“It’s just not cool,” Count Olaf said, snapping his fingers to emphasize the word “cool,” “to dismiss suspects from the scene of the crime until Detective Dupin gives the O.K.”
“But surely the orphans aren’t suspects,” one of the Elders said. “They’re only children, after all.”
“It’s just not cool,” Count Olaf said, snapping his fingers again, “to disagree with Detective Dupin.”
“I agree,” Officer Luciana said, and gave Olaf a big lipstick smile as he stepped through the doorway. “Now let’s get down to business, Dupin. Do you have any important information?”
“We have some important information,” Klaus said boldly. “This man is not Detective Dupin.” There were a few gasps from the crowd. “He’s Count Olaf.”
“You mean Count Omar,” Mrs. Morrow said.
“We mean Olaf,” Violet said, and then turned so that she was looking Count Olaf right in the sunglasses. “Those sunglasses may be hiding your eyebrow, and those shoes may be hiding your tattoo, but you can’t hide your identity. You’re Count Olaf, and you’ve kidnapped the Quagmire triplets and murdered Jacques.”
“Who in the world is Jacques?” asked an Elder. “I’m confused.”
“It’s not cool,” Olaf said with a snap, “to be confused, so let me see if I can help you.” He pointed at himself with a flourish. “I am the famous Detective Dupin. I am wearing these plastic shoes and sunglasses because they’re cool. Count Olaf is the name of the man who was murdered last night, and these three children…”—here Olaf paused to make sure everyone was listening—“are responsible for the crime.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Olaf,” Klaus said disgustedly.
Olaf smiled nastily at all three Baudelaires. “You are making a mistake when you call me Count Olaf,” he said, “and if you continue to call me that, you will see exactly how big a mistake you are making.” Detective Dupin turned and looked up to address the crowd. “Of course, the biggest mistake these children have made is thinking they can get away with murder.”
There was a murmur of agreement from the crowd. “I never trusted those kids,” Mrs. Morrow said. “They didn’t do a very good job when they trimmed my hedges.”
“Show them the evidence,” Officer Luciana said, and Detective Dupin snapped his fingers.
“It’s not cool,” he said, “to accuse people of murder without any evidence, but luckily I found some.” He reached into the pocket of his blazer and brought out a long pink ribbon decorated with plastic daisies. “I found this right outside Count Olaf’s jail cell,” he said. “It’s a ribbon—the exact kind of ribbon that Violet Baudelaire uses to tie up her hair.”
The townspeople gasped, and Violet turned to see that the citizens of V.F.D. were looking at her with suspicion and fear, which are not pleasant ways to be looked at. “That’s not my ribbon!” Violet cried, taking her own hair ribbon out of her pocket. “My hair ribbon is right here!”
“How can we tell?” an Elder asked with a frown. “All hair ribbons look alike.”
“They don’t look alike!” Klaus said. “The one found at the murder scene is fancy and pink. My sister prefers plain ribbons, and she hates the color pink!”
“And inside the cell,” Detective Dupin continued, as if Klaus had not spoken, “I found this.” He held up a small circle made of glass. “This is one of the lenses in Klaus’s glasses.”
“But my glasses aren’t missing any lenses!” Klaus cried, as everyone turned to look at him in suspicion and fear. He took his glasses off and showed them to the crowd. “You can see for yourself.”
“Just because you have replaced your ribbon and your lenses,” Officer Luciana said, “doesn’t mean you’re not murderers.”
“Actually, they’re not murderers,” Detective Dupin said. “They’re accomplices.” He leaned forward so he was right in the Baudelaires’ faces, and the children could smell his sour breath as he continued talking. “You orphans are not smart enough to know what the word ‘accomplice’ means, but it means ‘helper of murderers.’”
“We know what the word ‘accomplice’ means,” Klaus said. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the four toothmarks on Count Olaf’s body,” Detective Dupin said, with a snap of his fingers. “There’s only one person uncool enough to bite people to death, and that’s Sunny Baudelaire.”
“It’s true that her teeth are sharp,” another member of the Council said. “I noticed that when she served my hot fudge sundae.”
“Our sister didn’t bite anyone to death,” Violet said indignantly, a word which here means “in defense of an innocent baby.” “Detective Dupin is lying!”
“It’s not cool to accuse me of lying,” Dupin replied. “Instead of accusing other people of things, why don’t you three children tell us where you were last night?”
“We were at Hector’s house,” Klaus said. “He’ll tell you himself.” The middle Baudelaire stood up on tiptoe and called out over the crowd. “Hector! Tell everyone that we were with you!”
The citizens looked this way and that, the crow hats of the Elders bobbing as they listened for a word from Hector. But no word came. The three children waited for a moment in the tense silence, thinking that surely Hector would overcome his skittishness in order to save them. But the handyman was quiet. The only sounds the children could hear was the splashing of Fowl Fountain and the muttering of the roosting crows.
“Hector sometimes gets skittish in front of crowds,” Violet explained, “but it’s true. I spent the night working in his studio, and Klaus was reading in the secret library, and—”
“Enough nonsense!” Officer Luciana said. “Do you really expect us to believe that our fine handyman is building mechanical devices and has a secret library? Next I suppose you’ll say that he’s building things out of feathers!”
“It’s bad enough that you killed Count Olaf,” an Elder said, “but now you’re trying to frame Hector for other crimes! I say that V.F.D. no longer serve as guardian for such terrible orphans!”
“Hear, hear!” cried several voices scattered in the crowd, just as the children had planned to do themselves.
“I will send a message to Mr. Poe right away,” the Elder continued, “and the banker will come and remove them in a few days.”
“A few days is too long to wait!” Mrs. Morrow said, and several citizens cheered in agreement. “These children need to be taken care of as quickly as possible.”
“I say that we burn them at the stake!” cried Mr. Lesko, who stepped forward to wag his finger at the children. “Rule #201 clearly says no murdering!”
“But we didn’t murder anyone!” Violet cried. “A ribbon, a lens, and some bite marks aren’t enough evidence to accuse someone of murder!”
“It’s enough evidence for me!” an Elder cried. “We already have the torches—let’s burn them right now!”
“Hold on a moment,” another Elder said. “We can’t simply burn people at the stake whenever we want!” The Baudelaires looked at one another, relieved that one citizen seemed immune to mob psychology. “I have a very important appointment in ten minutes,” the Elder continued. “So it’s too late to do it now. How about tonight, after dinner?”
“That’s no good,” said another member of the Council. “I’m having a dinner party then. How about tomorrow afternoon?”
“Yes,” someone said from the crowd. “Right after lunch! That’s a perfect time!”
“Hear, hear!” Mr. Lesko cried.
“Hear, hear!” Mrs. Morrow cried.
“Glaji!” Sunny cried.
“Hector, help us!” Violet called. “Please tell these people that we’re not murderers!”
“I told you before,” Detective Dupin said, smiling beneath his sunglasses. “Only Sunny is a murderer. You two are accomplices, and I will put you all in jail where you belong.” Dupin grabbed Violet’s and Klaus’s wrists with one scraggly hand, and leaned down to scoop up Sunny with the
other. “See you tomorrow afternoon for the burning at the stake!” he called out to the rest of the crowd, and dragged the struggling Baudelaires through the door of the uptown jail. The children stumbled into a dim, grim hallway, listening to the faint sounds of the mob cheering as the door slammed behind them.
“I’m putting you in the Deluxe Cell,” Dupin said. “It’s the dirtiest one.” He marched them down a dark hallway with many twists and turns, and the Baudelaires could see rows and rows of cells with their heavy doors hanging open. The only light in the jail came from tiny barred windows placed in each cell, but the children saw that every cell was empty and each one looked dirtier than the rest.
“You’ll be the one in jail before long, Olaf,” Klaus said, hoping he sounded much more certain than he felt. “You’ll never get away with this.”
“My name is Detective Dupin,” said Detective Dupin, “and my only concern is bringing you three criminals to justice.”
“But if you burn us at the stake,” Violet said quickly, “you’ll never get your hands on the Baudelaire fortune.”
Dupin rounded the last corner of the hallway, and pushed the Baudelaires into a small damp cell with only a small wooden bench as furniture. By the light of the barred window, the siblings could see that the cell was quite filthy, as Dupin had promised. The detective reached out to pull the door closed, but with his sunglasses on it was too dark to see the door handle, so he had to throw off all pretense—a phrase which here means “take off part of his disguise for a moment”—and remove his sunglasses. As much as the children hated Dupin’s ridiculous disguise, it was worse to see their enemy’s one eyebrow, and the shiny, shiny eyes that had been haunting them for so long.
“Don’t worry,” he said in his wheezy voice. “You won’t be burned at the stake—not all of you, at least. Tomorrow afternoon, one of you will make a miraculous escape—if you consider being smuggled out of V.F.D. by one of my assistants to be an escape. The other two will burn at the stake as planned. You bratty orphans are too stupid to realize it, but a genius like me knows that it may take a village to raise a child, but it only takes one child to inherit a fortune.” The villain laughed a loud and rude laugh, and began to shut the door of the cell. “But I don’t want to be cruel,” he said, smiling to indicate that he really wanted to be as cruel as possible. “I’ll let you three decide who gets the honor of spending the rest of their puny life with me, and who gets to burn at the stake. I’ll be back at lunchtime for your decision.”
The Baudelaire orphans listened to the wheezy giggle of their enemy as he slammed the cell door and walked back down the hallway in his plastic shoes, and felt a sinking feeling in their stomachs, where the huevos rancheros Hector had made for them last night were still being digested. When something is being digested, of course, it is getting smaller and smaller as the body uses up all of the nutrients inside the food, but it didn’t feel that way to the three children. The youngsters did not feel as if the small potatoes they had eaten for dinner were getting smaller. The Baudelaire orphans huddled together in the dim light and listened to the laughter echo against the walls of the uptown jail, and wondered just how large the potatoes of their lives would grow.
CHAPTER
Ten
Entertaining a notion, like entertaining a baby cousin or entertaining a pack of hyenas, is a dangerous thing to refuse to do. If you refuse to entertain a baby cousin, the baby cousin may get bored and entertain itself by wandering off and falling down a well. If you refuse to entertain a pack of hyenas, they may become restless and entertain themselves by devouring you. But if you refuse to entertain a notion—which is just a fancy way of saying that you refuse to think about a certain idea—you have to be much braver than someone who is merely facing some bloodthirsty animals, or some parents who are upset to find their little darling at the bottom of a well, because nobody knows what an idea will do when it goes off to entertain itself, particularly if the idea comes from a sinister villain.
“I don’t care what that horrible man says,” Violet said to her siblings as Detective Dupin’s plastic footsteps faded away. “We’re not going to choose which one of us will escape and who will be left to burn at the stake. I absolutely refuse to entertain the notion.”
“But what are we going to do?” Klaus asked. “Try to contact Mr. Poe?”
“Mr. Poe won’t help us,” Violet replied. “He’ll think we’re ruining the reputation of his bank. We’re going to escape.”
“Frulk!” Sunny said.
“I know it’s a jail cell,” Violet said, “but there must be some way to get out.” She pulled her ribbon out of her pocket and tied up her hair, her fingers shaking as she did so. The eldest Baudelaire had spoken confidently, but she did not feel as confident as she sounded. A cell is built for the specific purpose of keeping people inside, and she was not sure she could make an invention that could get the Baudelaires out of the uptown jail. But once her hair was out of her eyes, her inventing brain began to work at full force, and Violet took a good look around the cell for ideas. First she looked at the door of the cell, examining every inch of it.
“Do you think you could make another lock-pick?” Klaus asked hopefully. “You made an excellent one when we lived with Uncle Monty.”
“Not this time,” Violet replied. “The door locks from the outside, so a lockpick would be of no use.” She closed her eyes for a moment in thought, and then looked up at the tiny barred window. Her siblings followed her gaze, a phrase which here means “also looked at the window and tried to think of something helpful.”
“Boiklio?” Sunny asked, which meant “Do you think you could make some more welding torches, to melt the bars? You made some excellent ones when we lived with the Squalors.”
“Not this time,” Violet said. “If I stood on the bench and Klaus stood on my shoulders and you stood on Klaus’s shoulders, we could probably reach the window, but even if we melted the bars, the window isn’t big enough to crawl through, even for Sunny.”
“Sunny could call out the window,” Klaus said, “and try to attract the attention of someone to come and save us.”
“Thanks to mob psychology, every citizen of V.F.D. thinks that we’re criminals,” Violet pointed out. “No one is going to come rescue an accused murderer and her accomplices.” She closed her eyes and thought again, and then knelt down to get a closer look at the wooden bench.
“Rats,” she said.
Klaus jumped slightly. “Where?” he said.
“I don’t mean there are rats in the cell,” she said, hoping that she was speaking the truth. “I just mean ‘Rats!’ I was hoping that the bench would be made of wooden boards held together with screws or nails. Screws and nails are always handy for inventions. But it’s just a solid, carved piece of wood, which isn’t handy at all.” Violet sat down on the solid, carved piece of wood and sighed. “I don’t know what I can do,” she admitted.
Klaus and Sunny looked at one another nervously. “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Klaus said.
“Maybe you’ll think of something,” Violet replied, looking at her brother. “There must be something you’ve read that could help us.”
It was Klaus’s turn to close his eyes in thought. “If you tilted the bench,” he said, after a pause, “it would become a ramp. The ancient Egyptians used ramps to build the pyramids.”
“But we’re not trying to build a pyramid!” Violet cried in exasperation. “We’re trying to escape from jail!”
“I’m just trying to be helpful!” Klaus cried. “If it weren’t for you and your silly hair ribbons, we wouldn’t have been arrested in the first place!”
“And if it weren’t for your ridiculous glasses,” Violet snapped in reply, “we wouldn’t be here in this jail!”
“Stop!” Sunny shrieked.
Violet and Klaus glared angrily at one another for a moment, and then sighed. Violet moved over on the bench to make room for her siblings.
“Come and sit do
wn,” she said gloomily. “I’m sorry I yelled at you, Klaus. Of course it’s not your fault that we’re here.”
“It’s not yours, either,” Klaus said. “I’m just frustrated. Only a few hours ago we thought we’d be able to find the Quagmires and save Jacques.”
“But we were too late to save Jacques,” Violet said, shuddering. “I don’t know who he was, or how he got his tattoo, but I know he wasn’t Count Olaf.”
“Maybe he used to work with Count Olaf,” Klaus said. “He said the tattoo was from his job. Do you think Jacques was in Olaf’s theater troupe?”
“I don’t think so,” Violet said. “None of Olaf’s associates have that same tattoo. If only Jacques were alive, he could solve the mystery.”
“Pereg,” Sunny said, which meant “And if only the Quagmires were here, they could solve the other mystery—the meaning of the real V.F.D.”
“What we need,” Klaus said, “is deus ex machina.”
“Who’s that?” Violet said.
“It’s not a who,” Klaus said, “it’s a what. ‘Deus ex machina’ is a Latin term that means ‘the god from the machine.’ It means the arrival of something helpful when you least expect it. We need to rescue two triplets from the clutches of a villain, and solve the sinister mystery surrounding us, but we’re trapped in the filthiest cell of the uptown jail, and tomorrow afternoon we’re supposed to be burned at the stake. It would be a wonderful time for something helpful to arrive unexpectedly.”
At that moment there was a knock on the door, and the sound of the lock unlatching. The heavy door of the Deluxe Cell creaked open, and there stood Officer Luciana, scowling at them from beneath the visor of her helmet and holding a loaf of bread in one hand and a pitcher of water in the other. “If it were up to me, I wouldn’t be doing this,” she said, “but Rule #141 clearly states that all prisoners receive bread and water, so here you go.” The Chief of Police thrust the loaf and the pitcher into Violet’s hands and slammed the door shut, locking it behind her. Violet stared at the loaf of bread, which looked spongy and unappetizing, and at the water pitcher, which was decorated with a painting of seven crows flying in a circle. “Well, at least we have some nourishment,” she said. “Our brains need food and water to work properly.”