Midnight Train to Prague - Carol Windley Page 0,6

road beside the tracks. Sunlight glinted off the dazzling paintwork and silver wheel spokes. The car was as blue as the blue sky over the green fields of Saxony. She leaned forward for a better look. The driver wore a tan jacket and a blue shirt. He steered with one hand and rested an arm casually on the door. The passenger, a woman, turned to him, laughing, her scarf fluttering in the wind like a banner. How happy they looked, those two!

The motorcar disappeared behind a hedgerow. She sat back, feeling as if it had taken part of her away with it. She understood why aviators risked their lives crossing an ocean in a flimsy aircraft. Imagine the freedom up there, alone in the clouds. Or here on earth, in a motorcar like that one.

The train rattled on, past fields in which pools of water left by the storm reflected the summer sky. Villages, house roofs, groves of trees.

“It’s very close in here,” the man beside her grumbled. He folded his newspaper and got up and opened the window as far as it would go. Before he sat down again, he managed to step not only on her neighbor’s foot but on Natalia’s as well. Her mother looked amused. She traveled second-class on principle, having been tipped off by Herr Saltzman that the Reichsbahn overpriced first-class tickets and underpriced second-class.

* * *

Soon after departing from Dresden the train came to a stop at a station near Pirna. Not a breath of air came in the open window. Have patience, the assistant conductor advised, when he poked his head in the compartment to announce that they were waiting for debris to be cleared from a branch line up ahead. Beatriz said she was going to walk in the corridor to try to get a breath of air. Time passed, and she didn’t return. The young man across from Natalia left the compartment and came back a few minutes later to inform her that her mother was unwell. “You should go to her, I think,” he said.

Beatriz was in the next carriage, leaning against a window. Her eyes were dark; she looked very pale and complained of feeling faint. Natalia guided her to a lavatory and ran cold water on her wrists, which did nothing, Beatriz said, except get her sleeves wet. Later, in the corridor, she spoke of unexpectedly encountering an old and very dear friend, someone she hadn’t seen for a long time. She thought she’d seen him at the Anhalter, and now here he was, on the train. It was a shock; her heart was still racing like mad. Natalia suggested going to their compartment, where Beatriz could rest and perhaps take one of the tablets the doctor had prescribed. “No, everyone will stare at me,” Beatriz said. “And it’s too hot in there. I think a good strong cup of coffee would settle my nerves better than anything. Shall we go and see if the dining car is open?”

Chapter Two

This, for Miklós, Count Andorján, was the inaugural run of his Bugatti Grand Sport Type 43, shipped to him three weeks earlier from Automobiles E. Bugatti in Molsheim, Alsace. The 2.3-liter in-line eight-cylinder engine generated 120 horsepower. Zero to ninety-seven kilometers per hour in twelve seconds. The fields and pine forests of Saxony slipped past. Somewhere between Leipzig and Dresden he opened it up, racing a train to a crossing, winning easily, with a little room to spare.

“What are you trying to do, kill us?” Zita said, laughing. The wind caught her scarf; it floated away, snagging on a tree at the edge of a field. Should he turn back? No, she said; what was gone, was gone.

The Bugatti’s wheels spun, slipped, gripped the road. Already his investment had yielded a good return; he felt young again, and happy.

* * *

Earlier, he’d called at his office on Kochstrasse, where he’d glanced at reports coming in on the teletype: overnight a cloudburst high in the Erzgebirge had sent torrents of water roaring down the Gottleuba and Müglitz Rivers, inundating villages, sweeping homes right off their foundations. You can’t go, the news chief, Paul Eisner, said, when Miklós reminded him he was leaving on vacation. He had one correspondent in Vienna, Eisner said, another in Palestine; he had sent a reporter to Spain to write something on Primo de Rivera’s reforms. In a few weeks, the damned Nazis were staging a rally in Nuremburg, and he’d have to send someone to

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