File Under: 13 Suspicious Incidents (1-6)

by Lemony Snicket

  “I’ll pay you double tomorrow.”

  “You can pay me triple yesterday. The answer is no.”

  “I could call the cops on you.”

  Jake sighed and pointed at Stew. “First of all, call them your parents, because that’s who the only cops are in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. And secondly, denying you a fourth muffin isn’t a crime. I’d call it a mercy.”

  Stew’s face snarled up like elevator doors had closed on it. “Then maybe I won’t pay for the first three,” he said.

  “You already did.”

  “Well, maybe I won’t leave a tip. Think it over while I use the can.” With that rude phrase I’ve never liked, Stew slid off the stool and clattered away to the door marked RESTROOMS, and the man in the green suit frowned after him.

  “What was that all about?” he asked.

  “That’s about four and a half feet tall and about as nice as a wasp stuck indoors,” Hix told him. “More coffee?”

  “No, thank you,” the man said, and left a few bills on the counter. “Keep the change and keep out of trouble. I should be back in town next month.”

  He nodded at both of us, the feather on his hat nodding, too, and off he went. Jake fed the money to the cash register and wiped the counter clean. “Been meaning to tell you, Snicket,” Jake said. “I’m trying one of those books you recommended about the clever kid in Utah. Don’t squawk but so far I’m not liking it much.”

  My mouth was full of crunchy onion, but Hix frowned at me. “I said don’t squawk,” he said.

  “I didn’t squawk,” I told him, after I’d swallowed.

  “Someone squawked, I heard it,” he said, and then I heard it too. For a minute I thought there was a radio in my shoe, as had once been required as part of my education. But the squawking sound came from the floor, and it was followed by a cry for help.

  “What was that?” Jake asked.

  “Help! Help!” the voice called again, and in moments I was crouching on the floor next to the counter. As Jake had mentioned, it was a nice clean floor, so it was easy to find what I was looking for. The squawking object was small and black, with an on-off switch, a round speaker, a red button marked TALK, and a piece of tape with more letters I couldn’t make sense of.

  “Help! Help!” said the object again.

  “It’s a walkie-talkie,” I said, and pressed the red button. “Lemony Snicket here. Can I be of assistance? Over.”

  I’d remembered to say “over,” a word which when spoken on a walkie-talkie means “I’m done talking and it’s your turn,” a code that the person on the matching walkie-talkie sounded too panicked to remember. “Help!” it said, so crackly I could not even tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman. “Where’s George? George, help me!”

  Jake looked at the walkie-talkie and then at the door. “My customer!” he said. “He must have dropped it.”

  “Is his name George?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. “I just know him as the guy who comes into town once a month for steak frites.”

  “Can you hear me?” the voice asked, and I pressed the red button again.

  “I can hear you,” I said, and headed toward the door. Jake took off his apron and followed. Steak frites is nothing more than a steak with French fries, but it’s delicious if it’s done well. I tried to be good at my job, too. “What is the nature of your emergency? Over.”

  “I’m trapped, over,” said the voice. “I need George to rescue me. Over. Our enemies have captured me.”

  There was a moment of staticky silence from the walkie-talkie as Jake and I stepped outside. Down the block I saw just a glimpse of a figure turning the corner, too quick for me to see if it was the man in the green suit, but Jake and I looked at each other and headed in that direction.

  “George?” said the walkie-talkie.

  “We’re trying to find him for you,” I said. “Over.”

  “Help me! Over! Help me!”

  “Tell me more about your situation, over,” I said, halfway down the block.

  There was another silence from the walkie-talkie, and I looked at the piece of tape and the letters printed there.

  OFF-SBTS-USE

  It was no word I’d heard of. The closest I could think of was “obtuse,” which could refer to a large angle or a dim-witted person, but “obtuse” didn’t have dashes in the middle. Not many words or phrases did, but maybe in a dashy town like Stain’d-by-the-Sea it was more common. Off-something, I thought. Perhaps it was just instructions to turn off the walkie-talkie.

  “George and I,” said the crackly voice, “are spies, and I have been captured.”

  “Is George wearing a green suit?” I asked, just as we reached the corner.

  “How do I know?” the voice asked. “I’m miles away.” The voice started to say something else, but then through the speaker I could hear a loud whoosh that interrupted. The noise reminded me of something I’d heard before, but I couldn’t think what.

  “What’s happening?’ I asked. “Over.”

  There was a brief pause, and then the voice grew louder and more worried. “Um, it’s a flood!” it cried. “They’re flooding the room!”

  “George?” Jake called as we rounded the corner, but there was no one but us on the sidewalk. I was thinking of the noise, like a waterfall but indoors.

  “Help!” the voice said again, and out of a doorway stepped the man in the green suit.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “I heard shouting just as I was entering my condominium.”

  “Are you George?” I asked him.

  “No,” the man said. “The name’s Leroy.”

  Jake’s face fell. “Are you sure you aren’t George?”

  “Are you obtuse?” the man said. “I’m quite sure of my name, thank you very much.”

  “Help!” the voice cried from the walkie-talkie. “Over! Find George!”

  “We’re sorry to have bothered you, sir,” I said, and led Jake back the way we had come. The man disappeared from the street, and I pressed the button and said, “We’re trying to find George. Is there anything else you can tell us about him? Over.”

  “He’s a spy like I am,” the voice said, after a short pause. “He might be in disguise, because of being a spy.”

  Jake and I looked at each other and then began to walk back toward Hungry’s. I scanned the block and wondered if George could disguise himself as a streetlight, or the rind of a melon someone had tossed into the gutter. DRAIN-LEADS-TO-SEA, it said on the curb, and even though the sea was gone, I looked at the printing carefully.

  “Does this label mean anything to you?” I asked Jake, showing him the tape.

  “OFF-SBTS-USE,” Jake tried to say out loud, but his mouth stumbled in the middle. “Maybe it’s initials?”

  “Help! Help!” the voice said, even more garbled than before. I hoped the spy wasn’t starting to drown. I had a list of ways I would prefer to die. Drowning was toward the bottom of the list. My top choice was “never.”

  At the door to Hungry’s we stopped again, looking every which way. We couldn’t know who we were looking for, but it didn’t matter. With no one on the streets, there was no one to find.

  “How many customers have you had today?” I asked Jake.

  “Not very many,” he said, “and none of them looked like spies.”

  “Good spies don’t look like spies,” I said, and the walkie-talkie crackled in my hand again.

  “Don’t just hang around the door!” the muffled voice said. “Help me! Over!”

  I turned the walkie-talkie off and pushed open the door to the diner. Stew Mitchum was behind the counter with his mouth full of muffin number four.

  “You scoundrel!” Jake said, gasping behind me. “You swindler! You rake! You snake in the grass!”

  “Snake in the grass” is a phrase for a person without scruples, such as a boy who would pretend to be a person in danger just to steal a muffin. But it wasn’t the phrase I was thinking of. I sudden
ly knew what OFF-SBTS-USE meant. I’d learned something—two things, really, if you included the whoosh sound. I’d already known that Stew was a scoundrel, a swindler, a rake, and a snake in the grass. But now I knew where he got the two walkie-talkies—the one behind his back, and the one in my hands. And at least I’d learned that the snake in the grass was good about washing his hands.

  The conclusion to “Walkie-Talkie” is filed under “Through the Window,” here.

  BAD GANG.

  This is an account of an eventful weekend I had unchaperoned. I was unchaperoned because S. Theodora Markson decided to leave one Thursday morning to visit her sister, who lived in a charming cottage out in the country with a beautiful garden and a darling teacup collection and no little boy underfoot to muck up everything and ruin their fun. That was me. I was going to stay by myself all weekend and not make any trouble and maybe she would bring me a teacup as a reward if I did.

  “That’s all right,” I told her. “You don’t have to steal your sister’s teacups on my behalf.”

  Theodora glared at me and put her suitcase in the back of her roadster, which was parked crookedly in front of the Lost Arms. My chaperone drove around in a green car that was so dilapidated I was afraid it would fall apart every time someone touched it. “I expect you to be good and follow all the rules of our organization.”

  “It’s against the rules of our organization for the chaperone to take a vacation and leave her apprentice all alone,” I said.

  “You sound like a person who doesn’t want a brand-new teacup.”

  “Most people sound like that,” I said, but Theodora just shook her head and put on the leather helmet she always wore when driving, which captured her wild hair about as well as a handkerchief would capture a swarm of eels. She was a curious sight, S. Theodora Markson. She always was, and I was always curious about her.

  “What does the S stand for?” I asked, over the ragged sound of the engine.

  “What?” she shouted back.

  “What does the S stand for in your name?”

  “See you Sunday!” she said, and puttered off. I watched her go and then waited a sensible amount of time in case she forgot something and had to come puttering back. She didn’t. I went back up to my room, and I’m not ashamed to say I did a little dance. It was the sort of dance you do when you’re finally alone in your room. It was a short dance, and I had plenty of time to head on over to the library and read as long as I liked.

  That was Thursday.

  The next morning I took a walk to the oldest neighborhood in Stain’d-by-the-Sea. I don’t know what I was looking for. I was thinking about my biggest case, a mystery which had started long, long before I’d arrived in town. Most of the clues had vanished. I thought perhaps a good place to look was the town’s first business district, which was a few blocks of buildings around a small paved courtyard. The buildings had once been very impressive and now looked only as if they had once been very impressive. Weeds had come through the cobblestones of the courtyard, pushing them aside like their turn was over, and little metal chairs where people had once sat and sipped drinks were now scattered and rusty.

  I found something straightaway, but I’m sorry to report it was Harvey and Mimi Mitchum, Stain’d-by-the-Sea’s only police officers and the sort of married couple who argued from the moment they woke up in the morning to the moment they fell asleep in the middle of some cranky sentence. They weren’t very good police officers, but to be fair, it was probably because they didn’t have enough time to do a good job. They were too busy arguing. This particular Mitchum argument was taking place in front of a shop window which had been shattered, leaving jagged fragments of glass everywhere on the sidewalk. According to the sign, the store was called Boards, and sure enough, the man waiting for the officers to stop arguing was holding a thick plank.

  “And I’m telling you, Mimi,” Harvey Mitchum was saying when I approached, “that he only thought he heard the heart beating in his room. It wasn’t actually beating.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Mimi said. “I read the story better than you did.”

  “You can’t read something better, Mimi. That’s absurd.”

  “Then why did you think the store was called Broads when we first got here?”

  “I just glanced at the sign.”

  “It’s because you were thinking about broads, that’s why.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, and everyone turned to look at me, although only the man holding the board wasn’t glaring.

  “Move along, Snicket,” Harvey said sternly. “This is police business. The Big Bad Brick Gang has struck again.”

  “Who are the Big Bad Brick Gang?” I asked.

  “Not that it’s any of your business,” Mimi said, “but the Big Bad Brick Gang is an anonymous group of vandals and other malcontents who strike in secret in the middle of the night, with clever strategy and bricks. We cannot know when they will strike next and no one will ever catch them, but the whole world knows the menace of the Big Bad Brick Gang.”

  “I’ve never heard of them,” I said.

  The Mitchums looked at each other as if they were a little embarrassed. “Confidentially,” Harvey Mitchum said, using a word which here means “please don’t tell anyone,” “we hadn’t heard of them until this morning.”

  “My son has mentioned them before,” said the man with the board. “When we heard the crash in the middle of the night, he guessed it was the Big Bad Brick Gang who was responsible.” He called into the shop through the shattered window. “Kevin!”

  A boy about my age stepped forward, holding a board in each hand. “Tell the police,” the man said. “Tell them what you’ve heard about this Big Bad Brick Gang.”

  “Not much,” Kevin said. “Just that they’re an anonymous group of vandals and other malcontents. Vandals are people who destroy property, and malcontents are people who are angry enough to do such things.”

  “My son has been telling me that we should get a weapon to keep the store safe from this gang,” the man said, using the plank to gesture down the street. “He’s always going on about fencing and swashbuckling and all the other nonsense he gets from pirate books. I’ve told him it’s foolishness.”

  “It is foolishness,” Mimi said. “Weapons would be of no help. We cannot know where they will strike next.”

  “Did they steal anything, or just break the window?” I asked.

  “They stole a board,” the shopkeeper said. “It’s our bestselling model, and it looks like this. In fact, this might be it. It’s hard to tell. But there was a board in the window we had on sale, and I think they took it after they threw the brick.”

  “I’m glad that’s all they took,” I said.

  “Don’t be glad,” Harvey snapped. “The police force of Stain’d-by-the-Sea will do all we can for Boards. It’s an Old family business.”

  “I’m Bob Old,” the shopkeeper explained. “My family has run this business for years. I’m grateful that you came, Officers, but I’m not sure what the police can do.”

  “That’s true,” Harvey said. “No one will ever catch them.”

  “How do you know all this about the Big Bad Brick Gang,” I asked, “if you’ve never heard of them until today?”

  Mimi reached into the pocket of her police uniform and handed me a wadded-up piece of paper. “This was wrapped around the brick,” she said, and I uncrumpled the note and read what it said.

  Hello there,

  We are the Big Bad Brick Gang, an anonymous group of vandals and other malcontents who strike in secret in the middle of the night, with clever strategy and bricks. You cannot know when we will strike next and no one will ever catch us, but the whole world knows the menace of the Big Bad Brick Gang.

  Yours truly,

  The Big Bad Brick Gang

  “Just because they wrote that no one will ever catch them,” I said, “doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  “You see?” Harvey said to his wife. “You do
n’t read very well.”

  “What this foolish kid said has nothing to do with how well I read,” Mimi said, and Bob Old walked back into his store as the Mitchums started up arguing again. I decided to leave, too. Listening to adults argue was a waste of a perfectly good unchaperoned day. Instead, I found Moxie Mallahan and we played a dice game her mother had taught her. Moxie’s father went to bed so early that she was unchaperoned most of the time. It was the sort of dice game you could play for money, but we didn’t. If we had played for money I would have owed Moxie a fortune.

  That was Friday.

  I woke up early and had breakfast at Hungry’s, but as soon as Jake Hix told me the news I left my frittata half-finished and hurried back to the old section of town. There was another shattered window and another shopkeeper out front. This time the sign read SWORDS, and this time the Mitchums were standing there arguing again, although this time they had their son, Stew, with them. Stew Mitchum was a nasty piece of work. Like a cactus, the best thing to do with him was ignore him, no matter how much he kept poking me.

  “Here you are again,” Harvey Mitchum said. “I’m beginning to think you’re a member of the BBBG yourself.”

  I was already a member of an organization that sometimes struck in the middle of the night, but I saw no reason to volunteer that information to the Mitchums. “I heard they struck again,” I said.

  Mimi shook her head and kicked at a piece of glass. “A Distinguished family business,” she said. “I can’t believe the BBBG dared to strike here.”

  “I’m Muriel Distinguished,” the shopkeeper explained to me, and she began to sweep up the broken glass.

  “Was anything stolen?” I asked.

  “Just one sword, which we had displayed in the window,” Ms. Distinguished said.

  “Similar crime, similar note,” Harvey said, waving a piece of paper.

  Hello there,