Free Bubble in the Bathtub by Jo Nesbø Page A

in the business world. It involved two brothers, inventors, who’d just created suspender clips.”
    â€œSuspender clips? I thought those had always existed.”
    â€œNo, no. In the past people used to have to button their suspenders. Suspender clips were considered a major step forward for humanity, kind of like … well,escalators and electric toothbrushes. But anyway, after the hippos paid the two brothers in nickels and dimes, Cliché took over their patent and it made him filthy rich. And that’s why he always wears suspenders.”
    â€œBut isn’t that a little weird?” Lisa asked. “You couldn’t stand him and yet somehow he was so in love with you that he wanted to marry you after only having seen you just that one time.”
    â€œIn love!” Juliette exclaimed. “Cliché has no idea what love is. There was only one reason why he wanted to marry me: He wanted to become nobility. If he married a baronette it would automatically make him a barometer. I told my father that, but he made it clear that if I said no, we would be bankrupt and kicked out of the castle. And that I should go change because Claude was coming to propose to me that very night.”
    â€œDouble yikes!” Lisa said. “What did you do?”
    â€œI locked myself in my room and thought. And then I realized what I had to do.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œMarry Victor before anyone could stop us. The only way to become a barometer is to be the first person to marry a baronette. If a man marries a baronette who’s been married before, it doesn’t make him any nobler than a mule and it certainly doesn’t give him the right to use a title that starts with baron. If I hurried up and married Victor, it would be too late for Cliché and he would leave us alone. That was my plan. I also thought that since powerful criminals like Cliché have eyes and ears everywhere, it would be smartest for us to drive across the border into Italy, where Victor and I could get married in total secrecy. So then I climbed out my window, went straight to the Hôtel Frainche-Fraille where Victor was living, and proposed.”
    Lisa laughed. “That’s what Proctor told me. How exactly did you propose?”
    Juliette shrugged. “I knocked on his door. He opened it and said, ‘Hi!’ I said, ‘Do you want to marryme?’ He said, ‘Yes,’ and I said, ‘Get your motorcycle helmet, we’re going to Rome to get married now.’ I didn’t give him any explanations. I really didn’t want to have to explain to him that my dad, his future father-in-law, didn’t want him as a son-in-law and had promised me to someone else instead.”
    â€œAnd what did the professor say?”
    â€œVictor just laughed and did what I said. We climbed onto the motorcycle and he floored it. Out of Paris to the south, toward the mountains of Provence and the Italian border. We drove all night and it was cold, but Victor’s scarf, which he’d knit on a knitting machine he had invented, was nineteen yards long, so we wrapped it around both of us.”
    â€œHow … sweet.”
    â€œSweet, yes. But I knew that by now Cliché would have sent out the alarm and dispatched his hippos. I hadn’t told Victor anything. Why should I? He was in high spirits, we were already far from Paris, and soon it would all be behind us. As the sun began to come up, we zoomed past a sign with a name on it and into a village, and Victor spotted a gas station and slowed down. I yelled from the sidecar that he should keep going, that he shouldn’t stop here, that we could fill up the tank in Italy, that it was only a mile or two to the border. But the engine and the long, flapping scarf were making so much noise that he didn’t hear me. So he stopped in front of a big guy in coveralls with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth who was leaning against the only pump.