Railway glamor such as even the 20th Century Limited never knew has ridden for half a century, still rides the Orient Express. For every tycoon deposited in Chicago and for every cinemactress brought to Broadway by the New York Central's famed train, the Orient Express has carried its kings, its Kreugers, its peacock Balkan generals and as many spies as frontier guards can be bribed to pass between Europe proper and Asia improper on the musty, rattle-banging train de luxe. There are also German travelers, omnivorous, industrious and good at figuring out. as one did recently, that on the Orient Express substantially the same dinner cost in:
Italy $2.60
France 2.40
Germany 2.00
Czechoslovakia 1.75
Austria 1.60
Yugoslavia 1.40
Hungary 1.25
Turkey 1.20
Rumania .90
Greece .65
In the special express car of the Orient Express, a service which cuts shipping time for packages across the Balkans from weeks to hours, everything has been carried, from a coffin crammed with counterfeit banknotes to a notorious suede moneybag containing only a Moslem potentate knew what. Every threat of Balkan war, every komitadji bandit raid near the steel rails, every chronic Bulgarian earth tremor means costly problems to the trilingual Frenchmen in creased, drab uniforms who somehow always get the Orient Express through.
Month ago Yugoslavian editors flayed Hollywood for misrepresenting the Balkans' trains de luxe in the cinema Orient Express, scare-headed AMERICAN FILM LIES ABOUT YUGOSLAVIA (TIME, April 1). Last week the Yugoslavian Government suppressed as long as possible a secret which finally leaked out: for the first time any Yugoslav could remember since the War, the mail car of the Orient Express had been robbed.
A favorite sport of Balkan pickpockets is to steal upon the Orient Express at night stops, fish passengers' baggage expertly from open windows with long hooks. Such thefts are counted among the common risks of mid-European travel, but to rob the mail car of the Orient Express is different. In Belgrade sly winks were tipped. Yugoslavs suspected their own government of wanting something out of the Orient Express mail car and getting it.
As the Orient was approaching Zagreb, six masked men ducked from a vestibule into the mail car, trussed its French guardian, locked him in the cabinet, and methodically went through eleven sacks of mail. What, if anything, they abstracted remained a mystery. When the Orient reached Zagreb the Frenchman kicked loose, raised an alarm, but the bandits had vanished.