Stamboul Train by Graham Greene Page A

her nose of failure, one more chance. ‘Nothing?’
    â€˜Nothing.’
    She laughed at him angrily. ‘You’ve said a mouthful already.’ He was unimpressed and she explained slowly as if to a mental defective, ‘We reach Vienna at eight-forty tonight. By nine I shall be telephoning to the Cologne office. They’ll get my story through to London by ten o’clock. The paper doesn’t go to press for the first London edition till eleven. Even if the message is delayed, it’s possible to alter the bill page for the last edition up to three o’clock in the morning. My story will be read at breakfast tomorrow. Every paper in London will have a reporter round at the Yugoslavian Ministry by nine o’clock in the morning. Before lunch tomorrow the whole story will be known in Belgrade, and the train’s not due there till six in the evening. And there won’t be much left to the imagination either. Think what I shall be able to say. Dr Richard Czinner, the famous Socialist agitator, who disappeared from Belgrade five years ago at the time of the Kamnetz trial, is on his way home. He joined the Orient Express at Ostend on Monday and his train is due at Belgrade this evening. It is believed that his arrival will coincide with a Socialist outbreak based in the slum quarters, where Dr Czinner’s name has never been forgotten, and an attempt will probably be made to seize the station, the post office and the prison.’ Miss Warren paused. ‘That’s the story I shall telegraph. But if you’ll say more I’ll tell them to hold it until you give the word. I’m offering you a straightforward bargain.’
    â€˜I tell you that I am leaving the train at Vienna.’
    â€˜I don’t believe you.’
    Dr Czinner sucked in his breath, staring through the window at the grey luminous sky, a group of factory chimneys, and a great black metal drum. The compartment filled with the smell of gas. Cabbages were growing in the allotments through the bad air, gross bouquets sprinkled with frost. He said so softly that she had to lean forward to catch the words, ‘I have no reason to fear you.’ He was subdued, he was certain, and his calmness touched her nerves. She protested uneasily and with anger, as if the criminal in the dock, the weeping man beside the potted fern, had been endowed suddenly with a mysterious reserve of strength, ‘I can play hell with you.’
    Dr Czinner said slowly, ‘There’s going to be snow.’ The train was creeping into Nuremberg, and the great engines that ranged themselves on either side reflected the wet steel aspect of the sky. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing you can do which will harm me.’ She tapped the Baedeker and he remarked with a flash of humour: ‘Keep it as a souvenir of our meeting.’ She was certain then that her fear was justified; he was escaping her, and she stared at him with rage. If I could do him an injury, she thought watching in the mirror behind him success, in the likeness of Janet Pardoe, wandering away, lovely and undeserving and vacant down long streets and through the lounges of expensive hotels, if I could do him an injury.
    It angered her the more to find herself speechless and Dr Czinner in control. He handed her the paper and asked her, ‘Do you read German? Then read this.’ All the while that the train stood in Nuremberg station, a long twenty minutes, she stared at it. The message it contained infuriated her. She had been prepared for news of some extraordinary success, of a king’s abdication, a government’s overthrow, a popular demand for Dr Czinner’s return, which would have raised him into the position of the condescending interviewed. What she read was more extraordinary, a failure which put him completely out of her power. She had been many times bullied by the successful, never before by one who had