Aboard the Orient Express August 29th to September 3rd, 2008 Written September 2008 for family, and some friends interested in railroading as it used to be. In 1954 when I was eight years old, my parents took me to New York for the first time. My mother had wanted us to fly, but my father said No, the kinds of passenger trains we know won’t be around much longer, and I want Jon to know what they were like. So we drove to Chicago, stayed overnight at my aunt’s, and then took the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited to New York. I have never forgotten that trip; I can still see the gleaming chocolate-brown Pullman cars alongside the platform at Chicago’s Union Station, still remember our sleeping compartments and dinner in the dining-car. Many years later, early in my career in Washington while I was still young and unencumbered, Peter Ashman proposed that we take the last great passenger train in America, Southern Railway’s Southern Crescent, all the way to New Orleans for a long jazzy weekend of eating, drinking and wenching in the French Quarter. But before we could, the Crescent derailed a bit south of Charlottesville, Va., killing several passengers. “That could have been us!” said Peter, and I could never get him interested again. Soon the Southern Crescent itself was gone, and so was a grand opportunity. But on the 27th of last month Susan and I flew to London and took the Chunnel train (the Eurostar) to Paris, where we stayed overnight at a Left Bank hotel; and on Friday the 29th, at the Gare de l’Est, we boarded the Orient Express for Constantinople — arriving there on September 3rd — over a period of six days with three nights on the train and two more in hotels in Buda-Pest and Bucharest. We spent three additional days in Constantinople at the end of the journey, then flew to London for three more days, and returned home on the 9th.* It is not my policy to make these statements overtly personal. But this was so exceptional an experience that I want to write about it for you, and while it is fresh in my mind. So— All aboard! __________________ • Some people insist that it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople. If I fly there, fine, it can be Istanbul. But if I take the Orient Express there, it’s Constantinople. Soon after nine o’clock on the morning of the day on which the police received his note, he left his hotel for the Gare de l’Est and the Orient Express. (Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios) I must start with the Orient Express’s reputation for intrigue, for my still-present if recently dormant counter-intelligence antennae were reactivated by something even before boarding the train. After checking in at the Gare de l’Est and seeing our luggage whisked away, an Orient Express demoiselle led us across the way to an Alsatian brasserie to wait embarkation time at the Orient Express’s expense, with other travelers for Constantinople. We found ourselves at a table, as if the other two seats had been kept open just for us, with an affable man in his fifties and his younger blonde wife. And golly, they were from Evanston, just around the corner where we once lived! Just another lawyer— but West Point class of ’69, interested in military affairs! And just had dinner the night before with good old class-of-’69 Bob Kimmett, the Treasury under-secretary! I didn’t know Kimmett to test this line, with a possibly planted link to soften me up; for I happen to know Kimmett’s younger brother Mark, a National War College classmate whom I sponsored for membership in the Army & Navy Club, now a brigadier general working at the State Department. Hmm. If I were still at the Pentagon, I’d have sicced the gumshoes onto this guy. But I’m no longer at the Pentagon, and the Cold War’s over anyway, right? So I retracted my CI antennae, most of the way anyway. (It was reassuring to find we weren’t traveling in the same Pullman car.) Susan and I returned to the Gare de l’Est, were escorted aboard to our compartment and served tea by our steward, and at 4:03 p.m. precisely the Orient Express was on its way. The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still the Orient Express thunders superbly over 1400 miles of glittering steel track between Paris and Istanbul. (Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love) The Consist and Crew: the engine (changed along with its driver at each border along the way), four sleeping-cars (ours the first, our compartment A8), a service car, the club car, three dining-cars (L’Oriental, Côte d’Azur, and L’Étoile du Nord), another service car, and four more sleeping-cars. While the chef was French, most of the crew were Italian out of Venice, including our sleeping-car steward Marco, and couldn’t have been better. The Passengers: about one hundred, and while I may miss a nationality or two, I noticed American, British, Canadian, Australian, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, and even a Korean couple. The passenger wearing a luau shirt while boarding the train at the Gare de l’Est was, blessedly, Canadian; the one with a thirty years’ younger Southeast Asian mail-order bride was English; and the one truly politically incorrect passenger we met aboard was a Brit as well. Also aboard was the current president of the Orient Express Company, a French-man, and his wife. He was clearly along to be sucked up to (and was, by the chef especially), without ever descending from Olympus to speak to another passenger as far as I noticed, let alone ask whether the rest of us were enjoying the ride. But we definitely were, and the rest of the passengers were lovely people.) The Route: Paris — Strasbourg — Baden-Baden — Munich — Salzburg — Vienna — Buda-Pest — Sinaia — Bucharest — Varna — Constantinople, for a total of 3,469 kilometers (2,155 and a half miles, a good deal more than James Bond’s 1400) through seven countries. Three nights in a train. It’s no joke. What do you want to go to Constantinople for anyway? (Graham Greene, Stamboul Train) One’s first night aboard the Orient Express is of course something never to forget. We had not finish-ed tea before the Maître d’ and an assistant came to take our reservation for dinner; we took the second seating in order to relax and enjoy while the daylight lasted the view of the French countryside through which we were passing. When it began to grow dark, we unpacked and changed into black tie (no mean feat, to do that simultaneously in a Pullman compartment), and set forth for the club car where the champagne was flowing generously on the house that evening. The pianist never wandered far from Cole Porter, and we wouldn’t have had it otherwise. The lovely old Pullman car with the padded seats and large tables. Shaded lights reflected on the windows, black with the night of foreign affairs. (John Gardner, Traitor’s Exit) We dined that night in the second dining-car, Côte d’Azur, gleaming ebony wood with striking Lalique glass panels lit softly by the Orient Express’s trademark rose-shaded lamps on the tables. A four-course dinner with both white and red wine. You could be in real trouble after a week on this regimen. And rich smooth Colombian coffee afterwards, followed by Armagnac and such in the club car. But it wasn’t that we were unsteady on our feet as we made our way back to our sleeping-car, you understand; it was the rocking of the train as it sped along. Marco had made up our sleeping berths while we were at dinner, the lamp on the folding table beneath the window shining upon the compartment’s polished wood and brass. We read in bed, Susan something on her Kindle — and when she turned her book off, up on the Kindle’s screensaver floated a picture of, I swear to God, Agatha Christie.* It was spooky, especially after I had switched from Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City to something called Spy Wars — an CIA-insider argument about whether a particular Soviet defector in the Cold War was genuine or a double-agent, a mess that tied the CIA in knots for years. To me those games of CIA’s are little more than the Mad Magazine spy vs spy hijinks I enjoyed as a kid, but I was reading it for a reason — to be able to discuss it in London later with someone who’s turning it into a screenplay. And perhaps it was too atmospheric for me at that, for I woke up at three in the morning. The train had been stopped. Peering out past the edge of the window shade, I saw we were sitting in Munich’s Hauptbahnhof — with people milling about on the platform at that beastly hour? Down the sleeping-car’s passageway, somebody demanded to know, it seemed to me through the muffled distance, “Wie heisst der amerikanischer Geheimrat!” Just imagination, I told myself fretfully. But I didn’t go back to sleep until the train finally moved again — on through the night to cross the border into post-Anschluss Austria, heading for Buda-Pest. In the afternoon I had wondered how well I’d sleep with the motion and sounds of the moving train; but it was only when it occasionally stopped in the middle of the night that I would awake, with a start, alert and tense. _______________ * The Orient Express shop offers the train’s own edition of Murder on the Orient Express. The things that go on in these long-distance trains! (Graham Greene, Stamboul Train) I shall try not to make this a mere travelogue. I only want to mention a few things for the record, hoping that they will be of interest to you. One is to say that Susan and I got quite used to be met and sent off at each station by a brass band, beginning with the train’s arrival in Buda-Pest — nor did it seem more than right for us to use, Orient Express passengers only s’il vouz plaît, the station’s special entrance and sumptuous waiting-lounge built a hundred and fifty years ago for Emperor Franz Josef. (And also the one at Bucharest’s station built for the sole use of Roumania’s mad dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.) As we got off the train at Buda-Pest, I accused the Englishman in the compartment next to ours of being the returning King of Hungary traveling incognito, though later in the voyage he tried to make out to me a case for his being Raffles instead. (I cheerfully humor anyone whose reading matter for such a trip is, I noticed, an Allan Quartermain omnibus.) Susan and I missed being met by a brass band when we got home on the 9th, but seeing our four pieces of checked luggage the first ones out onto the baggage carousel at O’Hare went far to make up for it. The folkways grew still stranger as we moved eastward, perhaps never more so than when leaving Bucharest, where we were seen off by not only a band, but by folk dancers, including a dancing bear, a dancing troll, and what I can only think must have been a dancing werewolf. “If only we hadn’t missed that train at Buda-Pest!” “Well, I don’t want to rub it in but if you hadn’t insisted on standing until they’d finished their national anthem—“ “Yes, but you must show respect, Caldicott! Of course if I’d known it was going to last twenty minutes. . . .” “Well, it’s always been my contention that the Hungarian Rhapsody is not their national anthem. In any case, we were the only two standing.” (The Lady Vanishes) This was my fourth visit to Buda-Pest, whose uprising against the Soviet puppet regime in 1956, crushed by the Red Army and secret police, was the event that launched me at age ten on my education in international relations and my career. So after Hungary had ejected the communists in its first free election in 1990, it was my first destination behind the crumbling Iron Curtain just two weeks later as we started developing defense and intelligence relationships with the new emerging democratic Eastern European governments. Buda-Pest in 1990 was threadbare, soiled and wary, since the Red Army had not yet pulled out. Now it gleams, once again one of Europe’s great capitals. Susan, seeing it for the first time, loved it and wants to return sometime to spend a week there. This stop was only twenty-four hours, but we had perfect weather, a personable young guide named István Szabó whose enthusiasm for his city was infectious, rooms on the Buda heights with smashing views of the Danube below and Pest on the other bank, a banquet at the Academy of Sciences, a cruise up and down the Danube as well as an excellent tour of the town, and lunch the day of our departure at Gundel, one of Buda-Pest’s great surviving institutions. (For Gundel’s approach to food, think of S. Z. Sakall’s Uncle Felix in the Barbara Stanwyck movie Christmas in Connecticut.) Not only does the prospect of the food allure us, but the fact that we shall be devouring it in a fantastic chariot of steel and glass, hurtling through a foreign country. (Beverley Nichols, No Place Like Home) While we had a dinner and a lunch in Buda-Pest and a dinner in Bucharest, we had three dinners and four lunches aboard the Orient Express, along with continental breakfast served in our compartment each morning we were on the train. The meals were splendid, more often than not more than we could manage — something the chef found distressing, as he made his way through the dining-cars each time to see if we’d been good boys and girls. Susan once provoked close to the reaction of Aunt Dahlia’s temperamental chef Anatole when Bertie Wooster organized a hunger strike amongst some star-crossed lovers in P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves. It must have come all right in the end, though, because when the chef inscribed a menu for Susan at the end of the journey, it was practically a mash-note. The experience reminded me of something I once read about the cooking aboard the 20th Century Limited in the 1930s and ’40s, that each passenger on the runs between Chicago and New York, with just one dinner and a breakfast, consumed a pound of butter. Meal for meal, those aboard the Orient Express may not be quite that rich, but its chef got more of a crack at us over our six days aboard. The final one took place in Turkey en route to Constantinople, after a Turkish chef and groceries came aboard at the frontier to prepare and serve our final lunch aboard. Somebody lies drugged in a wagon-lits: a corpse is substituted — but by which side? And in the moments when the racing wheels quieten, one can hear cartridge-clips being fed into well-oiled automatics, ready for the final shoot-up amid the snows of the frontier. (George Behrends, The Great Trains) We entered Transylvania in darkness, close (but not too close) to Borgo Pass, and stopped in its legendary Roumanian mountains at a town called Sinaia to visit Peles Castle, the summer residence of King Carol I. Built principally between 1873 and 1883, it’s a knock-out inside and out, and I will never again think of The Prisoner of Zenda without visualizing Peles. But poor King Carol did not put the finishing touches on it until 1914, the year he died; and by then the World War had already begun to destroy the civilization Peles represented. Now Peles Castle is to be returned in two years to the king in exile, Michael, already eighty-nine years old, whom the Roumanian government expects will sell it back to the State for a sum that will set up Michael’s daughter and grandson for life, or however long the loot lasts after their grieving arrival in Monte Carlo. Bucharest’s traffic is terrible, but in Roumania’s countryside horse-drawn wagons are common, and speckled bands of gypsy encampments could be seen from the train as we traveled. Bucharest itself has a long way to go before it matches Buda-Pest or other Eastern European capitals, even though they’re also recovering from fifty years of communism. Thanks to Ceausescu tearing down beautiful old neighborhoods to build pyramids to himself, prior to Christmas 1989 when the Roumanian Army shot it out with the secret police (shooting Mr. and Mrs. C. for good measure), much of Bucharest has the charm of Pyongyang. What the Roumanians make of Bucharest life today is mixed, according to our intelligent young guide Alexandra, but no one would think of bringing that vampiric era back. Nonetheless, Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, Dracula’s fifteenth-century original, is a national hero, she said, because he fought the Turks. In that part of Europe, if you fought the Turks, you’re forgiven a lot. The next night, back on the train for dinner, we were served shot-glasses of really scorching Romanian grappa. On the large round bottle’s label was a famous fifteenth-century woodcut of Vlad the Impaler. Old horrors die hard in southeastern Europe, or perhaps remain among us as the Undead. “We left Charing Cross on the morning of the 12th, got to Paris the same night, and took the places secured for us on the Orient Express. We travelled night and day, arriving here at Varna about five o’clock. Everything is pretty well fixed now, I think, to welcome the Count on his return from his tour.” (Bram Stoker, Dracula) I thought of the Undead again the next day as we entered Bulgaria and headed for the port of Varna, for it was to the “pearl of the Black Sea” that Dracula, aboard the ship Czarina Catherine, fled from the brave party vowed to destroy him. (After arriving aboard the Orient Express, they intercepted the Count up-country before he could reach safety and turn and destroy them instead.) Bulgaria, though seemingly in better shape than Roumania, is also poor, and even the seaside residence of Prince Alexander II, if pleasant, was no great shakes as royal residences go. Our guide, a woman who was probably an Intourist guide in the bad old days, was full of facts and figures about Varna, none conveying anything of its character. What she did convey again and again is how Bulgarians feel about Turks, who conquered and ruled the land for several centuries. They don’t like them one bit. I could have been back in Seoul, hearing from Koreans about the Japanese. To hear her talk, Bulgarians still brood over Britain and France siding with the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War. Memories are long in the Balkans, and so are the grudges. A taste of the casbah, a whiff of Asia, a pause at the cross-roads of two continents, is surely the promise which has brought so many travelers on the long and tedious railway journey from Paris. (Michael Barsley, The Orient Express) Southern Roumania, eastern Bulgaria and Thracian Turkey resemble America’s badlands, with towns full of old crumbling houses — so much so that I was unprepared for Constantinople, a fascinating city, the stuff of dreams in a gorgeous setting of green hills rising above the deep-blue Sea of Marmara, Golden Horn, and Bosphorus. After a tumultuous welcome at Sirkeci station, Susan and I stayed for three additional days at the Seven Hills Hotel in the Sultanahmet “old city” district, with a staggering view from our balcony of Hagia Sophia rising a block up the hill. We visited it and the Blue Mosque across the way; spent the better part of a day cruising up and down the Bosphorus; were almost intoxicated by the sights and smells of the Spice Market; laughed at the constant flow of cats in the streets and parks (and fed one of them half my lunch one day);wove through the Muslim Mardi Gras that is Ramadan by night in Constantinople (the hospitable Turks do not eschew the grape and grain, and make very serviceable wine themselves); and our last evening there, we dined in a splendid restaurant occupying an over-one-thousand-years-old candle-lit cistern built by Byzantium’s Emperor Justinian. If you remember my Sherlock Holmes fixation, you will not be surprised about the following passage from a 1934 New Yorker article by Alexander Woollcott, a favorite of mine: To F. Yeats-Brown, the old Bengal Lancer, we are all indebted for some knowledge of how, in April five-and-thirty years ago, Abdul-Hamid the Damned spent his last night as Caliph of Islam. Lord, as he liked to put it, of Two Continents and Two Oceans, he whom Gladstone had dubbed the Great Assassin knew on that night that already the obstreperous Young Turks, twenty thousand strong, were starting toward him from Salonika. He could only issue a statement breathing his somewhat belated passion for constitutional government and then await another daylight. This was no easy prospect, for his own unrest infected the entire palace. The pigeons in the imperial dovecotes, numerous as the Young Turks, were all a-twitter. The parakeets were on edge. Even the zebras seemed to know the jig was up. Though he bathed daily in milk and never forgot to rouge his saffron cheeks, Abdul-Hamid looked all of his sixty-six years. His concubines, of whom in that house of a thousand divans he had, through the force of tradition, acquired rather more than he any longer remembered what to do with, were themselves having the vapors. And anyway, if he must somehow while away the time until dawn, he would need a more potent anodyne. Happily this was provided by the linguists at the press bureau, for in the nick of time there came dawdling into Constantinople from London a recent issue of The Strand Magazine, and they all worked like beavers on a translation from its pages. I suspect it was the issue distinguished in the minds of collectors by the first publication of the magnificent story called “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” Thus it befell that the Great Assassin spent his last night as Sultan sitting with a shawl pulled over his poor old knees while his Chamberlain deferentially read aloud to him the newest story about Sherlock Holmes. I am not one hundred percent sure I found the precise chamber in question when we visited Topkapi Palace, for there were more than a few candidates. But I certainly looked for it, and I took away, if not a precise identification, then at any rate an enviable ticket of admission to the Harem. “And for special friends of Rick’s, we have a special price—“ (Casablanca) I also report with some pride and a little surprise at the accomplishment that we did not buy any rugs. Anyone who has been to Constantinople or similar points in The Levant will know how hard that can be. No one likes to leave Venice in a hurry but the Orient Express departs at 19.28, and the cocktails we downed in Harry’s Bar an hour or so earlier are proving just the thing to make locating the right platform that bit more exciting. (The Observer) The Orient Express’s club car has an able bartender, Attilio, but like so many bars it lacked the blonde Lillet to make my favorite cocktail, the Twen-tieth Century, named after the American train I mentioned before. (At least the club car has the excuse of severely limited storage space.) At a convenient moment our last morning on the train, when I found Attilio alone in the club car setting up before the pre-lunch rush, I told him about the cocktail, writing out the recipe for him and telling him about the streamlined 20th Century Limited for whose debut the cocktail was invented in 1938. He speculated as to what among his bottles might make a decent substitute for Lillet until he was back in Venice at the end of the return voyage, with full resources for comprehensive testing. An hour or two later, during the final lunch aboard the Orient Express, he entered our dining-car with two Twentieth Centurys on a silver tray, and served them to Susan and me with his compliments. Every other passenger and waiter in the dining-car watched us and wondered. Instead of Lillet, he had used a lesser amount of Galliano, he said, so the chocolate of the crème de cacao stood out a shade more than it would otherwise. (Which is how Susan has instructed me to make hers from now on.) But they were close to perfect in appearance and taste, and Atillio rhapsodized about the cocktail, saying how glad he was to know about it and its history. So when you ride the Orient Express in the future, if you see the Twentieth Century cocktail on the club car’s list, remember that “Lellenberg was there.” “The train, it is as dangerous as a sea-voyage.” (Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express) I conclude on a somber but not inappropriate note. The Orient Express was historically a train of international intrigue, running originally from the heart of the Entente Cordiale at its western terminus through Wilhelmine Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the seat of the Ottoman Empire at its eastern end. World Wars interrupted service, and then the Cold War brought the Orient Express to a halt, for too many years. Finally the implosion of Soviet Russia’s evil empire in 1989-90 made it possible for service to be restored. Yet once again an east wind is being felt by central and eastern Europeans along the storied route. Our voyage aboard the Orient Express took place as Russia was invading Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains on Turkey’s eastern border, and it was on the minds of both the passengers and the peoples through whose lands we were passing. As we rolled through Strasbourg, how best to respond to Russia’s reviving imperial ambitions was being debated in the European Parliament there. In Buda-Pest, Istvan took us to the Citadel the Austrians built after the 1848 revolutions, a spectacular artillery platform high above the Danube below which the entire city lies totally exposed. He pointed out in the distance a tall thin tower rising high above a building. It was the chimney, he told us, of a nineteenth-century power plant now converted from coal to natural gas. Today, he told us, all of Hungary’s electricity, power for industry and business, and heat comes from natural gas; and, he said, “Ninety-eight percent of it comes from Russia. Think what that may mean someday.” And in Bulgaria, we were taken at the end of our afternoon in Varna to its Eastern Orthodox cathedral. It looks ancient but is actually not, having been built only in the beginning of the twentieth century after the Turks were finally expelled. There half a dozen priests chanted prayers for us, and the bishop spoke to us, one of our guides providing a running translation. The bishop spoke for at least ten minutes, maybe fifteen, but I can reduce what he told us to these few pointed words: “Make no mistake about it, the Cold War is coming back. And this time, you nobles who travel on the Orient Express, spare some thought for the poor Balkan peoples who have known so little liberty, and suffered so much unhappy history.” Return to About Me Return to Welcome page

Aboard the Orient Express

August 29th to September 3rd, 2008

Written September 2008 for family, and some

friends interested in railroading as it used to be.

In 1954 when I was eight years old, my parents took me to New York for the first time. My mother had wanted us to fly, but my father said No, the kinds of passenger trains we know won’t be around much longer, and I want Jon to know what they were like. So we drove to Chicago, stayed overnight at my aunt’s, and then took the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited to New York. I have never forgotten that trip; I can still see the gleaming chocolate-brown Pullman cars alongside the platform at Chicago’s Union Station, still remember our sleeping compartments and dinner in the dining-car.

Many years later, early in my career in Washington while I was still young and unencumbered, Peter Ashman proposed that we take the last great passenger train in America, Southern Railway’s Southern Crescent, all the way to New Orleans for a long jazzy weekend of eating, drinking and wenching in the French Quarter. But before we could, the Crescent derailed a bit south of Charlottesville, Va., killing several passengers. “That could have been us!” said Peter, and I could never get him interested again. Soon the Southern Crescent itself was gone, and so was a grand opportunity.

But on the 27th of last month Susan and I flew to London and took the Chunnel train (the Eurostar) to Paris, where we stayed overnight at a Left Bank hotel; and on Friday the 29th, at the Gare de l’Est, we boarded the Orient Express for Constantinople — arriving there on September 3rd — over a period of six days with three nights on the train and two more in hotels in Buda-Pest and Bucharest. We spent three additional days in Constantinople at the end of the journey, then flew to London for three more days, and returned home on the 9th.*

It is not my policy to make these statements overtly personal. But this was so exceptional an experience that I want to write about it for you, and while it is fresh in my mind. So— All aboard!

__________________

• Some people insist that it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople. If I fly there, fine, it can be Istanbul. But if I take the Orient Express there, it’s Constantinople.

Soon after nine o’clock on the morning of the day on which the police received his note, he left his hotel for the Gare de l’Est and the Orient Express. (Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios)

I must start with the Orient Express’s reputation for intrigue, for my still-present if recently dormant counter-intelligence antennae were reactivated by something even before boarding the train. After checking in at the Gare de l’Est and seeing our luggage whisked away, an Orient Express demoiselle led us across the way to an Alsatian brasserie to wait embarkation time at the Orient Express’s expense, with other travelers for Constantinople. We found ourselves at a table, as if the other two seats had been kept open just for us, with an affable man in his fifties and his younger blonde wife. And golly, they were from Evanston, just around the corner where we once lived! Just another lawyer— but West Point class of ’69, interested in military affairs! And just had dinner the night before with good old class-of-’69 Bob Kimmett, the Treasury under-secretary! I didn’t know Kimmett to test this line, with a possibly planted link to soften me up; for I happen to know Kimmett’s younger brother Mark, a National War College classmate whom I sponsored for membership in the Army & Navy Club, now a brigadier general working at the State Department. Hmm.

If I were still at the Pentagon, I’d have sicced the gumshoes onto this guy. But I’m no longer at the Pentagon, and the Cold War’s over anyway, right? So I retracted my CI antennae, most of the way anyway. (It was reassuring to find we weren’t traveling in the same Pullman car.) Susan and I returned to the Gare de l’Est, were escorted aboard to our compartment and served tea by our steward, and at 4:03 p.m. precisely the Orient Express was on its way.

The great trains are going out all over Europe, one by one, but still the Orient Express thunders superbly over 1400 miles of glittering steel track between Paris and Istanbul. (Ian Fleming, From Russia With Love)

The Consist and Crew: the engine (changed along with its driver at each border along the way), four sleeping-cars (ours the first, our compartment A8), a service car, the club car, three dining-cars (L’Oriental, Côte d’Azur, and L’Étoile du Nord), another service car, and four more sleeping-cars. While the chef was French, most of the crew were Italian out of Venice, including our sleeping-car steward Marco, and couldn’t have been better.

The Passengers: about one hundred, and while I may miss a nationality or two, I noticed American, British, Canadian, Australian, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, and even a Korean couple. The passenger wearing a luau shirt while boarding the train at the Gare de l’Est was, blessedly, Canadian; the one with a thirty years’ younger Southeast Asian mail-order bride was English; and the one truly politically incorrect passenger we met aboard was a Brit as well.

Also aboard was the current president of the Orient Express Company, a French-man, and his wife. He was clearly along to be sucked up to (and was, by the chef especially), without ever descending from Olympus to speak to another passenger as far as I noticed, let alone ask whether the rest of us were enjoying the ride. But we definitely were, and the rest of the passengers were lovely people.)

The Route: Paris — Strasbourg — Baden-Baden — Munich — Salzburg — Vienna — Buda-Pest — Sinaia — Bucharest — Varna — Constantinople, for a total of 3,469 kilometers (2,155 and a half miles, a good deal more than James Bond’s 1400) through seven countries.

Three nights in a train. It’s no joke. What do you want to go to Constantinople for anyway? (Graham Greene, Stamboul Train)

One’s first night aboard the Orient Express is of course something never to forget. We had not finish-ed tea before the Maître d’ and an assistant came to take our reservation for dinner; we took the second seating in order to relax and enjoy while the daylight lasted the view of the French countryside through which we were passing. When it began to grow dark, we unpacked and changed into black tie (no mean feat, to do that simultaneously in a Pullman compartment), and set forth for the club car where the champagne was flowing generously on the house that evening. The pianist never wandered far from Cole Porter, and we wouldn’t have had it otherwise.

The lovely old Pullman car with the padded seats and large tables. Shaded lights reflected on the windows, black with the night of foreign affairs. (John Gardner, Traitor’s Exit)

We dined that night in the second dining-car, Côte d’Azur, gleaming ebony wood with striking Lalique glass panels lit softly by the Orient Express’s trademark rose-shaded lamps on the tables. A four-course dinner with both white and red wine. You could be in real trouble after a week on this regimen. And rich smooth Colombian coffee afterwards, followed by Armagnac and such in the club car. But it wasn’t that we were unsteady on our feet as we made our way back to our sleeping-car, you understand; it was the rocking of the train as it sped along.

Marco had made up our sleeping berths while we were at dinner, the lamp on the folding table beneath the window shining upon the compartment’s polished wood and brass. We read in bed, Susan something on her Kindle — and when she turned her book off, up on the Kindle’s screensaver floated a picture of, I swear to God, Agatha Christie.* It was spooky, especially after I had switched from Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City to something called Spy Wars — an CIA-insider argument about whether a particular Soviet defector in the Cold War was genuine or a double-agent, a mess that tied the CIA in knots for years. To me those games of CIA’s are little more than the Mad Magazine spy vs spy hijinks I enjoyed as a kid, but I was reading it for a reason — to be able to discuss it in London later with someone who’s turning it into a screenplay.

And perhaps it was too atmospheric for me at that, for I woke up at three in the morning. The train had been stopped. Peering out past the edge of the window shade, I saw we were sitting in Munich’s Hauptbahnhof — with people milling about on the platform at that beastly hour? Down the sleeping-car’s passageway, somebody demanded to know, it seemed to me through the muffled distance, “Wie heisst der amerikanischer Geheimrat!”

Just imagination, I told myself fretfully. But I didn’t go back to sleep until the train finally moved again — on through the night to cross the border into post-Anschluss Austria, heading for Buda-Pest. In the afternoon I had wondered how well I’d sleep with the motion and sounds of the moving train; but it was only when it occasionally stopped in the middle of the night that I would awake, with a start, alert and tense.

_______________

* The Orient Express shop offers the train’s own edition of Murder on the Orient Express.

The things that go on in these long-distance trains!

(Graham Greene, Stamboul Train)

I shall try not to make this a mere travelogue. I only want to mention a few things for the record, hoping that they will be of interest to you.

One is to say that Susan and I got quite used to be met and sent off at each station by a brass band, beginning with the train’s arrival in Buda-Pest — nor did it seem more than right for us to use, Orient Express passengers only s’il vouz plaît, the station’s special entrance and sumptuous waiting-lounge built a hundred and fifty years ago for Emperor Franz Josef. (And also the one at Bucharest’s station built for the sole use of Roumania’s mad dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.) As we got off the train at Buda-Pest, I accused the Englishman in the compartment next to ours of being the returning King of Hungary traveling incognito, though later in the voyage he tried to make out to me a case for his being Raffles instead. (I cheerfully humor anyone whose reading matter for such a trip is, I noticed, an Allan Quartermain omnibus.) Susan and I missed being met by a brass band when we got home on the 9th, but seeing our four pieces of checked luggage the first ones out onto the baggage carousel at O’Hare went far to make up for it.

The folkways grew still stranger as we moved eastward, perhaps never more so than when leaving Bucharest, where we were seen off by not only a band, but by folk dancers, including a dancing bear, a dancing troll, and what I can only think must have been a dancing werewolf.

“If only we hadn’t missed that train at Buda-Pest!”

“Well, I don’t want to rub it in but if you hadn’t insisted on standing until they’d finished their national anthem—“

“Yes, but you must show respect, Caldicott! Of course if I’d known it was going to last twenty minutes. . . .”

“Well, it’s always been my contention that the Hungarian Rhapsody is not their national anthem. In any case, we were the only two standing.”

(The Lady Vanishes)

This was my fourth visit to Buda-Pest, whose uprising against the Soviet puppet regime in 1956, crushed by the Red Army and secret police, was the event that launched me at age ten on my education in international relations and my career. So after Hungary had ejected the communists in its first free election in 1990, it was my first destination behind the crumbling Iron Curtain just two weeks later as we started developing defense and intelligence relationships with the new emerging democratic Eastern European governments. Buda-Pest in 1990 was threadbare, soiled and wary, since the Red Army had not yet pulled out. Now it gleams, once again one of Europe’s great capitals. Susan, seeing it for the first time, loved it and wants to return sometime to spend a week there. This stop was only twenty-four hours, but we had perfect weather, a personable young guide named István Szabó whose enthusiasm for his city was infectious, rooms on the Buda heights with smashing views of the Danube below and Pest on the other bank, a banquet at the Academy of Sciences, a cruise up and down the Danube as well as an excellent tour of the town, and lunch the day of our departure at Gundel, one of Buda-Pest’s great surviving institutions. (For Gundel’s approach to food, think of S. Z. Sakall’s Uncle Felix in the Barbara Stanwyck movie Christmas in Connecticut.)

Not only does the prospect of the food allure us, but the fact that we shall be devouring it in a fantastic chariot of steel and glass, hurtling through a foreign country. (Beverley Nichols, No Place Like Home)

While we had a dinner and a lunch in Buda-Pest and a dinner in Bucharest, we had three dinners and four lunches aboard the Orient Express, along with continental breakfast served in our compartment each morning we were on the train. The meals were splendid, more often than not more than we could manage — something the chef found distressing, as he made his way through the dining-cars each time to see if we’d been good boys and girls. Susan once provoked close to the reaction of Aunt Dahlia’s temperamental chef Anatole when Bertie Wooster organized a hunger strike amongst some star-crossed lovers in P. G. Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves. It must have come all right in the end, though, because when the chef inscribed a menu for Susan at the end of the journey, it was practically a mash-note.

The experience reminded me of something I once read about the cooking aboard the 20th Century Limited in the 1930s and ’40s, that each passenger on the runs between Chicago and New York, with just one dinner and a breakfast, consumed a pound of butter. Meal for meal, those aboard the Orient Express may not be quite that rich, but its chef got more of a crack at us over our six days aboard. The final one took place in Turkey en route to Constantinople, after a Turkish chef and groceries came aboard at the frontier to prepare and serve our final lunch aboard.

Somebody lies drugged in a wagon-lits: a corpse is substituted — but by which side? And in the moments when the racing wheels quieten, one can hear cartridge-clips being fed into well-oiled automatics, ready for the final shoot-up amid the snows of the frontier.

(George Behrends, The Great Trains)

We entered Transylvania in darkness, close (but not too close) to Borgo Pass, and stopped in its legendary Roumanian mountains at a town called Sinaia to visit Peles Castle, the summer residence of King Carol I. Built principally between 1873 and 1883, it’s a knock-out inside and out, and I will never again think of The Prisoner of Zenda without visualizing Peles. But poor King Carol did not put the finishing touches on it until 1914, the year he died; and by then the World War had already begun to destroy the civilization Peles represented. Now Peles Castle is to be returned in two years to the king in exile, Michael, already eighty-nine years old, whom the Roumanian government expects will sell it back to the State for a sum that will set up Michael’s daughter and grandson for life, or however long the loot lasts after their grieving arrival in Monte Carlo.

Bucharest’s traffic is terrible, but in Roumania’s countryside horse-drawn wagons are common, and speckled bands of gypsy encampments could be seen from the train as we traveled. Bucharest itself has a long way to go before it matches Buda-Pest or other Eastern European capitals, even though they’re also recovering from fifty years of communism. Thanks to Ceausescu tearing down beautiful old neighborhoods to build pyramids to himself, prior to Christmas 1989 when the Roumanian Army shot it out with the secret police (shooting Mr. and Mrs. C. for good measure), much of Bucharest has the charm of Pyongyang. What the Roumanians make of Bucharest life today is mixed, according to our intelligent young guide Alexandra, but no one would think of bringing that vampiric era back.

Nonetheless, Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler, Dracula’s fifteenth-century original, is a national hero, she said, because he fought the Turks. In that part of Europe, if you fought the Turks, you’re forgiven a lot. The next night, back on the train for dinner, we were served shot-glasses of really scorching Romanian grappa. On the large round bottle’s label was a famous fifteenth-century woodcut of Vlad the Impaler. Old horrors die hard in southeastern Europe, or perhaps remain among us as the Undead.

“We left Charing Cross on the morning of the 12th, got to Paris the same night, and took the places secured for us on the Orient Express. We travelled night and day, arriving here at Varna about five o’clock. Everything is pretty well fixed now, I think, to welcome the Count on his return from his tour.” (Bram Stoker, Dracula)

I thought of the Undead again the next day as we entered Bulgaria and headed for the port of Varna, for it was to the “pearl of the Black Sea” that Dracula, aboard the ship Czarina Catherine, fled from the brave party vowed to destroy him. (After arriving aboard the Orient Express, they intercepted the Count up-country before he could reach safety and turn and destroy them instead.) Bulgaria, though seemingly in better shape than Roumania, is also poor, and even the seaside residence of Prince Alexander II, if pleasant, was no great shakes as royal residences go. Our guide, a woman who was probably an Intourist guide in the bad old days, was full of facts and figures about Varna, none conveying anything of its character. What she did convey again and again is how Bulgarians feel about Turks, who conquered and ruled the land for several centuries. They don’t like them one bit. I could have been back in Seoul, hearing from Koreans about the Japanese. To hear her talk, Bulgarians still brood over Britain and France siding with the Ottoman Empire in the Crimean War. Memories are long in the Balkans, and so are the grudges.

A taste of the casbah, a whiff of Asia, a pause at the cross-roads of two continents, is surely the promise which has brought so many travelers on the long and tedious railway journey from Paris.

(Michael Barsley, The Orient Express)

Southern Roumania, eastern Bulgaria and Thracian Turkey resemble America’s badlands, with towns full of old crumbling houses — so much so that I was unprepared for Constantinople, a fascinating city, the stuff of dreams in a gorgeous setting of green hills rising above the deep-blue Sea of Marmara, Golden Horn, and Bosphorus. After a tumultuous welcome at Sirkeci station, Susan and I stayed for three additional days at the Seven Hills Hotel in the Sultanahmet “old city” district, with a staggering view from our balcony of Hagia Sophia rising a block up the hill. We visited it and the Blue Mosque across the way; spent the better part of a day cruising up and down the Bosphorus; were almost intoxicated by the sights and smells of the Spice Market; laughed at the constant flow of cats in the streets and parks (and fed one of them half my lunch one day);wove through the Muslim Mardi Gras that is Ramadan by night in Constantinople (the hospitable Turks do not eschew the grape and grain, and make very serviceable wine themselves); and our last evening there, we dined in a splendid restaurant occupying an over-one-thousand-years-old candle-lit cistern built by Byzantium’s Emperor Justinian.

If you remember my Sherlock Holmes fixation, you will not be surprised about the following passage from a 1934 New Yorker article by Alexander Woollcott, a favorite of mine:

To F. Yeats-Brown, the old Bengal Lancer, we are all indebted for some knowledge of how, in April five-and-thirty years ago, Abdul-Hamid the Damned spent his last night as Caliph of Islam. Lord, as he liked to put it, of Two Continents and Two Oceans, he whom Gladstone had dubbed the Great Assassin knew on that night that already the obstreperous Young Turks, twenty thousand strong, were starting toward him from Salonika. He could only issue a statement breathing his somewhat belated passion for constitutional government and then await another daylight. This was no easy prospect, for his own unrest infected the entire palace. The pigeons in the imperial dovecotes, numerous as the Young Turks, were all a-twitter. The parakeets were on edge. Even the zebras seemed to know the jig was up. Though he bathed daily in milk and never forgot to rouge his saffron cheeks, Abdul-Hamid looked all of his sixty-six years. His concubines, of whom in that house of a thousand divans he had, through the force of tradition, acquired rather more than he any longer remembered what to do with, were themselves having the vapors. And anyway, if he must somehow while away the time until dawn, he would need a more potent anodyne. Happily this was provided by the linguists at the press bureau, for in the nick of time there came dawdling into Constantinople from London a recent issue of The Strand Magazine, and they all worked like beavers on a translation from its pages. I suspect it was the issue distinguished in the minds of collectors by the first publication of the magnificent story called “The Bruce-Partington Plans.” Thus it befell that the Great Assassin spent his last night as Sultan sitting with a shawl pulled over his poor old knees while his Chamberlain deferentially read aloud to him the newest story about Sherlock Holmes.

I am not one hundred percent sure I found the precise chamber in question when we visited Topkapi Palace, for there were more than a few candidates. But I certainly looked for it, and I took away, if not a precise identification, then at any rate an enviable ticket of admission to the Harem.

“And for special friends of Rick’s, we have a special price—“ (Casablanca)

I also report with some pride and a little surprise at the accomplishment that we did not buy any rugs. Anyone who has been to Constantinople or similar points in The Levant will know how hard that can be.

No one likes to leave Venice in a hurry but the Orient Express departs at 19.28, and the cocktails we downed in Harry’s Bar an hour or so earlier are proving just the thing to make locating the right platform that bit more exciting. (The Observer)

The Orient Express’s club car has an able bartender, Attilio, but like so many bars it lacked the blonde Lillet to make my favorite cocktail, the Twen-tieth Century, named after the American train I mentioned before. (At least the club car has the excuse of severely limited storage space.) At a convenient moment our last morning on the train, when I found Attilio alone in the club car setting up before the pre-lunch rush, I told him about the cocktail, writing out the recipe for him and telling him about the streamlined 20th Century Limited for whose debut the cocktail was invented in 1938. He speculated as to what among his bottles might make a decent substitute for Lillet until he was back in Venice at the end of the return voyage, with full resources for comprehensive testing.

An hour or two later, during the final lunch aboard the Orient Express, he entered our dining-car with two Twentieth Centurys on a silver tray, and served them to Susan and me with his compliments. Every other passenger and waiter in the dining-car watched us and wondered. Instead of Lillet, he had used a lesser amount of Galliano, he said, so the chocolate of the crème de cacao stood out a shade more than it would otherwise. (Which is how Susan has instructed me to make hers from now on.) But they were close to perfect in appearance and taste, and Atillio rhapsodized about the cocktail, saying how glad he was to know about it and its history. So when you ride the Orient Express in the future, if you see the Twentieth Century cocktail on the club car’s list, remember that “Lellenberg was there.”

“The train, it is as dangerous as a sea-voyage.”

(Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express)

I conclude on a somber but not inappropriate note. The Orient Express was historically a train of international intrigue, running originally from the heart of the Entente Cordiale at its western terminus through Wilhelmine Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the seat of the Ottoman Empire at its eastern end. World Wars interrupted service, and then the Cold War brought the Orient Express to a halt, for too many years. Finally the implosion of Soviet Russia’s evil empire in 1989-90 made it possible for service to be restored.

Yet once again an east wind is being felt by central and eastern Europeans along the storied route. Our voyage aboard the Orient Express took place as Russia was invading Georgia in the Caucasus Mountains on Turkey’s eastern border, and it was on the minds of both the passengers and the peoples through whose lands we were passing. As we rolled through Strasbourg, how best to respond to Russia’s reviving imperial ambitions was being debated in the European Parliament there. In Buda-Pest, Istvan took us to the Citadel the Austrians built after the 1848 revolutions, a spectacular artillery platform high above the Danube below which the entire city lies totally exposed. He pointed out in the distance a tall thin tower rising high above a building. It was the chimney, he told us, of a nineteenth-century power plant now converted from coal to natural gas. Today, he told us, all of Hungary’s electricity, power for industry and business, and heat comes from natural gas; and, he said, “Ninety-eight percent of it comes from Russia. Think what that may mean someday.”

And in Bulgaria, we were taken at the end of our afternoon in Varna to its Eastern Orthodox cathedral. It looks ancient but is actually not, having been built only in the beginning of the twentieth century after the Turks were finally expelled. There half a dozen priests chanted prayers for us, and the bishop spoke to us, one of our guides providing a running translation. The bishop spoke for at least ten minutes, maybe fifteen, but I can reduce what he told us to these few pointed words: “Make no mistake about it, the Cold War is coming back. And this time, you nobles who travel on the Orient Express, spare some thought for the poor Balkan peoples who have known so little liberty, and suffered so much unhappy history.”

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