"The doorman?" Mr. Poe said, as the doorman handed Esmé a sack of coins and, with difficulty, lifted the enormous red fish statue off the stage, his hands still hidden in his long, long sleeves. "I'm surprised that a doorman can afford to buy anything at the In Auction."
"He told me once he was an actor, too," Jerome said. "He's an interesting fellow. Care to meet him?"
"That's very nice of you," Mr. Poe said, and coughed into his handkerchief. "I'm certainly meeting all sorts of interesting people since my promotion."
The doorman was struggling past the children with his scarlet herring when Jerome tapped him on the shoulder. "Come meet Mr. Poe," he said.
"I don't have time to meet anyone," the doorman replied. "I have to get this in the boss's truck and--" The doorman stopped midsentence when he caught sight of the Baudelaire children. "You're not supposed to be here!" he said. "You're not supposed to have left the penthouse."
"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 fun
nier 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. 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.