The microwaved risotto was not bad, if a bit congealed. At least I was not being intimidated by what George Behrend called the ‘gastrology’ of the night trains. The British film of 1948, Sleeping Car to Trieste (which is more or less a remake of Rome Express) satirises the philistinism of the British when confronted with sophisticated railway catering. At the outset of the journey the on-board chef – French, of course – makes a regal entrance to the kitchen car, being ‘the top chef of the Wagons-Lits company’. Throughout the film, he engages in a dialogue with a crass Englishman who ‘is thinking of going into the catering racket’, and wants a few tips. The chef tells him how to cook a fillet of white fish, involving white wine, shallots, herbs. The Englishman counters by commending the British method – lower it into a pan of hot water and boil it – as being both simpler and quicker. ‘But there is no sauce!’ exclaims the chef, appalled. ‘Oh, there’s usually a bottle of sauce lying around somewhere,’ says the Englishman. He then offers the chef a recipe for roly-poly pudding.
There’s a strain of Francophobia in that, and W-L, headquartered in Paris, was seen as a French company, even though it was Belgian. It did not therefore benefit from the British admiration for ‘plucky little Belgium’. If it really was true that the sleeping car conductors were fluent in three languages and conversant in half a dozen, then the average Englishman, fluent in one (and not even that after a few drinks), might easily feel intimidated. It might be thought that Sleeping Car to Trieste had been written by some gauche person who’d suffered social embarrassments on the Wagons-Lits, but the scriptwriter was William Douglas-Home, an old Etonian who’d also attended Sandhurst and Oxford and whose older brother, Alec Douglas-Home, became Prime Minister in 1963.
Dinner eaten, the choice was between the bleakness of the dining car (because the Texans had left and no one else had come) and the bleakness of my compartment. I ordered half a bottle of white wine to ‘take away’, and asked for the bill, which came to a reasonable twenty-five euros. Asked whether she took cards, the maître d’ said, ‘All except American Express and Visa Debit.’ The first part of that was not surprising (nobody takes American Express, as far as I can see), but it’s more unusual to meet a block on Visa Debit. I looked in my wallet, and saw about 120 euros, so I paid in cash and left a tip on the table. I also left something else, by accident, which we will come to.
THE COLONEL
In the compartment, the sleeping car conductor had now created the bunk below the top one, by a process that eliminated the back rest of the bottom seat. So now two beds were made up, but only the top one was made up for sleeping, with a pillow and a duvet of good clean linen. Surely this indicated that nobody would be getting on at Dijon. But then why was the second bunk made up?
At 10.10, we arrived at Dijon. This was the main junction of the old PLM network; but nothing happened. For five minutes, I had a good view of the depressing neon sign of a nearby restaurant: ‘Chic ’n’ Food’. We started again. It was too early for bed, so I decided to read, whereupon I realised I had left Major Arthur Griffiths in the dining car. I couldn’t be bothered to go back for him, and decided I would collect him in the morning at breakfast. I had a wash and climbed into bed with the half bottle of wine and my second book.
This was an autobiographical volume called Venices, by Paul Morand, author of fiction and travel books, who was described in an essay of 1987, written for the New Criterion by Renee Winegarten, as ‘the typical “haunted traveller” of the inter-war years’. Morand was such a regular on the sleepers that he described himself as a ‘horizontal nomad’, and he is one of the best writers on international trains, but he was not an easy man to love, being a dandified racist, anti-Semite and believer in the need for strong men to save Europe from excessive democracy. Winegarten sums him up as ‘a Proustian snob and salon Nietzschean’. In Venices, Morand described himself as being ‘homesick for every country!’, but Venice was his favourite destination. In his early twenties, he would get there by taking advantage of the low fares designed to attract passengers to trains running through the newly opened Simplon Tunnel.
Here he is, going to Venice and beyond, riding the Simplon-Orient Express, as it ‘dragged its tri-weekly public’ eastward from Paris through the new tunnel:
The train shook the loose glass of Gothic Swiss railway stations. For twenty-nine minutes the Simplon offered its large iron symphony. Then the banked roads and rice fields of Piedmont. Then a station leading off into nothing, a great cistern of silence and shadows that was Venice. In the morning a zinc-coloured north wind overbent the Croatian corn in the plains. Pigs, striped black and white as with racing colours, betrayed the presence of Serbia; they were apparently devouring the corpse, or rather the wheels and an alarm signal, of a car which lay derailed in a ditch. After rivers came yet other rivers that we crossed on rickety trestles beside the ruined piers of older bridges which had been destroyed in retreats. At Vinkovci we got rid of the velvet Rumanians …
At about midnight we stopped. A station sign read Vallorbe, which is on the French-Swiss border, at the south-eastern end of the tunnel under Mont d’Or. There was a white station building and white swirling snow. Muffled men walked up and down, and the train jerked about. They were changing the engine. About half an hour later we stopped again. Lausanne: a Swiss clock, flurries of snowflakes rushing across the face. As we pulled away, my conscience was afflicted by thoughts of Major Griffiths. The Passenger from Calais was a London Library book, long out of print, and would be expensive to replace. In the old days, I would have rung for the sleeping car conductor, and asked him to get it for me, or I would have asked him by simply opening my door and calling along the corridor – because the conductor would have been on his fold-down seat at the end, possibly dozing beneath a light-blue blanket (the staff blankets were always light blue, and never red like those of the passengers).
These were not the old days, however. So I put on my trousers, and the Thello slippers, and quit the compartment, almost immediately colliding with a bulky man in a leather jacket. He smelt strongly of cigarette smoke. I apologised, and he made no reply. I continued along the deserted corridors. The slippers were completely inadequate against the freezing cold of the jostling metal plates that formed the bridge between carriages. In W-L days, I could have warmed them, and myself, by the coke stoves at the ends of the corridors.
In the dining car, the book was on the table where I’d left it. The car was empty except for two people: the chef du train was talking to the woman behind the bar. He was a friendly chap, probably French, in a blue quilted jacket, and we discussed the train for a bit. I then returned to my compartment and locked the door.
What happened next is confused in my mind. I intermittently slept and looked through the window. It was at about half past two in the morning, on the approach to the Simplon Tunnel, that the scenery became stunning. The full moon suddenly seemed to have been switched on, or maybe it was the luminosity of the snow on the mountainsides, revealing deep gorges, pine trees, a fast-flowing river by the side of the tracks. I recall the stop at Brig that preceded our run through the ‘iron symphony’ of the Simplon, and – more vaguely – working out that the next stop we made, after emerging from the Tunnel, must have been at Domodossola, in Italy. At about 3.30am I went to sleep for a couple of hours, and awoke when we stopped at Milan Central. The grandeur of that station, a vanity project by Mussolini (who was ‘committed to a surprisingly advanced modernism,’ according to Steven Parissien in Station to Station), is undetectable from a train that has been swallowed by it. All I really noticed was one bleary-looking commuter checking his mobile phone. I did the same; it was 5.50am.
We reversed out of Milan, which is a terminus, and were quickly into frosted fields, with mountains in the distance. Was it too early to claim my free breakfast? I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep, so I got dressed and put on my jacket, checking in the pockets for my wallet. I then opened my wallet. All my credit and debit cards were prese
nt, but where I expected to see about a hundred euros in cash, there was a solitary English five-pound note.
I hunted through the compartment for the missing money. After ten minutes the verdict was in for certain: I had been robbed in the night. I could clearly recall that the nasty shock of the dining car not accepting my Visa Debit had been mitigated by the fact that I’d had the necessary euros in my wallet. I walked along the train, and found the sleeping car conductor on my way back to the dining car. He was as friendly as he had been the night before, and his face fell when I said I’d been robbed. He showed me into the dining car, where I re-encountered the chef du train. He sat down opposite me at a table, and as I was served with my free breakfast – coffee, fruit juice, yoghurt and croissant – we reviewed the various scenarios. I told him about my visit to the dining car to eat, before Dijon. I admitted I had not asked the sleeping car conductor to lock my door, but then I had been carrying all my valuables with me. The chef du train then reminded me that he had seen me in the dining car later on. Feeling like a fool, I admitted that on that occasion, I had neither asked for the door to be locked, nor carried my wallet with me. It had remained in my jacket pocket, which had been hung up just inside the door. This was just after Lausanne, at about 12.45am.
The chef du train then had an admission of his own to make. There had been other thefts on the train in recent months: ‘There is a man who … I don’t know the English word – we call him “the stealer”.’
‘The word is “thief”,’ I said.
‘Yes, that’s it, he is a thief.’
In the past, the chef du train explained, the thief had furtively boarded the train during the ‘technical stop’ at Lausanne. ‘Lausanne to Brig can be the danger,’ he said. ‘We have a security guard – a detective. He was on the train last night, but he didn’t get on until Brig. That is always how it works, because he says he is not authorised to work in Switzerland.’
‘But Brig is in Switzerland,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said the train manager, ‘so it is contradictory.’
He then explained that the detective had got off the train at Domodossola, and looked along the platform. He had glimpsed the thief on the platform but he (the thief) did not get on the train.
‘So,’ I said, ‘as far as the detective was concerned, the thief was not on the train last night?’
‘That’s right,’ said the train guard, rather doubtfully. ‘Was it possible,’ I suggested, ‘that when the detective saw the thief at Domodossola, the thief did not need to get on the train, because he’d just got off it, having robbed me?’
‘It’s possible,’ said the train manager.
The detective had left the train at Milan, so he was unavailable. I asked the train manager why the thief, if he was known to be the thief, could not be arrested. ‘Because there is no proof,’ he said with a sad shake of the head.
I mentioned the man I had bumped into while walking towards the dining car to collect Major Griffiths, after Lausanne and before Brig – right in the danger zone.
‘We think the thief is a Moroccan guy,’ said the train manager. ‘Did he look Moroccan?’
‘He could have been Moroccan, yes, but it was dark, and …’
We seemed to have become enveloped in a clichéd detective story. But if this had been fiction, the crime would have occurred after Brig – as the train sped through the Simplon Tunnel. Atavistic suspicions surround deep and long tunnels: they are unnatural. When the Mont Cenis Tunnel was being excavated one English paper warned that the contractors shouldn’t be tampering with ‘the bosom of the mighty fortress’. (Paradoxically, this tunnel, through which sleepers like the Rome Express would run, was excavated using so noisy a new invention as the pneumatic drill.) A subterranean transition from one place to another is too simple, fate-provokingly glib. Somehow-disturbing photographs exist of trains with snow on the carriage roofs – picked up on one side of an Alpine tunnel – running under bright sunshine on the other side. The presumption of people entering tunnels is likely to be challenged. When I was going through the Simplon as a boy in the 1970s, the explosives by which the Italians and the Swiss proposed to blow it up during the war were still in place. They were not removed until 2001.
In an essay of 1979, ‘Tunnels Through the Alps’, Paul Sharp writes, ‘Tunnels have always held a deep fascination for man. The legends of ancient times are full of references – the myths of the Labyrinth, Persephone, the Styx … and the early SF of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs with their tales of journeys to the centre of the earth … All this combined with Freud knows what makes a strange and sombre contrast to the wide vistas above ground.’ He adds that while the signalling of the Simplon was now automated, there used to be ‘a signal box in the heart of the mountain, manned in shifts’. It was located in one of the galleries between the two bores of the tunnel.
In fiction, a railway passenger entering a tunnel may not emerge. In From Russia with Love, the Simplon is where the fraudulent ‘Englishman’, Grant, plans to shoot Bond as he returns from Istanbul on the Simplon Orient Express. (Bond suspects he is not English because in the dining car he orders red wine with fish.) In The Venice Train, one of Simenon’s novels not featuring Inspector Maigret, a downtrodden French family man called Calmar is returning to Paris from a holiday in Venice. He is intending to change trains at Lausanne, and will have a three-hour wait for his connection. He mentions this to a stranger sitting opposite, whose own connection will allow him only a few minutes at Lausanne. He therefore asks if Calmar will take a bag from a left luggage office in Lausanne to a certain address in the city. Unwisely (and, I contend, implausibly) Calmar agrees, and he goes through with the commission even after the stranger steps out of the compartment as the train goes through the Simplon, and fails to reappear.
The chef du train asked if I wanted to make a formal report of the crime, which could then be handed on to the police. I said I would think about it. I then speculated that perhaps the thief had not entered the compartment when I’d left it, but had done so later on, while I was asleep. ‘But your door was locked,’ the train manager reminded me.
‘But perhaps they had a master key?’ I suggested, thinking of the Berne key. ‘Perhaps they were able to unlock the door, steal the money, then lock it again from outside?’
The chef du train heard me out politely, then we walked back to my compartment (passing the Texans, on their way to the dining car, who cheerily hoped that I’d slept well). The chef du train wanted to demonstrate a security feature. He invited me to step into the compartment and lock the door. He then attempted to open the door from the corridor with his master key, and it only opened a couple of inches, being retained by a steel fixture triggered by the locking of the door. The logic was that the door opened far enough to see whether it would be necessary to override this retainer by force – which would involve making a lot of noise. His point was that nobody, even equipped with a master key, could get into the compartment undetected if the compartment was locked. So the thief could only have done his work when I returned to the dining car to collect Major Griffiths.
In Wagons-Lits days he could not have done it even then, because the sleeping car conductor would have been sitting on his fold-down seat at the end of the corridor. The only way around this would have been to involve him in the crime, as with Pierre Michel, the conductor in Murder on the Orient Express, whose complicity (Poirot decides) explains the whole reason for committing the murder on the train in the first place.
After cleaning my teeth and packing my things, I decided I would ask the chef du train to make an official report of the theft, but not to involve the police. It didn’t seem worth it for a sum equivalent to about sixty pounds.
As we traversed the causeway between Venice Mestre and Venice Santa Lucia stations, I ought to have been paying attention to the promising brightness of the day and the sparkling water. Instead, I was back in the dining car with my bag beside me, and making a statement to the chef du
train, who wrote in French, beginning, ‘Le client déclare avoir découvert à environ 5h du matin …’ It was a waste of time, just as the empty water alongside us seemed a waste of space, a necessary penance before the beauty of Venice. He finished writing as we were approaching Venice Santa Lucia, which involves running parallel to the vineyard of the Carmelite monastery that is part of the Church of St Mary of Nazareth.
Inviting me to sign the statement, the chef du train said, ‘I don’t know what happened, but I’m sorry for what happened,’ and I believed him.
VENICE
Construction of the Venice Santa Lucia Station was started in the 1930s and finished in the 1950s. It is low, wide and austere, a function of Mussolini’s surprising Modernism and rail enthusiasm. In Blood, Iron & Gold, Christian Wolmar addresses the question of whether Mussolini really did ‘make the trains run on time’. He begins by pointing out that ‘Italy emerged from the inter-war period with the greatest proportion of electrified lines among European countries. The driving force was the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, who saw electric trains as epitomizing the modernizing image to boost Italy’s standing in the world.’ Mussolini certainly invested heavily in railways, but his reputation for making them run on time
was based on a special press trip staged in July 1939, days before the outbreak of war. A three-car electric unit travelled from Florence to Milan at an average of 102 mph for the near 200-mile trip, despite a long section through the Apennines, a world record that would stand until the launch of the Japanese high speed train a quarter of a century later.
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