Taxi driver(s) may be involved with V.F.D. as a disguise or may pick up people who are involved in the organization. Snicket's narration suggests that a taxi driver had picked up the Sugar Bowl at the Hotel Denouement. The taxi driver is described as 'a skinny man with a skinny cigarette', exactly the same as the taxi driver who took the Baudelaires to Aunt Josephine's house in the third book, so it is likely that they are the same person. It had been suggested that taxi driver was Snicket himself. In The Penultimate Peril, as a crowd is gathering to catch the Baudelaire orphans under the illusion that they deliberately shot Dewey with a harpoon gun (in fact the gun fell out of their hands and hit the floor, releasing a harpoon that killed Dewey), the Taxi Driver comes up and offers to take them away, saying that money is no objective. He also says what a lot of people have said in the Hotel Denouement - "Are you who I think you are?"
The Baudelaires think about whether to go with him - on the one hand they should not, as he is a strange man, but on the other hand, he has said no money is not a problem, he quotes American poetry, and smokes cigarettes, causing Snicket to write that therefore he was probably "in between" villainous and noble. Snicket adds that even if the children had gone with the taxi driver, that would not have been the end of their troubles, only the start of a new set of troubles. In any case, whether or not the Baudelaires wanted to go with the man in the taxi, after Sunny replies, "We don't know," to his question of "Are you who I think you are?" Mr. Poe arrives and takes the children away, and presumably the taxi driver leaves, with the sugar bowl "a small damp wet object sat on the seat beside him having been retrieved from its hiding place". The Taxi Driver plays no further part in the series. Part of this disguise includes a picture of a baby, mentioned in The Unauthorized Autobiography. When Count Olaf arrives at Uncle Monty's house in the second book as Stephano, he refuses to give his taxi driver a tip on account of his talking too much about his new baby. He may be Lemony Snicket.
Read more about this topic: List Of Supporting A Series Of Unfortunate Events Characters, Secondary Supporting Characters
Famous quotes containing the words taxi and/or driver:
“I have done almost every human activity inside a taxi which does not require main drainage.”
—Alan Brien (b. 1925)
“God help the horse, and the driver too!
And the people and beasts who have never a friend!
For the driver easily might have been you,
And the horse be me by a different end!
And nobody knows how their days will cease!
And the poor, when they’re old, have little of peace!”
—James Kenneth Stephens (1882–1950)