but no beard, but his voice was very hoarse, as if he had been screaming for hours and could hardly talk. 'It's been a long time since we've laid eyes on one another.' The man gave Olaf a grin that made it seem even colder on the mountain peak, and then stopped and helped the woman lean the toboggan against the rock where Sunny had served breakfast. The youngest Baudelaire saw that the toboggan was painted with the familiar eye insignia, and had a few long leather straps, presumably used for steering.
Count Olaf coughed lightly into his hand, which is something people often do when they cannot think of what to say. 'Hello,' he said, a bit nervously. 'Did I hear you say something about a fire?'
The man with a beard but no hair and the woman with hair but no beard looked at one another and shared a laugh that made Sunny cover her ears with her hands. 'Haven't you noticed,' the woman said, 'that there are no snow gnats around?'
'We had noticed that,' Esmй said. 'I thought maybe snow gnats were no longer in.'
'Don't be ridiculous, Esmй,' said the man with a beard but no hair. He reached out and kissed Esmй's hand, which Sunny could see was trembling. 'The gnats aren't around because they can smell the smoke.'
'I don't smell anything,' said Hugo.
'Well, if you were a tiny insect, you'd smell something,' replied the woman with hair but no beard. 'If you were a snow gnat, you'd smell the smoke from the V.F.D. headquarters.'
'We did you a favor, Olaf,' the man said. 'We burned the entire place down.'
'No!' Sunny cried, before she could stop herself. By 'No!' she meant 'I certainly hope that isn't true, because my siblings and I hoped to reach V.F.D. headquarters, solve the mysteries that surround us, and perhaps find one of our parents,' but she had not planned to say it out loud. The two visitors looked down at the youngest Baudelaire, casting their aura of menace in her direction.
'What is that?' asked the man with a beard but no hair.
'That's the youngest Baudelaire,' replied Esmй. 'We've eliminated the other two, but we're keeping this one around to do our bidding until we can finally steal the fortune.'
The woman with hair but no beard nodded. 'Infant servants are so troublesome,' she said. 'I had an infant servant once — a long time ago, before the schism.'
'Before the schism?' Olaf said, and Sunny wished Klaus were with her, because the baby did not know what the word 'schism' meant. 'That
'Not necessarily,' the woman said, and laughed again, while her companion leaned down to gaze at Sunny. Sunny could not bear to look into the eyes of the man with a beard but no hair, and instead looked down at his shiny shoes.
'So this is Sunny Baudelaire,' he said in his strange, hoarse voice. 'Well, well, well. I've heard so much about this little orphan. She's caused almost as many problems as her parents did.' He stood up again and looked around at Olaf and his troupe. 'But we know how to solve problems, don't we? Fire can solve any problem in the world.'
He began to laugh, and the woman with hair but no beard laughed along with him. Nervously, Count Olaf began to laugh, too, and then glared at his troupe until they laughed along with him, and Sunny found herself surrounded by tall, laughing villains. 'Oh, it was wonderful,' said the woman with hair but no beard. 'First we burned down the kitchen. Then we burned down the dining room. Then we burned down the parlor, and then the disguise center, the movie room, and the stables. Then we moved on to the gymnasium and the training center, and the garage and all six of the laboratories. We burned down the dormitories and schoolrooms, the lounge, the theater, and the music room, as well as the museum and the ice cream shop. Then we burned down the rehearsal studios and the testing centers and the swimming pool, which was very hard to burn down. Then we burned down all the bathrooms, and then finally, we burned down the V.F.D. library last night. That was my favorite part — books and books and books, all turned to ashes so no one could read them. You should have been there, Olaf! Every morning we lit fires and every evening we celebrated with a bottle of wine and some finger puppets. We've been wearing these fireproof suits for almost a month. It's been a marvelous time.'
'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,' Esmй 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?' Esmй 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?' Esmй asked.
'I think it's a cigarette,' the man said.
'A cigarette!' Esmй 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
