The Collectors Read Online Free PDF Page B

since his father’s death, DeHaven had actually enjoyed playing. Despite sometimes bristling under their strict code of conduct, he had almost always obeyed his parents.
    In fact, he had really only performed one act that had gone against their wishes, yet it was quite a large transgression. He’d married a woman nearly twenty years younger than him, a lady quite apart from his station in life, or so his mother had informed him over and over until she’d badgered him into having the marriage annulled a year later. However, no mother should be able to force her son to leave the woman he loved, even with the threat of cutting him off financially. His mother had stooped as low as telling him she would also sell all of her rare books, which she had promised to leave to him. Yet he should have been able to stand up to her, tell her to back the hell off. He thought this now, of course, far too late. If only he had possessed a backbone years ago.
    DeHaven sighed wistfully as he unbuttoned the front of his jacket and smoothed down his tie. It had quite possibly been the happiest twelve months of his life. He had never met a person like her before, and he was certain he wouldn’t again.
Yet I just let her go because my mother bullied me into it.
He’d written the woman for years afterward, apologizing any way he could. He sent her money, jewelry and exotic items from his trips around the world, but he never asked her to come back. No, he’d never done that, had he? She wrote him back a few times, but then his packages and letters started being returned unopened. After his mother died, he considered trying to find her, but finally decided it was too late. In truth, he didn’t deserve her anymore.
    He took a deep breath, put the door keys in his pocket and gazed around the reading room. Patterned after the Georgian splendor of Independence Hall, the space had an immediate calming effect. DeHaven particularly loved the copper domed lamps that sat on all the tables. He ran his hand over one lovingly, and the sense of failure in losing the only woman who’d ever given him complete happiness began to fade.
    DeHaven walked across the room and pulled out his security card. He waved it in front of the computer access pad, nodded to the surveillance camera bolted into the wall above the door and walked into the vault. Coming here each morning was a daily ritual; it helped to recharge his batteries, reinforce the notion that it really was all about the books.
    He spent some time in the hallowed grounds of the Jefferson Room leafing through a copy of the work of Tacitus, a Roman that the third U.S. president much admired. Next he used his keys to enter the Lessing J. Rosenwald Vault, where incunabula and codex donated by Rosenwald, the former head of Sears, Roebuck, sat next to each other on metal shelves in a room that, at great cost, was climate-controlled 24/7. Though the library operated on a very tight budget, a constant temperature of sixty degrees with a relative humidity of 68 percent could allow a rare book to survive for at least several more centuries.
    For DeHaven it was well worth the extra money to a federal budget that had always allocated more to war than it ever did to peaceful purposes. For a fraction of the cost of one missile he could purchase on the open market every work the library needed to round out its rare books collection. Yet politicians believed that missiles kept you safe, whereas actually books did, and for a simple reason. Ignorance caused wars, and people who read widely were seldom ignorant. Perhaps it was an overly simplistic philosophy, but DeHaven was sticking to it.
    As he looked over the books on the shelves DeHaven reflected on his own book collection housed in a special vault in the basement of his home. It wasn’t a great collection but a very satisfactory one. Everyone should collect something, DeHaven felt; it just made you feel more alive and connected to the world.
    After checking on a couple