"You must have thousands of questions, Baudelaires," said the man. "And just think- right here is where they can be answered."
"Who are you?" Violet asked.
"I'm Dewey Denouement," Dewey Denouement replied. "The third triplet. Haven't you heard of me?"
"No," Klaus said. "We thought there were only Frank and Ernest."
"Frank and Ernest get all the attention," Dewey said. "They get to walk around the hotel managing everything, while I just hide in the shadows and wind the clock." He gave the Baudelaires an enormous sigh, and scowled into the depths of the pond. "That's what I don't like about V.F.D.," he said. "All the smoke and mirrors."
"Smoke?" Sunny asked.
"'Smoke and mirrors,'" Klaus explained, "means 'trickery used to cover up the truth.' But what does that have to do with V.F.D.?"
"Before the schism," Dewey said, "V.F.D. was like a public library. Anyone could join us and have access to all of the information we'd acquired. Volunteers all over the globe were reading each other's research, learning of each other's observations, and borrowing each other's books. For a while it seemed as if we might keep the whole world safe, secure, and smart."
"It must have been a wonderful time," Klaus said.
"I scarcely remember it," Dewey said. "I was four years old when the schism began. I was scarcely tall enough to reach my favorite shelf in the family library-the books labeled 020. But one night, just as our parents were hanging balloons for our fifth birthday party, my brothers and I were taken."
"Taken where?" Violet asked.
"Taken by whom?" Sunny asked.
"I admire your curiosity," Dewey said. "The woman who took me said that one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways. And she took me to a place high in the mountains, where she said such things would be encouraged."
Klaus opened his commonplace book and began to take furious notes. "The headquarters," Klaus said, "in the Valley of Four Drafts."
"Your parents must have missed you," Violet said.
"They perished that very night," Dewey said, "in a terrible fire. I don't have to tell you how badly I felt when I learned the news."
The Baudelaires sighed, and looked out at the pond. Here and there on its calm surface they could see the reflections of a few lights in the windows, but most of the hotel was dark, so most of the pond was dark, too. The triplet, of course, did not have to tell the Baudelaires how it felt to lose one's parents so suddenly, or at such a young age. "It was not always this way, Baudelaires," Dewey said. "Once there were safe places scattered across the globe, and so orphans like yourselves did not have to wander from place to place, trying to find noble people who could be of assistance. With each generation, the schism gets worse. If justice does not prevail, soon there will be no safe places left, and nobody left to remember how the world ought to be."
"I don't understand," Violet said. "Why weren't we taken, like you?"
"You were," Dewey said. "You were taken into the custody of Count Olaf. And he tried to keep you in his custody, no matter how many noble people intervened."
"But why didn't anyone tell us what was going on?" Klaus asked. "Why did we have to figure things out all by ourselves?"
"I'm afraid that's the wicked way of the world," Dewey said, with a shake of his head. "Everything's covered in smoke and mirrors, Baudelaires. Since the schism, all the research, all the observations, even all of the books have been scattered all over the globe. It's like the elephant in the poem your father loved. Everyone has their hands on a tiny piece of the truth, but nobody can see the whole thing. Very soon, however, all that will change."
"Thursday," Sunny said.
"Exactly," Dewey said, smiling down at the youngest Baudelaire. "At long last, all of the noble people will be gathered together, along with all the research they've done, all the observations they've made, all the evidence they've collected, and all the books they've read. Just as a library catalog can tell you where a certain book is located, this catalog can tell you the location and behavior of every volunteer and every villain." He gestured to the hotel. "For years," he said, "while noble people wandered the world observing treachery, my comrade and I have been right here gathering all the information together. We've copied every note from every commonplace book from every volunteer and compiled it all into a catalog. Occasionally, when volunteers have been lost or safe places destroyed, we've had to go ourselves to collect the information that has been left behind. We've retrieved Josephine Anwhistle's files from Lake Lachrymose and carefully copied down their contents. We've pasted together the burnt scraps of Madame Lulu's archival library and taken notes on what we've found. We've searched the childhood home of the man with a beard but no hair, and interviewed the math teacher of the woman with hair but no beard. We've memorized important articles within the stacks of newspaper in Paltryville, and we've thrown important items out of the windows of our destroyed headquarters, so they might wind up somewhere safe at sea. We've taken every crime, every theft, every wicked deed, and every incident of rudeness since the schism began, and cataloged them into an entire library of misfortune. Eventually, every crucial secret ends up in my catalog. It's been my life's work. It has not been an easy life, but it has been an informative one."
"You're more than a volunteer," Violet said. "You're a librarian."
"I'm more of a sub-sub-librarian," Dewey said modestly. "That's what your parents used to call me, because my library work has been largely undercover and underground. Every villain in the world would want to destroy all this evidence, so it's been necessary to hide my life's work away."
"But where could you hide something that enormous?" Klaus said. "It would be like hiding an elephant. A catalog that immense would have to be as big as the hotel itself."
"It is," Dewey said, with a sly expression on his face. "In fact, it's exactly as big as the hotel."
Violet and Klaus turned their gaze from Dewey to look at each other in confusion, but Sunny was gazing neither at the sub-sub-librarian nor at her siblings, but down at the dark surface of the pond. "!ahA" she said, pointing a small, gloved finger at the calm, still water.