure it must be about this cargo of his. They learned of its contents, and he feared their betrayal. I am convinced of it now: fear is the thing that moves this man. His eyes betray him, even if his men do not.
    According to my father, Curry made less of the second entry than of the first, which he believed might be a reference to the writing of the
Hypnerotomachia
. If true, then the story the thief had discovered among Colonna’s belongings, the details of which Genovese never bothered to record, might have been an early draft of the manuscript.
    But Taft, who by then was pursuing the
Hypnerotomachia
from his own angles, assembling huge catalogs of textual references into a concordance, so that every word of Colonna’s could be traced to its origins, failed to see any possible relevance to the chicken-scratch notes the portmaster claimed to see Colonna keeping. Such a ridiculous story, he said, could never shed light on the profound mystery of the great book. He quickly treated the discovery the same way he’d treated every other book he’d read on the subject: as kindling for the fire.
    His frustration, I think, was rooted in more than his feelings about the diary. He had