But first, let’s see how Sunny fares on her own…
What Happens?
Sunny finds herself helping Principal Nero, Mr Remora and Mrs
Bass. They ask her to take them to the Indian restaurant, where they find Hal
working. Sunny winds up in the kitchen where she is witness to a conversation
between Hal and Frank/Ernest. She’s given a device to turn a door into a
Vernacularly Fastened Door and instructed to attach it to the door of the
laundry room, which is expected to receive a delivery shortly. So Sunny heads
off to do as she is instructed, just as the hotel clock chimes three
o’clock.
Thoughts as I read:
Firstly we’ve got to take a look at the picture for this chapter.
It’s five bags of money, though the centre one has ‘Chapter Six’ written across
it. The others have a big dollar sign and ‘Property of Mulctuary Money
Management’ around it. They’re sealed at the top with chains and padlocks which
I don’t think looks particularly secure. I’m guessing this will be the discovery
that Sunny makes, though just who the money is intended for will remain to be
seen.
Sunny’s exited the elevator on the third floor and found herself
in a corridor much the same as the one Klaus ended up on. She’s finding it a
little tricky to be a flaneur considering the fact that she’s barely past being
a baby and now she’s expected to be a spy and a concierge at the same time. Her
speech is still hard to understand and she’s only recently learned to walk, so
you can see why she might struggle a little.
Room 371 is the room for persons of an educational persuasion and
it’s fairly easy to work out who it is; there’s a sound like someone skinning a
cat or something, and there’s only one person we know who enjoys making noises
like that. It’s Principal Nero of course.
I love this next bit:
If you have ever worked someplace and then, later, not
worked there, then you know there are three ways you can leave a job: you can
quit, you can be fired, or you can exit by mutual agreement. “Quit,” as I’m sure
you know, is a word which means that you were disappointed with your employer.
“Fired,” of course, is a word which means that your employer was disappointed
with you. And “exit by mutual agreement” is a phrase which means that you wanted
to quit, and your employer wanted to fire you, and that you ran out of the
office, factory or monastery before anyone could decide who got to go
first.
That’s brilliant.
The reason for bringing up this distinction is that the last time
Sunny saw Nero, he fired her as his secretary. Imagine that! A baby not capable
of being someone’s secretary!
Sunny needs to cover up her lack of vocabulary so she tells Nero
‘You rang’ which he immediately mimics in that weird voice of his. He then
berates her for showing up and interrupting his violin practice, even though he
rang for her, who does she think she is?!
Also in the room are Mr Remora, the banana eating teacher, and Mrs
Bass, the teacher obsessed with measuring. Mrs Bass has a blonde wig perched on
top of her head and is wearing a black face mask which I think alludes to a
mention of her becoming a bank robber in an earlier book. They’ve requested the
presence of a concierge because they’re hungry and want to go to a room where
they can get something to eat.
Sunny can’t give her usual response (‘Andiamo’ meaning ‘I’d be
happy to take you there’) because it’ll give away who she is, so she doesn’t
speak, instead gesturing to the door. We then learn that the bags of money
belong to Mrs Bass, so she’s already embarked on her career of a life of
crime.
Luckily Mrs Bass, as well as being a bank robber, knows the way to
the Indian restaurant so Sunny is kind of surplus to requirements here. Nero
spends his time blathering about the violin recital he’s putting on this
Thursday. This is his big opportunity to be recognised for the obvious talent he
is and so quit his job at the school. It appears that each one of the teachers
has received a personal invite designed to appeal to the things they want most;
Mr Remora’s boasted of an ‘all-you-can-eat banana buffet’ while Mrs Bass’s was
about bringing valuables to be measured in celebration of the metric system.
This explains the bags from the bank, she had to steal stuff to have something
to bring to the party.
We also hear that Esme Squalor is behind the party invitations as
they head up to floor nine where we come face to face with another blast from
the past. It’s Hal, the short-sighted hospital archivist. He’s got a big turban
on to maintain the theme of the Indian restaurant, so it looks like he’s done
okay for himself since the hospital fire.
I think Hal is speaking in code because his response to Nero’s
mimicking is to say ‘I didn’t realise this was a sad occasion’. I’m sure we’ve
seen something in the past about this sort of code. Whatever the correct
response is supposed to be, Mr Remora gets it wrong.
Mrs Bass has a unique method for ordering food:
“I’ll have ten grams of rice,” Mrs. Bass interrupted, “one
tenth of a hectogram of shrimp vindaloo, a dekagram of chana aloo masala, one
thousand centigrams of tandoori salmon, four samosa with a surface area of
nineteen cubic centimetres, five deciliters of mango lassi, and a sada rava
dosai that exactly nineteen centimeters long.”
I dare you to try that next time you’re ordering in a
restaurant.
We know that Nero is a bad man because not only does he only order
candy for his meal, he also moves his glass off the coaster to ensure it makes a
mark on the wooden table top. The bastard.
The conversation turns to Coach Genghis, aka Olaf. Mrs Bass
defends him, since being on the run from the law can be very stressful. Mr
Remora is going to say something about this but he’s cut off by Nero who
dismisses Sunny in search of napkins. This takes her to the kitchen where she is
able to witness a mysterious conversation.
Frank/Ernest is talking to Hal. Apparently J.S. is at the hotel
and they are a she. This is a surprise. She’s apparently using a
‘Vision Furthering Device’ to watch the sky and has warned they’ll be ‘eating
crow’. I’m not sure if this another coded conversation. Apparently so, because
‘eating crow’ means ‘enduring humiliation’ which isn’t something I was aware of
before. This causes Sunny to reminisce about her parents playing backgammon so
we learn that Mr Baudelaire’s name was Bertrand. It’s only taken twelve books to
learn this!
Meanwhile Frank/Ernest are discussing the actual preparation of
cooked crow and the conversation just gets stranger with additions such as
‘According to our calculations, the sugar will be laundered sometime after
nightfall’. It’s bizarre. This then leads to the ‘Are you who I think you are?’
question, which Hal responds to by asking the same question back, at which point
they spot Sunny and ask her as well.
This prompts a brief consideration of the meaning of ‘taciturn’
and why Sunny doesn’t immediately tell everyone who she is. Some of the options
for her response include ‘Sunny Baudelaire please help’ which means ‘Yes, I’m
Sunny Baudelaire, and my siblings and I need your help uncovering the mysterious
plot unfolding in the Hotel Denouement, and signalling our findings to the
members of V.F.D.’, or ‘No Habla Esperanto’ which would mean ‘I’m sorry; I don’t
know what you’re talking about’. Instead she just says ‘concierge’.
The men seem to understand this because they show her a strange
device with cables coming out of it and a keyboard in the centre. Of course
Sunny knows just what it is. Frank/Ernest tells her what has to be done: it’s
placed on a door, the letters V, F and D are pressed and the door becomes a
Vernacularly Fastened Door. Sunny is ordered to fasten it to the door of Room
025.
Hal informs us, and Sunny, that it’s the laundry room, which
surely has something to do with the reference to the sugar being laundered. It
would seem that the sugar bowl is expected to fall into a funnel which leads
directly to the laundry room. Sunny is then informed that they’re grateful for
her help with the scheme before she takes off for Room 025.
And so we start to catch up with Violet and Klaus as, for the
third time, the clock begins to chime through the hotel. Once again it sounds
like ‘Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!’ which is how Sunny feels as well.
Which leads us to ALSO NOT A CHAPTER which
repeats the three images from NOT A CHAPTER though in a
slightly different order. This time it’s the man pressing the button in the
elevator which comes first, second is the woman drilling a hole in the wall
while a moustache and top hat lie on the floor beside her, while the final image
is of the eye peeping through a hole at some frayed rope.
This is followed by a single paragraph:
At this point, the history of the Baudelaire orphans reverts
to its sequential format, and if you are interested in finishing the story, you
should read the chapters in the order in which they appear, although I dearly
hope you are not interested in finishing the story, any more than the story is
interested in finishing you.
So there we are. Hopefully now the Baudelaires will be reunited
and some of these mysterious will begin to be solved.
Maybe we’re hoping for a little too much.
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