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

seen the balance of power shift against him, the chemistry of his work with Richard Curry decompose as my father lured Curry into new approaches and alternative possibilities.
    And so a struggle ensued, a battle of influence, in which my father and Vincent Taft conceived the hatred for each other that would last until the end of my father’s life. Taft, feeling that he had nothing to lose, vilified my father’s work in an attempt to win Curry back to his side. My father, feeling that Curry was withering under Taft’s pressure, responded in kind. In one month, the work of the previous ten was undone. Whatever progress the three men had made together unraveled into separate ownerships, neither Taft nor my father wanting anything to do with what the other had contributed.
    Curry, through it all, clung to Genovese’s diary. It mystified him, how his friends had let petty grudges compromise their focus. He possessed, in his youth, the same virtue he would later see and admire in Paul: a commitment to truth, and a great impatience with distraction. Of the three men, I think it was Curry who’d fallen hardest for Colonna’s book, Curry who wanted most of all to solve it. Maybe because my father and Taft were still university men, they saw something academic in the
Hypnerotomachia
. They knew a scholar’s life could be spent in the service of a single book, and it dulled their sense of urgency. Only Richard Curry, the art dealer, maintained his furious pace. He must have sensed his future even then. His life in books was fleeting.
     
    Not one but two events brought matters to a head. The first occurred when my father went back to Columbus to clear his head. Three days before returning to New York he stumbled, quite literally, across a coed from Ohio State. She and her Pi Beta Phi sisters were in the midst of a book drive, soliciting donations from local shops as part of a yearly charity event, and at the door to my grandfather’s bookstore their paths crossed before either of them realized it. In a feathery explosion of pages and paperbacks, my mother and father fell to the floor, and the needle of destiny tightened its stitch and shuttled on.
    By the time he arrived back in Manhattan, my father was irretrievably lost, thunderstruck by his encounter with the long-haired, azure-eyed sorority girl who called him Tiger and was alluding not to Princeton but to Blake. Even before meeting her, he knew that he’d had enough of Taft. He also knew that Richard Curry had struck out on a path of his own, fixated on the portmaster’s diary. Now the call of home nagged. With his father ailing, and with a woman in his one true port, my father returned to Manhattan only to gather his belongings and say good-bye. His years on the East Coast, which had begun so promisingly at Princeton with Richard Curry, were drawing to a close.
    When he arrived at their weekly meeting place, though, prepared to deliver the news, my father found himself in the wake of another bombshell. During his absence, Taft and Curry had argued the first night, and fought physically the next. The old football captain proved no match for bear-size Vincent Taft, who took one swing at the younger man and broke his nose. Then, on the evening before my father returned, Curry left his apartment, eyes black and nose bandaged, to have dinner with a woman from his gallery. When he returned to the apartment that night, documents from the auction house, along with all of his
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research, were gone. His most carefully guarded possession, the portmaster’s diary, had vanished with them.
    Curry was quick with accusations, but Taft denied each one. The police, citing a string of local burglaries, took little interest in the disappearance of a few old books. But my father, arriving in the middle of it all, sided instantly with Curry. Both of them told Taft that they wanted nothing more to do with him; my father then explained that he had a ticket for Columbus in the