"And if I refuse to obey your autocratic command?"
"It is hardly a command. Shall we say that it is--a warning?"
There was a cold menace in his tone.
"The first warning," he said softly. "You will be well advised not to
disregard it."
Then, before I had any hint of his intention, he rose and slipped
quickly away towards the door. I sprang to my feet and was after him
in a second, but by bad luck I cannoned straight into an enormously
fat man who blocked the way between me and the next table. By the time
I had disentangled myself, my quarry was just passing through the
doorway, and the next delay was from a waiter carrying a huge pile of
plates who crashed into me without the least warning. By the time I got
to the door there was no sign of the thin man with the dark beard.
The waiter was fulsome in apologies, the fat man was sitting placidly
at a table ordering his lunch. There was nothing to show that both
occurrences had not been a pure accident. Nevertheless, I had my own
opinion as to that. I knew well enough that the agents of the Big Four
were everywhere.
Needless to say, I paid no heed to the warning given me. I would do
or die in the good cause. I received in all only two answers to the
advertisements. Neither of them gave me any information of value. They
were both from actors who had played with Claud Darrell at one time or
another. Neither of them knew him at all intimately, and no new light
was thrown upon the problem of his identity and present whereabouts.
No further sign came from the Big Four until about ten days later. I
was crossing Hyde Park, lost in thought, when a voice, rich with a
persuasive foreign inflection, hailed me.
"Captain Hastings, is it not?"
A big limousine had just drawn up by the pavement. A woman was leaning
out. Exquisitely dressed in black, with wonderful pearls, I recognised
the lady first known to us as Countess Vera Rossakoff, and afterwards
under a different alias as an agent of the Big Four. Poirot, for some
reason or other, had always had a sneaking fondness for the countess.
Something in her very flamboyance attracted the little man. She was, he
was wont to declare in moments of enthusiasm, a woman in a thousand.
That she was arrayed against us, on the side of our bitterest enemies,
never seemed to weigh in his judgment. "Ah, do not pass on!" said the
countess. "I have something most important to say to you. And do not
try to have me arrested either, for that would be stupid. You were
always a little stupid--yes, yes, it is so. You are stupid now, when
you persist in disregarding the warning we sent you. It is the second
warning I bring you. Leave England at once. You can do no good here--I
tell you that frankly. You will never accomplish anything."
"In that case," I said stiffly, "it seems rather extraordinary that you
are all so anxious to get me out of the country."
The countess shrugged her shoulders--magnificent shoulders, and a
magnificent gesture.
"For my part, I think that, too, stupid. I would leave you here to play
about happily. But the chiefs, you see, are fearful that some word of
yours may give great help to those more intelligent than yourself.
Hence--you are to be banished."
The countess appeared to have a flattering idea of my abilities. I
concealed my annoyance. Doubtless this attitude of hers was assumed
expressly to annoy me and to give me the idea that I was unimportant.
"It would, of course, be quite easy to--remove you," she continued,
"but I am quite sentimental sometimes. I pleaded for you. You have a
nice little wife somewhere, have you not? And it would please the poor
little man who is dead to know that you were not to be killed. I always
liked him, you know. He was clever--but clever! Had it not been a case
of four against one I honestly believe he might have been too much for
us. I confess it frankly--he was my master! I sent a wreath to the
funeral as a token of my admiration--an enormous one of crimson roses.
Crimson roses express my temperament."