by Jo Nesbo
JULIETTE WAS STARING straight ahead. Then she put the handkerchief over her nose and blew—loudly, like a trumpet blast and not quite the way one would expect a baronette to blow her nose.
“Three days later I married Claude Cliché in Notre Dame, a cathedral in Paris. People were up playing Uno until all hours that night and Claude lost some money to one of my father’s wedding guests. That guest was found a week later at the bottom of the Seine with his pockets full of small change. I think that finally opened my father’s eyes to what kind of person Claude is. My father pulled me aside, asked if I was happy, said it would be all right with him if I got a divorce, that we didn’t need the castle, that we could live in a small apartment and that he could get a job. Poor Dad! He just didn’t understand that Claude would never allow himself to be humiliated like that, that if we so much as mentioned the word ‘divorce,’ we’d both end up in the Seine, Dad and me. So I said, no, I was fine. Of course the truth was that I could hardly stand living with that monster even for a single day.”
“Triple yikes!”
“You can say that again. And so the years passed. Dad got old before his time and then two years ago he got sick and died of pneumonia. As we were sprinkling dirt over his coffin, Claude whispered to me that now that my father wasn’t in the picture anymore, maybe I might be thinking about running off and finding my professor boyfriend again. But that if I tried that, I would find out what it was like to stand on the bottom of the Seine with my pockets full of coins, holding my breath and just waiting to drown. Then he patted my cheek and said the hippos would be watching me.”
“That … that … bully,” Lisa whispered, feeling her eyes well up.
“I had totally given up on having a happy life,” Juliette continued. “Until early this summer. Then I suddenly received a strange postcard in the mail. It had a Paris postmark and apart from my name the words on it were totally unintelligible. But I recognized the handwriting right away. It was my beloved Victor’s. Just think, he hadn’t forgotten about me after all these years! My heart rejoiced. So I sat down and tried to make sense of what he’d written. And do you know what I found out?”
Lisa nodded. “I think I do. It was written backward, wasn’t it?”
“Yes!” Juliette exclaimed. “How did you know … Oh, right, I forgot that you got a backward postcard too.”
“How did you know—” Lisa started to ask, but Juliette placed a hand on Lisa’s arm and said, “I’ll get to that in a second, dear. When I read the card backward, I saw that Victor wanted me to sneak out and meet him at the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille the following night. He was staying in the same room he had rented so many years before. He wrote that Madame Trottoir, owner of the Frainche-Fraille, had told him about the rumors that I had been forced to marry the worst thug in Paris, Claude Cliché. I was so nervous, I was shaking as I stood in front of his door and knocked. But when he opened the door and I fell into his arms, it was as if we had never been apart!” Juliette closed her eyes and whispered, enthralled, “Oooooh …”
“Oooh,” Lisa whispered, every bit as enthralled.
“Victor wanted us to run away together, but I explained to him that Cliché was more powerful, richer, and had more small change than ever before, and that he would pursue us to the ends of the earth and that eventually he would find us. That’s when Victor came up with his crazy, crazy idea….”
“What idea?”
“The idea of using Doctor Proctor’s time-traveling bathtub.”
“Doctor Proctor’s what-the-huh?”
Juliette was just about to respond when Lisa saw her notice something across the street.
“We have to get out of here, Lisa.”
“What is it?”
“Hippo alert.” Juliette put on her sunglasses and left a few coins on the table. “Come on. We have to find somewhere to hide.”
Lisa looked in the same direction that Juliette just had, and sure enough, two people with unmistakably hippo-like traits were standing across the street.
“Nilly!” Lisa said, jogging after Juliette who was quickly striding down the sidewalk. “We’ve got to go get Nilly!”
“Follow me,” Juliette said, handing Lisa a stiff little piece of paper that looked like a ticket and turning to descend a staircase that looked like it went right down into the ground.
It was a ticket and the stairs did go right down into the ground.
“This is the Métro,” Juliette said as they stood in a subterranean hall and fed their tickets into a yellow machine so the metal bar in front of them would let them through. They ran through the damp, cool tunnels and down stairs that led them farther underground. They emerged onto a platform in a catacomb-like cavern just as a train pulled in and doors slid open. They hurried in. As they were waiting for the doors to close, they heard a distant thudding sound, as if something heavy were running toward them. Juliette didn’t need to tell Lisa what it was, but she did anyway: “hippo feet.”
Lisa stared at the stairs. First she saw hippo feet, then hippo bodies, and then hippo faces. They stopped running and now they were looking around. One of them shouted something and pointed to the train. To Lisa. She ducked down below the window and stared at the sliding doors, which were still open. “Close, close, close,” she pleaded in a whisper.
Then she heard heavy, running hippo footsteps again.
A metallic voice said something over the PA system and then—finally—she heard a snorting groan from the doors as they started to slide shut. Lisa heard angry shouts and someone pounding on the side of the train and then a forceful blow right above her that shattered the glass.
The train started moving slowly. She looked up. Now there was a white pattern on the windowpane.
And an angry face was staring at her from the other side of the window, but not a hippo face. This face had bulging eyes and thick, wet snail lips just below a pencil-thin mustache. A pair of wide suspenders was stretched across the person’s stomach and shoulders. Juliette didn’t need to tell Lisa who it was, but she did anyway. In a whispering voice that quaked with fear: “Claude.”
Nilly Meets Juliette and Vice Versa
JULIETTE STARED DUMBFOUNDED at the tiny little boy with the red hair who had just opened the door for her and Lisa. Not just because the boy, who without a doubt had to be the Nilly that Victor had told her about, was even smaller now that she was seeing him close up. He was also naked—aside from a towel around his waist—dripping wet, and had a blue nose clip pinched onto his nose. But the most surprising thing was that he had just said Bonjour, Madame, which is French and means “Hello, ma’am” as if it were completely natural for him, and his French pronunciation was perfect.
“Je suis Juliette Margarine,” Juliette said. “Et tu es Nilly?”—which is also French and means, “I’m Juliette Margarine. And you’re Nilly?”
“Oui, Madame Juliette,” Nilly said in a nasal voice, bowing deeply and opening the door the rest of the way for them.
Juliette and Lisa darted in. Lisa hurriedly locked the door while Juliette took up position by the window, looking down at the street below.
“Cliché’s hippos are after us,” Lisa said. “We managed to sneak away, but I’m sure they’ll be back soon. That guy who was sitting in the lobby reading a newspaper looked suspiciously hippo-like.”
“Excuse-moi?” Nilly said.
“I’ll explain later. Quick, get dressed. We have to get out of here.”
Nilly looked like a wet, human miniature question mark topped with a few bath bubbles.
“Qu’est-ce que tu dis là?” he asked in that strange, nasal voice.
“Speak properly. We don’t have time for this nonsense,” Lisa said angrily and yanked Nilly’s nose clip off.
“So sue me, Miss Shrew, but I don’t understand a word you’re saying,” Nilly said.
“What don’t you understand?” Lisa asked.
“Hey, now I understand you!”
“Well it’s about time,” muttered L
isa, who had already started stuffing her things into her backpack. “Juliette is going to take us to a different hotel. Claude Cliché and his hippos have been spying on her for the last several weeks. They’ve had the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille under surveillance since Juliette has been here several times.”
“That’s why I didn’t dare come into the hotel and make contact with you here,” Juliette said. “I knew one of the hippos was sitting down there in the lobby in case I showed up. So I stood in the entryway of a building across the street and waited for you guys to come out, so I could make contact. I’m afraid I might have scared Lisa a little.”
“Yeah, maybe a little,” Lisa said. “Hurry up, Nilly. That hippo in the lobby saw us. They’ll be here soon.”
“Yeah, yeah. Let me just concentrate,” Nilly said as he stared down at the clothes lying on the bed. “Let’s see. First the pants, then the shoes. FIRST the pants, THEN the shoes. Yes, that’s right.”
Then he pulled on his pants. And then his shoes.
“Um, what about the socks?” Lisa asked.
“Darn it,” Nilly said, kicking off his shoes again and putting on his socks.
“What have you been doing, anyway?” Lisa asked.
“I took a bath,” Nilly said. “And danced the cancan at the Moulin Rouge. One of the dancing girls thought I was cute.”
“Yeah, right,” Lisa said.
“It’s true,” Nilly said. “I just ducked down into the bathwater and when I came up again, I was at the Moulin Rouge. And it seemed like it was a long time ago, because everyone was wearing old-fashioned clothes.”
“Dude, don’t you ever get tired of making things up?” Lisa asked, slapping shut the top flap of her knapsack. She was ready to go.
“And there I was,” Nilly said. “Just as naked as the day I was born, in front of a huge audience and eight super-attractive cancan dancers. Boy, was that embarrassing.”
Lisa noticed that Juliette was laughing so hard she was shaking as she stood over by the window, keeping her eye on the street below.
“So I jumped back into the bathtub and submersed myself. I held my breath and wished I was back in the hotel room, here and now. And guess what happened? When I came up again, I was back here, as if nothing had happened!”
“That’s because nothing had happened,” Lisa said. “Aside from inside that weird brain of yours. And meanwhile a lot of stuff has been happening in the real world, so get a move on, would you?”
Before Nilly put the few things he’d unpacked back into his knapsack, he took out a small jar with a lid with several air holes in it. He carefully placed the jar in the side pocket.
“What’s that?” Lisa asked sternly.
“A seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider.”
“A what? You didn’t bring the …?”
Nilly shrugged his shoulders. “He seemed so lonely down there in Doctor Proctor’s cellar. No professor and so far away from all his buddies in Peru, huh? I decided to call him Perry. So sue me. But we did agree that we were allowed to bring small things that start with P, right?”
“Yeah, I guess,” Lisa groaned. “But hurry up now. And no more making up stories.”
“I haven’t made up any—”
“Oh, you haven’t, have you? How did you understand that that dancing girl said you were cute? You don’t happen to speak French, do you?”
They were interrupted by Juliette’s calm voice from over by the window. “Hey guys. I have some good news and some bad news.”
Nilly and Lisa turned toward her.
“The good news is that Nilly doesn’t need to hurry after all. The bad news is that the hippos have surrounded the hotel, so we’re not going to be going anywhere.”
“Uh-oh,” Lisa said softly.
“Uh-oh,” Nilly said softly.
“Now what are we going to do?” Lisa said. “The hippos are going to fill our pockets with small change and dump us in the Seine.”
“What?!” Nilly protested. “Small change? Those cheapskates. I want big change. I want bills!”
“Shh, kids,” Juliette said. “There might be a way for us to get out. But it would mean that you have to listen to me very carefully. All right?”
It seemed like that was fine with them. At any rate, both Nilly and Lisa shut their mouths and looked at Juliette while their ears sort of seemed to curl out from their heads a little bit so they could hear extra well. And a good thing, too, because Juliette was about to tell them something that would explain Nilly’s strange experience in the bathtub, how he was suddenly able to both understand and speak French, how Doctor Proctor had disappeared, and how Lisa and Nilly might—just might—be able to escape from the hippos and the watery depths of the River Seine.
But you won’t be finding out any of that until the next chapter.
Doctor Proctor’s Time-Traveling Bathtub
JULIETTE FLUNG OPEN the door to the bathroom and pointed dramatically to the bathtub. It was filled to the rim with water and soap bubbles, even though the bubble layer had diminished quite a bit since Nilly had done his cannonball into it.
“This,” said Juliette, her voice quivering, “is a time-traveling bathtub. You can go anywhere you want in terms of time or space in this bathtub. All you have to do is fill it with water, get the soap to make bubbles, and then submerse yourself. You concentrate on where and when—the date and the time—you want to go. After seven seconds, you can come up again and, voilà, you’re there! You can go anywhere you want, but you can’t go to the same place more than once. In other words, you get only one chance to change the past at that specific location.”
“Cool!” Nilly exclaimed. “When did Proctor invent this doohickey?”
“While he was living here in Paris, just before he met me. Which is to say: Victor—”
“Victor?”
“Doctor Proctor,” Lisa said. “Doctor Victor Proctor, that is.”
“Victor Proctor?” Nilly spluttered in disbelief.
“Well he has to have a first name, doesn’t he? Just like everyone else,” Lisa said.
“Sure,” Nilly said. “Doctor, for example. That’s a great first name.”
“Anyway,” Juliette said patiently. “Victor was the one who invented the actual time-traveling bathtub and his assistant invented the time soap.”
“Remarkable,” Lisa whispered.
“Ha!” Nilly said, folding his arms across his chest. “Now do you believe me? I was lying there on the bottom of the bathtub thinking about the Moulin Rouge in around 1909, wasn’t I? And voilà—”
“You were there,” Lisa said. “Wow, I’m sorry I doubted you, Nilly. You always do tell the truth.”
Nilly closed his eyes halfway and gave Lisa a gracious look. “I’m not the kind of person to hold a grudge, my dear Lisa. If you tie my shoelaces for the next week, we’ll call it even.”
Lisa gave him a warning look.
“Well, well, get into the tub, kids,” Juliette said. “Cliché is on his way.”
“Are you sure it will work now that there’s more than one of us in the tub?” Lisa asked skeptically, climbing cautiously into the water after Nilly.
“Yes,” Juliette said. “Victor and his assistant tested it thoroughly.”
“How weird,” Lisa said. “If he’s had this amazing invention for all these years, why hasn’t the rest of the world ever found out about it?”
“Exactly!” Nilly said. “He could have been rich and famous.”
“Because the time-traveling bathtub only works with the time soap,” Juliette said. “And his assistant was the only person who knew how to make that. They had a falling out, and without the time soap Victor didn’t have a patentable invention. All Victor had left of the time soap was that little jar he brought back to Norway with him when he was expelled from France.”
“The jar that was in his basement on Cannon Avenue,” Lisa said.
Juliette nodded and held up the mason jar containing the strawberry-red powder. “He broug
ht a little of the time soap from this jar with him when he came back to Paris two months ago, and that’s what he used three weeks ago when he stood exactly where you are standing now, said good-bye to me, and traveled back to July 3, 1969, to the village of Innebrède in the Provence mountains to change history.”
“To change history?” Nilly and Lisa gasped in unison.
“Nothing less,” said Juliette. “The plan was to travel back to Innebrède and be standing there waiting at the gas station when we pulled in on the motorcycle. He’d hold up a big sign written in Norwegian so that only we could read it, warning us not to stop so we would keep driving all the way to Italy and get gas there. Even if gas costs six cents more per gallon in Italy.”
“Of course!” Lisa said. “Because that would keep all the stuff that happened from happening.”
“Exactly,” Juliette said. “The hippos would never have noticed us, Victor and I would have gotten married in Rome, Cliché would have given up trying to become a barometer, and Victor and his assistant would have made up again and patented the time-traveling bathtub and the time soap together and become world famous and so rich that Victor could pay off the mortgage on my folks’ castle.”
“But if everything had gone the way it was supposed to with his time traveling, Proctor would have been back by now, wouldn’t he?” Lisa asked. “So what could have happened?”
“Elementary,” Nilly said. “Doctor Proctor ran out of time soap and couldn’t get back. That’s why he sent us that message on that postcard. Although how he managed to send that …”
“I was the one who sent it,” Juliette said, pouring a little of the soap powder into the tub.
“You?” Nilly said.
“Well, actually, I forwarded it. I snuck into the hotel room every day to see if Victor was back yet. I sat in the bathtub and waited, but nothing happened. Until one day suddenly a postcard floated up to the surface. It was addressed to Lisa, whom I’d heard so much about.”
“And Nilly,” Nilly said.
“And Nilly,” Juliette agreed.