The Collectors Read Online Free PDF

the funeral and stalk right up to heaven demanding to be let in so she could commence running things. At one corner he boarded a crowded Metro bus, where he shared a seat with a young man covered in drywall dust, a battered ice cooler wedged between his feet. Twenty-five minutes later the bus dropped DeHaven off at a busy intersection.
    He crossed the street to a small café, where he had his morning cup of tea and a croissant and read the
New York Times.
The headlines, as usual, were very depressing. Wars, hurricanes, a possible flu pandemic, terrorism, it was enough to make you crawl in your house and nail the doors shut. One story dealt with a probe into irregularities in the defense-contracting arena. There were allegations of bribery and corruption between politicians and weapons manufacturers.
What a shock!
A dollars-for-influence scandal had already brought down the former Speaker of the House. And then his successor, Robert Bradley, had been brutally murdered at the Federalist Club. The crime was still unsolved, although a domestic terrorist group, heretofore unknown, calling itself Americans Against 1984—a reference to Orwell’s masterpiece of fascism—had claimed responsibility for the crime. The police investigation was not going well, at least according to the media.
    DeHaven occasionally glanced out the café window at government workers striding with great purpose down the street ready to take on the world, or at least a nebbish senator or two. It really was the most unusual place, he thought. Here you had epic crusaders dancing alongside sleazy profiteers coupled with more than a fair sampling of idiots and intellectuals, with the former, unfortunately, usually holding higher positions of power. It was the only city in the United States that could declare war, raise your federal income tax or reduce your Social Security benefits. The decisions reached in these few square miles of monuments and mockeries made legions of people either furious or euphoric, and those sides kept switching depending on who was in control of the government at any given time. And the fights, spins and conspiracies concocted and then carried out to hold or regain power consumed every ounce of energy that enormously bright and talented people could give it. The swirling, ever-changing mosaic had too many frenetically moving parts for any outsider to even come close to comprehending what was really going on. It was like a lethal kindergarten that never ended.
    A few minutes later DeHaven trotted up the broad steps of the massively domed Library of Congress’ Jefferson Building. He signed for the alarmed door keys from the library police and headed up to the second floor, quickly making his way to room LJ239. Located here were the Rare Books reading room and the honeycombed series of vaults that kept secure many of the nation’s paper treasures. These bibliophilic riches included an original printed copy of the Declaration of Independence that the Founding Fathers had labored over in Philadelphia on the march to freedom from England.
What would they think of the place now?
    He unlocked the massive outer doors of the reading room and swung them back against the inside walls. Then he performed the complicated keypad procedure allowing him to enter the room. DeHaven was always the first person to arrive here each day. While his typical duties kept him away from the reading room, DeHaven had a symbiotic relationship with old books that would be inexplicable to a layperson and yet a bond immediately understandable to a bibliophile of even modest addiction.
    The reading room was not open on the weekends, which allowed DeHaven to ride his bike, collect rare books for his personal collection and play the piano. It was a skill he’d learned under the rigorous tutelage of his father, whose ambition to be a concert pianist had been rudely crushed by the reality that he wasn’t quite good enough. Unfortunately, neither was his son. And yet ever