Chiasso is a border town, and the railroad runs right through it. The platform stretches from the station on the Swiss side south to the Italian border, marked by a customs house and crossing gate. Philby and I had been waiting an hour, nervously watching the train halted behind the gate, still on Italian soil. Diana was on board, or so I’d hoped, until a half dozen men in leather trench coats entered the train, and a platoon of German soldiers with submachine guns surrounded it. The black locomotive released a sigh of steam from its boiler, as if straining at the leash for the final stretch.

“Gestapo,” Philby had said. “Not to worry. She has good travel papers, signed by the German general commanding rail transport in Northern Italy.”

“The Gestapo can sniff out phony papers, no matter how good.”

“Oh, they’re the real thing, old boy,” Philby said, clenching his pipe between his teeth. “This general is quite the churchgoer, especially since he arranged for the transport of several thousand Italian Jews.”

“To where?” I knew the Nazis were rounding up Jews everywhere, and shooting a lot of them. But I didn’t know where they kept transporting them to, or why. It didn’t make sense when they needed railroads for troops and supplies, but then nothing in this war made much sense.

“To those camps in the east we keep hearing about. This old general began to feel guilty, more so after we landed in Italy. He let it be known he’d be glad to do a small favor for the Vatican now and then.”

“Isn’t it dangerous to give him Diana’s name? Or whatever name she’s using?”

“Yes, it would be,” Philby said absently, as he knocked the ash from his pipe and jammed it into his coat pocket. “That’s why she’s coming out with a group of twenty nuns. Didn’t want to tell you the details before now, you understand.”