The Sunday Gentleman (37 page)

Year after year conferences were held between Wagons-Lits and the various European governments to settle the problems of passports, currency exchange, luggage, and conductors. It was agreed that if a conductor committed a minor crime, he could not be summarily pulled off the train but enjoyed the status of an extraterritorial and came under the jurisdiction of the Geneva Court. If he committed a major crime, it was determined that he was subject to the laws of the nation through which the train was passing at the moment of the crime—that is, hypothetically, if an Italian conductor strangled an English duchess while the Orient Express was racing through Yugoslavia, he would have to submit to the trial and judgment of a Belgrade court.

In 1919, at the Versailles Peace Conference, the Wagons-Lits company signed a series of international treaties and contracts, the most important of which provided that the train should cut its time to Istanbul by passing through the longest tunnel in the Alps, the Simplon Tunnel. Because it steamed through this hole, entering at Valais, Switzerland, emerging in Piedmont, Italy, the old Orient Express was officially renamed the Simplon-Orient Express, a name the Wagons-Lits people now use in documents and advertising, but which Continental travelers persistently ignore.

Other treaties have been concerned mostly with namesakes of the Orient Express. An American traveler in Europe who believes there is but one Orient Express will, after a few days at travel bureaus, be sadly confused by the repetitions of the name, applied to a variety of trains which seem to go in every direction at once. The fact is, there is not one Orient Express, and there never has been. There are a half-dozen or more different trains going back and forth to the Near East, three times a week, and all are rightly called the Orient Express. Then, too, in normal times, there are special sleeping coaches that go and come from Rome, Athens, and Berlin, on other trains, and are eventually attached to the Orient Express en route. They then proceed with it either to Paris or to Istanbul. Just before the war the special Orient Express sleeper, brought down from Berlin to meet the main Express, often carried disguised Jews with false papers, escaping the wrath of Hitler, and Nazi secret agents going into the Balkans and France. For security reasons, the German car was kept isolated, by means of a locked door, from the rest of the Express. Today, also, there is an Orient Express that goes from Paris, through Munich, to Vienna and Bucharest, and there is a sister train, the Arlberg-Orient Express, that goes through Zurich, Switzerland, to Vienna in 34 hours. Added to all this confusion, there is another luxury train, the Taurus Express, that picks up some passengers the Orient Express drops off in Istanbul and takes them to Cairo or Baghdad.

But these trips remain sideshows beside the three-ring circus provided by the Paris-to-Istanbul train. Starting at night, from the hangarlike Gare de Lyon in Paris, the. Orient Express speeds through Dijon, crosses the French frontier station of Frasne, and chugs into the mountains of Switzerland. With the dawn, it runs through Lausanne, skirting the north shore of Lake Geneva, the most spectacular of Switzerland’s 1,484 lakes, passes Montreux, and goes through the Simplon Tunnel, over twelve miles long. With the new day, the Orient Express swings past Lake Maggiore toward Milan. The American tourist, having missed France and Switzerland in the night, will still see a good part of northern Italy. AH the first day, the Orient Express rides through or past such cities as Verona, Venice, Trieste and, with the second night, leaves San Pietro del Carso and enters Yugoslavia.

The passenger, sleeping through Zagreb, capital of Croatia, will have breakfast his second morning in Belgrade, while coaches arriving from Ostend, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, and Budapest are attached. Listening to the newcomers, he will hear plenty to write home about—that Lidice is now a flourishing wheat field, that Princess Gabrielle Esterhazy now runs a Budapest furniture delivery company, that the current anti-Russian joke making the rounds of the Balkans is that “Joe Stalin made two big mistakes—in showing Europe to the Russians, and the Russians to Europe.”

Passing from Yugoslavia to Bulgaria, conductors will point out their favorite oddity, the small island of Ada-Kaleh in the middle of the Danube, which still belongs to Turkey because diplomats forgot about it. All the second day the Express moves through Bulgaria, reaching Sofia before nightfall. The passenger, if he stays up late, may dine when the train goes through Dikea, Turkey, but he will certainly be asleep as the train crosses Pityon, Greece. In the early morning, puzzling over piasters, assaulted by dragomen who wish to show him the Mosque of St. Sophia and the ninety-two streets of the Grand Bazaar, the tourist will alight in Mohammedan Istanbul.

But long after the sights seen between Paris and Istanbul have become as unreal as a picture postcard, the American tourist will remember, vividly, the best sight of all—his fellow travelers on the journey, both the world-famous and the nonentities, and he’ll remember what they did and what they said Before the war, Pierre Laval, Philippe Petain, and Field Marshal von Rundstedt once traveled in the same coach of the Orient Express at the same time. Singers and musicians frequently jammed the train. Lily Pons and Grace Moore would ride it, and be heard warbling each day on their way to engagements in Italy, and Bruno Walter and Toscanini would go regularly on it to Salzburg. Paderewski, just before his death, was a frequent and favored passenger. In the dining room, whenever he sat to eat, fellow passengers would be treated to a silent recital; as he talked in French to tablemates, Paderewski would drum the table with the fingers of one hand, playing passages from various piano works, and it was always a favorite sport among observers to try to identify a particular composition.

Anthony Eden is remembered as the train’s most elegant passenger. He would have a compartment for himself, another for his wife, a third for the rest of his family. He would wear a freshly pressed suit every day, melt female passengers with his manners, and talk politics to the train personnel. The late Cardinal Luigi Maglione, Secretary of State of the Vatican, was equally elegant, handsome, and much more awesome. “I’ll never forget the cardinal,” said one passenger, “very severe and stiff, all Jesuit, constantly nodding over his Bible. And when he looked at you, well, you tried to remember the last time you’d been to church.” Maurice Chevalier often traveled the Express in those days, and while many passengers liked him, the conductors generally detested him for his bad manners. “Once there were some Americans on the train,” recalls one conductor, “man, wife, children, good solid people. They had admired Chevalier’s old Hollywood films and they sent their card by me inviting him to dine or have a drink. He just tore the card lip, threw it back at me, and refused to reply. So I made up a nice excuse for the Americans, but it was rude of him.” Another entertainer, Marlene Dietrich, traveled on the Orient Express from her earliest days with UFA, the Berlin film company. Male passengers drooled over her, and mash notes were slipped under her compartment door, but she remained smilingly aloof.

Government representatives regarded the Orient Express as their personal conveyance. Dr. Eduard Beneš, the unsmiling President of Czechoslovakia, usually devoted fifteen hours a day to working on notes, his bulging briefcase beside him, but on a few trips he mingled with other passengers and expounded his ideas on disarmament and a United States of Europe. But mostly there were kings—rulers of nations like King Michael of Romania, who always took first-class passage instead of a private coach, and rulers of finance like the endless European Rothschilds, who were regarded variously by the employees of the train (the French Rothschilds considered too class-conscious and cold, the Austrian Rothschilds considered charming, friendly, and handsome tippers). King Gustaf of Sweden, annually on his way to Monte Carlo via Paris to play tennis under the pseudonym of Mr. G., would delight other passengers with his stories of hunting in Sweden. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, father of the late King Boris, is remembered as having the biggest appetite ever seen on the Express. He would eat his way through five courses, following them up an hour later with five more, and often awarded Bulgarian decorations, for extraordinary services to the crown, to chefs and conductors.

The numerous coaches usually attached to the Orient Express at Belgrade brought their share of celebrities, characters, and stories. The most prolific coach for anecdotes was the one switched on from Berlin. Karl Fürstenberg, the German banker, was a regular passenger. Once, for privacy, he bought both the lower and upper of a compartment. The train was crowded, and a new arrival asked old Fürstenberg if under the circumstances he might use the empty upper for the night. Fürstenberg, who was making an overnight trip, sniffed and said, “Sir, I always make it a rule to sleep on my decisions. I’ll let you have my answer in the morning.”

The Berlin coach of the Express was always a beehive of smuggling. All sorts of persons were trying to get their possessions out of Germany, under the noses of the Gestapo. One Romanian artist, now in Hollywood, a Jew who had incurred Hitler’s anger by marrying the German girl selected as “Germany’s most typical Aryan beauty,” knew that he must get out while the getting was good. His life’s savings were on his person, but he realized they would be confiscated when his train left Germany. Carefully, the Romanian made a study of all trains leaving Berlin and then selected, for his flight, the Berlin coach of the Orient Express simply because it had the only possible place he might successfully hide his money. This was a metal sign, with some instructions to passengers, screwed onto the compartment wall. This, the Romanian felt, was the one foolproof place, unlikely to occur to anyone searching. He worked for hours in desperation, unscrewing the sign with a penknife, fearful every moment the Wagons-Lits conductor might discover him. At last, it was loose. He shoved his bank notes behind it, screwed it back into place, and then sat down to wait. The German frontier was reached. The customs officer came on. The Gestapo came on. He was searched. Every inch of his room was searched. But the Nazis overlooked the metal sign, and they left, and in a moment the train was out of Germany and the Romanian’s money was safe. As they passed the frontier, the Wagons-Lits conductor stuck his head in the door. “Hope you had no trouble with your money, sir,” he said. “Best place to hide it is behind that metal sign up on the wall. Everyone does, and it always fools those pigs.” And he winked and walked down the aisle.

Before the war, the nonentities on the Orient Express were often more fascinating than the celebrated travelers. A Wagons-Lits inspector, Mr. Lebrun, traveling up from Istanbul to Paris, noted his fellow passengers in the same coach, on a single journey. They included one Japanese returning from Iraq, a Berlin tailor who had been to Baghdad to take measurements of wealthy customers there, a Pennsylvania professor returning from a jaunt through the Near East in which he tried to follow the footsteps of Alexander the Great, and a Spanish nobleman. The only celebrity in the coach was the relatively sedate and bemused Mr. Lloyd George.

But those were the good old days, the Wagons-Lits people say now, and though it was less than ten years ago, they make it sound like a century. They insist that most of the people traveling today are dull businessmen going to Zurich, or Italians who have wangled passports, or French traveling in search of better meals, or Chinese UNESCO representatives. They complain that the newly rich, “the bloodsucker black marketeers” as they label them, who used to travel third-class, now clutter the Orient Express. “You should see,” says an Orient Express controller, “how these new rich put their feet on the opposite seat. Utter the car, spit on the floor. But we catch them and make them pay for everything soiled or broken.”

This Orient Express controller is a cherubic, elderly man, most zealous about his job, and several weeks ago, he took me down into the Gare de Lyon to watch the Orient Express pull in from faraway Sofia. As the passengers stepped off the train and came walking through the steam vapors, dodging baggage trucks, the controller intercepted the blue-uniformed
chef de train
, a skinny, toothy fellow, and said to him, “I have a writer here. Tell him the kind of people who have just been on the Orient Express with you, I have been warning him that the old glamour is gone.”

The
chef de train
nodded, glanced down at his passenger list, then, in a matter-of-fact voice, said:

“It was a quiet trip. I would estimate 40 percent of our passengers were dealing in the black market or just smuggling. It’s the usual thing. Our conductors must resist those devils all the time. You remember what happened in June? No? Jean-Pierre Coateval, a gangster, was arrested for using fourteen of our men on the Orient Express as smugglers for gold, jewels, foreign exchange, and drugs like heroin between countries. The whole syndicate got rid of 300 million francs’ worth of goods. Well, that was cleaned up, and our conductors are above reproach now. But our passengers continue, four out of ten of them, to deal in these shady activities.

“Who else did we have? Oh, the everyday thing. Government officials, and two diplomatic couriers with padlocked pouches—they are not touched by customs. A colonel who had come up all the way from India. Those two walking over there, they came on from Bucharest. Jews. Terrorists from Palestine. I hear one is going into England to direct sabotage of public works.

“Oh, yes. One more thing. Most amusing. A little Turkish governess. She got on at Sofia. A very nervous girl. In Yugoslavia, she pulled the emergency cord, held up the whole train at night for five minutes. She said a man wearing a coat had been in her compartment, but she screamed and scared him off. Ridiculous. We couldn’t even get into her compartment—it was bolted from the inside—until she opened the door. The conductor says he saw a mystery novel by her berth. We had that once before, you know, an English girl who had read and heard too much about the Orient Express, all the fantasies, the nonsense, and got hallucinations one night about stranglers, and she pulled the cord. But if you wish to write stories about the Orient Express, monsieur, you have certainly picked the wrong time. It is nothing now. Come, have a brandy with me at the cafe, and I will tell you about the old days and the real types.”