Murder at the Library of Congress (5 page)

“What? Oh, this. Sorry.” She backed up and placed the cutter on her small desk. “They always have me opening boxes,” she said, returning to Annabel, “so I bought this myself at a hardware store.” She chuckled. “Yup, that’s me,
the
intern.”

“I just arrived,” said Annabel. “I’ll be here for a couple of months.”

“That’s great. Consuela told me all about you. That’s exciting, writing about Columbus for
Civilization
.”

“Yes, I am excited about it. I understand you’re cataloging Cuban newspapers.”

“That’s
not
so exciting, but it’s part of learning, I guess. I spend a lot of time in the main reading room. I really like it there. I’m studying to be a librarian.”

“A noble profession. I read somewhere that the first Librarian of Congress only made two dollars a day.”

“That’s okay. I don’t want to become a librarian for money. It’s because … it’s because I love books. I really, really love them. I mean, there’s something special about bringing people and books together, serving others, like the living and the dead. Some day I want to be the Librarian of Congress.”

“Run the whole show.”

“Run the whole show. When I do, you’ll always be welcome. I won’t keep you from your work, and I have to get back to those Cuban newspapers. Great meeting you.”

“Same here.”

The intern’s high spirits lifted Annabel’s momentary concerns about Mac’s knee, about the dour Dr. Michele Paul, about her own ability to research and write about Las Casas. She was suddenly restless, and decided to take a walk through the Jefferson Building, which had reopened in May of 1997 after more than a decade of modernization and restoration. When it originally opened in 1897 to house the overflowing collection of books and manuscripts that had been stored haphazardly in the Capitol Building, it was called the most beautiful public building in America. As far as Annabel was concerned, the building itself was yet another of LC’s treasures.

She returned a little before noon, enjoyed lunch in the cafeteria with Consuela Martinez, and spent the entire afternoon in the Manuscript reading room in the Madison Building. Before being granted access, she had to fill out a registration form and secure all personal belongings, including outerwear, pens, pencils, and newspapers, in a locker. The only item she was allowed to bring into the room was a laptop computer without its case. Annabel was provided the division’s own paper and pencils and a pair of white gloves and assigned a desk, where she waited for one of the Library of Congress’s most precious pieces of early Americana to be brought to her, secured in a special clear plastic sheath.

The Book of Privileges arrived. It was a privilege in itself.

Viewing the document had a visceral impact upon Annabel, creating a sustaining physical tension. The rarity and fragility of the document played a role in this reaction, of course. But more pervasive was being transported into Columbus’s world through the thoughts and words he committed to the vellum. She went word by word, soon realizing that even her intensive Spanish lessons of the past three years would not provide her
with the ability to fully comprehend what the discoverer of the New World was saying.

Still, she plugged away, making extensive notes on the paper provided by the reading room’s personnel.

At four-thirty, the Book was returned to its climate-controlled vault, and Annabel collected her belongings and returned to her space in Hispanic. She was alone on the upper gallery. Below, men and women doing research at reader desks packed up in preparation for leaving. The room’s quiet was omnipresent, even unsettling.

She placed some items in her locker, secured it with the padlock, and came downstairs. Consuela Martinez was in her office.

“Productive afternoon?” the division chief asked.

“Yes, but just a start. I’ll be back there day after tomorrow looking at it again. I see that Michele Paul never showed up.”

“No, he didn’t,” Consuela said, leaning back in her chair and chewing on a pencil’s eraser. “He pretty much comes and goes as he pleases, although he knows I expect him to keep me informed where he is.”

“I’m sure we’ll meet up one of these days,” Annabel said. “Thanks for everything. As they say, I think I’ve hit the ground running.”

5

The road from the hotel to the airport on Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands, was steep, narrow, twisting, and treacherous. It hugged the side of a mountain, with a drop-off to the rock-studded shore five hundred feet below.

Lucianne Huston sat in the passenger seat of the Range Rover and fought to stay awake. It had been an exhausting and frustrating three days, beginning with flight delays made more exasperating by a lack of information from the airline. It had taken her fourteen hours to get there from Miami, with a plane change in Puerto Rico. Then came clandestine midnight meetings that failed to materialize, promises of cooperation that were broken, and a couple of veiled threats from a midlevel official whom Lucianne had wanted to punch. She didn’t of course; it would not have been the sort of behavior expected of a TV journalist representing NCN, the world’s leading all-news cable network.

Worse than the fatigue had been the lack of results. Her assignment had been to follow up on information she’d received through good sources that certain government officials in the idyllic British Virgins were on the payroll of South American drug runners. She’d come up empty, with plenty of promising leads but not enough to go with the story. She knew such payoffs existed because
not only did she trust her sources, she trusted her own instincts. But you needed facts to make such accusations on the air, and Lucianne didn’t have them—yet.

The Range Rover’s driver had been her guide for the three days on the islands of Virgin Gorda and Tortola. He was a young man carrying too much weight, with tousled black hair, heavy acne, and a pleasant disposition. The network had hired him through an intermediary, and he’d been at Lucianne’s beck and call since picking her up at the airport three days ago. If there was any reason for her to be sorry to leave, it was him. His name was Robert, and he spoke with a lilt, scattering English Creole terms throughout conversations with her, many of which she had to ask him to translate.

They were halfway down the mountain when a battered blue pickup truck appeared coming up the road, which was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass. Robert slowed to a crawl as he waited for the other vehicle to come abreast. Lucianne looked down to her right. They were on the outside, the Range Rover’s wheels on the extreme edge of the road.

When the pickup truck was twenty feet away, Lucianne saw the two men in the cab. The driver laughed as he pointed the truck directly at the Range Rover and gunned the engine. Robert stiffened and applied the brakes, causing the wheels on the right side to slip in the direction of the drop-off. “Stinkin’ bastard,” he said. There was no way to turn away from the truck, no room to maneuver. The pickup’s left front fender hit the Range Rover’s left front fender, causing the vehicle to move farther off the road. The front wheels went over the edge; the undercarriage rested on the drop-off’s crest.

The driver of the pickup shifted into reverse, then roared forward, his right wheels literally climbing the lower edge of the mountain and tipping the truck in the
direction of the Range Rover. It passed and roared up the road, kicking dirt and dust into the air.

Robert and Lucianne scrambled from the vehicle through the driver’s door, careful not to step off the edge of the road. Robert shook his fist at the wake of the pickup while Lucianne let loose a string of longshoreman invective and threw a rock. The verbal warnings had turned physical.

Lucianne Huston was used to being in dangerous situations—civil wars in Third World countries, tribal uprisings, in Saddam Hussein’s shadow during Desert Storm, Bosnia, Northern Ireland, interviews with serial killers in maximum-security prisons, the Middle East. But no one had ever tried to kill her because of her investigations and reporting. At least she hadn’t considered all the mishaps she’d experienced to have been deliberate acts.

“You’d better call for help,” she told Robert, who carefully retrieved his cell phone from the vehicle. A half hour later, a tow truck arrived and pulled the Range Rover back onto the road. It was drivable, and Robert and Lucianne followed the truck the rest of the way down to the airport. Her flight to Puerto Rico had left—The one time it’s on time, she thought, and it has to be today. She remained at the tiny airport for six hours until the next flight took her to San Juan. There were more delays. She arrived home in Miami at three in the morning.

She had intended to sleep late in her oceanfront Fort Lauderdale apartment and take the day off. But that plan to enjoy a day of leisure was dashed by the one message on her answering machine.

“Lucianne, this is Baumann. Sorry the BVI story didn’t pan out, but I’ve got another one for you. Different. Top priority. Ten o’clock in my office. Welcome back.”

She managed four hours of sleep, showered, put on jeans, white T-shirt, and tan safari jacket—at least she could dress as though it was a day off—grabbed a doughnut and tea at a nearby outdoor cafe, and drove in her red Fiat Spider convertible to her TV network’s broadcast center. Located on the Dixie Highway, it was a year-old, ten-story building whose glass curtain-walls reflected its surroundings, distorting shapes, and, when the sun shifted, wiped them off the huge, multipanel screen. As far as Lucianne was concerned, the building represented a rigid, unimaginative, and distinctly ugly blot on the landscape, not that the landscape was any great shakes, either. That she spent most of her working days on the road covering stories was fine with her.

She swore at the car parked in the slot with her name on it, pulled into another marked space, slung her large, heavy leather bag over her shoulder, and entered through an employee door, flashing her badge at the guard, who greeted her by name.

Robert Baumann’s office was in the rear of the building, on the top floor. Lucianne fielded a succession of greetings as she passed desks in the spacious newsroom and breezed through the open door into the news director’s corner office.

“Hello,” he said from behind a boomerang-shaped black desk. He was in his shirtsleeves, a tie pulled loose from his neck. Baumann was a burly forty-five-year-old man with hair like a bear, a black thatch of it curling out from his neck through the shirt’s opening. He’d come to TV news after a good career in print journalism. His news judgment was considered solid; management liked and backed him at almost every turn. Lucianne liked him, too, although she wasn’t always in agreement with his judgment calls where her assignments were concerned.

She dropped her bag on the carpeted floor and pulled a director’s chair closer to the desk.

“So,” he said, “tell me about the BVI. They must be pretty good at covering up if they kept you at bay.”

“I’ll break through,” she said. “I’ve got a few sources working on it.”

Baumann looked up from something he was reading and laughed. “You have more sources, Lucianne, than Miami has Cuban restaurants.”

“Lots more.”

“How close do you get to them?”

Now, a laugh from her. “You mean do I sleep with them? A few. That they’re still my sources must mean I’m pretty good at that, too.”

Baumann dropped his reading material on his lap, leaned back in his high-backed black leather chair, and fixed her in a bemused stare.

Lucianne Huston was a star at the network. Her willingness—no, make that enthusiasm—to be where the action was, no matter what danger it posed for her, had made her compelling to millions of TV news junkies: hurricane winds threatening to blow her over, rockets whistling past her ear, fierce mountain freedom fighters glaring at her as she asked how they felt about killing their fellow countrymen. Baumann had occasionally considered moving her into an anchor chair to take advantage of her popularity and good looks, but reversed himself whenever the notion struck him. The one time he’d suggested it to her, she’d laughed it off, saying, “I’m not a talking head, Bob. I’m a
real
journalist. Keep your anchor job; just pay me what your pretty-boy readers get.”

Baumann appreciated Lucianne’s reporting skills. Her looks weren’t lost on him either. It wasn’t that she was beautiful in a magazine cover or Hollywood way. Her
features were less than perfect, nose a little too broad, mouth a little too small. It was the overall impression that counted. She was five feet seven inches tall, slim and fit, and carried herself with confidence. Her auburn hair was worn short but not too short, an easy style to maintain in the jungles of Central America or the winter winds of Bosnia. Her complexion was dusky, brown eyes large and round; many assumed she was of mixed parent-age. She wasn’t.

“So, what’s this story you want me on?”

“Columbus.”

“Columbus? You mean Columbo? Peter Falk?”

“Christopher. He discovered us.”

“Oh,
that
Columbus. He’s surfaced?”

Baumann grinned. “You might say that. See this?” He slid papers across the desk. “Just got these this morning.”

Lucianne read quickly, dropped the papers on the desk. “So?” she said.

“Interesting, huh?”

She shook her head.

“Happened night before last.”

“Bob, this was my day off. You said you had a story for me—‘top priority,’ you said.”

“Right. This is it.”

“A local murder? What’s the big deal?”

“I’m not sure it is a big deal, Lucianne, but it could be. You do know that the Columbus celebration is coming up in six months.”

“Uh huh.”

“And that there’s been this controversy for years over whether one of Columbus’s sailing companions, Bartolomé de Las Casas, might have written his own account of the voyages.”

“I read something about it.”

“The security guard who was shot worked for a small museum called Casa de Seville. In Little Havana.”

“Latin Quarter. You’re behind the times.”