Dark Star Quote

European Train 1938
Different story, but I need a picture, and this one fits.

Andre Szara (in my head I say Sarza, it's probably closer to Zara, but then why is there an S?) is a Soviet journalist working in Europe in the late 1930's, just when situation is getting ready to boil over. He gets sent to various cities to write stories, mostly for Pravda but sometimes he gets printed in the western press. Because he is docile and follows the party line he is allowed a certain amount of freedom, and because he is obedient he is also 'asked' to do favors like deliver messages and check if certain people are actually at certain addresses. Nothing overt or violent, just little innocuous favors, favors which just happen to be critically important to the machinations of the Soviet spy masters, though who is actually calling the shots is a bit of a mystery. Anyway the story is rolling along / Andre is on the night train rolling along to Berlin and the train stops in the middle of nowhere and the conductor boots him off. In today's lingo Andre might say WTF? but because he's been around the block a few times he is not too surprised.

Then the author gives us this little scene:

Scene from Dark Star by Alan Furst, p. 49

Total divorced from the main story line, but it provides a pleasant counterpoint.

P.S. I was poking around in Google Photos and when I pulled up a screenshot of a real estate listing I discovered something called Lens which offered to extract the text from the image. Since that was what I wanted, I said yes, and presto! there it is, clear as a bell. The next image was a screenshot from Google Books which was all text, but Lens did not deign to notice it. There doesn't seem to be anyway to call it up either, it just appears automagically when it wants to. I suspect Google embeds something in the images it makes from books the prevents Lens from being activated. Text would have been nice, but the image works just as well for what I want here.