Sylvia Sinclair
The Star
The whistle goes. The doors slam shut all along the train.
And then … nothing. Catherine shoots a glance at her wristwatch.
‘It’s two minutes past the hour. It should have left by now.
Why aren’t we leaving?’ We’re both trying to look back down the platform from the windows of our compartment.
First class, which I guess might seem a little fancy for a couple of nuns but we need the privacy. To talk, to celebrate, to hide away.
‘It’s OK,’ I tell her, all calm on the surface. ‘We’ve come this far. I just know it’s all going to be OK. We survived an avalanche, for God’s sake!’
‘Thanks to you,’ she says, allowing herself a small, nervy smile. ‘If you hadn’t half dragged me to the side … I was like a deer in headlights.’
Another eternity of waiting, or so it seems.
Then finally, goddamn finally, there’s a clanking – the brakes releasing, I guess – and the train begins to move. Thank holy hell. ‘There we go,’ I say. Catherine sits back in her seat in relief.
One minute we’re leaving the station and the next the train seems to be floating over water, water that slides by in a misty green-blue blur …
partly because of the speed of the train, partly because of the tears in my eyes.
Sylvia Sinclair never cries … but I think I left the shell of her somewhere in the mountains, along with the platinum blonde.
See, all my braggadocio aside, I didn’t truly believe we’d pull it off. Not ’til now.
‘We’re free,’ Catherine says. ‘I can’t believe it. We’re free.’ See, that’s what the gold is to us: freedom. Even if we have to spend the rest of our lives looking over our shoulders.
‘I don’t feel too great about that woman,’ I say, after a while. ‘That’s the one thing that’s on my conscience.’
‘No,’ Catherine says, her jaw set. ‘It was her fault – her choice to come after us. She should have left well enough alone.’ I look at her, all English rose and then that ferociousness beneath the surface.
Sometimes she almost scares me a little.
All the planning: that was her work. I wasn’t even sure we really had to kill the French detective, but after Catherine found the photo of him in Tony’s stuff, she insisted we had to take him out.
She smiles and the fierceness all melts away. ‘Besides. It’s all behind us now. I’m finally ready to believe it. A new life!’
I allow myself a smile, too. We sit for a little while, watching the Italian landscape rush by – I love the campy colours they paint their houses and churches here.
Just sitting in silence together, I think of all the cafés in which we can do this, over coffee, watching the world go by.
That’ll keep the little black moths at bay. Someone to be silent with.
‘Shall we hit the dining cabin?’ I say, after a while, looking down at the nun’s habit. ‘I could do with a martini and got up like this I don’t think anyone’ll—’
The next words die on my lips. A shadow, moving through the compartment. It’s surely just someone headed to the next carriage …
But no … now the handle to our compartment door begins to turn. The door swings open.
I look to Catherine and see that her eyes have filled with tears.