A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Ersatz Elevator (12 page)

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," Esme said dismissively. "I've made enough money today." "I never thought I'd hear Esme 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. Esme 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 Esme. 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 Esme a monocled wink. "Please, sir, if--" "Thousand!" Gunther stopped at the sound of a new bidder for Lot #50. Esme'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 Esme, 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." Esme 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!" Esme 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 Esme are trying to smuggle them out of the country." "What?" Jerome cried. "Esme, is this true?" Esme 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. Poe 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," Esme 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." "Esme!" Jerome cried. "They lost their parents! Where else can they go?" "Don't argue with me," Esme 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," Esme 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 Esme. "We're not in. We're out--out of the city! Come on, Esme!" With a shriek of laughter, Olaf took Esme'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 Esme 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 Esme 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 Esme, 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 Esme 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 Esme 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 Esme looked at one another, and burst into laughter as they slipped into the black truck. Esme 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 Esme'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. But your imaginings would be ersatz, as all imaginings are. They are as untrue as the ersatz auctioneer who found the Baudelaires at the Squalors' penthouse, and the ersatz elevator outside their front door and the ersatz guardian who pushed them down the deep pit of the elevator shaft. Esme hid her evil plan behind her reputation as the city's sixth most important financial advisor, and Count Olaf hid his identity behind a monocle and some black boots, and the dark passageway hid its secrets behind a pair of sliding elevator doors, but as much as it pains me to tell you that the Baudelaire orphans stood on the steps of Veblen Hall, weeping with anguish and frustration as Count Olaf rode away with the Quagmire triplets, I cannot hide the unfortunate truths of the Baudelaires' lives behind an ersatz happy ending. The Baudelaire orphans stood on the steps of Veblen Hall, weeping with anguish and frustration as Count Olaf rode away with the Quagmire triplets, and the sight of Mr. Poe emerging from the award-winning door, with a doily in his hair and a look of panic in his eye, only made them weep harder. "I'll call the police," Mr. Poe said, "and they'll capture Count Olaf in no time at all," but the Baudelaires knew that this statement was as ersatz as Gunther's improper English. They knew that Olaf was far too clever to be captured by the police, and I'm sorry to say that by the time two detectives found the big black pickup truck, abandoned outside St. Carl's Cathedral with the motor still running, Olaf had already transferred the Quagmires from the red herring to a shiny black instrument case, which he told the bus driver was a tuba he was bringing to his aunt. The three siblings watched Mr. Poe scurry back into Veblen Hall to ask members of the in crowd where he could find a phone booth, and they knew that the banker was not going to be of any help. "I think Mr. Poe will be a great deal of help," Jerome said, as he walked out of Veblen Hall and sat down on the steps to try to comfort the children. "He's going to call the police, and give them a description of Olaf." "But Olaf is always in disguise," Violet said miserably, wiping her eyes. "You never know what he'll look like until you see him." "Well, I'm going to make sure you never see him again," Jerome promised. "Esme may have left---and I'm not going to argue with her--but I'm still your guardian, and I'm going to take you far, far away from here, so far away that you'll forget all about Count Olaf and the Quagmires and everything else." "Forget about Olaf?" Klaus asked. "How can we forget about him? We'll never forget his treachery, no matter where we live." "And we'll never forget the Quagmires, either," Violet said. "I don't want to forget about them. We have to figure out where he's taking our friends, and how to rescue them." "Tercul!" Sunny said, which meant something along the lines of "And we don't want to forget about everything else, either-like the underground hallway that led to our ruined mansion, and the real meaning of V.F.D.!" "My sister is right," Klaus said. "We have to track down Olaf and learn all the secrets he's keeping from us." "We're not going to track down Olaf," Jerome said, shuddering at the thought. "We'll be lucky if he doesn't track us down. As your guardian, I cannot allow you to try to find such a dangerous man. Wouldn't you rather live safely with me?" "Yes," Violet admitted, "but our friends are in grave danger. We must go and rescue them." "Well, I don't want to argue," Jerome said. "If you've made up your mind, then you've made up your mind. I'll tell Mr. Poe to find you another guardian." "You mean you won't help us?" Klaus asked. Jerome sighed, and kissed each Baudelaire on the forehead. "You children are very dear to me," he said, "but I don't have your courage. Your mother always said I wasn't brave enough, and I guess she was right. Good luck, Baudelaires. I think you will need it." The children watched in amazement as Jerome walked away, not even looking back at the three orphans he was leaving behind. They found their eyes brimming with tears once more as they watched him disappear from sight. They would never see the Squalor penthouse again, or spend another night in their bedrooms, or spend even a moment in their oversized pinstripe suits. Though he was not as dastardly as Esme or Count Olaf or the hook-handed man, Jerome was still an ersatz guardian, because a real guardian is supposed to provide a home, with a place to sleep and something to wear, and all Jerome had given them in the end was "Good luck." Jerome reached the end of the block and turned left, and the Baudelaires were once again alone in the world. Violet sighed, and stared down the street in the direction Olaf had escaped. "I hope my inventing skills don't fail me," she said, "because we're going to need more than good luck to rescue the Quagmire triplets." Klaus sighed, and stared down the street in the direction of the ashy remains of their first home. "I hope my research skills don't fail me," he said, "because we're going to need more than good luck to solve the mystery of the hallway and the Baudelaire mansion." Sunny sighed, and watched as a lone doily blew down the stairs. "Bite," she said, and she meant that she hoped her teeth wouldn't fail her, because they'd need more than good luck to discover what V.F.D. really stood for. The Baudelaires looked at one another with faint smiles. They were smiling because they didn't think Violet's inventing skills would fail, any more than Klaus's research skills would fail or
Sunny's teeth would fail. But the children also knew that they wouldn't fail each other, as Jerome had failed them and as Mr. Poe was failing them now, as he dialed the wrong number and was talking to a Vietnamese restaurant instead of the police. No matter how many misfortunes had befallen them and no matter how many ersatz things they would encounter in the future, the Baudelaire orphans knew they could rely on each other for the rest of their lives, and this, at least, felt like the one thing in the world that was true.