and song, Istanbul was a more common name among its people. (Actually, most of them just called it “the City.”) In any case, the Turkish post office stopped delivering mail marked “Constantinople” in 1923.
The Orient-Express was a real train, of course, running along various routes from Paris to Istanbul since 1883. In its heyday, the Express symbolized all that was elegant and adventurous about travel. On December 14, 2009, a few weeks after I finished this book, it ran for the last time.
There is no such thing as a “Tesla cannon,” but Nikola Tesla was a real inventor, famous for discovering the basic principles of radio, radar, and the alternating current. He spent decades working on a so-called death ray, and in the 1930s he claimed it could “shoot down 10,000 planes at a rage of 250 miles.” He offered the device to several governments, but no one took him up on it.
Maybe that’s a good thing.
