The Last Train to London

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Mrs. Van Lange called the name of a child in the seat in front of her—one of the girls who’d been so intent on the Sherlock Holmes story she’d told them. When a woman came and took her hand, her seatmate began to cry.

  “It’s okay,” Žofie whispered to her. “You can sit with Johanna and me.” And she lifted the child up and sat her in her lap. The baby was still quiet. No one here had seen the baby.

  They watched out the window as the children walked across the platform. Žofie tried not to think of those little twin boys who were taken away in Germany.

  After the children who were to stay had exited the carriage, the rest of them settled in, waiting for the train to set off again. After a long wait, though, Mrs. Van Lange returned, calling out, “Carl Füchsl? Is Carl Füchsl on this carriage?”

  Žofie felt a shock of alarm. Walter couldn’t lose Stephan. She couldn’t lose Stephan herself.

  “Carl Füchsl?” Mrs. Van Lange repeated.

  Žofie glanced across at Stephan still sitting there, holding tightly to his brother’s hand.

  “Carl Füchsl,” Mrs. Van Lange said yet again.

  One of the other women consulted with her.

  “I know, but he wasn’t on the car he was supposed to be on,” Mrs. Van Lange explained to the woman, who suggested perhaps the child had gone mute, as several of the children had.

  “Listen, children,” Mrs. Van Lange called out. “If you are near Carl Füchsl—number one hundred and twenty—please tell us.”

  Stephan surreptitiously turned his number so it wasn’t visible. No one answered.

  “We’d better get Mrs. Wijsmuller,” Mrs. Van Lange said.

  Together

  Truus boarded the carriage Klara van Lange was on, the second to the last, saying, “One of the children is missing?” Klara was now further along in her pregnancy than Truus had ever been, but would not be dissuaded from their work—albeit only on this side of the border now.

  “Carl Füchsl,” Klara said.

  “I see,” Truus said.

  She scanned the children in the carriage, finding Stephan Neuman in the back row. The boy held his brother in his lap. Of course he wouldn’t leave without his brother. Well, Stephan Neuman was a complication, and the complication didn’t end here, anyway. The boy was out of German hands, but he still needed to be gotten into England. She couldn’t risk that there might be some delay, as he would turn eighteen in just a few weeks.

  “Let me see the list,” she said, and she took it from Klara and scanned it. “All right,” she said to the children, “who would like to stop here for hot chocolate and a nice warm bed?”

  Nearly every hand went up. Well, of course they did. What child wouldn’t want off this train, now that it was more or less safe?

  Žofie-Helene said, “Tante Truus, Elsie here was quite devastated when Dora was called and she wasn’t. They’re friends from Vienna. I think their mothers registered them together so that they could stay together.”

  Stephan Neuman looked alarmed as Truus headed toward them down the aisle of the carriage, saying, “Elsie, would you like to go have a cup of hot chocolate and some cookies with Dora?”

  The child clung to Žofie—torn between the girl and her friend—but already Žofie was setting the child in the aisle and urging her forward, seeming as alarmed that Truus might take Stephan as Stephan himself was. How could they fail to see that she meant to take another child?

  “It’s all right, Stephan,” she said to the boy. “You can go ahead to England with your brother.”

  The little brother, little Walter Neuman, raised his rabbit and said in a pretend rabbit voice, “He’s not Walter’s brother. He’s Carl Füchsl.”

  Truus scooped up the little girl and turned, not wanting the dear little boy to see the laugher in her eyes. Heavens, that was just what she herself needed: a stuffed rabbit to take responsibility for the little lies she sometimes needed to tell.

  Had this little Elsie soiled herself? But no. Truus supposed this was the smell of sixty children in a single train carriage for a day and a night and a day again.

  As she reached the front of the carriage, she turned back. Was that the sound of a baby? Lord, now she really was imagining things.

  She glanced out the window to the anchor of Joop, trying to push back the memory of those new babies being delivered to new mothers while she lay alone under the white sheets in the white-walled hospital room. It must be seeing Klara van Lange so pregnant that brought it on.

  “Oh dear, we’re forgetting Elsie’s suitcase,” she said.

  Already, Stephan Neuman was hurrying up the aisle with the suitcase, making an unreasonable clatter in the process.

  There it was again. A baby cooing, she could swear it.

  Stephan delivered the suitcase to her, and with it a long soliloquy about how much Elsie had liked the Sherlock Holmes story Žofie-Helene had told her, for heaven’s sake, while seeming to be trying to hurry her along out of the carriage.

  “Thank you, Stephan,” she said in a tone meant to hush him, so she could better hear.

  The poor boy looked chastened. She oughtn’t have been so short. Was she hearing things?

  The children sat silently. Too silently.

  She turned little Elsie over to Klara, to take the child into the station and find Dora. She would tell Joop about the substitution herself.

  She turned back to the carriage and stood silently watching, waiting. The children stared back at her. No one spoke.

  Their silence might be hope or fear. She oughtn’t suspect these children of trying to hide something from her. Why would they hide anything, now that they were safely out of the German Reich?

  Again, the sound of a baby, coming from the back of the carriage.

  Truus wandered slowly up the aisle, listening.

  Again, the cooing of a child, moving toward a fuss.

  She examined each seat, still wondering if the sound of the child wasn’t in her imagination alone.

  At the back, there between Žofie-Helene’s feet, was a picnic basket. From inside it came again the gurgle of a baby.

  Truus exhaled relief: she hadn’t gone off her rocker, she wasn’t imagining babies who didn’t exist.

  She reached for the basket.

  Žofie-Helene, trying to block her, accidentally knocked it, setting the child inside to fussing in earnest. The girl, with defiance in her clear green eyes, opened the basket, lifted the infant, and snuggled her into silence. Truus stood watching, unable to believe there was a baby here, even now that she could see the dear little thing reaching for Žofie’s eyeglasses.

  “Žofie-Helene,” she said, her voice not much more than a whisper, “where in heaven’s name did this baby come from?”

  The girl didn’t answer.

  Truus called up the aisle, “Klara!” Thinking the child would have to go to the orphanage with the one hundred until she could sort this out.

  But Klara was outside, of course, taking little Elsie to join her friend Dora.

  “She’s my sister,” Žofie said.

  “Your sister?” Truus repeated, confused.

  “Johanna,” Žofie said.

  “But, Žofie-Helene, you didn’t . . . A picnic basket? You didn’t have a picnic basket—”

  “When I ran back with the necklace like you told me,” Žofie said. “I got her then.”

  Truus watched the girl, so comfortable with the baby. She did have a sister, Truus remembered that. It had been devastating, to have to tell the grandfather that the sister was too young. So much devastation stuck in her memory from that day.

  “Your sister is a toddler, Žofie,” she said, remembering. I’m a big girl. I’m three.

  The baby took the girl’s finger in her grasp and made a sound that might have been laughter. How old would a baby have to be to laugh?

  “If Britain can take a whole train of children,” Žofie said, “they can take one more baby. She’ll stay on my lap on the ferry. She won’t need a
seat.”

  Truus looked from Žofie-Helene to Stephan. Where had this child really come from? Žofie guarded the poor little thing as surely as if the child were her own.

  The girl had been so intent on saving this boy. But they were impossibly young. Surely they couldn’t . . .

  Truus reached over and edged the blanket back from the baby’s face, to better see. A baby with no papers. Just a few months old. You couldn’t tell anything about such a young baby.

  Dismantling

  Yes, six hundred train chocolates,” Michael said to the assembled chocolatiers. “I do understand that Arnold alone usually decorates the trains, but unless he can do them all himself in a very few hours—”

  Better to deliver six hundred imperfect trains than to miss the delivery.

  Six hundred. The party the chocolates were to be made for, he now understood, was a celebration of Eichmann’s “success in ridding Austria of six hundred little Jews.”

  Six hundred, Michael thought, including Stephan and Walter.

  “Use whatever chocolates we have,” he directed the chocolatiers. “It’s the train Obersturmführer Eichmann cares about, not the filling.”

  “Yes, you can explain to the others why their orders will be short,” he said. To most of Vienna now, the fact of Eichmann placing such a sizable order of Wirth chocolates would raise their stature, and the others would understand it was a request not to be denied.

  AFTER HE’D FINISHED with the chocolatiers and made arrangements for the delivery, Michael told Anita he was not to be further disturbed, and he returned to his office. He closed and locked the door, then sat on the couch for a long time, taking in the portrait of the Lisl he’d fallen in love with. The dark hair and dark, sultry eyes. The lips that, with a simple brush against his neck, drove him mad with desire. She had slept with Kokoschka, he supposed, although he’d never asked her about it and she had never offered, and he didn’t actually want to know. It was in her cheeks, the scratched rage there that was not Lisl’s, but rather the painter’s. So perhaps she hadn’t slept with him; perhaps the rage was at her refusal.

  He quietly lifted the portrait from the wall, set it on the floor, and began to pry the backing from the frame. He dismantled the painting careful step by careful step, removing the canvas even from its backing.

  When the painting was freed of its moorings, he slid the empty frame into the closet, to be disposed of after dark late some night.

  He pulled out the other painting, the one he’d stored in the closet, and he dismantled it in the same careful manner.

  He rolled the two canvases carefully together and tied a string around each end, then put on his overcoat and slid them underneath. He carefully buttoned them inside, feeling the hard thump of his heart at this crazy risk, and he walked out of the office, down the stairs, and out of the building, onto the Vienna street.

  At the Hotel Metropole

  Eichmann sat alone, only Tier beside him, at the sole table on the upper level of the grand Hotel Metropole dining room, the wall of glass windows behind him, the chandeliers at his level, and, below, every German of any importance in occupied Vienna. His guests were finishing a fine meal as the band played. He would speak in a moment, just a few words to proclaim the triumph of ridding Vienna of six hundred of its little Jews at the expense of the British. It was his triumph; he had commanded that it would be done only on his terms, and so it had been.

  “On my terms, Tier,” he said.

  He would have the Jew Friedmann brought in tonight and kept in a cell in the basement for a night or two, he decided as he frowned out over the people sitting together below, laughing and visiting. Why had he allowed these people to bring their spouses, with Vera still in Berlin?

  A waiter came to deliver him the first dessert, as he’d instructed. The man bowed and set the crystal dish before him: a special torte made by the chef in Eichmann’s honor, dressed with Vienna’s finest chocolates, each decorated with a train.

  Below him now, waiters cleared the dinner dishes as others stood at the ready, with trays of identical tortes to serve to the guests only after Eichmann had eaten his own and given his speech.

  He raised his fork and carved off a bite even as the waiter poured coffee from a silver server into his china cup. He wished to get on with this, to get it over with. At the bitter smell of the coffee, though, he set the fork back on the plate, the torte uneaten. The nerve of that horrible Dutchwoman, suggesting she might be worthy of drinking coffee with him.

  He pushed the coffee away.

  “I find I’m no longer hungry,” he said to the waiter. “You may remove my coffee and feed my torte to Tier.”

  The Lights of Harwich

  Young Walter Neuman was the first. The ties of the Prague were hardly thrown off and the shore was still well in sight when the North Sea seized the boy’s stomach. Truus was helping another child settle in a ferry bunk not ten feet away. The boy’s brother had just opened his suitcase and extracted a horrid bundle that, as he unpeeled the layers, turned out to be the baby’s diapers, all carefully rinsed but still quite soggy, and similarly wet handkerchiefs, and, at the bundle’s core, a journal and a book. She thought the boy might cry at the state of the book, its cover expanding from the dampness of the wrappings, the pages wavy and stuck together.

  His little brother set his stuffed Peter Rabbit on Stephan’s knee and used the rabbit’s paw to open the book and turn a clump of pages.

  Stephan said, “I’m not sure even Peter can read this anymore.”

  He laughed so bravely. Then little Walter said he was going to be sick, and promptly made good on the threat by retching right onto the opened pages. That had been hours ago. The first, but far from the last.

  Truus emerged now onto the ferry’s deck, a child’s hand in each of hers. “The fresh night air will help, if we can stay warm enough,” she assured the children, “but do stay back here on the bench, away from the railing and the sea.”

  The little boy—number 500, his tag read underneath the streak of vomit she wiped away with an already filthy handkerchief—took his thumb from his mouth long enough to say, “I’m going to be sick again.”

  “I don’t believe there is anything left inside you, Toma,” she said comfortingly. “But even if there is, you stay here. Stay back from the railing.”

  This sea was no easy crossing in the best of weather. Truus might be sick herself if she could afford to be, if there weren’t so many children to tend to. How had she imagined she could manage this? The children sick, or crying, or mercifully asleep from exhaustion. What a dreadful first impression they would make on the good people of England.

  “Can I say hello to the baby?” petite little thirteen-year-old Erika Leiter asked. She was a furniture-maker’s daughter, one of the few children who would go directly to a sponsor in Camborne rather than wait at one of the summer camps until a home could be found.

  Truus followed Erika’s gaze to see Žofie-Helene standing at the ferry’s rail, as green at the gills as any of the children.

  “Don’t move!” she commanded the children, and she rushed over and took the infant from Žofie-Helene.

  “I promised her mother I would keep her all the way to England,” Žofie said.

  “The two of you will be swimming to England,” Truus said. “You come find me when the sea is done with you, and I’ll put her back in your care. Now, be careful. Why don’t you step back from the rail? Take a seat on one of the benches.”

  “I don’t want to be sick all over the deck,” Žofie said.

  “I assure you one more will make no difference,” Truus said.

  She took Žofie’s arm with her free hand and guided her back away from the rail and the sea below it, to a vacant seat on the bench beside Erika. “Keep your eyes on the horizon,” she said. “It will help you feel better.”

  Žofie-Helene sat with the other two, facing the sea. After a moment, she said, “Those are the lights of Harwich, I suppose.”

&
nbsp; Just visible in the distance: a faint, blinking light that might be the coast of England, in which case they had perhaps another hour. “Maybe the lighthouse at Orford Ness,” Truus said. “Or Dovercourt—that’s quite near Harwich. You won’t see Harwich until we round Dovercourt, though, as it’s in a protected bay.”

  “It’s a line from a Sherlock Holmes story, ‘His Last Bow,’” Žofie said. “‘Those are the lights of Harwich, I suppose.’”

  “Is it?” Truus said. “Well, you just keep your eyes on the light and it will help you feel better. Now, I’m going to take the babe to one of the other girls.”

  She took the infant not to another girl, though, but instead to a quiet spot out of the view of Žofie-Helene. She sat on a bench herself and slowly rocked the child—Johanna, Žofie-Helene had taken to calling her, Žofie’s own sister’s name. Truus really ought to separate the two. This would come to no good end.

  There was no place for the baby in England yet, and the thought of explaining another child, of asking the English to take care of a baby they weren’t expecting and had no home for . . . Really, she ought to take the child back to Amsterdam until arrangements could be made for a home for her.

  “You might like to live in Amsterdam, mightn’t you, child-with-no-name?” she cooed, trying to push back the memory of little Adele Weiss in the tiny coffin. Truus hadn’t told even Joop about the tiny coffin.

  She began to sing to the child then, a popular old song, “The moon has risen; the golden stars shine in the sky bright and clear.”

  She looked up, startled, half expecting to see Joop frowning down at her, although of course Joop was home alone, asleep in his pajamas, a single plate waiting on the table for the solitary breakfast he’d make with a bit of bread from the bread keeper and chocolate sprinkles from the jar. It was a child standing before her, vomit down the front of his coat. Several more children gathered around her then, and a teenage girl came running, exclaiming that two of the boys were fighting.