The world was never quiet

Lie 3 : I've never seen this sugar bowl.

We were investigating my father's kidnapping when I came across the first documents related to VFD. Well, I didn't come across them. Jacques had tasked me to go through everything I had saved from home whilst he interrogated, spied and searched clues in the field. The field meant everything around the hideout we had stopped in after several hours of car. According to him, we were still not in safety but we could consider ourselves hidden. All things considered, we were not hidden. Anyone with the slightest spark of intelligence could have tracked us, especially as I didn't know how to disguise my own tracks.

Anyway, it's in my father's notebook that I found those three letters. VFD everywhere, in coded message, in poems, in personal notes, from his teen years to my birth, with a special sets of page for his marriage with my mother and her death. My father was more laconic than Sparta itself, and only used one or two sentences to sum-up an event. A few years before my birth, under a red-written date, was written "Received the package. In safety. A.B does not know", and I have to admit that, of the whole notebook, it was the most important part.

And yet it wasn't the one I dwelt on. I rather focused on the initials, all those occurences of this VFD and all the phrases with those three letters. It was almost as if my father had gone crazy and I would have believed it if it was just for him. I had written in my own notebook everything that VFD seemed to mean. From this time forward, I didn't use it as an inspiration device anymore, but as a clue collector. Village of Fowl Devotees, a delightful town that would later on leave me stinging memories and a broken heart, Volunteers Fighting Diseases of the lovely Heimlich Hospital, the Valorous Farms Dairy that I haven't visited yet and, quite ironically the most and least important signification of all, the Volunteer Fire Department. None of that made much sense to my eyes or ears. To be honest, it does not really have much sense now - but anyway.

I tried to give sense to those letters, phrases and words as I waited for Jacques' return. Put together, they didn't have any sense anymore, especially as I spent hours staring at them. When I heard the door opening and my benefactor's voice, I didn't wait for him to hand his coat and hat to jump down his throat.

"Jacques, what does VFD mean?

- Where have you heard of that?" He tensed immediately. I already said it, Jacques never learned how to lie. "Read, rather.

- In my father's notebook.

- In your… Wait, you have you father's notebook?

- I grabbed it before the fire, yeah. But it's not what I…"

He gestured me to shut up and looked around, as if we were suddenly surrounded by spies. He closed every blinders of every windows and double-locked the door before coming back to me. He led me to sit on the age-old sofa and, a bit lost, I didn't resist and stared without the slightest of idea of what was going on.

"Cassandre, you must not tell anyone you have this notebook," he told me, both confidently and firmly. "I have not idea what is written inside, but some people would kill to have access to it, believe me.

- But why? It's all about this thing, VFD, and poems, and codes…

- I can't tell you what VFD is. It's too dangerous and some secrets… Must remain secret.

- Is that a joke?"

I guessed it was absolutely not the reaction he was waiting for at the way he looked at me. Since I'd woken up from my semi-coma, I had been nothing but obedient, composed and excessively docile. I conscientiously did everything he asked me and didn't ask any questions. But Jacques didn't know me, not yet anyway, and he couldn't have known that I was waiting for the first occasion to remind him he literally snatched me without telling me who he really was, why he was searching for my father or why I had never heard of him before. And I'd just found this occasion.

"You miraculously save me from my burning house, you take me out all over the city, you assure you knew my father and you're looking for him," I listed. "But you won't tell me what this damn VFD is nor who you are? Are you kidding me?

- I'm not kidding you, no, but some things are just beyond you.

- No shit Sherlock? Like the fact that my father got abducted before my eyes, and in the space of fourty-eight hours his best friends died in, oh surprise, a fire? I'm not a child, Jacques!"

I was a child, of course I was. But from all of my twenty years of age, with all the experience I thought I had and all the things I thought I'd lived, I imagined myself able to hear everything, understand everything. And Jacques eventually nodded, as if he'd figured out something he was trying to ignore since ages. Or maybe it was something he refused to see. He sighed a sigh I couldn't give any signification too, weary and sad as it was. He put a hand on my shoulder and finally spoke.

"No, you're not a child," he repeated as if trying to convince himself. "And you're already so deep into this that I can't keep hiding it from you. I already told you I am Jacques Snicket. I am a… Let's say, colleague of your father. We worked together in the same organization. VFD.

- But what does it mean

- Many things. There's no point in telling you everything, just know that VFD was originally an organization of firemen in charge of literally putting out fires." He shrugged. "I suppose we still put out fire, but more figuratively.

- And my father was part of this? Of VFD? He never told me.

- Because he didn't want you to know. If he'd wanted you to be a part of it, you would already be."

I remember I was upset. I didn't understand why my father had hidden this part of his life to the point of rejecting me out of this mysterious sphere and leaving me clueless about the whole thing. Upset and humiliated, too, to hear of it from a quasi-stranger.

But I didn't say anything. I just nodded to incite him to continue. His beautiful green eyes darkened and he looked away. He took a long time before he went on with his explanation, enough time for me to lose patience.

"There was a time when VFD was a solid and powerful community, some kind of big family gathering every knowledgeable and powerful individuals. But a schism happened and tore the organization apart.

- Then those who abducted my father…" I whispered, following the thread of my thoughts. "They were also part of VFD?

- That's what I'm trying to find out. But even if it's the case, the two sides of the schism use the same codes, the same gathering places and the same distinguishing features. It's almost impossible to know one side from the other if you don't know who you're talking to."

He shook his again, looking beaten. Jacques Snicket, I would find out way later, long after I lost him for good, was one of the most talented investigators of VFD. He obviously was a rightful and loyal man, but he was also able to let the clues do the talking and knew how to interpret signs. And people. He read everyone like an open book but me because, while I lived with him, I learnt to bypass his technics. Living with my father had taught me the basis, even imperceptibly.

And yet he was also the most transparent man I've ever known, at least intimately. His face expressed everything his mouth dared not to utter, and the way he talked said a lot more than the words he chose. No need to have a PhD in psychology to understand this man sincerely loved the organization and truly regretted what happened. Truth is, VFD never deserved men like him, whatever the side of the schism.

"But this schism, does it separate the good from the bad?

- Summarily, it did. My brother liked to say that it separated those who light fires from those who put them out," he sighed. "Your father, my family and the Baudelaire were part of the latter.

- And those who light them abducted my father, according to you?

- That's what the organization believes. That's what I'm trying to prove."

I nodded with a theatrical gravity. I was trying to be up to the trust he was placing in me – and it would be the one and only time I was. He had the delicacy not to comment on it and smiled to me. He took back his hand from my shoulder, and his weight remained. His soft heat, however, disappeared. I almost regretted it for a few seconds, enough time for me to remember I had written things in my notebook.

He didn't say anything when I searched through the pages, but read backward everything that was written. His smiled widened and he patiently waited for me to find what I wanted to say.

"My father talks of many places that seem related to VFD. Could that be of any use?

- I don't think so. But this notebook and the papers you took with you are our best lead," he said, gesturing the dark cover of the said notebook. "If we manage to find why he was kidnapped, we'll know who did it and where he was taken.

- Do you have an idea? That would easier than following every tiny leads.

- Search… For everything you can find on a sugar bowl. Even if it sounds strange."

My stomach tightened when he evoked the sugar bowl but I nodded and went back to my notebook. If truth be told, I had already spotted a few entries about this sugar bowl in whatsoever form but I had not yet tried to understand what was implied. I decided to dedicate a page of my own notebook to all the mysteries, all the weird things and everything I didn't understand. The first words I wrote were sugar bowl. It would the very last I would cross out of the whole list I would come up with. I have only crossed out words on this page. Like a dubious grocery list.

It actually didn't take much time to compile everything my father had written about the sugar bowl. It had been recovered by a B.B, it had remained in VFD's hands for a while and was still in their hand, last my father heard. Except this part wasn't true anymore, not since he'd been snatched anyway. When I came back to Jacques to tell him about my petty discoveries, I couldn't keep myself from checking if my bag was still where it was supposed to be.

"What do you have ?

- The last thing my father wrote about a sugar bowl was about him retrieving it and putting it in safety," I declared. "He wrote that an A.B does not know about it. Do you have any idea who this person would be?

- I'm afraid I don't." He was lying. Of course he was. "Do you have more recent information? This entry has been written twenty years ago.

- It's his old notebook, it does not go beyond fifteen years ago. I'll try to search in the papers I found."

He nodded and went back to his own notebook when I glared at the bundle of loose sheets I had shoved in my bag. There were many useless stuff, some photos that didn't have any interest yet and notes taken about books I hadn't read yet.

My father was a brilliant, legendary calm, I already said it, but he had an organization and a truly superhuman work capability. There weren't many flaws in his organization but one remained: he was too organized, too brilliant, too clear. Most of the papers I'd found came from the same file, and this file revolved around the famous woman named A.D (yeah, it was a woman) and seemed to constitute some sort of a corpus of evidences against her. And even if everything was written so that no one not concerned by the case could understand anything, everything was so concise that following the thread of his reasoning wasn't hard. And the crux of this thread was the sugar bowl, amongst other things I would discover later on.

It wasn't hard to find the only paper about the sugar bowl. It was a journal, or something of the like, as if the bowl had kept note of its itinerary from the moment my father had found it until it stopped to move. And it quite evidently had been in many hands before coming back home in what he called the chest. Chest I had involuntarily opened in my frantic search for information. Chest whose contents I had shoved in my bag – contents that were still there, hidden under clothes and a notebook.

There was still time for me to tell Jacques I had the sugar bowl. I could have done it. Some told me I should have done it. But I didn't do it, because though I didn't really know what it was, I guessed the value of the object and knew that my father had been taken because of it. And it's truly were my lies begun – the other ones were ill-fated, unintentional. It wouldn't be the case anymore. Nevermore.

"It's written here that the sugar bowl was hidden in your house," he finally said once his reading was over. "This chest… Do you know what he was talking about?

- No, I don't know.

- It doesn't make sense. Why would your father have hidden the sugar bowl in your house when he wanted to distance himself from VFD, it's not logical…" He ran a hand across his face. "He could have given it, taken it away…

- My father wanted to leave VFD?

- After your mother's death. He was… Shocked, I suppose."

Haha. Shocked. It didn't sound stupid, at this point. It was rather coherent. There is something to be shocked about, when you lose your wife to a car accident shortly after your daughter's birth. There were even more reasons to be shocked if you took into account the real circumstances of her death, but anyway. All in good time.

A few minutes passed during which Jacques read his own notes to try to make sense of the itinerary while I cleaned my papers in blank envelopes and wrote on one of them the letters A and D and then on my mystery pages. He came and, again, put a hand on my shoulder.

Jacques was a handsome man. He was too old for me in every regards, but it never bothered him. Or me. Maybe more him than me, this said, but I never knew his real age anyway. He was a handsome man, as I said, but any negative emotion gave him this weird hangdog look that didn't suit him at all. When he was wary or suspicious, as he was at this moment, his eyebrow stooped and hid his eyes a bit and his mouth puckered in a stupid angle. He looked like a displeased and teary child, or maybe like a wet-eyed dog. Or both, all things considered.

"Cassandre, are you sure you never saw it?

- You're still speaking of the sugar bowl?

- What else?" He sighed. "Listen, I know it must sound bizarre but this sugar bowl is extremely precious of the volunteers. It's probably what motivated those who abducted your father. If you remember anything, it could be…

- What you looking for, exactly? This sugar bowl or my father?"

It wasn't fair to attack him like that, and it wasn't fair to take advantage of his weakness to knock him down, but it was either that or I would have broken down. Even if I didn't know anything about this damned sugar bowl, it weighted too much on my conscience – now try to imagine how heavy it is now. How heavy it was until I destroyed it, rather. Today it's more like a ghost, something I found myself searching in my bag for ages until I realize I don't have it anymore. Some sort of a shady phantom limb symptom, if you want.

His gaze darkened even more and he shook his head. I had reached a sensitive area and he wasn't angry at me. Maybe just a little. Well, at least I had managed to divert both our attentions from my part in the problem.

"I'm looking for your father, so that he will help me find the sugar bowl," he replied, more sincere than I would ever be in this kind of situation. "To be honest, I was in town to see him.

- Were we supposed to meet you to go to Mortmain Mountains?

- No." He didn't add anything. He wasn't going to tell me we were supposed to meet his sister, not just yet. "All I want is to be sure you know nothing more, nothing that could help us."

Then again I could have told him. I don't think he would have abandoned me and left my father – wasn't like him. But I shook my head a long time. A bit too much.

"I've never seen this sugar bowl, Jacques. I'm sorry.

- It's nothing. He really wanted it hidden."

It wasn't nothing. His voice was full of remorse, full of sadness, full of things I would never know. And his sadness woke up mine and I felt tears in my eyes. He saw it and drew me in his arms with the gentleness of a friend. When I rested my head on his shoulder and let my tears soak up his jacket, when I let the regular beating of his heart and the hand on my back lulled me, I tried not to think of the sugar bowl in my bag, nor what could be inside, nor of the consequences of my choice. And it wasn't so difficult. I only had to let go inside Jacques' arms to forget that I had just sealed not just my fate, but also his, my father's and countless others' with what still looked like a white lie.