The Labors of Hercules - Agatha Christie [96]
Twisting himself sideways, leaning over the balustrade, Poirot cried despairingly:
“Chère Madame—where can I find you?”
Her reply came to him faintly from the depths. It was unexpected, yet seemed at the moment strangely apposite.
“In Hell . . .”
Hercule Poirot blinked. He blinked again. Suddenly he rocked on his feet. Unawares he had reached the top—and had neglected to step off properly. The crowd spread out round him. A little to one side a dense crowd was pressing on to the downward escalator. Should he join them? Had that been the Countess’s meaning? No doubt that travelling in the bowels of the earth at the rush hour was Hell. If that had been the Countess’s meaning, he could not agree with her more. . . .
Resolutely Poirot crossed over, sandwiched himself into the descending crowd and was borne back into the depths. At the foot of the escalator no sign of the Countess. Poirot was left with a choice of blue, amber, etc. lights to follow.
Was the Countess patronizing the Bakerloo or the Piccadilly line? Poirot visited each platform in turn. He was swept about amongst surging crowds boarding or leaving trains, but nowhere did he espy the flamboyant Russian figure, the Countess Vera Rossakoff.
Weary, battered, and infinitely chagrined, Hercule Poirot once more ascended to ground level and stepped out into the hubbub of Piccadilly Circus. He reached home in a mood of pleasurable excitement.
It is the misfortune of small precise men to hanker after large and flamboyant women. Poirot had never been able to rid himself of the fatal fascination the Countess held for him. Though it was something like twenty years since he had seen her last the magic still held. Granted that her makeup now resembled a scene-painter’s sunset, with the woman under the makeup well hidden from sight, to Hercule Poirot she still represented the sumptuous and the alluring. The little bourgeois was still thrilled by the aristocrat. The memory of the adroit way she stole jewellery roused the old admiration. He remembered the magnificent aplomb with which she had admitted the fact when taxed with it. A woman in a thousand—in a million! And he had met her again—and lost her!
“In Hell,” she had said. Surely his ears had not deceived him? She had said that?
But what had she meant by it? Had she meant London’s Underground Railways? Or were her words to be taken in a religious sense? Surely, even if her own way of life made Hell the most plausible destination for her after this life, surely—surely her Russian courtesy would not suggest that Hercule Poirot was necessarily bound for the same place?
No, she must have meant something quite different. She must have meant—Hercule Poirot was brought up short against bewilderment. What an intriguing, what an unpredictable woman! A lesser woman might have shrieked “The Ritz” or “Claridge’s.” But Vera Rossakoff had cried poignantly and impossibly: “Hell!”
Poirot sighed. But he was not defeated. In his perplexity he took the simplest and most straightforward course on the following morning, he asked his secretary, Miss Lemon.
Miss Lemon was unbelievably ugly and incredibly efficient. To her Poirot was nobody in particular—he was merely her employer. She gave him excellent service. Her private thoughts and dreams were concentrated on a new filing system which she was slowly perfecting in the recesses of her mind.
“Miss Lemon, may I ask you a question?”
“Of course, M. Poirot.” Miss Lemon took her fingers off the typewriter keys and waited attentively.
“If a friend asked you to meet her—or him—in Hell, what would you do?”
Miss Lemon, as usual, did not pause. She knew, as the saying goes, all the answers.
“It would be advisable, I think, to ring up for a table,” she said.
Hercule Poirot stared at her in a stupefied fashion.
He said, staccato, “You—would—ring—up—for—a table?”
Miss Lemon nodded and drew the telephone towards her.
“Tonight?” she asked, and taking assent