"Why did you burn it down gradually?" Count Olaf asked. "Whenever I burn something down, I do it all at once."
"We couldn't have burned down the entire headquarters at once," said the man with a beard but no hair. "Someone would have spotted us. Remember, where there's smoke there's fire."
"But if you burned the headquarters down room by room," Esmé said, "didn't all of the volunteers escape?"
"They were gone already," said the man, and scratched his head where his hair might have been. "The entire headquarters were deserted. It was as if they knew we were coming. Oh well, you can't win them all."
"Maybe we'll find some of them when we burn down the carnival," said the woman, in her deep, deep voice.
"Carnival?" Olaf asked nervously.
"Yes," the woman said, and scratched the place where her beard would have been, if she had one. "There's an important piece of evidence that V.F.D. has hidden in a figurine sold at Caligari Carnival, so we need to go burn it down."
"I burned it down already," Count Olaf said.
"The whole place?" the woman said in surprise.
"The whole place," Olaf said, giving her a nervous smile.
"Congratulations," she said, in a deep purr. "You're better than I thought, Olaf."
Count Olaf looked relieved, as if he had not been sure whether the woman was going to compliment him or kick him. "Well, it's all for the greater good," he said.
"As a reward," the woman said, "I have a gift for you, Olaf." Sunny watched as the woman reached into the pocket of her shiny suit and drew out a stack of paper, tied together with thick rope. The paper looked very old and worn, as if it had been passed around to a variety of different people, hidden in a number of secret compartments, and perhaps even divided into different piles, driven around a city in horse-drawn carriages, and then put back together at midnight in the back room of a bookstore disguised as a cafe disguised as a sporting goods store. Count Olaf's eyes grew very wide and very shiny, and he reached his filthy hands toward it if it were the Baudelaire fortune itself.
"The Snicket file!" he said, in a hushed whisper.
"It's all here," the woman said. "Every chart, every map and every photograph from the only file that could put us all in jail."
"It's complete except for page thirteen, of course," the man said. "We understand that the Baudelaires managed to steal that page from Heimlich Hospital."
The two visitors glared down at Sunny Baudelaire, who couldn't help whimpering in fear. "Surchmi," she said. She meant something along the lines of, "I don't have it
— my siblings do," but she did not need a translator.
"The older orphans have it," Olaf said, "but I'm fairly certain they're dead."
"Then all of our problems have gone up in smoke," said the woman with hair but no beard.
Count Olaf grabbed the file and held it to his chest as if it were a newborn baby, although he was not the sort of person to treat a newborn baby very kindly. "This is the most wonderful gift in the world," he said. "I'm going to go read it right now."
"We'll all read it together," said the woman with hair but no beard. "It contains secrets we all ought to know."
"But first," said the man with a beard but no hair, "I have a gift for your girlfriend, Olaf."
"For me?" Esmé asked.
"I found these in one of the rooms of headquarters," the man said. "I've never seen one before, but it has been quite some time since I was a volunteer." With a sly smile, he reached into his pocket and took out a small green tube.
"What's that?" Esmé asked.
"I think it's a cigarette," the man said.
"A cigarette!" Esmé said, with a smile as big as Olaf's. "How in!"
"I thought you'd enjoy them," the man said. "Here, try it. I happen to have quite a few matches right here."
The man with a beard but no hair struck a match, lit the end of the green tube, and offered it to the wicked girlfriend, who grabbed it and held it to her mouth. A bitter smell, like that of burning vegetables, filled the air, and Esmé Squalor began to cough.
"What's the matter?" asked the woman in her deep voice. "I thought you liked things that are in."
"I do," Esmé said, and then coughed quite a bit more. Sunny was reminded of Mr. Poe, who was always coughing into a handkerchief, as Esmé coughed and coughed and finally dropped the green tube to the ground where it spewed out a dark green smoke. "I love cigarettes," she explained to the man with a beard but no hair, "but I prefer to smoke them with a long holder because I don't like the smell or taste and because they're very bad for you."
"Never mind that now," Count Olaf said impatiently. "Let's go into my tent and read the file." He started to walk toward the tent but stopped and glared at his comrades, who were beginning to follow him. "The rest of you stay out here," he said. "There are secrets in this file that I do not want you to know."
The two sinister visitors began to laugh, and followed Count Olaf and Esmé into the tent closing the flap behind them. Sunny stood with Hugo, Colette, Kevin, and the two white-faced women and stared after them in silence, waiting for the aura of menace to disappear.
"Who were those people?" asked the hook-handed man, and everyone turned to see that he had returned from his fishing expedition. Four salmon hung from each of his hooks, dripping with the waters of the Stricken Stream.
"I don't know," said one of the white-faced women, "but they made me very nervous."
"If they're friends of Count Olaf's," Kevin said, "how bad could they be?"
The members of the troupe looked at one another, but no one answered the ambidextrous person's question. "What did that man mean when he said 'Where there's smoke there's fire'?" Hugo asked.
"I don't know," Colette said. A chilly wind blew, and Sunny watched her contort her body in the breeze until it looked almost as curvy as the smoke from the green tube Esmé had dropped.
"Forget those questions," the hook-handed man said. "My question is, how are you going to prepare this salmon, orphan?"
Olaf's henchman was looking down at Sunny, but the youngest Baudelaire did not answer for a moment. Sunny was thinking, and her siblings would have been proud of her for the way she was thinking. Klaus would have been proud, because she was thinking about the phrase "Where there's smoke there's fire," and what it might mean. And Violet would have been proud, because she was thinking about the salmon that the hook-handed man was holding, and what she might invent that would help her.
Sunny stared at the hook-handed man and thought as hard as she could, and she felt almost as if both siblings were with her, Klaus helping her think about a phrase and Violet helping her think about an invention.
"Answer me, baby," the hook-handed man growled. "What are you going to make for us out of this salmon?"
"Lox!" Sunny said, but it was as if all three of the Baudelaires had answered the question.