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was in the office all the time; while none of his friends ever
spent that much time with their fathers, except Morty Sorgenson, because Mr. Sorgenson was a lot older and had retired, he had thought that, being as how they were on holiday, it might have
been different. It would be nice to get to know each other better, like he felt he knew his gramps. But then he did spend a lot of time with Gramps – or, more correctly, his gramps found the
time to spend a lot of time with him. Trey often spent some of his holidays on the ranch Gramps had outside Topeka.
    Trey’s trip turned out to be more torture than punishment as he spent the whole, entire day being bludgeoned at high-volume with a continuous barrage of “information of interest to
the touristic person”, followed by questions to see that he’d been paying attention.
    It seemed to Trey as if Signorina Sanpietro hardly paused for breath from the moment they left the hotel until she delivered him to the station at 15.30 precisely, where his father was waiting
to get back on board the Orient Express. Next major stop Belgrade, capital city of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which Trey thought had to be the longest name for a country ever , and with the added attraction of being somewhere The Formidable Aurelia wasn’t.
    Thankfully the stop was too short and too late in the day to actually do anything remotely cultural, but long enough for Trey’s father to send a telegram back to the Chicago office and
give him a lecture about the city and its environs (“Belgrade lies on the Danube, son – which is, at over 1,700 miles from start to finish, Europe’s second longest river”)
and for him to write his mother a postcard. Then, according to Trey’s pocket compass – the one that had been in his other jacket the day before, when he’d really needed it –
the train began to travel in a more south-easterly direction as it made its way towards the Bulgarian capital of Sofia.
    The fact that this happened to be one of the oldest cities in Europe was somewhat less fascinating to Trey than that it was also his mother’s name, except she spelled it Sophia. On the
other hand, the news that the country’s Tsar, Boris III, had escaped assassination not once but twice in the last couple of years – and that the Tsar’s actual name was
Boris Klemens Robert Maria Pius Ludwig Stanislaus Xaver Saxe-Coburg Gotha – was the kind of information that you could call enlightening and well worth knowing.
    It was, though, a pretty dull journey as his father had made it quite clear that he must not, under any circumstances, bother anyone. Which meant that he was banned from investigating who and
what was on the train (you never knew, the Giovedis might be on board...). People, his father pointed out, did not want the company of an over-imaginative boy. Trey did not believe this was true,
but the veto had been imposed and he could tell by the look on his father’s face that it was not about to be lifted any time soon...
    It was at seven o’clock in the morning, two boring days after they’d left Venice, when the train finally pulled into Constantinople’s Sirkeci Terminal. The
station was on the western side of the city (“...where the Orient casts its eye at Europe across the straits of the Bosphorus, son!”). It all sounded mighty romantic, as his gramps
would put it, but the reality came as something of a shock.
    Stations were – by the very nature of their being full of trains, luggage and people attempting to get themselves somewhere or other in a hurry – very noisy, dirty and somewhat
chaotic places. This one was chaotic, dusty and very hot, but, Trey had to admit, it was also pretty grand, with what looked like a fancy restaurant and a lobby that was the size of a small
church.
    But once they were finally on their way to the hotel – there had been something of a scene at the station when it looked like a piece of their luggage might have