Bubble in the Bathtub (10 page)

Lisa giggled a little. And so did Juliette.

“I said it was nothing, that now 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 toward 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 maneuver its way onto the bridge and was coming straight toward 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 suspenders and that scrawny mustache,
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 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
—good-bye—and he drove away.

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.”

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 Lisa, 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.”