Dirk looked thoughtful. "Why do you think he broke off the project? Lack of money?"
"Certainly not the money," Loren answered. "British economic journalists estimate his personal assets upward of fifty billion dollars."
"Makes you wonder," Pitt murmured, "why he didn't complete the tunnels, with so much at stake."
Loren hesitated; not so Giordino. "How do you know he threw in the towel? How do you know he isn't secretly digging away under Nicaragua while we enjoy our port?"
"Not possible." Loren was blunt. "Satellite photos would show construction activity. There's no way he could hide an excavation of such immense magnitude."
Giordino studied his empty glass. "A neat trick if he could hide millions of tons of excavated rock and muck."
Pitt looked across the table at Micky. "Could you supply me with a map of the area where the tunnel was supposed to begin and end?"
Micky was only too happy to oblige. "You've piqued my curiosity. Let me have your fax number and I'll send you the site plans."
"What's on your mind, Dad?" asked Dirk.
"Al and I will be cruising down Nicaragua way in a few days," Pitt said with a crafty grin. "We just might drop in and browse the neighborhood."
17
Dirk and Summer drove to St. Julien's residence in Georgetown with the top down on Dirk's 1952 Meteor, a California custom-built fiberglass-bodied hot rod with a DeSoto Fire-Dome V-8 that was souped up from the stock one hundred and sixty horsepower to two hundred and seventy. The body was painted in American racing colors, white with a blue stripe running down the middle. Actually, the car never had a top. When it rained, Dirk merely pulled a piece of plastic from under one seat and spread it over the cockpit with a hole for his head to poke through.
He pulled off a picturesque tree-lined brick street and turned into the drive circling a large, old, three-story manor house with eight gables. He continued around the side until he came to a stop in front of what was the manor's former carriage and stable house. Quite large, it was once the home of ten horses and five carriages, with rooms upstairs for the grooms and drivers. Purchased by St. Julien Perlmutter forty years earlier, he had remodeled the interior into a homey archive with miles of shelves crammed with books, documents and private papers, all recording the marine history of nearly three hundred thousand ships and shipwrecks. A gourmand and bon vivant, he maintained a refrigerated food locker stocked with delicacies from around the world and a four-thousand-bottle wine cellar.
There was no doorbell, only a big door knocker cast in the shape of an anchor. Summer rapped three times and waited. A full three minutes later the door was thrown open by a massive man standing four inches over six feet and weighing four hundred pounds. Perlmutter may have been huge, but he was solid; the sea of flesh was firm and tight.
His gray hair was shaggy and his full beard was enhanced by a long mustache twisted on the ends. Except for his size, children might have taken him for Santa Claus because of his round red face with a tulip nose and blue eyes. Perlmutter was dressed in his customary purple-and-gold paisley silk robe. A little dachshund puppy danced around his legs and yapped at the visitors.
"Summer!" he exclaimed. "Dirk!" He swept the young people up in his huge arms in a great bear hug and lifted both of them off the porch. Summer felt as if her ribs were cracking and Dirk gasped for breath. To their great relief, Perlmutter, who didn't know his own strength, set them down and waved them through the door.
"Come in, come in. You don't know what a joy it is to see you." Then he admonished the dog. "Fritz! Any more barking and I'll cut off your gourmet dog food allowance."
Summer massaged her breast. "I hope Dad told you we were coming?"
"Yes, yes, he did," Perlmutter said cheerfully. "What a pleasure." He paused and his eyes became misty. "Looking at Dirk, I can remember when your father was your age, even a bit younger, when he used to come around and browse my library. It's almost as if time has stood still."
Dirk and Summer had visited Perlmutter with Pitt on several occasions and were always astounded by the vast archives that sagged the shelves and the volumes stacked in hallways and every room of the carriage house, even the bathrooms. It was renowned as the world's largest repository of marine history in the world. Libraries and archives around the nation stood in line, ready to bid whatever price it took should Perlmutter ever decide to sell his immense collection.
Summer was always bewildered at Perlmutter's incredible memory. It would seem that the mass of data should be categorized and indexed onto a computer data file system, but he always claimed he couldn't think abstract and never bought a terminal. Amazingly, he knew where every scrap of information, every book, every author and source and every report was deposited. He liked to boast that he could pick any one out of the maze within sixty seconds.
Perlmutter escorted them into his beautiful sandalwood-paneled dining area, the only room of the house devoid of books. "Sit down, sit down," he fairly boomed, motioning to a thick, round dining table he'd had carved from the rudder of the famous ghost ship Mary Celeste, whose remains had been found in Haiti. "I've made a light lunch of my own concoction of guava-sautéed shrimp. We'll wash it down with a Martin Ray Chardonnay."
Fritz sat beside the table, his tail sweeping the floor. Perlmutter reached down every few minutes and gave him a bit of shrimp, which he swallowed without chewing.
Not much later, Dirk patted his flat stomach. "The shrimp was so good I'm afraid I made a pig of myself."
"You weren't alone," Summer groaned softly, fully sated.
"Now then, what can I do for you kids?" said Perlmutter. "Your Dad said something about you finding Celtic artifacts."
Summer opened a briefcase she'd brought with her, retrieved the report she and Dirk had written on the airplane to Washington and photos of the ancient relics. "This pretty well sums up our findings. It also includes Hiram Yaeger's conclusions on the amphor, comb and printed photocopies of the artifacts and chambers."
Perlmutter poured himself another glass of wine, dropped his spectacles over his nose and began reading. "Help yourself to more shrimp. There's plenty."
"I don't think either of us could manage another bite," Dirk muttered, holding his stomach.
Wordlessly, Perlmutter dabbed around his beard that hid most of his mouth. He paused occasionally, staring up at the ceiling in thought before he went back to studying the report. Finally, he laid it on the table and fixed the Pitts with a steady stare.
"Do you realize what you've done?"
Summer shrugged unknowingly. "We think it's an archaeological find of some significance."
"Some significance," Perlmutter parroted, with a slight tone of sarcasm. "If what you've discovered is the genuine article, you've thrown a thousand accepted archaeological theories down the sink."
"Oh dear," said Summer, looking at her brother, who was containing laughter. "Is it all that bad?"
"Depends from what direction you look at it," Perlmutter said between sips of wine. If the report was an earthshaking revelation, he was acting buoyantly calm. "Very little is known about Celtic culture much before five hundred B.C. They didn't keep written records until the Middle Ages. All that is known through the mists of time is that sometime around two thousand B.C., the Celts fanned out from Eastern Europe after originating around the Caspian Sea. Some historians theorize that the Celts and Hindus shared a common ancestry because their language was similar."
"How widespread were their settlements?" asked Dirk.
"They moved into the north of Italy and Switzerland, then on to France, Germany, Britain and Ireland, reaching as far north as Denmark in the Scandinavian region and as far south as Spain and Greece. Archaeologists have even found Celtic artifacts across the Mediterranean in Morocco. Also, graves of well-preserved mummies have been discovered in northern China from a culture called the Urumchi people. They were most certainly Celtic, since they had Caucasian skin and facial features, blond and red hair, and were dressed in tartan-woven cloth."