Time-Travel Bath Bomb (27 page)

Behind her there were two uniformed policemen. They each had a different kind of moustache. Enough said.

“
Bonjour
, Lisa.” The woman in the suit smiled, held out her hand and said something else in French.

“Uh . . .” Lisa said, jumping a little as Juliette decisively slid her French nose clip back into place.

“You don’t recognise me, do you?” the woman said. “Without the poncho.”

“Uh, no,” Lisa said.

“What if I take these off?” the woman asked, taking off her glasses.

Then Lisa saw it.

Sure enough, she wasn’t a little girl anymore, she was a grown woman, but it was . . . Yes, it was the girl she’d met by the bridge outside Innebrède!

“Anna?” Lisa exclaimed.

“Yup, it’s me,” the woman laughed. “I suppose I ought to be surprised to see you again too, but my whole life I’ve had this feeling that we would see each other again. Especially since I made a decision that day we met by that bridge.”

“Oh?”

“Do you remember what we talked about?”

“Hm . . . Wait, yes! How terrible it was that no one was brave enough to stop men like Claude Cliché.”

“Exactly. But you said
I
ought to try. So I decided I would. I worked hard in school, I studied the law in Paris and I’ve worked long and hard until now to become a judge. For the last year I’ve been leading the investigation into Claude Cliché. We’ve had him under surveillance day and night to obtain evidence of his criminal activities. We decided a few days ago that we have enough to arrest him, so we decided to apprehend him when he came here today.”

“That’s great!” Lisa said, clapping her hands. “Did you hear that, Doctor Proctor? Now we don’t need to send Cliché anywhere.” Lisa turned back to Anna again. “Because you guys promise to put him away for a good, long time, right?”

“Yup, we promise,” said Anna Showli. “He’s going to spend a lot of years in jail, especially now that we witnessed firsthand his attempts to shoot that unbelievably cute little boy outside. 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 fringe.

“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 bath bomb.”

“Oh dear,” Proctor said. “Well, well, then, we’d better hurry up and go back while there are still enough bubbles in the bath. 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 plug, 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 his head was now above water and that he was sitting in a bath. 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 got here, in a bath 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 bath 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 braces 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 red-haired 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 bath. 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 towards 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 a big shadow fell over him.

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 really well!” 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 lift back here? I thought I heard a car engine outside.”

“That was Doctor Proctor’s motorcycle,” Lisa said. “I ran into him on my way back and he gave me a lift. Nilly and I are invited to dinner in his garden. Is that okay?”

“Of course,” her mother said. “Just don’t stay out too late, it’s a school night. Did you practise your clarinet? You’ve got band practice tomorrow, you know.”

“Oops. I’ll do that now.”

Lisa dropped her backpack on the floor and ran up to her room, and soon her parents heard the reedy hollow sound of a clarinet playing . . . Could that be the Marseillaise?

“Do you know what I like best about living in 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 garden, waiting. They cheered when they saw Doctor Proctor emerge from the house balancing a tray with a two-metre-long jelly on it.