The Sunday Gentleman (34 page)

For me, only one question remained. Would the historic system of rating sites by stars continue to be used—and if so, were any changes or modifications in the star system contemplated?

To this, Otto Baedeker replied at length: “No, the star system as such has not been changed or modified within the last decade, and it will not be changed. Of course, some stars may disappear in the course of time—a particular painter or painting may have been held in high esteem at the turn of the century, but today is no longer looked upon as important. Or a building which at the time of its construction was a great feat of engineering is no longer outstanding in this respect. But these are gradual changes, which do not affect the star system as such.”

Otto Baedeker was eager to illustrate how the star system was kept up-to-date. “The prehistoric drawings in the Altamira cave in Spain now have two stars, whereas before the war they had only one, because at that time the interest in archaeology was perhaps not as great as it is today. A new two-star item is the Television Tower at Stuttgart, which was the first building of its kind and represents an outstanding engineering achievement.”

Then, as he had so many years ago in London, Otto Baedeker reminded me that the star system must not be overemphasized. “We naturally take the greatest care in awarding stars,” he said. “But we would be the last to suggest that ‘he who has seen the stars has seen it all,’ and that the culture and scenery of a country could be summed up by a list of starred objects. I am saying this because we have at times been reproached for inducing people to rush from one star to the next. This, we think, is rather unfair. Firstly, we try to provide accurate and well-balanced information, and to point out what in our opinion is important. But we cannot be held responsible for the use people make of this information. Secondly, it is only natural that American tourists, for example, with a limited time to spend in Europe, should restrict themselves to what is outstanding.”

I was satisfied. With Baedeker, little had altered since 1953, or even since 1827. In a new time of flux, a bewildering time of illusive horizons, many of us yearn for the finite, the known, the dependable. Death, yes. Taxes, oh yes. And Baedeker, always. In my book, still, Baedeker shall have its two stars.

9

Intrigue Express

One night in the late winter of 1930, the crack international train, the Simplon-Orient Express, hurtling through Turkey on the final lap of its regular run from Paris to Istanbul, ran into a blinding snowstorm. As first sleet and then swirling snow blanketed the rails, the Orient Express slowed, and at last, somewhere in the vicinity of Tcherkeuy, came to a full stop.

About the immobile train, the storm grew in intensity. Within a matter of hours the snow was piled many feet high, and by early morning, it almost obscured the windows of the Wagons-Lits coaches. The thirteen passengers—most of the other travelers had been dropped at previous stops in Lausanne, Milan, Belgrade—found themselves trapped within a fortress of white. These thirteen passengers, according to Wagons-Lits personnel who swear to the fact, represented exactly thirteen different nationalities. One was a sleek Italian countess who wore low-cut dresses, another was a young British diplomatic courier, the third was an American corporation lawyer, and among the several couples there was an ex-Prussian officer with his pretty Swiss bride.

The employees of the Simplon-Orient Express (or plain Orient Express, as they and everyone else preferred to call it), engineers, conductors, cooks, led by the
chef de train
, immediately held a council of war in the restaurant car. Several had been snowbound for as long as four days on previous trips, and they knew that this present imprisonment might last even longer. Their first concern was for the passengers who, sealed in by a wall of hard-packed snow and representing all types of nationalities, might become irritable, troublesome, even dangerous. A rule was made, promptly announced, and as far as possible, strictly enforced. Passengers must not discuss politics with each other. They might discuss, nostalgically, their homes, friends, experiences, they might discuss art, literature, sex, sports, but absolutely no politics. This was a sage rule that Orient Express personnel, themselves representing seven nationalities, observed oil their hectic trips three times weekly between Paris and Istanbul, and it had prevented friction on the run for almost half a century.

With this censorship established, all hands settled down to mingled boredom and hope of rescue. As it turned out, there was no boredom, and rescue proved long deferred. The first cook was given complete dictatorship over rations. Instead of three sumptuous meals a day, he ladled out only one meager repast, since the train had been almost at the end of its journey and the cupboards were practically bare.

On the sixth day, disaster seemed unavoidable. The food ran out. And late in the afternoon, just as in the most improbable of adventure stories, wolves began howling. The seventh day was not a day of rest. The snow melted and receded slightly, and the weary passengers, peering from their windows, could see the wolves at a distance, erratically circling the train. The conductors found three guns, and stood guard, in shifts, on the open platforms between the coaches.

The food problem now approached desperation since there was no means of communication with the outside world and no way of knowing when help might arrive. Soon almost all the coal was gone, and the train became bitterly cold. The passengers sat huddled and hungry in their compartments. When the water supply ran out, all optimism went with it.

The personnel of the Express did not despair. The second cook, with the ingenuity of Robinson Crusoe, solved the water situation. He began melting snow and boiling the water from it, and that helped. Meanwhile, others of the Orient Express personnel tried to burrow a tunnel through the snow, but the first two tunnels collapsed after a dozen yards. A third tunnel was begun. Reinforced with the train’s furnishings, the red plush seats, the silk armchairs, the dismantled berths, it held, and on the ninth day they broke out into daylight at the foot of a shallow bank. Conductors, armed against the wolves, climbed into the open and after brief exploration found semisolid footing. They knew by checking their timetables that the village of Tcherkeuy was nearby. That was their only hope. Two conductors, lightly dressed, often slipping and sinking waist-deep in snow, set out on foot for aid. For another day, the passengers, in the snowbound train, alternately paced and prayed.

And then the break came. The conductors, driven by a Turkish farmer in a primitive sleigh, returned. They had found the village and bargained with the villagers for sheep and coal, and there would be roast lamb for dinner. And they had telephoned of their plight, and learned that help was already on its way from several directions.

On the fifteenth day, Turkish soldiers, in horse-drawn sleighs, arrived with food, clothing, first aid. On the following day, a snow sweeper arrived from Switzerland. Shortly thereafter, its latest misadventure at an end. the famed Orient Express, two and a half weeks overdue, limped into Istanbul and disgorged its baker’s dozen of exotic, long-suffering passengers.

Occurrences such as this, although regarded as strictly routine by the sophisticated personnel of the Orient Express, are the stuff of which thriller fiction is spun. For example, five years after the incident at Tcherkeuy, Agatha Christie, who often accompanied her archeologist husband on the Orient Express to diggings in the Near East, wrote a suspense novel entitled
Murder in the Calais Coach
. Her mystery, if not based directly on the incident at Tcherkeuy. was at least compounded of several such near catastrophes that have befallen the Orient Express.

“High in the mountains of Yugoslavia,” states a blurb on the dust wrapper of Miss Christie’s novel, “the Orient Express, speeding northward, was halted by heavy storms and huge snowdrifts. One compartment of the Calais coach was occupied by one of the most delightful of all detective characters, Hercule Poirot. In another lay the body of a murdered man!” Among those also stranded in Miss Christie’s Orient Express were a British colonel returning from India, a Belgian director of Wagons-Lits, a young English lady from Baghdad, an American commercial traveler, a White Russian princess, a Hungarian diplomat, a German maid, a female Swedish missionary—and, of course, the knifed body.

To those who like their stories straight, Miss Christie may seem to have been spreading it on a bit thick. But the most jaded world traveler will quickly confirm that the Orient Express is one institution that does not disappoint—it offers an authentic romantic experience, one of the few left available, where fact and fiction merge.

For what the Orient Express sells is glamour. It has none of the standard attractions. It is neither as fast as the Super Chief or the City of Los Angeles ripping across the United States, nor as old a scheduled train as the Royal Scot running from London to Edinburgh, nor does it travel as long and as far as the Trans-Siberian chugging from Moscow to Vladivostok in nine days. In place of records for speed, longevity, or distance, the Orient Express, the world’s first and foremost international train, offers romance.

In a single journey of two days and three nights, the Orient Express crosses seven foreign frontiers, more than any other train in the world. It is the only train in existence whose passage from country to country has been arranged by diplomatic treaty among governments, rather than by mere contracts between railways. Most important, it links two worlds. In connecting Paris, metropolis of Western Europe, with Istanbul, colossus of the Near East, it promises that, for the price of a one-way ticket, the twain shall meet—three times a week.

More than its physical journey, more than its highly advertised luxuries, it is something else that makes the Orient Express the most colorful and dramatic rolling stock on earth. It’s the people you meet.

Even though the Orient Express, like its more mundane counterparts in America, carries its share of traveling salesmen (conductors refer to the late Sir Basil Zaharoff, a regular passenger, as “that salesman”), the specialty of the house is still, as it has been since 1883, female secret agents swathed in mink, bearded men in monocles, inscrutable heads of armament cartels, pretty girls in distress, royalty in flight. “Ah, if I had but the pen of a Balzac, I would depict this scene,” an Agatha Christie character sighs, observing the assortment of passengers boarding the Orient Express. “All around us are people, of all classes, of all nationalities, of all ages. For three days, these people, these strangers to one another, are brought together. They sleep and eat under one roof, they cannot get away from each other. At the end of three days, they part, they go their several ways, never perhaps to see each other again.”

No journey on this train is without its strange drama. The cast of characters, especially before World War II, often included Franz von Papen, King Michael of Romania, Greta Garbo, Toscanini, King George of Greece, W. Somerset Maugham, Pierre Laval, Sonja Henie, Edda Ciano, King Gustaf of Sweden, Philippe Petain, Lily Pons, Baron Edouard de Rothschild, King Boris of Bulgaria, the Duchess of Kent, Maurice Chevalier, the Duke of Windsor, King Alfonso of Spain, Marlene Dietrich.

Personnel of the Orient Express affectionately remember Pope Pius XII, when he was Cardinal Pacelli, as a frequent passenger. He would chat with the conductors, or fellow passengers, in perfect French, often probing into their lives and hearing out their problems. Sometimes he would retire to his apartment, leave the door ajar, and could be seen pecking away on a pure white portable typewriter. The 244-pound Aga Khan, direct descendant of Mahomet’s daughter, Fatima, is remembered by the personnel with less affection. The Aga, an owlish mountain of flesh, was always remote, uncommunicative, and he devoted hours to lolling back listening as his male secretary read aloud to him from a book or newspaper. Many times, there were ex-King Carol and his redheaded, pudgy Pompadour, Magda Lupescu. Since they never lived openly together in Romania, they remained equally discreet on the Orient Express, riding in separate compartments.

The majority of passengers, however, were not celebrities, but they were no less provocative. There was the cameo-faced French girl, gowned by Schiaparelli, dripping with orchids, who kissed her elderly French husband good-bye, cried a little, boarded the Express and, as it pulled out, joined a young Czech artist in his compartment. There was the French countess who traveled on the Orient Express monthly, picked up wealthy industrialists in the diner, and lived on the expensive gifts she obtained from them. There was also the cute Italian actress, all ingenue, who stole jewels and was finally apprehended. Most memorable of all, there was the quiet little Englishman, with unruly rust hair and quick smile, who, as the Orient Express was moving across a bridge high in the Swiss Alps, was seen suddenly plummeting from the train to his death thousands of feet below. The French Sûreté, in the best manner of Vidocq and Bertillon, later combed the train and its luggage for a clue, questioning everyone, but never learned whether he fell, jumped, or was pushed.

It is because of such incidents, because everything (and everyone) happens on the Orient Express, that writers of international tales of intrigue like Agatha Christie, Eric Ambler, Leslie Charteris, Georges Simenon, Graham Greene, persist in starring the intrigue train in their fiction. For the same reason, Hollywood producers have used this mobile Grand Hotel as inspiration for settings of suspense, while some of the classic English adventure films (like Alfred Hitchcock’s
The Lady Vanishes
and Carol Reed’s
Night Train
) have played all their action on the Orient Express, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, even though they have taken a necessary dramatic license and attached crowded day coaches to the Express (a proletarian liberty its proprietors would never permit in the lush prewar days), so that their strange characters might all be depicted before the camera together.