“Oh, but they’re feeling better now,” Jerome said, but the doorman wasn’t listening. He had turned around—swatting several pinstripe members of the crowd with his fish statue as he did so—and was calling up to the people on the stage. “Hey, boss!” he said, and both Esmé and Gunther turned to look as he pointed at the three Baudelaires. “The orphans are here!”
Esmé gasped, and she was so affected by the element of surprise that she almost dropped her sack of coins, but Gunther merely turned his head and looked directly at the children. His eyes shone very, very brightly, even the one behind his monocle, and the Baudelaires were horrified to recognize his expression. Gunther was smiling as if he had just told a joke, and it was an expression he wore when his treacherous mind was working its hardest.
“Orphans in,” he said, still insisting on pretending that he could not speak English properly. “O.K. for orphans to be here, please.” Esmé looked curiously at Gunther, but then shrugged, and gestured to the doorman with a long-nailed hand that everything was O.K. The doorman shrugged back at her, and then gave the Baudelaires a strange smile and walked out of the award-winning door. “We will skip Lot #49, please,” Gunther continued. “We will bid on Lot #50, please, and then, please, auction is over.”
“But what about all the other items?” someone called.
“Skip ’em,” Esmé said dismissively. “I’ve made enough money today.”
“I never thought I’d hear Esmé say that,” Jerome murmured.
“Lot #50, please,” Gunther announced, and pushed an enormous cardboard box onto the stage. It was as big as the fish statue—just the right size for storing two small children. The box had “V.F.D.” printed on it in big black letters, and the Baudelaires saw that some tiny airholes had been poked in the top. The three siblings could picture their friends, trapped inside the box and terrified that they were about to be smuggled out of the city. “V.F.D. please,” Gunther said. “Who bid?”
“I bid twenty,” Jerome said, and winked at the children.
“What in the world is ‘V.F.D.’?” Mr. Poe asked.
Violet knew that she had no time to try to explain everything to Mr. Poe. “It’s a surprise,” she said. “Stick around and find out.”
“Fifty,” said another voice, and the Baudelaires turned to see that this second bid had come from the man in sunglasses who had asked them to leave.
“That doesn’t look like one of Gunther’s assistants,” Klaus whispered to his sisters.
“You never know,” Violet replied. “They’re hard to spot.”
“Fifty-five,” Jerome called out. Esmé frowned at him, and then gave the Baudelaires a very mean glare.
“One hundred,” the man in sunglasses said.
“Goodness, children,” Jerome said. “This is getting very expensive. Are you sure you want this V.F.D.?”
“You’re buying this for the children?” Mr. Poe said. “Please, Mr. Squalor, don’t spoil these youngsters.”
“He’s not spoiling us!” Violet said, afraid that Gunther would stop the bidding. “Please, Jerome, please buy Lot #50 for us. We’ll explain everything later.”
Jerome sighed. “Very well,” he said. “I guess it’s only natural that you’d want some in things, after spending time with Esmé. I bid one hundred eight.”
“Two hundred,” the man in sunglasses said. The Baudelaires craned their necks to try and get a better look at him, but the man in sunglasses didn’t look any more familiar.
“Two hundred four,” Jerome said, and then looked down at the children. “I won’t bid any higher, children. This is getting much too expensive, and bidding is too much like arguing for me to enjoy it.”
“Three hundred,” the man in sunglasses said, and the Baudelaire children looked at one another in horror. What could they do? Their friends were about to slip out of their grasp.
“Please, Jerome,” Violet said. “I beg of you, please buy this for us.”
Jerome shook his head. “Someday you’ll understand,” he said. “It’s not worth it to spend money on silly in things.”
Klaus turned to Mr. Poe. “Mr. Poe,” he said, “would you be willing to loan us some money from the bank?”
“To buy a cardboard box?” Mr. Poe said. “I should say not. Ocean decorations are one thing, but I don’t want you children wasting money on a box of something, no matter what it is.”
“Final bid is three hundred, please,” Gunther said, turning and giving Esmé a monocled wink. “Please, sir, if—”
“Thousand!”
Gunther stopped at the sound of a new bidder for Lot #50. Esmé’s eyes widened, and she grinned at the thought of putting such an enormous sum in her pinstripe purse. The in crowd looked around, trying to figure out where this new voice was coming from, but nobody suspected such a long and valuable word would originate in the mouth of a tiny baby who was no bigger than a salami.
“Thousand!” Sunny shrieked again, and her siblings held their breath. They knew, of course, that their sister had no such sum of money, but they hoped that Gunther could not see where this bid was coming from, and would be too greedy to find out. The ersatz auctioneer looked at Esmé, and then again out into the crowd.
“Where in the world did Sunny get that kind of money?” Jerome asked Mr. Poe.
“Well, when the children were in boarding school,” Mr. Poe answered, “Sunny worked as a receptionist, but I had no idea that her salary was that high.”
“Thousand!” Sunny insisted, and finally Gunther gave in.
“The highest bid is now one thousand,” he said, and then remembered to pretend that he wasn’t fluent in English. “Please,” he added.
“Good grief!” the man in sunglasses said. “I’m not going to pay more than one thousand for V.F.D. It’s not worth it.”
“It is to us,” Violet said fiercely, and the three children walked toward the stage. Every eye in the crowd fell on the siblings as they left an ashy trail behind them on their way to the cardboard box. Jerome looked confused. Mr. Poe looked befuddled, a word which here means “as confused as Jerome.” Esmé looked vicious. The man in sunglasses looked like he had lost an auction. And Gunther kept smiling, as if a joke he had told was only getting funnier and funnier. Violet and Klaus climbed up on the stage and then hoisted Sunny up alongside them, and the three orphans looked fiercely at the terrible man who had imprisoned their friends.
“Give your thousand, please, to Mrs. Squalor,” Gunther said, grinning down at the children. “And then auction is over.”
“The only thing that is over,” Klaus said, “is your horrible plan.”
“Silko!” Sunny agreed, and then, using her teeth even though they were still sore from climbing up the elevator shaft, the youngest Baudelaire bit into the cardboard box and began ripping it apart, hoping that she wasn’t hurting Duncan and Isadora Quagmire as she did so.
“Wait a minute, kids!” Esmé snarled, getting out of her fancy chair and stomping over to the box. “You can’t open the box until you give me the money. That’s illegal!”
“What is illegal,” Klaus said, “is auctioning off children. And soon this whole room will see that you have broken the law!”
“What’s this?” Mr. Poe asked, striding toward the stage. Jerome followed him, looking from the orphans to his wife in confusion.
“The Quagmire triplets are in this box,” Violet explained, helping her sister tear it open. “Gunther and Esmé are trying to smuggle them out of the country.”
“What?” Jerome cried. “Esmé is this true?”
Esmé did not reply, but in a moment everyone would see if it was true or not. The children had torn away a large section of the cardboard, and they could see a layer of white paper inside, as if Gunther had wrapped up the Quagmires the way you might have the butcher wrap up a pair of chicken breasts.
“Hang on, Duncan!” Violet called, into the paper. “Just a few more seconds, Isadora! We’re getting you out of there!”
Mr. P
oe frowned, and coughed into his white handkerchief. “Now look here, Baudelaires,” he said sternly, when his coughing spell was over, “I have reliable information that the Quagmires are in a glue factory, not inside a cardboard box.”
“We’ll see about that,” Klaus said, and Sunny gave the box another big bite. With a loud shredding sound it split right down the middle, and the contents of the box spilled out all over the stage. It is necessary to use the expression “a red herring” to describe what was inside the cardboard box. A red herring, of course, is a type of fish, but it is also an expression that means “a distracting and misleading clue.” Gunther had used the initials V.F.D. on the box to mislead the Baudelaires into thinking that their friends were trapped inside, and I’m sorry to tell you that the Baudelaires did not realize it was a red herring until they looked around the stage and saw what the box contained.
CHAPTER
Thirteen
“These are doilies,” Violet cried. “This box is full of doilies!” And it was true. Scattered around the stage, spilling out of the remains of the cardboard box, were hundreds and hundreds of small, round napkins with a strip of lace around them—the sort of napkins that you might use to decorate a plate of cookies at a fancy tea party.
“Of course,” the man in sunglasses said. He approached the stage and removed his sunglasses, and the Baudelaires could see that he wasn’t one of Gunther’s associates after all. He was just a bidder, in a pinstripe suit. “I was going to give them to my brother for a birthday present. They’re Very Fancy Doilies. What else could V.F.D. stand for?”
“Yes,” Gunther said, smiling at the children. “What else could it stand for, please?”
“I don’t know,” Violet said, “but the Quagmires didn’t find out a secret about fancy napkins. Where have you put them, Olaf?”
“What is Olaf, please?” Gunther asked.
“Now, Violet,” Jerome said. “We agreed that we wouldn’t argue about Gunther anymore. Please excuse these children, Gunther. I think they must be ill.”
“We’re not ill!” Klaus cried. “We’ve been tricked! This box of doilies was a red herring!”
“But the red herring was Lot #48,” someone in the crowd said.
“Children, I’m very disturbed by your behavior,” Mr. Poe said. “You look like you haven’t washed in a week. You’re spending your money on ridiculous items. You run around accusing everybody of being Count Olaf in disguise. And now you’ve made a big mess of doilies on the floor. Someone is likely to trip and fall on all these slippery napkins. I would have thought that the Squalors would be raising you better than this.”
“Well, we’re not going to raise them anymore,” Esmé said. “Not after they’ve made such a spectacle of themselves. Mr. Poe, I want these terrible children placed out of my care. It’s not worth it to have orphans, even if they’re in.”
“Esmé!” Jerome cried. “They lost their parents! Where else can they go?”
“Don’t argue with me,” Esmé snapped, “and I’ll tell you where they can go. They can—”
“With me, please,” Gunther said, and placed one of his scraggly hands on Violet’s shoulder. Violet remembered when this treacherous villain had plotted to marry her, and shuddered underneath his greedy fingers. “I am loving of the children. I would be happy, please, to raise three children of my own.” He put his other scraggly hand on Klaus’s shoulder, and then stepped forward as if he was going to put one of his boots on Sunny’s shoulder so all three Baudelaires would be locked in a sinister embrace. But Gunther’s foot did not land on Sunny’s shoulder. It landed on a doily, and in a second Mr. Poe’s prediction that someone would trip and fall came true. With a papery thump! Gunther was suddenly on the ground, his arms flailing wildly in the doilies and his legs flailing madly on the floor of the stage. “Please!” he shouted as he hit the ground, but his wiggling limbs only made him slip more, and the doilies began to spread out across the stage and fall to the floor of Veblen Hall. The Baudelaires watched the fancy napkins flutter around them, making flimsy, whispering sounds as they fell, but then they heard two weighty sounds, one after the other, as if Gunther’s fall had made something heavier fall to the floor, and when they turned their heads to follow the sound, they saw Gunther’s boots lying on the floor, one at Jerome’s feet and one at Mr. Poe’s.
“Please!” Gunther shouted again, as he struggled to stand up, but when he finally got to his feet, everyone else in the room was looking at them.
“Look!” the man who had been wearing sunglasses said. “The auctioneer wasn’t wearing any socks! That’s not very polite!”
“And look!” someone else said. “He has a doily stuck between two of his toes! That’s not very comfortable!”
“And look!” Jerome said. “He has a tattoo of an eye on his ankle! He’s not Gunther!”
“He’s not an auctioneer!” Mr. Poe cried. “He’s not even a foreigner! He’s Count Olaf!”
“He’s more than Count Olaf,” Esmé said, walking slowly toward the terrible villain. “He’s a genius! He’s a wonderful acting teacher! And he’s the handsomest, innest man in town!”
“Don’t be absurd!” Jerome said. “Ruthless kidnapping villains aren’t in!”
“You’re right,” said Count Olaf, and what a relief it is to call him by his proper name. Olaf tossed away his monocle and put his arm around Esmé. “We’re not in. We’re out—out of the city! Come on, Esmé!”
With a shriek of laughter, Olaf took Esmé’s hand and leaped from the stage, elbowing aside the in crowd as he began running toward the exit.
“They’re escaping!” Violet cried, and jumped off the stage to chase after them. Klaus and Sunny followed her as fast as their legs could carry them, but Olaf and Esmé had longer legs, which in this case was just as unfair an advantage as the element of surprise. By the time the Baudelaires had run to the banner with Gunther’s face on it, Olaf and Esmé had reached the banner with “Auction” printed on it, and by the time the children reached that banner, the two villains had run past the “In” banner and through the award-winning door of Veblen Hall.
“Egad!” Mr. Poe cried. “We can’t let that dreadful man escape for the sixth time! After him, everyone! That man is wanted for a wide variety of violent and financial crimes!”
The in crowd sprang into action, and began chasing after Olaf and Esmé, and you may choose to believe, as this story nears its conclusion, that with so many people chasing after this wretched villain, it would be impossible for him to escape. You may wish to close this book without finishing it, and imagine that Olaf and Esmé were captured, and that the Quagmire triplets were rescued, and that the true meaning of V.F.D. was discovered and that the mystery of the secret hallway to the ruined Baudelaire mansion was solved and that everyone held a delightful picnic to celebrate all this good fortune and that there were enough ice cream sandwiches to go around. I certainly wouldn’t blame you for imagining these things, because I imagine them all the time. Late at night, when not even the map of the city can comfort me, I close my eyes and imagine all those happy comforting things surrounding the Baudelaire children, instead of all those doilies that surrounded them and brought yet another scoop of misfortune into their lives. Because when Count Olaf and Esmé Squalor flung open the door of Veblen Hall, they let in an afternoon breeze that made all the very fancy doilies flutter over the Baudelaires’ heads and then settle back down on the floor behind them, and in one slippery moment the entire in crowd was falling all over one another in a papery, pinstripe blur. Mr. Poe fell on Jerome. Jerome fell on the man who had been wearing sunglasses, and his sunglasses fell on the woman who had bid highest on Lot #47. That woman dropped her chocolate ballet slippers, and those slippers fell on Count Olaf’s boots, and those boots fell on three more doilies that made four more people slip and fall on one another and soon the entire crowd was in a hopeless tangle.
But the Baudelaires did not even glance back to see the latest grief that the doilies had
caused. They kept their eyes on the pair of loathsome people who were running down the steps of Veblen Hall toward a big black pickup truck. Behind the wheel of the pickup truck was the doorman, who had finally done the sensible thing and rolled up his oversized sleeves, but that must have been a difficult task, for as the children gazed into the truck they caught a glimpse of two hooks where the doorman’s hands should have been.
“The hook-handed man!” Klaus cried. “He was right under our noses the entire time!”
Count Olaf turned to sneer at the children just as he reached the pickup truck. “He might have been right under your noses,” he snarled, “but soon he will be at your throats. I’ll be back, Baudelaires! Soon the Quagmire sapphires will be mine, but I haven’t forgotten about your fortune!”
“Gonope?” Sunny shrieked, and Violet was quick to translate.
“Where are Duncan and Isadora?” she said. “Where have you taken them?”
Olaf and Esmé looked at one another, and burst into laughter as they slipped into the black truck. Esmé jerked a long-nailed thumb toward the flatbed, which is the word for the back part of a pickup where things are stored. “We used two red herrings to fool you,” she said, as the truck’s engine roared into life. The children could see, in the back of the truck, the big red herring that had been Lot #48 in the In Auction.
“The Quagmires!” Klaus cried. “Olaf has them trapped inside that statue!” The orphans raced down the steps of the hall, and once again, you may find it more pleasant to put down this book, and close your eyes, and imagine a better ending to this tale than the one that I must write. You may imagine, for instance, that as the Baudelaires reached the truck, they heard the sound of the engine stalling, instead of the tooting of the horn as the hook-handed man drove his bosses away. You may imagine that the children heard the sounds of the Quagmires escaping from the statue of the herring, instead of the word “Toodle-oo!” coming from Esmé’s villainous mouth. And you may imagine the sound of police sirens as Count Olaf was caught at last, instead of the weeping of the Baudelaire orphans as the black truck rounded the corner and disappeared from view.