Dine and Die on the Danube Express (27 page)

“This was first discovered more than a century ago when Prince Rakoczi, the ruler of Transylvania, delayed the harvest on his estate because he was busy with one of his wars and all his workers were fighting. He managed to win that war, and the harvest could not be brought in until late November.”

“Doesn’t that mean,” asked Eva Zilinsky, “that any vineyard could make Tokay? All they have to do is wait until the weather gets cold—like the
Spatlese
wines from Germany.”

“They are simply sweet wines, gathered late,” said Herr Brenner. “Tokay has a taste that is like no other wine—but you can see for yourselves.” He motioned to the waiter. He handled the bottle reverently, with a cloth with colored edges, clearly a special one.

“This grade is known as
Essentia
,” said Herr Brenner. “The grapes for this are not pressed, the juice is allowed to drip from the grapes into a tub. It is one of the factors that make Tokay unique. Very few wine producers want to invest that much time in a wine. This is the finest grade of Tokay.”

It was immeasurably sweet. Little wonder the glasses were tiny and not filled. There was a hint of fruit, a little like apricots but not quite identifiable. The remarkable thing about Tokay—and I had noticed it before—is that its sweetness changes to a dry finish so that the mouth is not left with the cloying sweetness of sugar. It is truly a taste experience quite unlike any other in the wine realm.

After the Tokay, my dinner companions drifted away one by one. I was left till last because I was observing the table where Irena Koslova sat. The Australians had left already. I watched Larouge speaking to Irena, and she was shaking her head. The Frenchman tried again but finally gave up and left. I thought Irena was looking in the direction of my table, and I walked over to hers.

“Enjoy your last meal in Hungary for this trip?” she asked me.

“Yes, it was excellent.”

“Did you notice that La Malescu is not here?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I hope it doesn’t mean that she has disappeared again.”

“Elisha Tabor is not here either.”

“That’s true. A good thing you are here—brightening up the room.”

She smiled an acknowledgment and rose. I went with her to the door, which a steward opened for us.

Irena hesitated. “Let me see now—I still have a problem remembering which direction my compartment is.”

“It’s this way,” I told her. “May I escort you?”

At the door, she produced her key and inserted it in the lock.

“A pity we couldn’t sit at the same table,” I said.

The door swung open. “Larouge and that nice Australian lady waved to me to join them,” she said.

“Like I say—a pity.”

She looked into my eyes. Hers were deep and inviting. “Doesn’t matter,” she said, “you’re here now.” She placed a hand at the back of my neck and pulled me into the compartment, adroitly kicking the door closed at the same time.

I
RENA WAS STILL SLEEPING
the next morning when I woke. She opened her eyes briefly, smiled, turned over, and went back to sleep. I dressed, returned to my compartment to change, and went to the dining coach with a healthy appetite.

I started with a bowl of fresh fruit, which included plump cherries, juicy apricots, aromatic pears, fat blackberries, and tangy grapefruit slices. One of the chefs was Italian, I knew, and he and his chrome-plated monster of a machine produced a
caffe latte
that put all its imitations to shame. I asked for a cup of the magnificent brew it produced, then I was ready to order.

The waiter ran through a tempting array of possibilities. “I want to stay with Hungarian dishes as long as we are still in Hungary,” I told him.

He motioned out of the window. The rail line was running along the edge of the Danube Valley, looking down two hundred feet or more at the slowly flowing river. The surface was broken by numerous small islands. A castle that was in no worse repair than a score of others we had seen slipped by, and, as we climbed even higher, a vineyard stretched away to the horizon.

“We travel more slowly at night,” the waiter said, “so we are still in Hungary, though we will be leaving it very soon. Zimony will be the last Hungarian town we pass.”

“Didn’t it used to be an important frontier station?” I asked.

“Yes, it did, very important.” He was at least ten years older than I and he smiled with a touch of nostalgia. “But in these days of harmony, frontiers are no longer the exciting places they were in the past. Passports are no longer the vital documents they were—officials would delay a train for two or three hours to examine passports, then the customs people would come through the train with forms and documents and searches and questions.”

“The good old days?”

“Ah, you are right. Perhaps some things have changed for the better, what used to take hours now only takes minutes.”

“Still, all the romance has gone out of it, hasn’t it?” I said. “Frontier guards with their uniforms and guns, the flags, the barriers, the languages—now one frontier is just like another, and the thrilling moments of passing from country to country have vanished.”

“That is unfortunately true.”

“At least the
Donau Schnellzug
maintains a semblance of romance,” I said. “The periodic whistle, the puff of smoke, the slower speed … not to mention these coaches.”

“It is a wonderful train,” he agreed and waited patiently for me to make a breakfast decision, his pen poised.

“Tell me about the Crêpes with Ham.”

“Certainly. Flour, salt, eggs, butter, and milk are blended until thick. We let this batter stand at least an hour, then we bake small crêpes. We mince ham and add beaten egg yolks. In another pan, we beat sour cream with white pepper and tarragon and add it to the ham mixture. We spread some on each crêpe and fold into small squares.” He smiled, took a breath, and continued.

“Each crêpe is then dipped into beaten egg, then into flour, then into egg again, and finally into bread crumbs. The crepes are then fried until crisp and served at once.”

“I wouldn’t dare order anything else,” I told him. “It sounds irresistible.”

It was. The tarragon and pepper had been added by a sure hand at spicing, and the crêpe were golden brown and thin, just on the edge of crispy.

“Something else,
Meinherr
?” the waiter asked when I had finished.

“One more cup of this delicious
caffe latte
,” I said.

I looked down on a small market square, full of stands and people. It was evidently market day, and the farmers had brought in their wares for sale. Our train moved past it at a reduced speed so that we could take in the full view. It was an animated scene and a Gypsy band was unpacking its instruments. The
Zigeuner
, the Gypsies, are making a comeback in Hungary after so many decades of repression and brutality by two ruthless totalitarian regimes in succession.

Now we were approaching the junction point where the broad Save River joins the Danube and widens it considerably. The great War Island sits in the middle of the conflux, and the railbed here runs high along the riverbank. The town of Zimony was coming into sight, surrounded by trees and green hills. This is Croatia once again, after being part of Yugoslavia for so long and Austrian before that. We rolled smoothly past the town and as the waiter brought my second
caffe latte
, he glanced out the window, and said, “Now we approach Belgrade.” It was the Serbian capital once again after it, too, had been absorbed by Yugoslavia.

Ferocious battles had been fought many times in history over this crucial bend where two great rivers meet. I knew that such conflicts had persisted since Celtic times and decided that, after breakfast, I would seek out Professor Sundvall and ask him to fill in the details.

I was watching boats on the gently flowing Danube when the door to the dining coach opened with an unusual abruptness. A steward burst in, looked around the tables. He evidently did not see the person he was looking for, but at that moment the door at the other end of the coach opened and Karl Kramer entered.

The steward immediately approached him, and the two spoke in low tones. The steward was clearly agitated and, over his shoulder, Kramer saw me. He exchanged a few more words with the steward, then the two of them came to my table. The adjacent tables were empty, but even so, Kramer’s voice was kept low.

“You had better come with us. Werner here tells me we have another dead body.”

I almost choked on the coffee. Werner, the steward, was a small man with streaky gray hair and an alert manner.

“Tell us,” Kramer invited.

“It’s a young lady,” Werner said. “I’m afraid she’s dead.”

I felt a freezing cold grip me. After carefully swallowing the mouthful of coffee, I took another sip for restorative purposes. It didn’t help. Fortunately, Kramer looked so disturbed by the news that he didn’t notice my alarm, and the steward was so upset he was not in an observant mood either.

“Where is she?” Kramer asked.

“In her compartment. I think she—you had better come and see,” said Werner.

We walked out of the dining coach, all endeavoring to look calm. I wasn’t sure any of us were convincing. Werner led the way through the adjacent coach and into the next. My heart was pounding, my brain filled with disbelief and anguish.

When had this happened? After I had left Irena’s compartment? But such a short time had elapsed. Would she admit anyone at such an hour? Perhaps she had thought it was me returning. Who else would she admit?

When the steward stopped in front of a compartment door and Kramer produced his master key, my stomach flipped over, my head was in turmoil—but now the reason was different.

I had been rehearsing my answers. “She was alive when I left her … Certainly, I had no reason to harm her … No, I had never met her before this journey … What time had it been? …”

Now my brain was settling. I was still puzzled, but knew I didn’t need my defensive answers.

It was not Irena’s compartment.

My utter relief must have showed in my attitude, but neither Kramer nor Werner the steward noticed. My relief was that Irena was all right—but Werner had spoken of a dead woman. Who was it?

The door opened and we entered. She sat in a chair at a table for two. She wore a sky-blue dressing gown and puffy slippers. It was Elisha Tabor.

She was in a normal sitting position, though her head rested on the chairback, her eyes closed. She was not breathing, but her face appeared relaxed. Kramer pressed his fingers on the inside of her wrist, then shook his head. He placed his hand flat on her forearm. “She has been dead six to eight hours,” he said.

An empty wine glass was on the small table in front of her. I sniffed at it but could detect nothing. All was orderly and completely normal.

Kramer moved restlessly through the room, looking, peering, probing, and Werner took his lead from the security chief and did likewise but touched nothing.

I went into the bathroom. In front of the large mirror, an array of cosmetics was spread and several bottles and small boxes of pharmaceutical products. I looked through them—headache remedies, sleeping pills, cold remedies. Kramer came in, and I shook my head.

“Then it is far beyond coincidence,” he said. “It is murder.”

We continued our investigation, but none of us found anything unusual. Werner glanced out of the window as we were concluding our third tour of the compartment.

“We are leaving Hungary,” he told Kramer.

I knew that he was reminding him that the train was no longer under the official jurisdiction of Hungary and that would make it easier to continue on to Bucharest without hindrance. The multinational nature of the Danube Express blurred those lines of delineation anyway, and the blurring was compounded by the diplomatic leverage that Herr Brenner could exert.

Kramer had his phone out and called Dr. Stolz first. I could hear that there was some amazement at the other end of the connection. It was understandable that the doctor should be bewildered at being called upon to attend to yet another dead body. It was clearly not turning out to be the relaxing journey he had anticipated.

Kramer then called Thomas, and I could hear that he was asking him to check what messages had gone out in the recent hours. Next, he called Erich Brenner and broke the news to him. He didn’t do it gently—there was no way to do that.

He had hung up, and we had patrolled the compartment once more without seeing any item that was unusual, when Herr Brenner arrived. He was out of breath and bordering on the incredulous. He stared at the body, then listened to Kramer and shook his head sadly. “Two women dead. I can’t believe it.”

He and Kramer had a discussion on the political ramifications and agreed that it should be possible to continue the journey to Bucharest and turn over the investigation to the authorities there. The possibility of stopping in Yugoslavia because the crime had been discovered there was dismissed as quickly as it arose.

“Besides,” Kramer said grimly, “we intend to solve both deaths before reaching Bucharest.” He looked at me and I nodded vigorously. “That’s right. We will.”

Herr Brenner looked relieved. He and Kramer put together a short message to send back to
Donau Schnellzug
headquarters in Germany and secure strong backing there first for the train’s continuation, then another to send ahead to Bucharest to have them prepare a forensic team to bring on board.

“We will have this solved before then,” Kramer said, “but we need to have Bucharest believe that they will have authority over it.

Brenner left, and, as he did so, Kramer’s phone buzzed. He listened, then, the phone still in his hand, said to me, “A message went out from a cell phone just before midnight. It went to the Budapest
Times
.”

“Czerny?”

“It could have been.” He shook his head. “What a pity we are not permitted to have a full trace on every call that goes out.”

“Can you have Thomas have a look at the morning edition of the Budapest
Times
? See if there was a story that could have gone out?”