47
AFTER HIS MEETING with Dirk and Julia, St. Julien Perlmutter rolled up his sleeves and went to work. Once he walked the trail leading to a lost ship, he became obsessed. No lead, no rumor, no matter how seemingly insignificant, was left unexplored. Though his diligence and persistence had paid off in ferreting out any number of answers and solutions that led searchers to successful shipwreck discoveries, he failed more often than he succeeded. Most ships that vanished into thin air left no thread to follow. They were simply swallowed up by the infinite sea that very rarely gave up her secrets.
On the surface, the Princess Don Wan looked to be simply another one of the many dead ends Perlmutter had experienced during his decades as a marine historian. He launched the search by scouring his own immense collection of sea lore before expanding into the many marine archives around the United States and the rest of the world.
The more impossible the project, the more he tackled it with inflexible tenacity, laboring all hours of the day or night. He began by assembling every shred of known historical information concerning the Princess Dou Wan, from the time her keel was laid until she went missing. He obtained and studied plans and designs of her construction, including engine specifications, equipment, dimensions and deck plans. One particularly interesting bit of data he gleaned from the records was a description of her sailing qualities. She was revealed as a very stable ship, having survived the worst storms during her time in service that the seas around Asia could throw at her.
A team of fellow researchers was hired to dig through archives in England and Southeast Asia. By using the expertise of other marine historians, he saved himself considerable time and expense.
Perlmutter sorely wished he could consult his old friend and fellow marine historian Zhu Kwan in China, but it was his understanding that Pitt wanted no revelations making their way back to Qin Shang. He did, however, contact personal friends on Taiwan for leads to still living comrades of Chiang Kai-shek who might shed some light on the missing treasure trove.
In the early hours of the morning, when most of the world was asleep, he stared into a computer monitor the size of a home-entertainment video screen and analyzed the data as it accumulated. He peered at one of the six known photographs of the Princess Dou Wan. She was a stately-looking ship, he thought. Her superstructure was set far aft of the bow and appeared small in relation to her hull. He studied the colored image of her, magnifying the white band in the center of the green funnel, focusing on the emblem of the Canton Lines, a golden lion with its left paw raised. Her maze of loading cranes suggested a ship that could carry a substantial cargo besides her passengers.
He also found photos of her sister ship, the Princess Yung T'ai, which was launched and entered service the year after the Princess Dou Wan. According to the records the Princess Yung T'ai was broken up six months before the Princess Dou Wan was scheduled to be scrapped.
A tired old liner doomed for the scrappers at Singapore would not have made an ideal transport to move China's national treasures to a secret location, he thought. She was beyond her time and hardly in prime condition to weather heavy seas on an extended voyage across the Pacific. It also seemed to Perlmutter that Taiwan was the more sensible destination since it was where Chiang Kai-shek eventually set up the Chinese Nationalist government. It was not conceivable the last known report of the ship had come from a naval radio operator in Valparaiso, Chile. What possible purpose could the Princess Dou Wan have for being over six hundred miles south of the Tropic of Capricorn in an area of the Pacific Ocean far off the traditional shipping lanes?
Even if the liner was on a clandestine mission to hide China's art treasures somewhere on the other side of the world in either Europe or Africa, why go across the vast, empty region of the South Pacific and through the Strait of Magellan when it was shorter to steer west across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope? Was secrecy so consuming that captain and crew could not risk going through the Panama Canal, or did Chiang Kai-shek have an unknown cavern or man-made structure hidden in the Andes to conceal the immense treasure, if indeed it could be proven the ship was carrying China's national historic wealth?
Perlmutter was a pragmatic man. He took nothing for granted. He went back to square one and restudied the photos of the ship. As he examined her outline, a vague notion began to form in his mind. He called a nautical archivist friend in Panama, waking him from a sound sleep, and charmed him into going through the records of ships passing west to east through the Canal between November 28 and December 5, 1948.
With that lead being pursued, he began reading through a list of names of the ship's officers last known to have sailed on the Princess. All were Chinese except for Captain Leigh Hunt and Chief Engineer Ian Gallagher.
He felt as if he was throwing chips on every number of a roulette table. What are the odds of losing? he mused. Thirty-six out of thirty-six? But then he had to consider the zero and double zero. Perlmutter was no old fool. He covered every bet, firmly believing that if only one number paid off, he'd win.
He punched the buttons on his speakerphone and waited for a sleepy voice to answer. "Hello, this better be good."
"Hiram, it's St. Julien Perlmutter."
"Julien, why in God's name are you calling me at four in the morning?" Hiram Yaeger's voice sounded as if he was talking through a pillow.
"I'm in the middle of a research project for Dirk, and I need your help."
Yaeger became marginally alert. "Anything for Dirk, but does it have to be four in the morning?"
"The data is important, and we need it as quickly as possible."
"What do you want me to investigate?"
Perlmutter sighed with relief, knowing from experience that the NUMA computer genius had never let anyone down. "Got a pencil and paper? I'm going to give you some names."
"Then what?" asked Yaeger, yawning.
"I'd like you to hack your way through government census, IRS and Social Security records for a match. Also, check them out through your vast file of mari
time records."
"You don't want much."
"And while you're at it..." said Perlmutter, forging onward.
"Does it never end?"
"I also have a ship for you to trace."
"So?"
"If my intuition is working, I'd like you to find what port it arrived at between November twenty-eighth and December tenth, nineteen forty-eight."