A man who would have been instantly forgettable if you could actually see him sat in the shadows of his office, quietly smoking a pipe while considering the papers on his desk, as one does when sitting in a shadowy office. While there are many who consider smoking to be a filthy habit, he considered it to be a boon, as it had saved his life multiple times. Being willing to light fires, however small, next to one's mouth does that around a band of pyromaniacs who require convincing that one is like them.

There was a knock on the door.

"Come in, door's unlocked," he said after taking the pipe stem out of his mouth.

The man who opened the door, stepped through it, then shut it behind him, moved rather like a marionette, although he was not, and jerked his way into the best seat in front of the desk.

The pipe-smoking man considered him for a few moments, then leaned back in his armchair.

"Have you read the Count's file?" he asked calmly, looking directly into the puppet-like man's eyes.

"No," the man replied, "I haven't."

"Well, you're going to. If I had to suffer though reading that, so do you. That was one of the more miserable experiences of my life." Normally, that phrase would have meant that reading the file was as miserable as spending thirty minutes walking through the rain after a bad breakup. In this case, it meant that reading the file was as miserable as slicing your mentor and father figure's throat open after he proposed doing heinous things to the young woman the two of you had taken prisoner.

The room's temperature dropped like a bowling ball. "Kindly explain to me why the Beria Protocol was not activated for him a decade ago, because I can't think of a single reason right now," he ordered, and the puppet-like man shrugged like wormwood.

"It's in his file," he said resignedly. "He was good at his job. He could make the most ridiculous disguises work, and he got the organization money. Lots of it."

The pipe-smoking man put the pipe stem back in his mouth, puffed furiously for a few seconds, took it back out, and glared at the other man.

"I knew our chiefs had no morals," he snarled, "but I expected them to have standards. This was utterly unacceptable. The protests regarding attempted annulments should have been seen as the excuses they were. They had the High Court, curse it!" He shook his head. "I'm glad he never got his claws into the last ones he hunted."

"We don't know about the Quagmire girl."

"Point. However, he was weird about his…activities, which is why I don't think he got to her. Speaking of the Count?"

"I came to tell you it's done," the other man replied. "We modeled the probable path of the perilous passage partly by plotting the perambulations…"

The pipe-smoking man held up a hand. "You're alliterating again."

"Sorry," the puppet-like man acknowledged, then continued. "We used the Babbage Ant Farms to find the path of the vessel Count Olaf and the Baudelaires took from the Hotel Denouemont, taking into account the currents and the storm that came through that area. We then started checking every rock and shoal within the theoretical area."

"How long did it take you?"

"Two days."

"So soon?"

The puppet-like man shrugged jerkily. "We decided that we'd try and check for visible wreckage first instead of going underwater. It was also considerably closer than we thought to shore, around twenty miles from Briny Beach."

"You mentioned that in the summary you sent, and that you'd found signs of habitation. What sorts?" the pipe-smoking man said as he leaned back in his chair.

"Well, there was what looked like an abandoned camp of sorts. The storms had hit it hard, but we decided the inhabitants left around a year and a half ago." He paused, and the pipe-smoking man spoke.

"A year and a half ago…wait a minute. Wasn't there that Medusoid Mycelium outbreak close to Briny Beach then?" He shuddered. "Horseradish and pyromania stood us in good stead those three days."

"Yes, I was just about to get to that. We found spores in an old broken diving helmet in the camp. It looked like there was a scuffle, the helmet got broken, the fungus got loose, and then the idiots left."

"Dealt with?"

"No casualties. We had horseradish. Also, we found a delightfully bitter type of apple tree on the island that contains horseradish, along with numerous saplings. We brought some back."

"Worth the trip by itself," the pipe-smoking man said with a grin. "But please, continue."

"We found two unmarked graves."

"Ah?"

"We exhumed them," the puppet-like man said uncomfortably, as it is generally considered a mark of grave disrespect to dig up a dead person. "The bodies were decomposed, of course, but based on clothing, identifying marks, bone structure, and the fact that we ended up with a bunch of Medusoid Mycelium spores in our faces, we concluded that they died of it, and that the they in question were Count Olaf and," he paused for a moment, "Kit Snicket."

The pipe-smoking man put his head in his hand and cursed, then looked at his friend sidewise. "This is going to kill Lemony when he finds out. First Beatrice, then Jacques, and now Kit?"

"How far away is he from the island?"

"He's currently poking around the ashes of Heimlich Hospital."

"We could…"

"No. Better to know than not, curse it." The pipe-smoking man sighed, then leaned back in the chair and cocked an eyebrow. "You refilled the graves, I trust?"

"Yes."

"Good." He paused, then smiled slightly unpleasantly. "And that does it for Olaf, too. That's some of the best news I've gotten in weeks. Maybe now we can bring this schism to an end."

"You think so?"

"With Count Olaf and Kit Snicket confirmed dead, all the lead and supporting actors in the original drama are either dead or otherwise off the board," the pipe-smoking man stated flatly. "Lemony's the last of the original volunteers who isn't indisposed in some fashion, and he's wrecking himself trying to make up for Beatrice's death by finding her children. He'll be a broken man once he finds Kit's grave. No, he's no further threat. As to the original villains," he snarled, "Olaf was the last one unaccounted for. Hardly anyone still around knows what the original schism was about!"

"We still don't know about the Quagmires or Widdershins and the Queequeg," the puppet-like man pointed out.

The pipe-smoking man shrugged. "We know that we found traces of the Great Unknown near the wreckage of the Queequeg and that weird hot-air balloon mobile home. Since we haven't seen any of the people on board those since," he sighed, "And Widdershins was not a hard man to notice, I think we can assume they're dead, curse it. Good people, all of them."

He shook himself, then looked at the other man. "Anyway, so what else did you find?"

"Well, remember about that apple tree? We found it in a recently abandoned storage arboretum."

"You found one? I thought they were myths."

"Well, they're not. We found a lot of useful information stuff in there, including the answers to a lot of our questions."

"Really," the pipe-smoking man said as he crossed his right leg over his left. "Where was it?"

"The Baudelaires' commonplace book."

"How did the kids get a commonplace book?"

"No, not the kids. The parents."

The pipe-smoking man's eyes widened slightly. "That's exceedingly interesting."

The puppet-like man shook his head jerkily. "It may not be that useful. They stopped writing in it around fifteen years ago. Then someone else started writing in it—Ishmael."

"Ishmael…Ishmael…wait…wasn't he the only survivor off that boat? Well," he amended, "He was, until Selma decided that we needed no witnesses. That was rough."

The puppet-like man grimaced. "She was smarter than she knew. He was a totalitarian, a busybody, a hypocrite, a hider of knowledge, and helped shove the volunteers over the edge—that night at the opera was his idea. And that's just what we got from his entries in the thing. His handwriting stops two days before the Mycelium outbreak, and the next entries indicate that it was his idea to leave the island without the horseradish apples."

"Who was left on the island to write it?"

"The Baudelaire children."

The pipe-smoking man blinked for a second, then grinned very pleasantly. "Well, so they did manage to survive the storm after all. Good to hear."

"They did set the Hotel Denoumont fire, and accidentally killed Dewey."

"Yes, they did. And your point is? No one who's still alive and effective has clean hands, and neither do a lot of the ineffectual ones. I seem to recall that the two of us were up to our eyeballs in the Saint Bartholomew Sanction and the Katyn Catastrophe."

"Yes, but we were in our twenties when we did that. None of them are even sixteen yet."

"Which is why I sympathize. Look, you and I both know that the only reason we're not in their position is that you, I, and several of our friends realized that we were adrift when we were legal adults, which meant we could go where we willed and no one asked questions. And even then," he said heavily, "we're the only ones left from the Council of Ten."

The puppet-like man cocked his head to the side for a moment, then nodded. "I can agree with that…for now."

"Of course."

"Anyway, apparently the Baudelaires made it to the island with Olaf, then found Kit Snicket after she escaped the wreck of the Queequeg, there was some kind of argument that became a schism, the Mycelium got loose, they managed to find the horseradish apples thanks to the Incredibly Deadly Viper—"

"We've still got him, right?"

"Oh yes."

"Excellent. A trained snake is a marvelous thing. My apologies for interrupting."

The puppet-like man waved a hand dismissively. "Anyway, they ran back only to find the islanders leaving with Ishmael and failed to stop them, Olaf bled to death from wounds received in the schism, Kit Snicket died shortly after delivering her baby…"

"What?!"

"Kit Snicket was pregnant, and Dewey Denoumont was the father. I thought you knew."

"I most certainly did not. Who told you?"

"Frank."

"What do we have him doing?"

"Running the Bodacious Beer, Bed, and Breakfast over near Superbia. We're using it to keep tabs on Tarquin de Moff."

"Keep him there. My apologies for interrupting intermittently."

The puppet-like man waved a hand. "None needed," he said, "that news came as a shock to me, as well."

"What did they name the child?"

"Beatrice."

The pipe-smoking man smiled sadly. "She wasn't a bad woman. Not compared to most of us." He sighed. "Maybe that'll help Lemony. I hope so. But, please continue."

"So, after all that happened, they buried the bodies and stayed on the island for a year, apparently read through the entire commonplace book, as well as a lot of the other information, took care of Beatrice, and repaired the boat they took to the island. They then loaded up the boat, left the commonplace book behind, and set sail."

"Anything else?"

"The boat's name was Beatrice," the puppet-like man replied.

The pipe-smoking man leaned back and thought for a moment, then sat up, got up, and walked to the door.

After opening it, he poked his head through and looked down the hall to see a young man walking along the hallway, whistling an infuriatingly cheery tune. "Peter Knight!" the pipe-smoking man accosted.

"Yes, sir!" Knight replied as he came to an abrupt halt.

"If you're not busy," the pipe-smoking man said in a tone that implied that "busy" meant "informing people of an outbreak of plague," "Please go down to the records room and pull the last year of the observation reports from Briny Beach."

"Yes, sir," Knight said, and ran back down the hall.

The pipe-smoking man went back into the room, closed the door, and went back to his chair, where he steepled his hands, ruminated a minute, then spoke.

"Every one of our bushrangers had, and has, orders to watch for the Baudelaires," he thought out loud in order to reduce the levels of social awkwardness that existed in the room. "But they were told to watch for two teenagers, the girl older than the boy, and a baby. If there were four, they probably didn't think a thing of it."

"The Beatrice crashed and sank during the middle of the Briny Beach Bread Brining Blowout, and the Baudelaires are extremely recognizable, thanks to The Daily Punctilio," the puppet-like man pointed out. "And besides, wouldn't we have noticed something in the observation reports and news stories?"

The pipe-smoking man shook his head. "Remember, Briny Beach is one of the biggest consumers of that rag. Someone might have noticed their remarkable resemblance, but then someone else would have pointed out that while there were three Baudelaires, there were four people on the boat. And that would have been the end of that. As for news stories," he shrugged, "that was at the same time as we were implementing William Joel's little plan. The reporters were busy. As to observation reports, you know I've been relying on summaries for almost a year now. I don't have time to read them all."

"Neither do I," the puppet-like man said, then grinned. "Did you think, when we formed the Council of Ten, that we'd ever be in this position?"

Before the pipe-smoking man could answer, there was a knock on the door, and a voice saying, "Briny Beach observation reports, sir."

"Coming," the pipe-smoking man said as he walked to the door. He opened it, took the box from Peter's hands, nodded, and said, "Thank you. Have fun tonight."

"Thank you sir," Peter said with a smile that said he was already thinking of his evening out on the town. The pipe-smoking man chuckled and waved him on, then closed the door with his foot, put the box on his desk, and began to ruffle through it.

"Aha, here's the date," he said after a few minutes of searching as he pulled out the papers held together by beeswax. "Now let's see—she went to the Bread Brining Blowout, then a boat named Beatrice crashed and…yes, here it is. Four children, the oldest a girl in her mid-teens, a young teenage boy, a toddler girl, and a baby. They all survived, took their things from the boat, dried them on the rocks, took some bread, and left Briny Beach at the end of the day."

He grinned boyishly. "Ha-ha! Yes! Finally, some good news." He paused. "All right, old friend, there's some decisions to be made, and I've got a flash of inspiration coming on, so settle me down if I get too weird, okay?"

The puppet-like man grinned. "Can do, boss."

"Good. First, we get the word out to all the bushrangers. Give them the description contained in this report, remind them that there could be two toddlers by now, and tell them not to spook them." He paused, drumming his hands on the desk, then chuckled. "Yes, definitely don't spook them, but keep watch all the same. We don't need addresses, just cities—for now. Also send orders that, once found, if attacked they are to be aided without caveat."

The puppet-like man quirked an eyebrow. "Are you sure about that last?"

The pipe-smoking man thought a moment and nodded. "Yes. We owe them, and we owe them big. That fire at the Hotel Denoumont allowed us to initiate the Emetic and Diuretic Contingencies, and in a way that allowed us to keep most of our organization intact and bring in most of the surviving volunteers while ridding ourselves of the villains. Also, it was Hathorne who took Poe's position, yes?"

The puppet-like man growled. "Yes. Little pretentious snot, just like his predecessor."

"Put Coldprice on him. Inform him that when the Baudelaires come to claim their fortune, he will give them no trouble beyond the bare minimum necessary, or some of the more embarrassing parts of his diary will be made public."

He thought again, tapped his chin, and chuckled. "Also, let's get Squalor working on that book again. He should at least have his notes. That'll clear the way for getting Strauss on the High Court."

"Are you mad? Strauss may be a kind woman, but she's obsessed with legalities. And the High Court is currently in flux"—which means here that every position on the court had, in the year and a half since the fire, been held by three or more people, none of whom had left voluntarily or alive—"and I thought you thought well of her."

"I do," the pipe-smoking man said, "But by the time Squalor manages to rewrite his book and we get it to Samizdat Press, most of the wolves should be dead, and we can bring down the rest. And any legal case against the Baudelaires has so many undotted i's and uncrossed t's that any judge who cared about such things would throw it out in a trice."

He puffed furiously on his pipe for three seconds, then spoke again. "Then, once that's done, they should be in a position to claim their fortune without let or hindrance." He paused, ruminated, nodded. "Then we make the recruitment offer, when they won't think we're trying to take advantage of their poverty. We could use them. I don't know how Beatrice or Sunny would be useful, but Klaus could be a great help in the archives, and Violet…she's already as good an inventor as Angus ever was, maybe better. And she's not yet sixteen. Who knows how she'll grow."

The puppet-like man clucked his tongue. "And now we come to the real reason you want to recruit them. You're sweet on the girl," he said with a slight smile.

The pipe-smoking man shot a suppressive look at his friend. "I'm twelve years older than she is," he said curtly, "and I am not reviving, even—or, in this case, especially—metaphorically, the old V.F.D. tradition of cradle-robbing."

The puppet-like man held up his hands. "Easy there," he said, "I was kidding."

The pipe-smoking man slumped slightly. "I know. I'm wound tighter than a pocketwatch."

"Why don't you go out with me and the lads tonight?" the puppet-like man asked. "The Terrific Tumbler's got some great new beer in, and the barmaids have more than their fair share of pulchritude."

The pipe-smoking man grimaced in thought. "Maybe. There's a lot to do." He sighed, patted his coat jacket, then nodded decisively and returned to business. "Also, put the neophytes on Lemony. We've got better things for the tall ones to do. And please come with me," he requested of the puppet-like man. "We'll need to deliver a sign of good faith to the Baudelaires when we approach them, and the discovery of that arboretum makes this the perfect opportunity to set that up. It's time to tie up the last loose end."

The addressee of these remarks jerked to his feet and grinned like a wolverine. "Finally," he said. "We've had him in this place too long."

"Just a moment," the pipe-smoking man said, then flipped up the cover for the Conversational Capillary that ran to the basement. "Prepare the prisoner for interrogation, and put a camera in the room, if you would."

"Right away, sir," came the reply, and the pipe-smoking man nodded.

"Thank you," he replied as he flipped the cover shut, and the two men walked out the door of the office, the pipe-smoking man pausing to put the report back in the file and pick up the box, and then again to shut and lock the door. There wasn't anything especially important in there, but it was the done thing.

After stopping by the records room to drop off the box, they continued down the hall and down the stairs to the basement in silence, the sort of silence that is held between two friends who are about to finish something they had devoted their lives to completing and had never thought they would.

They halted at the last Vernacularly Fastened Door in existence. The pipe-smoking man typed in "Dulcinea," then "Colt made them equal" and finally "Pro amicus mori," and the door swung open to reveal a long hallway and a grey-bearded man with a limp.

"Is the prisoner ready?" the pipe-smoking man asked, and the limping man nodded. "Wait here, if you would," the pipe-smoking man ordered. "There will be things said that should be heard by few."

"No trouble there, sirs," the limping man said. "His mutterings keep me awake at night," he added as the other two men went down to the far end of the hall, where a door with a question mark etched into it stood.

The puppet-like man opened the door, the pipe-smoking man stepped through it, and the former shut the door behind them. There was no lock on it—none was needed.

The man with a beard, but no hair, sat shackled to a chair in the center of the room, which had as its only other furnishing a table with a camera on it. The shackling was almost cartoonish—each wrist to its respective arm of the chair as well as together, and each ankle to its respective leg and to each other.

"You two again," he sneered. "I see you still don't have the guts to actually get some of your own back, even with the cover of trying to get information out of me. You know my friends are going to break me out of here, and that you won't do what you should have done whenever you captured me and shoot me, because it wouldn't be legal. Why do you maintain this rigmarole?"

"Because of the hope that a day like this would come," the pipe-smoking man rasped as he laid his pipe on the table. "I won't be asking you any questions, except maybe rhetorically."

"Really?" the man in the chair sneered yet again. "What are you going to do then? Try and convince of the error of my ways? Convince me to repent?"

"Yes and no. I'm going to give you some information. First, Olaf is dead. Second, you are one of four survivors from the Hotel Denouemont fire."

"Four?" the man with a beard, but no hair said, his eyes widening a little in shock. "That's all?"

"That got you," the pipe-smoking man said, crossing his arms with an unpleasant smirk. "Yes, that's all. Well, not quite. There were four others who set the fire to cover their escape. Care to guess who?"

The man with a beard, but no hair, cursed. "Olaf, I'll bet. The little treacherous rat. And after I gave him the Snicket file. Ungrateful wretch." Then he looked up with a gleam in his eye. "That leaves three. Wait, don't tell me—the Baudelaires. Little disobedient brats. Olaf should've waited 'til they got back from Briny Beach to burn down their house."

"Yes, the Baudelaires," the pipe-smoking man replied. "And as you should have been able to figure out by now, that fire allowed the Emetic and Diuretic Contingencies to be implemented. Your friends won't be coming for you. Most of them have killed each other after discovering their mutual treacheries. But even if they hadn't, it wouldn't matter."

"Why not?"

"Because the only reason you're not dead is that you have information that we wanted about the origins of the schism and its early days, and we knew of no other source," the pipe-smoking man said as his face creased into a smile colder than the Valley of Four Drafts. "Until we found the arboretum library."

The man with a beard, but no hair, went white. "You can't have," he whispered. "We spent years hunting for that place."

"Well, we did," the pipe-smoking man said as he pulled out the revolver from his coat pocket. "Which means we don't need you anymore."

"Wait! No! I have—"

"No information that's worth keeping detritus like you out of the landfill," the pipe-smoking man snarled as he cocked the revolver. "Worst part of all this for you? If your placement practices had been a little better, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"Placement practices? What are you talking about?"

"You remember Mark Sade, who you sent to capture Justine? He was my mentor. And remember how she somehow got loose and cut his throat? That was me, after he proposed that I join him in his interrogation. You know about his interrogations. Hadn't been for that, I'd've been one of your loyal soldiers."

"But you're a hero!" the man with a beard, but no hair said desperately. "Heroes don't shoot men who are shackled to chairs in basements! That's for men like me!"

"But I'm not a hero," the pipe-smoking man said softly. "I'm not a volunteer. I'm a man who decided that running from himself for the rest of his life sounded like too much effort." He chuckled grimly. "I'm the one element of your legacy that will survive, even once all the villains you've aided and all the evil edifices you've built have been burned away. You wanted someone who could do wetwork"—a term that here does not mean performing tasks in damp conditions, but rather soaking people's clothing in their own blood—"without flinching. You've got him." He raised the revolver until it was pointed at the center of his target's forehead. "Good-bye."

The pistol cracked as the man with a beard, but no hair, reared back in the chair, and the combined momentum of the bullet and the man conspired to put his newly-brainless body on the floor.

The pipe-smoking man looked down at the corpse as the puppet-like man picked up the camera and began taking photographs. It was over. Four years of training, five years of apprenticeship, and ten years of fighting a secret war in the belly of the beast. He looked at the revolver. It was tempting, so tempting…but then he thought of Frost.

"But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep," he murmured, put the revolver back in his pocket, raised his head, felt a great weight roll off his shoulders, and he didn't know whether to straighten in joy or sag in relief.

"I've taken about a dozen pictures," the puppet-like man said, breaking into his thoughts. "Is that enough?"

"What? Oh, yes, yes. Should be more than enough, we don't want them to think us creepy," the pipe-smoking man replied as he picked up his pipe and opened the door to, once more, reveal the limping man standing just outside it.

"I heard a shot," he replied to the pipe-smoking man's unanswered question, then craned his head around and grimaced when he saw what was lying on the floor.

"Took you long enough," he grumbled, and the pipe-smoking man smiled a little.

"Do you want us to clean it up?" he asked.

The limping man shook his head. "No thanks," he replied, "I'll do this myself. Where do you want the body?"

The pipe-smoking man thought for a minute, then shrugged. "Make sure that he goes back to dust as quick as quick."

"That won't be a problem, sir," the limping man said.

The two other men went out the door, but then the pipe-smoking man turned around. "One more thing, Ward. Once the body's disposed of, take the week off. Paid leave. I'll make the arrangements."

"Thank you sir," Ward said, giving a gap-toothed grin.

The pipe-smoking man and the puppet-like man climbed up the stairs in contemplative silence until they delivered the camera to the darkroom for picture development.

"Made up your mind?" the puppet-like man asked as they shut the door behind them.

The pipe-smoking man grinned. "Sure, why not? There's not so much to do, after all."

"Good, good," the puppet-like man said.

They strode down the hall to the doorway of the Motel Maquis, went through it after opening the doors, and the pipe-smoking man took a long whiff of the air and smiled. "Even the air seems fresher."

"I suppose it does, but I wish your references were."

"Oh?"

"Well," the puppet-like man said as they went down the steps, "Frost? Really?"

"I like Frost, thank you very much. Just because you completely misunderstand "The Road not Taken" is no cause to abandon his entire body of work."

"He's jejune," the puppet-like man said, a word here meaning that the speaker has no interest in New England.

"Frost? Jejune? This from the man who loves Flaubert."

"Flaubert is an eminent describer of the human condition."

"Flaubert," the pipe-smoking man stated as he waved his pipe for emphasis, "spends his time vigorously declaiming about how disgusting the middle class is, which is fine in its place but really needs some balance."

"I really think you misunderstand Flaubert. It's fairly obvious that…"

And thus did they argue—companionably, as they had not done for ten years and friends at ease will—as they walked down the sidewalk.