A MAN WITH an enormous handlebar mustache and an even more enormous potbelly and a pipe between his lips was staring at the girl who had so unexpectedly appeared in his office. Not to mention the bathtub. He squeezed his eye around his monocle, emitted a surprised “pff!” from his lips, and a cloud of tobacco smoke rose into the air between the bookshelves.
Lisa looked around. The walls were hung with drawings of buildings, bridges, breweries, and other enormous things that start with B that you couldn’t fit in a normal piece of luggage. There were two drawings on the desk under the window, two empty bottles of red wine, and a pouch of tobacco. The window faced a large, open, and rather empty public square. Strikingly empty, actually. Apart from all the people with parasols and top hats strolling across it. There was something strangely familiar about this square, Lisa thought.
“Who are you?” the man asked. “And where did you come from?”
“I’m Lisa,” Lisa said, wringing out the sleeve of her sweater. “I come from Cannon Avenue in Norway. From sometime in the next millennium. You must be Gustave Eiffel?”
The man nodded and then had a coughing fit.
“I understand that you’re afraid, Mr. Eiffel,” Lisa said as she climbed out of the bathtub.
The man waved this away dismissively, coughing, and then in a voice that was scarcely a hiss whispered, “Not at all.”
His face was now as red as a peony and he was clearly struggling to get air. When he finally did manage to breathe, his throat squeaked and his lungs gurgled. Then he stuck the pipe back into his mouth, inhaled, and said with a satisfied smile:
“Nothing serious, just a touch of asthma.”
It occurred to Lisa that Mr. Eiffel didn’t seem quite as afraid as you would expect given that an unexpected bathtub and a little girl who said she came from the future had just appeared in his office. And a second later, she knew why.
“The professor said there would be two of you,” Mr. Eiffel said. “A certain Mr. Nilly appears to be missing.”
“You talked to Doctor Proctor?” Lisa exclaimed. “Where is he?”
Mr. Eiffel stuck a thoughtful finger in between two buttons on his vest and scratched his stomach. “Unfortunately I am not exactly sure, moan amee. We had a very brief meeting, right here in this very room. And then he left. But, like you, he came in a bathtub. A time-traveling tub, as he explained to me.”
“And you believed him?” Lisa asked. “That he’d invented a way to travel through time?”
“Of course. I would have had a harder time believing the opposite, that no one would ever invent a way of traveling through time. I am an engineer, after all, and I’m a hard and firm believer in people’s ability to create things. All you need is a dose of imagination and a little logic.” Eiffel smiled sadly. “Unfortunately, I myself only have the logic part of it, but not the imagination. If there’s one thing you can never have enough of, it’s imagination.”
“Oh, I know a little boy who’s pushing the limit,” Lisa said, wringing out her wet hair over the tub.
“Really? If only I could be him right now.”
“Why?”
Eiffel coughed and nodded toward the window. “Next year is the World’s Fair and the Paris city council has asked me to design a tower to go in that square you see out there. They have only three requirements: that it should be beautiful, ingenious, and should take the breath away from everyone who sees it. Fine …” Eiffel let his monocle fall into his hand, closed his eyes, and rubbed his pipe against his forehead. “The problem is that I just don’t have the imagination to come up with something that beautiful and ingenious. And the only thing taking away my breath is this tobacco, which isn’t anywhere near strong enough. Construction has to start in a few months, and now everyone’s just waiting for me to complete the design. But I can’t do it. They’re going to fire me and assign me to design bike racks!”
He had another coughing fit, and the red coloring climbed up his face as if he were a thermometer.
“Hogwash,” Lisa said. “Of course you can draw something beautiful and ingenious.”
“Afraid not,” Eiffel said, choking up a little. “All I can design are broad, solid, and rather ugly bridges. Like this bridge your professor came to ask me about …”
“Yes?”
“There’s a bridge in Provence that I’ve already finished the drawings for. I was going to turn them in next week. He wanted me to adjust the plans, make the bridge a tiny little bit narrower. Something about hippopotamuses and their limousines …”
“Yes, yes!” Lisa cried. “Narrower so that Doctor Proctor and Juliette can get away and go to Rome and get married!”
“Yes, that’s what he said. A touching story, I must admit it choked me up a little. And I really wasn’t at all opposed to making that hideous monstrosity a little narrower. So I said yes.”
“Yippee!” Lisa exclaimed jumping up and down. “Then it’ll work! Then everything will be fine! Thank you so, so much, Mr. Eiffel! Good-bye!” She jumped back into the bathtub.
“Wait a sec …,” Eiffel said.
“I have to hurry to get back to my own time while there are still soap bubbles. I’m sure they’re all waiting for me.”
“Your professor didn’t go back. He wouldn’t let me change the plans for the bridge.”
“What?” Lisa gasped, her eyes wide. “Why not?”
“We shared a bottle of wine while he told me a little about what was going to happen in the future. And then he suddenly thought of something he’d forgotten. That if the bridge were narrower, the American tanks that liberated France from Hitler in World War Two wouldn’t be able to cross it. And that would be a catastrophe worse than he and Juliette not winding up together. Yes, this Hitler is going to be born very soon and as I understand it he’s going to be a horrible person. So we don’t want him to hold on to France.”
“No, obviously not,” Lisa said. “But … but then, well, but then everything is lost. Then Claude Cliché is going to win after all.”
“Yes, that’s what your Doctor Proctor said too.” Eiffel said, slowly nodding his head. “So we opened another bottle of wine, drank more, and both wound up getting a little choked up.”
“And then?” Lisa asked.
“Then I did the only thing I’m any good at,” Eiffel said. “I thought about things logically.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your professor told me that when Juliette’s great-great-great-great-grandfather, the Count of Monte Crisco, was beheaded in the French Revolution, the family fortune was inherited by Leaufat Margarine, who had a gambling addiction. He promptly gambled it all away playing Uno. But if the Count hadn’t been beheaded, he almost certainly would have had children. And then they would have inherited the fortune instead of this drunken lout Leaufat. And then the Margarine family would still have this fortune. And then Juliette’s father wouldn’t have needed to say yes to Claude Cliché’s offer to save them from ruin by marrying his daughter. So I asked the professor why he didn’t just go back to the Revolution and save the Count from the guillotine. Quite logical, don’t you think?”
“Quite,” Lisa said. “But what’s a … uh, guillotine?”
“Oh, that,” Eiffel said eagerly. “A very clever invention that the revolutionaries used to chop the heads off of counts and barons. Well, countesses and baronesses, too, for that matter. Quick and efficient, chop, chop! I have the drawings for the invention around here somewhere….” Eiffel pulled open one of his desk drawers.
“Oh, that’s really not necessary,” Lisa said quickly. “So that’s where Doctor Proctor went? To the French Revolution?”
“Yes, but he had to find this Count in the middle of all the chaos that was raging in Paris in 1793. So I’m not really sure exactly where he is now. Or then. Or back then. Ugh, this time-travel business is a little confusing, don’t you think?” Eiffel succumbed to another coughing fit, and his eyes bulged so much it looked like they were going to pop out of his head.
Lisa looked at the soap bubbles, which were already fading away in the tub. She had to hurry if she was going to make it out of here.
“So he didn’t leave any kind of message behind that might make it easier for me to find him?” she asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Eiffel said, shaking his head sadly. “Well, after your professor thought about it a bit, he asked me if I had a postcard and a stamp with a picture of Felix Faure from 1888. Which of course I had, since it’s 1888 now and Felix Faure is the current president, right?” Eiffel laughed. “Your professor claimed that the stamp was going to be very rare and valuable someday, which is obviously completely ridiculous. Because this stamp is completely commonplace—you can find it in any house in France! But anyway I gave him the stamp and a postcard with a picture of the square you see out the window there.”
“I knew there was something familiar about that square!” Lisa exclaimed. She thought about the picture on the postcard, how she’d thought the empty public square seemed like it was missing something. And suddenly she thought she knew what it was missing….
“He wrote some stuff in code on the card and said it was to two friends in Oslo,” Eiffel said. “A Mister Nilly and Miss Lisa. He said he was going to tell you to come to the same place he was about to go to.”
“Which was … the, uh, French Revolution in 1793?”
“Yes, didn’t you know that? He said he wrote that on the card.”
“That must’ve been the part that got washed away. Any idea where in the French Revolution I should start looking for him?”
“Well …” Eiffel twisted his mustache. “I would try the Place de la Révolution, which was in front of the dreaded Bastille prison in Paris. That’s where the guillotine was put to most industrious use, surely that’s where the Count of Monte Crisco must have been beheaded as well.”
“Thanks,” Lisa said. “I’ll focus on 1793, the Count of Monte Crisco, and the Pastille in Paris. But there’s one other thing: How did Doctor Proctor send his postcard from here?”
Eiffel chuckled at the memory: “He held the card underwater in the bathtub and stuck his head underwater at the same time. He said he just thought about where the card should go and—voilà!—there it went. I guess only things that are completely submerged in the water can be sent, so he stayed here.”
“Interesting,” Lisa said, and pointed at the empty wine bottles on the desk. “Could I borrow one of these and a piece of paper and a pencil?”
Gustave Eiffel made a sweeping gesture with his hand and said, “Help yourself.”
Lisa went over to the desk, grabbed a pencil and started scribbling something on a piece of paper. Then she folded it up, stuffed it into one of the wine bottles, found two corks in the trashcan, and shoved one into the mouth of the bottle.
“What’s that?” Eiffel asked.
“A note saying where I’m going,” Lisa said. “If Doctor Proctor can send things by bathtub post, I should be able to too.”
“Sounds logical. Who’s it to?”
“Nilly or Juliette. I don’t know where they are, but I’m sending the note to the bathtub in our room at the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille.”
Eiffel wasn’t able to follow the last bit, because Lisa had already stuck her head under the water along with the bottle and her words were floating up to the surface of the water like small bubbles of speech.
“There!” she said as she pulled her head back up again. “It’s sent!”
“I have to hurry up and go now,” Lisa said, climbing into the tub.
“I have to hurry too,” Eiffel said dejectedly. “But it was very nice to meet you, Lisa. If you find the professor, give him my regards. And please don’t mess history up too much.”
Lisa gave him a wave and dove down.
After she was gone, Eiffel leaned over his drawings again and muttered, “Merde, why couldn’t they just ask me to draw one of my standard ugly old bridges?” Then he noticed the sound of something dripping on the wood floor next to him and looked up. There was Lisa with her hair full of soap bubbles.
“Oh, you didn’t leave after all, moan amee?” he asked.
“I just thought I would make a suggestion first, to thank you for all your help,” she said, grabbing one of his pencils and starting to draw.
Eiffel stared wide-eyed at how her hand flew up and down, as if she knew exactly what the thing she was drawing looked like. The arches, the latticework, the four legs sloping gently outward, almost like the legs of a bathtub. It was beautiful, it was ingenious, it … it took his breath away.
“There, like that,” Lisa said. “Do you like it?”
Eiffel was overwhelmed. “Wha-what is it?”
“A tower.”
“I can see that. But it’s not just a tower, it’s a marvelous tower. It’s perfect! But what should I call it? The Lisa Tower?”
Lisa considered it for a second. “I think the Eiffel Tower sounds better.”
“The Eiffel Tower?” The engineer had a coughing attack from sheer excitement. “You mean it? Thank you!”
“No need to thank me. Good luck!” Lisa said, and then she marched back to the bathtub, climbed in, mumbled “the Pastille in Paris” to herself, dove under, and—voilà!—just like that she was gone.
When she surfaced again, the first thing that struck her was the pervasive stench. The second thing that struck her was the hysterical squealing and snorting. And if Lisa had been Nilly, the third thing that would have struck her would have been the thought of: Breakfast! Fresh bacon!
The fourth thing that struck her was the end of a wooden plank that hit the back of her head. The other end was being held by an enraged farmer with a red-striped hat.
“Get out of my pigpen, you ragamuffin!” he growled. “Shh! Piggy, piggy, shh!”
