The waitress came, a plump girl, profoundly bored, and stood beside him with her pad of paper. He had no appetite – the fag of tramping with the holdall through a hot city he had little affection for had triggered a nagging headache – but he selected something at random from the menu and ordered a bottle of Kaiser beer. She brought the beer immediately. It was cold and it seemed to do him some good. He relaxed a little, closing his eyes, trying to come to terms with the fact that he was here at all – in Vienna! – when in a saner, more orderly world he would be at his desk in Paris, picking at lines of dialogue and starting to wonder what there might be in the fridge for lunch.

The rhythms of the train were in his blood still, a sensation distantly familiar to him, for he had once known the night train well. Four or five times a year he had taken it to visit his mother and Uncle Ernö. ‘The Orient Express’ – an exotic name for a conveyance that was neither luxurious nor even particularly fast. Six berths to a compartment, eleven compartments to a car, and along the length of the carriage a narrow corridor where people smoked and leaned at the windows, gazing moodily at dark blue fields and the lights of strange towns.

And there was always some incident, some curious encounter. On this trip he had spent an hour somewhere in Eastern France calming the fears of a red-haired American girl who had heard, or perhaps read in one of those tedious guidebooks no one seemed capable of leaving home without, that there were criminal gangs who sprayed knockout gas into the sleeping cars in order to rob, or even to murder, the unconscious passengers. His English – unused since San Francisco – was shaky, and she spoke nothing else, but with the help of some schnapps he had at last succeeded in making her see the absurdity of her fears, though privately he suspected that farther to the east (Romania?) such gangs did indeed exist, for these were desperate times.

Once the girl was asleep, and the Frenchman on the berth below her ceased to grind his teeth, László had stretched out on his own bunk, and thought back to to his last journey on the Orient Express, the winter of 1989, when he had come to Vienna to watch his mother die. János had flown in from New York (where his marriage to Patty was ending in the divorce courts), and the pair of them had carried on a three-day vigil at their mother’s bedside in the Allgemeines Krankenhaus, János muttering in László’s ear about justice and love and private detectives, while László watched the February snow, silver and dark, building drifts on the sill of the narrow window above his mother’s head.