Venice Santa Lucia station
Two days later
The Simplon-Orient-Express idles beside the platform, grumbling and snorting like some great beast. It is perhaps not quite as immaculate, not quite as glamorous, as in its pre-war heyday, but there is a storied, blue-blooded majesty to it all the same.
The last calls for remaining passengers echo through the loudspeakers:
‘The Simplon-Orient-Express with stops in Trieste, Zagreb, Bucharest, Brod, Vincovci, Belgrade, Nis, Sophia and Stamboul leaves in … fifteen minutes’ time!’
Train porters wheel luggage carts with kamikaze haste through the milling crowds, passengers consult tickets and board carriages marked COMPAGNIE INTERNATIONALE DES WAGONS-LITS.
Lovers bid farewell. Well-heeled honeymooners stroll arm in arm, but with a quickening step as another whistle sounds.
Grey men carrying nondescript briefcases move through the throngs with the sinuous ease of sharks through shoals of sardines.
Their very featurelessness marks them out as agents of espionage, traversing the newly fraught barrier between West and East.
The loudspeakers blare again: ‘The Simplon-Orient-Express with stops in Trieste, Zagreb, Bucharest, Brod, Vincovci, Belgrade, Nis, Sophia and Stamboul leaves in … ten minutes’ time!’
People are running now – the last few stragglers. A faint note of panic. A man trips and curses, dropping a tin of cigarettes which bursts open. He seems to contemplate scrabbling about for them before thinking better of it, hurrying on.
The platform is emptying out now. Just a few well-wishers, waving their goodbyes to travellers now inside the train.
And then: two nuns appear from the depths of the station, small packs upon their backs, hurrying a little, which seems odd …
when does one ever see nuns hurry? Perhaps the answer is: when they are this late to catch a train.
They climb into the nearest carriage and disappear inside, just as the final whistle blows.