“If you can?” Her hand reached for the knocker hesitantly. “Is there a trick to it?”
“Not what you're thinking. Go ahead, try to lift it.”
But before Julia could touch the knocker, the door was swept open, revealing a huge, roly-poly man dressed in burgundy paisley silk pajamas under a matching robe. Julia gasped and took a step backward, bumping into Pitt who was laughing.
“He never fails.”
“Fails to do what?” demanded the fat man.
“Open the door before a visitor knocks.”
“Oh, that.” The big man waved airily. “A chime sounds whenever someone comes up the drive.”
“St. Julien,” said Pitt. “Forgive the late visit.”
“Nonsense!” boomed the man, who weighed four hundred pounds if he weighed an ounce. “You're welcome any hour of the day or night. Who's the lovely little lady?”
“Julia Lee, may I present St. Julien Perlmutter, gourmet, collector of fine wines and possessor of the world's largest library on shipwrecks.”
Perlmutter bowed as far as his bulk allowed and kissed Julia's hand.
“Always a pleasure to meet a friend of Dirk's.” He stood back and swept out an arm, the silk sleeve flapping like a flag in a stiff breeze. “Don't stand out there in the night. Come in, come in. I was just about to open a bottle of forty-year-old Barros port. Please share it with me.”
Julia stepped from the enclosed courtyard that once served to harness teams of horses to fancy carriages and gazed enraptured at the thousands of books that were massed over every square inch of open space inside the carriage house. Many were neatly spaced on endless shelves. Others were piled along walls, up stairs and on bateonies. In bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, they were even clustered in the kitchen and dining room. There was barely enough room for a person to walk through a hallway, they were so thickly stacked.
Over fifty years, St. Julien Perlmutter had accumulated the finest and most extensive collection of historical ship literature ever assembled in one place. His library was the envy of every maritime archive in the world and second to none. What books and ship records he could not possess, he painstakingly copied. Fearful of fire or destruction, his fellow researchers pleaded with him to put his immense archive on-line, but he preferred to leave his collection in bound paper.
He generously shared it all without cost to anyone who came to his front door seeking information on a particular shipwreck. As long as Pitt had known him, Perlmutter had never turned down anyone who sought his extensive knowledge.
If the staggering hoard of books wasn't a colossal sight, Perlmutter was. Julia gazed openly at him. His face, turned crimson from a lifetime of excessive good food and drink, barely showed under a curly mass of gray hair and a thick, heavy beard. His nose under the sky-blue eyes was a little red knob. His lips were lost under a mustache twisted at the ends. He was obese but not sloppy-fat. No flab hung. He was solid as a massive wood sculpture. Most people who first met him thought he was probably much younger than he looked. But St. Julien Perlmutter was a year past seventy and as hearty as they came.
A close friend of Pitt's father, Senator George Pitt, Perlmutter had known Dirk almost from the time he was born. Over the years they had formed a close bond to the point where Perlmutter was like a favorite uncle. He sat Pitt and Julia down around a huge latticed hatch cover, reconstructed and lacquered to as high a sheen as a dining table's. He offered them crystal glasses that had once graced the first-class dining room of the former Italian luxury liner the Andrea Doria.
Julia studied the etched image of the ship on her glass as Perlmutter poured the aged port. “I thought the Andrea Doria rested on the bottom of the sea.”
“She still does,” said Perlmutter, twisting one end of the gray hair flowing from his lips. “Dirk here brought up a rack of wineglasses during a dive he made on the wreck five years ago and graciously gave them to me. Please tell what you think of the port.”
Julia was flattered that such a gourmet would want her opinion. She sipped the ruby contents of the glass and made an expression of delight. “It tastes wonderful.”
“Good, good.” He gave Pitt a look reserved for a derelict on a park bench. “You I won't ask, since your taste runs to the mundane.”
Pitt acted as if he was insulted. “You wouldn't know good port if you drowned in it. While I, on the other hand, was weaned on it.”
“I hate myself for ever letting you through the front door,” Perlmutter moaned.
Julia saw through the charade. “Do you two always go on like this?”
“Only when we meet,” Pitt said, laughing.
“What brings you here this time of night?” asked Perlmutter, winking at Julia. “It couldn't have been my witty conversation.”
“No,” Pitt agreed, “it was to see if you ever heard of a ship that left China sometime around nineteen forty-eight with a cargo of historical Chinese art and then vanished.”
Perlmutter held the port in front of his eyes and swirled it around in his glass. His eyes took on a reflective expression as his encyclopedic mind delved into his brain cells. “I seem to recall that the name of the ship was the Princess Dou Wan. She went missing with all hands somewhere off Central America. No trace of ship or crew was ever found.”
“Was there a record of her cargo?”
Perlmutter shook his head. “The word that she was carrying a rich cargo of antiquities came from unsubstantiated reports only. Vague rumors actually. No evidence ever came to light to suggest it was true.”
“How do you call it?” asked Pitt.
“Another mystery of the sea. There is very little I can tell you except the Princess Dou Wan was a passenger ship that had seen her day and was scheduled for the scrap yard. A pretty ship, in her prime she was known as the queen of the China Sea.”
“Then how did she end up lost off Central America?”
Perlmutter shrugged. “As I said, another mystery of the sea.”
Pitt shook his head vigorously. “I disagree. If there is an enigma, it is man-made. A ship simply doesn't vanish five thousand miles from where she is supposed to be.”
“Let me dig out the record on the Princess. I believe it's in a book stacked under the piano.” He lifted his bulk off a thankful chair and ambled out of the dining room. In less than two minutes, Pitt and Julia heard his voice roar out through the hall from another room. “Ah, here it is!”
“With all these books, he knows exactly where to find the one he's looking for?” she asked in amazement.
“He can tell you the title of every book in the house,” said Pitt with certainty, “its exact location and what number it lies from the top of its stack or from the right side of its shelf.”
Pitt had no sooner finished speaking than Perlmutter came into the room, his elbows brushing both frames of the doorway simultaneously. He held up a thick, leather-bound book. The title, lettered in gold, read, History of the Orient Shipping Lines. “This is the only official record I've ever come across on the Princess Dou Wan that gives details of her years afloat.” Perlmutter sat down at the table, opened the book and began reading aloud.
“She was laid down and launched in the same year, nineteen thirteen, by Harland and Wolff shipbuilders of Belfast for the Singapore Pacific Steamship Lines. Her original name was Lanai. Gross tonnage of just under eleven thousand tons, over-all length of four hundred and ninety-seven feet and a sixty-foot beam, she was rather a good-looking ship for her day.” He paused and held up the book to show a photograph of the ship sailing over a flat sea with a trailing wisp of smoke from her single smokestack. The photo was tinted and revealed the traditional black hull with white superstructure topped by a tall green funnel. “She could carry five hundred and ten passengers, fifty-five of them first class,” Perlmutter continued. “She was originally coal-fired but converted to oil-firing in nineteen twenty. Top speed of seventeen knots. Her maiden voyage took place in December of nineteen thirteen when she left Southampton for Singapore. Until nineteen thirty-one, most of her voyages were between Singapore and Honolulu.”