“You in there, Pop?” I asked the head.

Nobody answered.

I took a deep breath and grabbed the iron door handle and pulled with all my might. The door opened into a small room, a kind of reception area, like maybe what you’d see at an inn. Tally whistled. This place was nice. I mean it had a thick red carpet for my muddy old feet and a chandelier full of crystals dangling down over our heads, casting the room and its bright blue wallpaper with sparkles. It was easily the fanciest place I’d ever been in my life. A tiny man stood behind a counter, his back to a door-sized vault, big and metal like at a bank. He wore a black suit and had thin white hair. He was bent over some notebooks scribbling away with a big feather quill. There was a door on the right side of the room and a chair for sitting. A wooden placard on the desk said “Concierge.”

“Can I help you?” said the scribbling man, not bothering to look up at us.

“We’re looking for someone,” I said.

“And you think this ‘someone’ is currently on the premises of Baudelaire Quatro’s Place, is that correct?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“It is not company policy to bandy about the identity of any of our guests, no matter who they be or where they came from or what they may or may not have done. Is that clear?”

“You got a guest book?” I said.

“Of course we have a guest book,” he said.

“Can I see it?”

The concierge looked up at us, the light turning his glasses into little silver coins.

“No,” he said.

He went back to scribbling.

That made me mad.

I said, “Now listen here—”

The concierge lurched his chest over the counter, until we were eye to eye.

“No, you listen,” said the concierge. “I will not have the sacred halls of Baudelaire Quatro’s Place sullied by the likes of a couple of mouthy little tramps that just so happened to drift downriver. I detect in your manner a deep lack of respect, both for myself and for the esteemed Mr. Quatro, and I will have no disrespect on these grounds.”

“Is that so?” I said.

“Indeed, child, that is so!” said the concierge. “In fact, I ought to bend you over my knee and spank you for speaking to me in such a way. I ought to grab you by the hair and chuck you out the front door and let the gators have their way with you. I ought to do any such thing than sit behind this counter and endure your insolence, but that is what I choose to do, and you may commence thanking whatever higher power you believe in that I don’t slit you stomach to gullet and feed your entrails to the nutria. How does that sound?”

He dipped his big feather quill in the inkbottle and got back to it.