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By Root 569 0

she picked up that day’s Washington Post and read of the latest scandals in the nation’s capital. She often told herself, sometimes aloud when no one was looking, that she was fortunate that neither she nor Mac was involved in politics. It had become a nasty business, the courtly debates and backroom maneuverings with the nation’s best interests in mind replaced by vituperative, blatantly partisan attacks, too many of them personal as far as she was concerned. Owning an art gallery and being married to a law professor were exactly her cup of tea, smooth Darjeeling with just enough lemon to make things interesting.

She was about to drop the paper and join Mac in the kitchen when an article about the Library of Congress caught her eye. A wealthy woman in Massachusetts had died and left her late husband’s collection of legal documents from eighteenth-century Cape Cod to the library. Upon opening the boxes and examining the contents, librarians discovered an urn with the husband’s ashes. She grinned. Happens. A year earlier, the article pointed out, another donation of rare books included two plastic bags of cocaine.

Annabel smiled. She’d loved libraries since childhood, their once dusty shelves filled with the thoughts and talents of the ages, the quietude of their reading rooms, and the intensity of persons using them to learn about something they hadn’t known before.

Two months at the Library of Congress, she thought, her smile broadening. She couldn’t wait to get started.

Chapter 4

The Library of Congress is America’s oldest national cultural institution; the year 2000 will mark its two-hundredth anniversary. It is, quite simply, the largest repository of recorded knowledge in the world, as well as an active symbol of the symbiotic relationship between knowledge and democracy.

While continuing to serve as the primary reference source for Congress, the Library of Congress, known as LC by Washingtonians, houses more than 115 million “items” on 532 miles of bookshelves in three large buildings: more than 17 million books. And it is not all books. There are 2 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4 million maps, and 47 million manuscripts. Some national libraries in other countries confine themselves to their own languages. The LC has holdings in 460 languages. It has four thousand employees, some of whom serve in overseas offices in Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, New Delhi, Islamabad, Jakarta, and Nairobi, and in acquisitions offices in Moscow and Tokyo.

Each year, almost a million visitors pass through the metal detectors of the Jefferson, Adams, and Madison buildings for a weapons search and subject their handbags and briefcases to personal examination. Annabel Reed-Smith was among them, entering the newest of LC’s buildings, the Madison, the morning after her return from New York.

She passed inspection, having nothing suspicious in her bag except the usual womanly too-much-of-everything, and went directly to where she’d been told to report, the Office of Public Affairs, on the ground floor.

“Good morning,” she said to the first person she met. “I’m Annabel Reed-Smith. I’m working on an article for Civilization and was told to check in here. I’ll be working in the Hispanic-Portuguese section.”

“Of course,” the attractive, middle-aged woman said, smiling, extending her hand, and introducing herself. “I’m Joanne Graves. I’ve been expecting you. Civilization is my baby, so to speak. I’m the library’s liaison. Coffee?”

“Thanks, no, I’ve had enough.” Annabel didn’t add that having married Mackensie Smith, an avowed coffee snob, had turned her into a caffeine parvenu in her own right. Office coffee? Either bring it from home or skip it.

The public affairs specialist fetched a fresh cup of coffee for herself from a small kitchen, sat behind her desk, and asked pleasantly, “Ready to settle in to the life of scholarly research?”

“More than ready,” Annabel said. “It was a bit of a scramble to cover the gallery. I have an art gallery in Georgetown. But it worked out.”

Annabel had once been a matrimonial attorney