LISA AND NILLY walked straight from the Trench Coat Clock Shop to Town Hall Square, where they caught the express bus to the airport. An hour later, they climbed off in front of Oslo International Airport and walked into the gigantic departures hall, which was swarming with people. They got in line at the Air France ticket counter. While they were standing there, Lisa thought she heard a familiar sound through the murmur of voices, scuffle of shoes, and the announcements coming over the loudspeakers. The squeaking noise of ungreased wheels. She whirled around but all she saw was a sea of unfamiliar faces and people hurrying on their way. She sniffed the air for the odor of rotten meat and stinky socks, but didn’t detect it. It was probably the wheels of one of those wheeled suitcases, Lisa thought. And jumped when she suddenly felt a hard finger poke her in the small of her back. She spun around. It was Nilly.
“Go, go! It’s our turn,” he said.
They walked over to an unbelievably beautiful woman with unbelievably tan skin and unbelievably white hair.
“What can I help you with, ma’am?” she asked.
“Two tickets to Paris, please,” Lisa said.
“For you and who else?”
An irritated response came from below the edge of the ticket counter. “Me, obviously!”
The woman stood up and peered over the counter. “Ah, right. That’ll be six hundred dollars.”
Lisa set the money on the counter. The woman counted the twenty-dollar bills first, but then stopped and raised her eyebrows when she saw the two hundreds. “Is this supposed to be a joke?” she asked.
“A joke?” Lisa said.
“Yes. These hundreds are no longer legal tender. They’re from …” She looked at them more closely. “From 1905. They should have been taken out of circulation ages ago. Don’t you have any other bills from this century?”
Lisa shook her head.
“Sorry, I can only give you one ticket to Paris.”
“But …,” Lisa began in desperation. “But …”
“That’s fine,” said the voice from under the edge of the counter. “Give us one ticket.”
Lisa glanced down at Nilly who was nodding at her encouragingly.
When she looked up again, the woman already had the ticket ready and was holding it out to her. “Bon voyage. Have a good trip to Paris. I assume there are some grown-ups there who will be meeting you.”
“So do I.” Lisa sighed and nodded, eyeing the ticket and Raspa’s old hundred-dollar bills.
“What do we do now?” Lisa asked anxiously as she and Nilly walked toward the security checkpoint.
“Relax,” Nilly said. “I have an idea.”
“You do? What’s your idea?”
“For you to go alone,” Nilly said.
Lisa stared at him, shocked. “A-a-alone?”
There. Now she was stuttering too.
AS LISA STEPPED onboard the plane, a flight attendant who smelled nice and had very neat lipstick smiled at her and said, “Welcome aboard. Two carry-ons?”
“Lots of homework,” mumbled Lisa, who was looking a little lost and alone as she stood there.
“Here, let me help you,” the woman said, grabbing one of the bags, lifting it up and wedging it into the overhead bin between two wheeled suitcases, and then slamming the front of the bin shut.
Lisa found her seat, put on her seatbelt, and yawned. This day had already been way too exciting and she had hardly slept the night before. She closed her eyes, and when she did, the words of that woman in the Trench Coat Clock Shop started echoing through her head:
“Only death can change history. Only if you are willing to die can you change what is written.”
With that, Lisa fell asleep and didn’t wake up until she heard the captain’s voice instructing them to buckle their seat belts for landing. It had gotten dark and thousands of Paris lights twinkled and gleamed below them. Lisa knew that millions of people lived down there. And she was just one, a little girl from Cannon Avenue. Suddenly Lisa felt terribly alone and had to bite her lower lip to get it to stop trembling.
After they landed at an enormous airport that was named after some dead president named Charles Something-or-Other, the flight attendant helped Lisa get her bags down, gave her a comforting pat on the cheek, and chirped that she hoped Lisa would have a lovely weekend in Paris. Lisa walked down a long corridor, stood on a long escalator, waited in a long passport line, and exchanged the rest of her old Norwegian money for new French money. She was completely worn out by the time she found herself outside the terminal building, sliding her bags into the back-seat of a taxi and climbing in after them.
“Ooh allay-vooh??” the cab driver asked.
Now, although Lisa could not speak a single word of French, she assumed that the first thing a cab driver would ask was where she wanted to go. Unfortunately, she also realized that in her confusion she couldn’t remember the name of the hotel, all she remembered was that it had something to do with potatoes.
“Hotel Potato,” she tried, holding on to her bags tightly.
“Keska vooh zaavay dee??” the driver said. His tone of voice made it sound like a question, and he was looking at her in the rearview mirror.
“Uh …,” Lisa said. “The Potato Chip Inn?”
The driver turned around to face her and again asked: “Ooh?” but louder now. And his voice definitely sounded irritated.
Lisa’s head, in which everything was usually right where it was supposed to be, was one big chaotic jumbled mess right now. “Yukon Gold?” she tried and could feel in her throat that she was about to cry.
The driver shook his head.
“Hotel Mashed Potato?”
The driver spat out a couple of angry French words that probably weren’t expressions of politeness. Then he leaned over to the rear door next to her, pushed it open and yelled, “Out!” pointing firmly to the street.
“Frainche-Fraille!” came from the back of the cab.
The driver stiffened and stared at her. Probably because the voice that had just said “Frainche-Fraille” did not sound anything like the voice the little girl had had a moment ago. And it also hadn’t sounded like it came from her, but from one of the pieces of luggage she was clutching on to.
“Aha,” said the driver, lighting up. “L’Hôtel Frainche-Fraille?”
Lisa nodded, quickly and eagerly. “Yes, Hotel French Fry.”
With a grunt, the driver shut the door again, started the cab, and began driving.
Lisa sat back in the seat and exhaled in relief.
Then she heard a whispered voice next to her: “Psst! What about letting me out now?”
Lisa opened the lock on the front of the bag and pulled open the top of the bag. And then a tiny boy with enormous freckles and a red Elvis hairdo jumped out.
“Oh, delicious taste of freedom, CO2, and dust particles wafting in the air,” Nilly said, sitting down contentedly next to Lisa with his hands clasped behind his head. Lisa noticed that her best friend appeared a little wrinkled, but otherwise he seemed like he was in great shape. “Now then, my dear Lisa, were you very worried about me during the flight?”
“Actually, no,” Lisa said. “I slept. What did you do?”
“I read Animals You Wish Didn’t Exist until the battery on my pocket flashlight ran out. Actually, now that you mention sleep, there was a section in there about the Congolese tse-tse elephant.”
“Tse-tse elephant?” Lisa asked, but regretted it the second it came out of her mouth.
“It’s as big as a house and suffers from narcolepsy,” Nilly explained. “Which means that it’ll just suddenly, without any advance warning, fall asleep and tip over. So if you don’t keep a safe distance, you risk having an eighteen-ton Congolese tse-tse elephant flop down on your head at any time. Several years ago, someone tricked a circus into buying a gigantonormous elephant from a little pet shop in Lillesand. What they didn’t know was that it was a—”
“Congolese tse-tse elephant.” Lisa finished Nilly’s sentence, sighed, and looked out the window, resigned.
“Exactly,” Nilly said. “The elephant fell asleep right in the middle of his first performance, and then they had to dig three generations of Russian trapeze artists out of the sawdust.”
“Oh, enough already. Elephants like that don’t exist!”
“They do too! My grandfather told me he saw a couple of them at the zoo in Tokyo. They had just flown the elephants straight there from the jungle in the Congo and because of the time-zone difference, they obviously still had jet lag. One time they fell asleep …”
Nilly’s mouth kept moving like that until the cab stopped and the driver said, “Madame and Mussyer, l’Hôtel Frainche-Fraille.”
And sure enough, they had pulled up in front of a tall, thin building that was so crooked you might suspect that the stonemasons had enjoyed a little too much red wine when they were building it. But the hotel had small, charming balconies and a glowing sign that said HÔTEL FRAINCHE-FRAILLE. Well, actually it said HÔT L FRA NC E-F ILLE” since a fair number of the letters seemed to have burned out.
Lisa paid the driver, and they clambered out onto the sidewalk. In the distance they heard accordion music and the sound of champagne corks popping out of bottles.
“Ah,” Nilly said, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath, “Paris!”
Then they stepped in the front door of the hotel. Standing behind the reception desk there was a smiling, red-cheeked woman and a pleasant, plump man who made Lisa think of her mother and father back home on Cannon Avenue.
“Bohnswaar,” the woman said. And even though Lisa didn’t know what that meant, she could tell it was something nice, so she responded by saying “Good evening” and curtsying a little. Then she elbowed Nilly, who immediately bowed deeply. She knew a little curtsying and bowing never hurt. This was obviously true in Paris, too, because now the two standing behind the counter were smiling even more warmly.
“Doctor Proctor?” Lisa asked hesitantly, preparing for another round of linguistic confusion. But to her delight, the red-cheeked woman lit up, “Ah, le professeur!”
“Yes,” Lisa and Nilly said in unison, nodding eagerly. “We’re here to see him.”
“Vooh zet famee?” the woman asked, but Lisa and Nilly just stood there staring at her blankly.
“Paarlay-vooh fraansay?” the man asked cautiously.
“Why are you shaking your head?” Nilly whispered to Lisa.
“Because I’m pretty sure he’s asking if we speak French,” Lisa whispered back.
The two behind the counter discussed something between themselves for a while, and Nilly and Lisa realized that French must be a very difficult language even for French people. Because to make themselves understood they had to use their faces, both arms, all their fingers—well, actually, their whole bodies.
Finally, the woman grabbed a key that was hanging on a board behind them, came out in front of the counter and motioned that Nilly and Lisa should follow her as she hurried over to a wooden staircase.
Twenty-six steps and half a hallway later, she unlocked a door and showed them into a room.
It was very plain, with two twin beds, a small sofa, a wardrobe and a desk that was strewn with notes. Plus a door that led into a bathroom that was clearly in the process of being renovated. Or at least on the shelf under the mirror—next to two glasses—there was a hammer, a screwdriver, and a tube of glue. There was a bathtub by one wall and a rusty pipe that was dripping. As Nilly unpacked his toiletries and put them on the shelf under the mirror, Lisa set her knapsack down next to the desk in the bedroom. And there—in the middle of the papers on top of the desk—she spotted a drawing. She picked it up. It depicted a bathtub, just like the one in the bathroom. Under the drawing there were a lot of numbers. They looked like equations, rather complicated equations, actually. They seemed to involve borrowing, carrying, multiplying, and dividing, Lisa thought.
“What is that?” asked Nilly, who had just come back in from the bathroom.
“I don’t know,” Lisa said. “But it sure looks like Doctor Proctor’s handwriting.”
“And this looks like Proctor’s motorcycle helmet,” said Nilly, who had opened the door to the wardrobe and picked up a brown leather helmet. “So then these must be his white long underwear.”
The red-cheeked and very French woman started speaking French. She gestured dramatically with her arms, repeated the word “evaporay!” several times and made her fingers into a bird that flew away.
“He disappeared,” Lisa said.
“I got that,” Nilly said.
The red-cheeked woman pointed first questioningly at Nilly and Lisa and then at her own mouth with all five fingers.
“And what do you think she’s asking us now?” Lisa asked.
“How many fingers we can fit in our mouths,” Nilly said.
“You idiot, she’s wondering if we want something to eat.”
Lisa curtsied deeply and nodded and then firmly elbowed Nilly, who immediately bowed and nodded as well.
The pleasant woman brought them down to the kitchen and seated them at a table. Then she served them chicken thighs or wings or something, which Nilly thought were really good, whatever they were, before he got so full he couldn’t help but burp. All of a sudden he leaped up, bowed politely, something he seemed to have gotten the hang of, and launched into a long, rhyming apology that made the man and woman laugh out loud, even though they didn’t understand a word of it. Then Nilly yawned so loudly that it seemed as if his head would rip in half.
The woman left and came back with two sets of clean sheets that she handed them along with the key to Doctor Proctor’s room.
As Nilly and Lisa each made their bed, Nilly commented that those chicken thighs had been so small you might almost think they were frog legs. They both laughed pretty hard at that—because who in the world would ever dream of eating frog legs?
“Hm,” Nilly said after a while. “Why does your bed look so much neater than mine?”
“Because it makes more sense to put the comforter in the comforter cover than in the pillowcase,” Lisa sighed, walking over to Nilly’s bed to help him.
Then they went into the bathroom to brush their teeth.
“How are we going to find the professor?” Lisa asked.
“I’m too tired to think,” Nilly said yawning, his eyes half-closed, pushing the screwdriver on the shelf aside so he could grab his tube of toothpaste. “We’ll figure it out tomorrow.”
“But how can we find him when no one understands what we’re saying? And we can’t understand what they’re saying?”
“We’ll learn French tomorrow,” Nilly said.
“Even little kids here seem able to learn the language, so how hard could it really be?” Nilly asked and squeezed a white dollop onto his toothbrush, popped it into his mouth, and started brushing.
“It takes weeks and months,” Lisa said. “And I have a feeling that we don’t have much time.”
“That’s for sure,” Nilly gurgled. “We have band practice on Monday.”
“Quit joking around, Nilly! This is serious.”
She turned to face her friend, who smiled back with gleaming white teeth. Astonishingly white, actually. Yes, whiter than she had ever seen them before—Nilly was not a super-reliable toothbrusher.
“Nilly,” she said. “What’s with your teeth, Nilly? Well?”
But Nilly just stood there with that grin, which was so stiff that it looked like his bottom teeth were glued to his top teeth. And when Lisa noticed the desperate look in his eyes and the frantic gesticulations he was making with his toothbrush, she realized that that was exactly what had happened. She looked over at the shelf. Sure enough—his toothpaste tube lay there untouched, but the lid on the tube of glue next to it was off.
She picked up the tube and read the label out loud: “Doctor Proctor’s Fast-Acting Superglue! You grabbed the wrong tube, Nilly!”
Nilly shrugged his shoulders apologetically and kept smiling that sheepish, idiotic grin.
Lisa sighed and rummaged around in her own toiletries bag until she found her nail file.
“Stand still!” she ordered. “And help me!”
Nilly used both his hands to pull his lips out of the way and Lisa managed to slide the nail file between his teeth on the far left side of his mouth and started filing toward the right. Nilly hummed the Marseillaise as she slowly filed his top teeth and his bottom teeth apart.
“Whoa,” he said when she was done and he looked at himself in the mirror. “Check out these pearly whites, would you? And they’ll be totally impervious to cavities with this superglue on them, my dear Lisa. No more visits to the dentist for me!” He picked up the tube of glue and offered it to her. “You want to try?”
“No thanks. Why do you suppose Doctor Proctor’s Fast-Acting Superglue was sitting right here? Along with these tools?”
“Elementary,” Nilly said. “He was obviously renovating the bathroom.”
“Maybe,” Lisa said with a yawn. “Well, that’s enough thinking for one day.”
But after they got in bed, Lisa lay there awake, listening to the sound of water dripping in the bathroom, making a sorrowful seeping slurping sound. From outside came the distant rumble of traffic and some wailing accordion music. Plus a sound she couldn’t quite identify, but which could have been the creak of a light swinging in the wind. Or, for example, a roller skate on a wooden leg.
Such strange things go through your mind when it’s dark out and you’re alone in a big city. She glanced over at Nilly. Well, almost alone.
Surely everything would seem cheerier tomorrow.
And indeed, she would be right about that.
