and extended his hand.
“Mr. Pitt. I’m Charlie Hunley.”
“Mr. Hunley,” Pitt said, shaking hands. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“Not at all. Your phone call ticked my curiosity. You’re the first person to ask about our boiler making capacity in, golly, must be forty years.”
“You’re out of the business?”
“Heavens, yes. Gave it up during the summer of fifty-one. End of an era, you might say. My great-granddaddy rolled armor plate for the Confederate ironclad fleet. After World War Two, my daddy figured the time had come for a change. He retooled the plant and started fabricating metal furniture. As things turned out, it was a shrewd decision.”
“Did you, by chance, save any of your old production records?” Pitt asked.
“Unlike you Yankees, who throw out everything,” Hunley said with a sly smile, “we Southern boys hold onto everything, including our women.”
Pitt laughed politely and didn’t bother asking how his California upbringing had qualified him as a Yankee.
“After your call,” Hunley continued, “I ran a search in our file storage room. You didn’t give me a date, but since we only supplied forty water-tube boilers with the specifications you mentioned for Liberty ships, I found the invoice listing the serial number in question in fifteen minutes. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what you don’t already know.”
“Was the boiler shipped to the company that supplied the engines or direct to the shipyard for installation?”
Hunley picked up the yellowing paper from his desk and studied it for a moment. “It says here we shipped to the Georgia Shipbuilding Corporation in Savannah on June fourteenth, 1943.” Hunley picked up another piece of paper. “Here’s a report from one of our men who inspected the boilers after they were installed in the ship and connected to the engines. All that is mentioned of any interest is the name of the ship.”
“Yes, I have that,” said Pitt. “It was the
A strange expression of puzzlement crossed Hun-ley’s face as he restudied the inspector’s report. “We must be talking about two different ships.”
Pitt looked at him. “Could there be a mistake?”
“Not unless you wrote down the wrong serial number.”
“I was careful,” Pitt replied firmly.
“Then I don’t know what to tell you,” said Hunley, passing the paper across the desk. “But according to the inspection report, boiler number 38874 went into a Liberty ship called the
15
Congresswoman Loren Smith was waiting on the concourse when Pitt’s flight from Charleston arrived at Washington’s National Airport. She waved to get his attention, and he smiled. The gesture was unnecessary. She was an easy woman to spot.
Loren stood tall, slightly over five foot eight. Her cinnamon hair was long but layered around the face, which accented her prominent cheekbones and deep violet eyes. She was dressed in a pink cotton-knit tunic-style dress with scoop neck and long sleeves that were rolled up. For an elegant touch, she wore a Chinese-patterned sash around her waist.
She possessed an air of breezy sophistication, yet underneath one could sense a tomboyish daring. A representative elected from the state of Colorado, Loren was serving her second term. She loved her job; it was her life. Feminine and softspoken, she could be an unleashed tiger on the floor of Congress when she tackled an issue. Her colleagues respected her for her shrewdness as well as her beauty. She was a private woman, shunning the parties and dinners unless they were politically necessary. Her only outside activity was an “on again, off again” affair with Pitt.
She approached him and kissed him lightly on the mouth. “Welcome home, voyager.”
He put his arm around her and they set off toward the baggage claim. “Thank you for meeting me.”
“I borrowed one of your cars. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Depends,” he said. “Which one?”
“My favorite, the blue Talbot-Lago.”
“The coupe with the Saoutchik coachwork? You have expensive taste. That’s a $200,000 car.”
“Oh, dear, I hope it doesn’t get dented in the parking lot.”
Pitt gave her a solemn look. “If it does, the sovereign state of Colorado will have a vacant seat in Congress.”
She clutched his arm and laughed. “You think more of your cars than you do your women.”
“Cars never nag and complain.”
“I can think of a few other things they never do,” she said with a girlish smile.
They threaded their way through the crowded terminal and waited at the baggage claim. Finally the conveyor belt hummed into motion and Pitt retrieved his two suitcases. They passed outside into a gray, sticky morning and found the blue 1948 Talbot-Lago sitting peacefully under the watchful eye of an airport security guard. Pitt relaxed in the passenger’s seat as Loren slipped behind the wheel. The rakish car was a right-hand drive, and it always struck Pitt odd to sit and stare out the left side of the windshield at the approaching traffic with nothing to do.
“Did you call Perlmutter?” he asked.
“About an hour before you landed,” she answered. “He was quite agreeable, for someone who was jolted out of a sound sleep. He said he’d go through his library for data on the ships you asked about.”
“If anyone knows ships, it’s St. Julien Perlmutter.”
“He sounds like a character over the phone.”
“An understatement. Wait till you meet him.”
Pitt watched the passing scenery for a few moments without speaking. He stared at the Potomac River as Loren drove north along the George Washington Memorial Parkway and cut over the Francis Scott Key Bridge to Georgetown.
Pitt was not fond of Georgetown; “Phonyville,” he called it. The drab brick town houses looked like they had all been popped from the same biscuit mold. Loren steered the Talbot onto N Street. Parked cars jammed the curbs, trash lay in the gutters, little of the sidewalk shrubbery was trimmed, and yet it was perhaps four blocks of the most overpriced real estate in the country. Tiny houses, Pitt mused, filled with gigantic egos generously coated with megadoses of forged veneer.
Loren squeezed into a vacant parking space and turned off the ignition. They locked the car and walked between two vine-encrusted homes to a carriage house in the rear. Before Pitt could lift a bronze knocker shaped like a ship’s anchor, the door was thrown open by a great monster of a man who mashed the scales at nearly four hundred pounds. His sky-blue eyes twinkled and his crimson face was mostly hidden under a thick forest of gray hair and beard. Except for his small tulip nose, he looked like Santa Claus gone to seed.
“Dirk,” he fairly boomed. “Where’ve you been hiding?”
St. Julien Perlmutter was dressed in purple silk pajamas under a red and gold paisley robe. He encompassed Pitt with his chunky arms and lifted him off the doorstep in a bear hug, without a hint of strain. Loren’s eyes widened in astonishment. She’d never met Perlmutter in person and wasn’t prepared.
“You kiss me, Julien,” said Pitt sternly, “and I’ll kick you in the crotch.”
Perlmutter gave a belly laugh and released Pitt’s 180 pounds. “Come in, come in. I’ve made breakfast. You must be starved after your travels.”
Pitt introduced Loren. Perlmutter kissed her hand with a Continental flourish and then led them into a huge combination living room, bedroom and study. Shelves supporting the weight of thousands of books sagged from floor to ceiling on every wall. There were books on tables, books on chairs. They were even stacked on a king-size
