by Jo Nesbo
“But,” said Juliette, opening the door, sticking her head out and peering cautiously to the right and left, “we should go somewhere where we won’t be seen . . .”
Juliette Margarine’s Remarkable Story
JULIETTE MARGARINE AND Lisa found a quaint pavement café on a quiet side street and each ordered a croissant. Plus one for Lisa to take back to the hotel for Nilly. But Nilly would have to wait a bit, because first Lisa had to hear Juliette Margarine’s story.
“I don’t know exactly where Victor is,” Juliette said. “But I was there when he left, and I know what he was thinking. This is a long story, I think I’d better start at the beginning.”
“Good,” Lisa said, taking a rather large bite of her croissant.
“The whole thing started one Sunday many years ago as I was strolling through Montmartre right here in Paris. There are always lots of painters there offering to paint tourists’ pictures for a reasonable price. But in the middle of all these, I came across an eccentric-looking young man I recognised from the university. He was studying chemistry, just like me. I knew that his name was Victor Proctor, that he was a promising inventor and that he came from Norway. I had occasionally had the sense that he wanted to speak to me, but didn’t quite dare. But on this day in Montmartre, he came over to me and pointed to a strange contraption – a machine he said he had invented himself that painted portraits in just a fraction of the time the other painters took and for half the price. So I let him – or actually his machine – paint me. But when the painting was done, he looked at it for a few seconds, then ripped it up and groaned in despair. I asked what was wrong and he explained that it was another one of his failed inventions. Because the portrait machine hadn’t come anywhere near capturing the beauty of my face. He gave me my money back and was about to leave, but I asked him if I could at least buy him a café au lait for his trouble. We came to this very café that you and I are sitting in now, and we talked about chemistry together until it got dark. Then, we ordered some wine and kept on talking, about our lives, what we liked and what made us happy and about our dreams. And by the time he walked me to the Métro station that evening, I had fallen in love with him and knew that he was the one I wanted. Imagine, I just knew!” Juliette laughed. “All I thought about from that day on was this cute young inventor from a country way up north.”
“Cute?” Lisa said dubiously. “Doctor Proctor?”
“Oh, yes, he was quite handsome, you know. I looked for him at the university every day that week, but he wasn’t anywhere to be found. On Sunday I went to Montmartre again, and there he was, standing in the exact same spot as the last time, but without his portrait machine. He was shivering and his teeth were chattering, but he lit up when he saw me and we kissed each other on both cheeks the way we do here in France. When I asked what he’d been up to for the last week, he said that he’d been waiting. ‘Where?’ I asked. ‘Right here,’ he answered. ‘Waiting for what?’ I asked. ‘For you,’ he answered. And from that day on, Victor and I were a couple.”
“Ooooh,” Lisa sighed. “How romantic!”
“Yeah, it was.” Juliette nodded. She smiled a little sadly and drank a sip of her coffee. “But unfortunately, there was someone who had other plans for me.”
“Your father, the baron,” Lisa said. “He didn’t want you to marry a poor inventor. Right?”
“Yes, in a sense that’s true, but he wasn’t the one who came up with the plan I’m talking about. You see, the Margarine family is an old, aristocratic family. Nobility. My father is a baron. My mother was a baroness and that makes me a baronette. At one time we also had money. All the way up until my great-great-great-greatgrandfather, the Count of Monte Crisco, was beheaded by Bloodbath the Executioner during the French Revolution over two hundred years ago. Unfortunately, the family fortune then went to his brother, Baron Leaufat Margarine. He was a drunken lout and a gambling addict who frittered the whole fortune away on Uno.”
“Uno?”
“Leaufat lost and lost, but then during a fateful round of Uno in a tavern in Toulouse, when he had been dealt all four of the Wild Draw 4 cards, he became convinced that his luck had finally changed. He bet everything that was left of the family fortune. Unfortunately, it turned out that one of the guys he was playing against, a sneaky swindler named Aigeaulde Cliché, also had four Wild Draw 4 cards . . .”
“But . . .”
“Leaufat lost and in his rage he accused Aigeaulde Cliché of cheating and challenged him to a duel at dawn. But by dawn, Leaufat was so drunk he could hardly stand up. And when Cliché skewered him with his rapier they say more brandy trickled out of his body than blood.”
“Ugh.”
“You can say that again. There was no money left and our family was only just barely able to hold on to Margarine Castle, which was mortgaged up to its chimneys. Since then we’ve pretty much just had the title of baron, but not really much in the way of worldly goods.”
“But if you’re so poor, why wouldn’t your dad let you marry a poor inventor?”
Juliette shook her head sadly. “One night my dad came to me and said that he had amazing news, that I had a suitor. And not just any old suitor, but a rich businessman. I was horrified and said that I already had a boyfriend. I mean, he knew that! Yeah, yeah, my dad said, but this suitor had offered to pay off all the debts on Margarine Castle and to restore my family to its former glory. Could my Proctor do all that? he asked. This suitor had come to ask for my hand and my father had already said yes, so the matter was decided. Oh, and by the way, his name was Claude Cliché, my father said, and looked rather alarmed when I screamed at the top of my lungs. You have to understand, my father was not actually a bad person, just a little naive. He must have been the only one in Paris who hadn’t heard of Claude Cliché and his gang of hippopotamuses.”
“Gang of hippopotamuses?”
“Cliché is a conniving thug who made himself rich by using his gang to threaten people into doing what he wanted. The hippopotamuses are not actual hippopotamuses, they come from a village in Provence called Innebrède. Almost everyone there is related to each other and they all look like hippopotamuses. The hippo potamuses are not very good at doing maths in their heads, but they’re very big and strong and they drive around in enormous black limousines. Their job is to copper people.”
“Copper people?”
“If you don’t agree to one of Claude Cliché’s business proposals, like selling your restaurant to him for a ridiculously low price, the hippos come. They say they’ve come to pay you in copper coins. They fill your pockets with enough coins to buy so many penny sweets that you could fill a swimming pool. Then, they tie your hands and feet, say thanks for doing business with them and chuck you in the River Seine, where you sink like a plumb-bob. And then you stay there, on the bottom, for two months straight, unless someone finds you first.”
“Yikes! Didn’t you tell your father that this Cliché guy was a crook?”
“Yeah, of course, but my dad just laughed and said that they were probably just rumours, that Claude was probably just like any other businessman. That he couldn’t be that bad, my dad had seen Claude and me dancing together at the Christmas Ball.”
“You guys danced together?”
“Just one dance. And I only did it because he was sitting at my table and I didn’t want to be rude when he asked. I couldn’t stand him. He had bulgy fish eyes, a scrawny moustache and thick, wet lips that splattered spit as he bragged about how he’d started out in the business world. It involved two brothers, inventors, who’d just created braces clips.”
“Braces clips? I thought those had always existed.”
“No, no. In the past people used to have to button their braces. Braces clips were considered a major step forward for humanity, kind of like. . . well, escalators and electric toothbrushes. But anyway, after the hippos paid the two brothers in coppers, Cliché took over their patent and it made him filthy rich. And that’s why he always wears b
races.”
“But, isn’t that a little weird?” Lisa asked. “You couldn’t stand him and yet somehow he was so in love with you that he wanted to marry you, after only having seen you just that one time.”
“In love!” Juliette exclaimed. “Cliché has no idea what love is. There was only one reason why he wanted to marry me: he wanted to become nobility. If he married a baronette, it would automatically make him a barometer. I told my father that, but he made it clear that if I said no, we would be bankrupt and kicked out of the castle. And that I should go and change because Claude was coming to propose to me that very night.”
“Double yikes!” Lisa said. “What did you do?”
“I locked myself in my room and thought. And then I realised what I had to do.”
“What?”
“Marry Victor before anyone could stop us. The only way to become a barometer is to be the first person to marry a baronette. If a man marries a baronette who’s been married before, it doesn’t make him any nobler than a mule and it certainly doesn’t give him the right to use a title that starts with baron. If I hurried up and married Victor, it would be too late for Cliché and he would leave us alone. That was my plan. I also thought that since powerful criminals like Cliché have eyes and ears everywhere, it would be smartest for us to drive across the border into Italy, where Victor and I could get married in total secrecy. So, I climbed out of my window, went straight to the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille where Victor was living and proposed.”
Lisa laughed. “That’s what the doctor told me. How exactly did you propose?”
Juliette shrugged. “I knocked on his door. He opened it and said, ‘Hi!’ I said, ‘Do you want to marry me?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Get your motorcycle helmet, we’re going to Rome to get married now.’ I didn’t give him any explanations. I really didn’t want to have to explain to him that my dad, his future father-in-law, didn’t want him as a son-in-law and had promised me to someone else instead.”
“And what did the professor say?”
“Victor just laughed and did what I said. We climbed onto the motorcycle and he floored it. Out of Paris to the south, towards the mountains of Provence and the Italian border. We drove all night and it was cold, but Victor’s scarf, which he’d knitted on a knitting machine he had invented, was twenty metres long, so we wrapped it around both of us.”
“How . . . sweet.”
“Sweet, yes. But I knew that by now Cliché would have sent out the alarm and dispatched his hippos. I hadn’t told Victor anything. Why should I? He was in high spirits, we were already far from Paris and soon it would all be behind us. As the sun began to come up, we zoomed past a sign with a name on it and into a village. Victor spotted a petrol station and slowed down. I yelled from the sidecar that he should keep going, that he shouldn’t stop here, that we could fill up the tank in Italy, that it was only a mile or two to the border. But the engine and the long, flapping scarf were making so much noise that he didn’t hear me. So he stopped in front of a big guy in overalls with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth who was leaning against the only pump. Behind him sat another guy who looked exactly like him, tilting a chair back and reading a magazine. Victor said, ‘Fill ’er up’ and didn’t notice that I had unwound myself from the scarf and was hunching down in the sidecar.”
“Why were you doing that?”
“Because I’d been able to read the name on the sign as we drove in. And look at those two guys. They had teeth as big as tombstones in those enormous jaws of theirs. They looked like—”
“Don’t tell me,” Lisa gasped. “Hippos! You were in Innebrède. How awful!”
“The guy in the overalls starting pumping the petrol, eyeing Victor with suspicion the whole time. Then he called over his shoulder to his twin brother, ‘Hey, what did the boss say that professor guy looked like?’ ‘Tall, thin, ugly beanpole with motorcycle goggles,’ the brother answered without looking up from his magazine. ‘Guy’s name is Proctor.’
“I was scared because that meant that not only did Cliché know I’d run off, but he knew who I was with. Meanwhile, Victor, who had no idea what was going on, lit up: ‘Wow! Have you guys heard of me? I mean, I knew there was that piece in the school paper about my time-travel bath bomb, and they did take my picture to go with it, but to be recognised so far from Paris, well—’
“At this point I interrupted Victor and whispered as loudly as I dared, ‘Drive away! Drive away now!’
“‘But honey, Juliette, these nice men just wanted to—’
“‘Drive! Otherwise we’ll miss our appointment with the priest!’
“‘Well, I have to pay for the petrol—’
“Victor hadn’t noticed that the hippos were closing in, so I stood up in the sidecar, stomped on the starter pedal and turned the throttle as far as it would go. The motorcycle jumped, lurching forward. And I did a backflip out of the sidecar. I landed on my head on the asphalt as the pump hose arched and danced, spraying petrol all over both of the hippos and me.”
“Oh no, oh no!” Lisa exclaimed, leaning so far forward that she was about to tip over her coffee cup.
“Oh yes, oh yes,” said Juliette, rescuing the coffee cup at the last second. “I saw stars, but picked myself up and started running – well, staggering – after the motorcycle. With both hippos on my heels. I was spitting out petrol and yelling for Victor, but he couldn’t see or hear me, I could see that he was laughing and saying something to the sidecar. He thought I was still sitting in there and was probably getting a kick out of driving away without paying for the petrol.”
“Oh no!”
“I thought I was done for. The two hippos were closing in. The one in the overalls with the cigarette grabbed me by the hair. But then I heard a poof and he was gone.”
“What happened?”
“Cigarette smoking and petrol, a bad combination. But the other one was closing in. I could hear the coins jingling in his pockets. His heavy, wheezing hippo breathing. And Victor didn’t seem to be slowing down. He was slowly getting further and further away.”
“Double oh no!”
“I was about to give up and then I noticed Victor’s scarf. It was dragging along behind the motorcycle. I felt hippo fingers clutching at my back. With the last of my strength, I dived forward, grabbed the corner of Victor’s scarf and held on for my very life as I was pulled away.”
“But then you were being dragged over the asphalt?”
“Yup. The asphalt instantly wore holes in the knees of my trousers, and it stung like you wouldn’t believe. So, I scrambled up onto my feet and kept the soles of my shoes against the ground so that I was being pulled along behind the motorcycle, kind of like if I was on water skis.”
“That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard!”
“No, that would be this next part,” said Juliette. “Victor still hadn’t noticed what was going on. I was about to lose my grip on the scarf as we came round a bend, heading straight for a bridge. Next to the bridge there was a sign that said ‘Gustav Eiffel’s Bridge’. I realised that this was my last chance to catch Victor. Without letting go, I scooted to the edge of the road and over to the sign. The next instant, the scarf and I starting whipping round the signpost. That’s the fastest carousel ride I’ve ever been on in my whole life. I was so dizzy that I was reeling when I stood up and saw Victor lying in the middle of the bridge. His motor cycle was stopped a little further ahead. I ran over to my beloved Victor. His face was totally blue, poor thing, his eyes were bulging out and he tried to speak, but he couldn’t get a single word out . . .”
“Was he injured?”
“No, it was just the scarf squeezing his neck. Once I loosened it and he was able to breathe again, he talked. True, in a very strange voice, kind of like this . . .”
Juliette mimicked him, speaking in a high, squeaky voice: “Juliette, what happened?”
Lisa giggled a little. And so did Juliette.
“I said it was nothing, that n
ow we would go to Rome and get married. Then I took his hand and we ran to the motorcycle. He got it started, but a valve had been damaged and he said we wouldn’t be able to go very fast, that he hoped the priest would wait for a bit. That’s when I saw the wide black limousine coming over the crest of the hill towards the bridge.”
“A black limousine?” Lisa said. “Hippos!”
“The limousine was so wide that for a second I hoped the bridge would be too narrow for it. But it just barely managed to manoeuvre its way on to the bridge and was coming straight towards us.”
“Surely this was the end!”
“Yes, Lisa. This time it was the end. With a broken valve there was no way we would beat them to Italy. Way down under the bridge there was a river, flowing deep and black. And I knew what the hippos would do if they caught us together.”
“Yeah,” Lisa said breathlessly. “Fill your pockets with coins and toss you off the bridge.”
“Victor, yes,” Juliette said. “But not me. They would take me to Paris, put me in a wedding dress and then drive me to a church where Cliché would be waiting, in a tuxedo and braces and that scrawny moustache, waiting for my ‘I do’ so that he could finally call himself a . . . BAROMETER!”
Juliette slapped the table with her hand so her café au lait sloshed over the side of her cup and then continued in a voice on the verge of tears.
“But, I also knew that if the hippos caught me, they wouldn’t worry about chasing Victor anymore. He wouldn’t be that important to them once they had me. So I . . . I did what I had to do.” Juliette stuck her hand in her purse and pulled up a handkerchief that was every bit as white and daintily embroidered as one would expect a baronette’s handkerchief to be. She dabbed away a big, glossy tear. “I lied to Victor. I said that it was my father’s limousine, that he must have followed us and that I had to go and talk to him. And that Victor should hurry, drive over the border into Italy and wait for me there. He protested, but I insisted. I pushed him onto the motorcycle, said au revoir – goodbye – and he drove away.”