Bubble in the Bathtub (28 page)

“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?”

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!

“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?”