“Yup, we promise,” said Anna Showli. “He’s going to spend a lot of years in the slammer, especially now that we witnessed firsthand his attempts to shoot that unbelievably cute little boy right out front. That boy sure is a quick thinker, I have to say.”
“He is very quick,” the professor chuckled.
“We’re free!” Juliette cheered and kissed Proctor on the mouth causing his face to go completely red.
“Yippee!” cheered Joan.
Lisa wanted to cheer too, but one word Proctor had said had set off alarms in her head.
One of the policemen cleared his throat. “Well, why don’t we see about arresting this scoundrel?”
“Yup, enough talk,” the other one said, walking over to the bathroom door and opening it.
“What is that kid doing?” the first policeman asked. “Is he washing his hair? Now?”
“And where’s Claude Cliché?”
Right then Lisa thought of the word. Quick. Nilly was quick. Uh-oh.
The policemen jumped back a step as the little boy flipped his head back up out of the foaming bathwater, blew the soap away from under his nose, exhaled, and announced, “It’s done!”
His smile stretched from ear to ear below his dripping, bright red bangs.
“You didn’t … did you …?” Juliette started.
“I must say, I did,” Nilly laughed. “I bet we won’t see that guy again for a while.”
“Well then, we have to go back and get him,” Proctor said. “They’re here to arrest him right now.”
“Oh?” Nilly asked. “Cool. Uh, but then I think we’d better hurry. I forgot all about the part where we go back to get him and, uh, I’m afraid I used up the rest of the time soap.”
“Oh dear,” Proctor said. “Well, well, then, we’d better hurry up and go back while there are still enough bubbles in the tub. I’ll go myself and …”
But Lisa had already seen it. Seen the familiar zigzag smile on Nilly’s face, the one that meant that yet another plan had gone down the drain. Which is why Lisa wasn’t at all surprised when Nilly opened his hand, showing them the stopper and right then they heard the slurping sound of the last of the soapy water disappearing down the drain.
“I guess I was a little, uh, quick,” Nilly said.
There was absolute silence in room four at the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille. Everyone just stared at Nilly. And the silence continued. For a long time. A very long time.
Until Nilly eventually said, “Well, well,” and brushed his hands together. “What’s done is done. Anyone else feel like some breakfast?”
Tokyo
CLAUDE CLICHÉ WOKE up trying to breathe underwater. And since it is widely acknowledged that breathing underwater doesn’t work particularly well unless you’re a fish or other marine animal, he was basically drowning and started automatically flailing his arms and legs. And then just like that, he managed to inhale some air after all and discovered that he had gotten his head above water. And that he was sitting in a bathtub. There were trees around him. Tall tree trunks with vines dangling between them. The trunks disappeared up into a very green, very dense canopy of leaves way above him. He was in a jungle, of that there was little doubt.
But how in the world had he gotten here, in a bathtub of all things? Cliché furrowed his brow and struggled to remember. He tried to remember who he was, where he came from, and what had been happening before he woke up in this bathtub with a frightful headache.
And do you think he could remember anything? Him, a man with a spider—that may or may not have been a seven-legged Peruvian sucking spider—in his ear and possibly even further in?
Well, here’s the answer:
He remembered everything. Absolutely everything.
He remembered, for example, that his name was Claude Cliché, that he was a barometer, and that he owned a lot of stuff. Among other things, he owned a whole heap of money, the patent for a suspender clip, a village full of hippos, a castle called Margarine, and a baroness named Juliette. He remembered that he had been sitting in the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille in the room of that stupid inventor Juliette thought she was in love with. And he remembered quite clearly the little redhaired boy who was dressed like Napoléon, and the girl who claimed she was Joan of Arc. Yup, they had tricked him! Their reward for that would be a lot of small change and a trip to the bottom of the Seine.
Cliché stood up and climbed out of the bathtub. He wasn’t the least bit scared. Not at all! He was the King of Paris, wasn’t he? No matter how far into this jungle he might be, it was only a question of time until he was back home again. And then he would start hunting!
He started walking toward a clearing in the trees.
As he approached, he heard some sounds, like buzzing and clicking.
Could it be ticking tigers, hiccupping hyenas, or rattlesnakes?
Or the clicking of crocodile jaws clacking together?
Ha! It didn’t scare him. Cliché marched straight ahead, bending the branches aside.
And there, right in front of him, were the creatures making the buzzing and clicking sounds.
Buzzz-click! Buzzz-click!
Claude started laughing out loud.
It was a huge group of Japanese tourists standing behind some bars that obviously formed some kind of cage. The Japanese tourists were taking pictures with little cameras. Buzzz-click! How comical! When they caught sight of Claude, they were suddenly scared and started talking to each other in a strange, staccato-sounding language.
“Boo!” Claude yelled at them, because he liked it when people were afraid of him. And now he was in high spirits, because behind the people, above the trees, he could see skyscrapers. And where there were skyscrapers, the nearest airport couldn’t be far away.
“This isn’t over, Doctor Proctor …,” he mumbled to himself, rubbing his hands together. But just then he discovered to his astonishment that the cage in front of him continued around to his right and to his left. Which meant that he—and not the Japanese photographers—was in the cage. Hm. Whatever, same difference! Now it was just a matter of finding the door out of this darned cage.
“Hey, where’s the door?” Cliché yelled, but the people on the outside of the bars just stared at him. Or rather they actually weren’t staring at him. They were staring over him, he thought. And they’d stopped taking buzzz-click! pictures with their cameras. In the silence that resulted, Cliché heard a familiar sound: snoring. But not the snoring of hippopotamuses. Something that must be even bigger. And just then it suddenly got overcast.
Cliché just had time to look up, just had time to think, just had time to understand how his story was going to end. When it did.
The ground shook and clouds of dust rose up as the enormous, snoring creature—and Claude Cliché for that matter—hit the ground. The cage shook so the iron sign on the outside came off, fell down, and rolled sideways down an asphalt path in the Tokyo Zoo.
Then it was quiet again. The only thing you could hear was the ringing of the iron sign which had stopped rolling and tipped over with a clanging sound, right in front of the feet of a little girl who had just walked up holding her father’s hand. And since the sign landed with the words up and the little girl had just learned how to read, she read it, faltering only a little, out loud to her father:
“Cong …”
“Yes,” her father said.
“Congolese …”
“Good,” said her father.
“Congolese Tse-Tse …”
“You’re doing great!” her father encouraged.
“Congolese Tse-Tse Elephant!”
“Did you hear that!” the father exclaimed to the other observers, who were still looking on in terror. “My daughter is only four years old and she can read! My child is a genius!”
“Golly,” said one of the tourists.
Someone raised a camera:
Buzzz-click!
Home Again
“BOAN SWOIR!”
It was
Sunday afternoon and Lisa’s parents looked up from their books to smile at their daughter, who was suddenly standing in the doorway to the living room chirping hello to them in French.
“Boan swoir yourself,” her father the Commandant replied. “Did you have a good time in Sarpsborg?”
“I’m so happy to see you guys again,” Lisa said, going over first to her father and then her mother and giving them each a good, long hug.
“Well that was an enthusiastic hug,” her mother laughed. “Did Anna’s father give you a ride back here? I thought I heard a car engine out front.”
“That was Doctor Proctor’s motorcycle,” Lisa said. “I ran into him on my way back and he gave me a ride. Nilly and I are invited to dinner in his yard. Is that okay?”
“Yeah, sure,” her mother said. “Just don’t stay out too late, it’s a school night. Did you practice your clarinet? You’ve got band practice tomorrow, you know.”
“Oops. I’ll do that now.”
Lisa dropped her knapsack on the floor and ran up to her room, and soon her parents heard the reedy hollow sound of a clarinet playing … Say, could that be the Marseillaise?
“Do you know what I like best about living on Cannon Avenue?” the Commandant asked, humming along to the melody. “That it’s so safe and boring here, you don’t have to worry about anything at all happening.”
JULIETTE, LISA, AND Nilly were sitting at the picnic table in the tall grass under the pear tree in Doctor Proctor’s yard, waiting. They cheered when they saw Doctor Proctor emerge from the house balancing a tray with a five-foot-long Jello-O on it.
“Help yourselves,” he said, plunking the tray down onto the table.
Nine minutes later they were all leaning back, their stomachs bulging, wearing satisfied grins.
“I just talked to Joan on the phone,” Juliette said. “Unfortunately, she didn’t get that hairdresser’s job at Montmartre. The lead stylist thought her methods were a little, uh, dramatic. And bowl cuts haven’t come back in style yet.”
“It’s just a matter of time,” Nilly said.
The other three didn’t respond, just silently and skeptically eyed the bright red bowl cut Joan had given Nilly as a good-bye present along with a kiss in the middle of his freckled nose.
“What are you looking at?” Nilly said. “Trendsetters have to lead the way, right?”
“Anyway.” Doctor Proctor chuckled. “She got another job. Didn’t she, Juliette?”
“Yup,” Juliette said. “As a tourist guide at the Museum of the History of France at the Palace of Versailles. She’s going to tell people about the Middle Ages and especially about the famous Joan of Arc, who led the French in battle against the English and was ultimately burned at the stake. The museum director was very impressed at her detailed knowledge.”
The professor cleared his throat: “As long as we’re on the subject of friends who are no longer with us. Before you guys came over, I took a spin down to Rosenkrantz Street and the Trench Coat Clock Shop.”
Everyone looked at him.
“The clock shop wasn’t there,” Proctor said. “There was an old jewelry store there instead.”
“Old?” Nilly burst out. “Impossible! The Trench Coat Clock Shop was there last Friday!”
The professor nodded. “I know. But according to an old cab driver who was parked nearby, the jewelry store had been there since he was a kid. And he’d never heard of a Trench Coat Clock Shop.”
They sat in silence for a while, everyone lost in his own thoughts. When Lisa went to take a bite of her Jell-O, she was surprised to find that her plate was empty. She looked over at Nilly, who looked at her with innocent blue eyes, but puffed-out balloon cheeks, as he hurriedly tried to swallow the last of the evidence.
“Nilly!” she said. “You ate mine!”
His response was drowned out by all the Jell-O dribbling out the corners of his mouth.
“Huh?” Lisa asked.
Nilly tilted his head back and repeated, “Sho shue me!”
The professor, Juliette, and Lisa, none of them could help but laugh at that.
Then they started retelling all the fantastic things they’d experienced over the last two days. Or the last nine hundred years. Depending on how you looked at it. About Nilly who had ridden in the Tour de France and called off the Battle of Waterloo. About Lisa who had designed the Eiffel Tower and blown out a whole witch’s pyre with her fart. About Doctor Proctor who was almost beheaded, but saved at the last minute by some clever trumpet playing. And about Juliette who was finally free and hadn’t heard a peep from Cliché.
“Cheers!” Doctor Proctor said sincerely, and they all raised their glasses of pear juice. “Not to changing history, but to changing the future.”
And they drank to that. But there was no longer any future for this Jell-O or this Sunday evening. The tray in front of them was bare, the moon had risen, and the birds that had settled on the pear tree to listen to all their incredible exploits were starting to yawn.
So they said good night, and Proctor and Juliette went into the blue house, Lisa into the red, and Nilly into the yellow.
In her room Lisa thought about the clock shop that was gone and how, well, how it was like it had never existed. She decided to look through her schoolbooks until she found her history book, flipped to the chapter on Joan of Arc, and looked at the famous painting of her death. And gasped in shock even though she was half expecting it.
The picture had changed.
The woman didn’t have long auburn hair anymore but inky black hair. She was wearing red lipstick, had long fingernails with red fingernail polish, and down—under her dress—wasn’t that … a roller skate?
Lisa gulped and thought about Raspa, who had given her life for love. And maybe also to make up for everything she’d tried to destroy. Lisa remembered something that Nilly had told Mrs. Strobe in class back at the beginning of this story:
“To be a real hero, you have to be really dead.”
Lisa decided that tomorrow she would copy and enlarge the picture of Raspa and hang it up on the wall over her bed. Not just because it was a truly magnificent picture and everyone knew that the woman in the fire was a hero, but because it would remind Lisa of something important. That even if a person did something wrong, it was never—never—too late to fix it again. When you thought about it that way, anyone could change history at least a little bit at any time.
Then Lisa closed her history book and looked over at Nilly’s bedroom window.
And sure enough: The shadow play had begun. It clearly depicted a little boy and a slightly bigger woman dancing the cancan and every once in a while kissing a little. Lisa giggled. You would almost think Nilly was in love. And now he was standing on his bed and he started jumping up and down. The shadow, which was twice as big as the tiny little boy, did a somersault, and Lisa laughed so hard she hiccupped. Laughed so hard she cried. Laughed so hard she had to put her head down on her pillow and close her eyes. And when she did that, she fell asleep.
Jo Nesbo, Bubble in the Bathtub
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