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Pitt was beginning to feel drowsy. It had been a long day. He used the pause to dial Yaeger and ask for a cup of coffee.
"How are you and Hope getting along?"
"I'm almost beginning to think she's real," Pitt answered.
"Just so long you don't start fantasizing about her nonexistent body."
"I'm not at that stage yet."
"To know her is to love her."
"How are you doing on LeBaron?"
"What I was afraid of," said Yaeger. "He pretty much buried his past. No insight, only statistics up to the time he became the Wall Street whiz."
"Anything interesting?"
"Not really. He came from a fairly affluent family. His father owned a chain of hardware stores. I get the idea Raymond and his father didn't get along. There's no mention of his family in any newspaper biographies after he became the financial whiz."
"Did you find out how he made his first big bucks?"
"That area is pretty vague. He and a partner by the name of Kronberg had a marine salvage company in the middle nineteen-fifties. Seems they scratched along for a few years and then went broke. Two years later, Raymond launched his publication."
"The Prosperteer."
"Right."
"Is there any mention of where his backing came from?"
"None," replied Yaeger. "By the way, Jessie is his second wife. His first was named Hillary. She died a few years ago. Nothing on her at all."
"Keep hunting."
Pitt hung up as Hope said, "I'm ready with the data on the illfated final voyage of the Cyclops."
"Let's hear it."
"She put to sea from Rio de Janeiro on 16 February 1918, bound for Baltimore, Maryland. On board were her regular crew of 15 officers and 231 men, 57 men from the cruiser Pittsburgh, who were being rotated to the Norfolk Naval Base for reassignment, the 5 prisoners including DeVoe, and the American consul general at Rio, Alfred L. Morean Gottschalk, who was returning to Washington. Her cargo was 11,000 tons of manganese ore.
"After a brief call at the port of Bahia to pick up mail, the ship made an unscheduled stop on 4 March, when she entered Carlisle Bay on the island of Barbados and dropped anchor. Here, Worley took on extra coal and provisions, which he claimed were necessary to continue the voyage to Baltimore, but was later considered to be quite excessive. After the ship was lost at sea, the American consul in Barbados reported a number of suspicious rumors regarding Worley's unusual action, strange events on board, and a possible mutiny. The last anyone saw of the Cyclops and the men on board was 4 March 1918, when she steamed away from Barbados."
"There was no further contact?" asked Pitt.
"Twenty-four hours later, a lumber freighter called the Crogan Castle reported her bow crushed by an immense freak wave. Her radio signals for assistance were answered by the Cyclops. The final words from the collier were her call number and the message, `We are fifty miles due south of you and coming at full steam.' "
"Nothing else?"
"That was it."
"Did the Crogan Castle give her position?"
"Yes, it was reported as latitude twenty-three degrees, thirty minutes north by longitude seventy-nine degrees, twenty-one minutes west, which put her about twenty miles southeast from a bank of shallow reefs called the Anguilla Cays."
"Was the Crogan Castle lost also?"
"No, the records say she limped into Havana."
"Any wreckage of the Cyclops turn up?"
