The Death-Defying Pepper Roux Read online

  “But he was almost fifty!” exclaimed the girl.

  “Almost dead!”

  “Not dead to love,” said Pepper sternly.

  One man telegraphed his wife to say he had found an apartment to rent but that dogs were not allowed. She was to have Beowulf put down. Pepper told her—nothing at all. He simply sneaked the dog out of the garden and home to the loft on the rue de la Poste. “Just for a while,” he told Exe and Why, slipping the wolfhound another biscuit. “I’ll take him back soon.” Though that just added one more lie to all the rest.

  Of course, his job took Pepper to the garden gate of other people’s lives without ever quite letting him inside. Every day he saw children playing in gardens, smelled cooking or heard quarrels through open windows; saw women heaving shopping bags in at front doors, kissing sons good-bye for the day with packed lunches. He saw fathers come home and pull out bunches of keys—Hello, dear! I’m home! How are the children?

  And Pepper’s heart yearned toward those doorways like a dog on a leash, and he would have to haul it back, speak sharply to it, tame it, before stepping back onto the pedals of his bicycle and setting off to spread a bit more joy.

  Anyway, he had a home now too, high up, with a view over rooftops to the sea. He made himself a bed out of a postal sack stuffed with shredded undeliverable mail. Each evening the starlings roared over Aigues Mortes—he could hear them clear through the roof, see them mobbing one another outside the tiny eaves window. As the sea light faded, the birds’ twittering merged into a single high-pitched whistling note—a curfew siren warning the city to light its lamps. For half an hour, the sharp rooflines were softened by the wavering movement of a thousand thousand birds roosting for the night. Were the angels as countless as this, Pepper wondered? Were they as small? He had always pictured them big, like albatrosses or golden eagles, but perhaps they were little, like starlings—or smaller still, so that they could ride the starlings over the darkening streets: pilots on reconnaissance missions.

  From the loft window, Pepper had a clear view of the city’s tallest building—the Constance Tower—impaling the sky on its blunt tip. The starlings that massed each evening did not exactly rain down destruction on the town, but they did loose a lot of guano: It clung like cake icing to windowsills and public monuments. The Constance Tower suffered worst of all, and scaffolding caged it now while the guano was cleaned off. Still, the statue of the woman that stood on its summit rose above such indignities. She had the perfect vantage point—could surely see everything and everyone in the city. So he never stood long at the window, watching the starlings.

  “If anyone comes asking, please don’t tell her I’m here,” he said to Exe and Why, who looked at each other in alarm.

  One day, a telegram took him to the rue Méjeunet. He wondered why the name was familiar. Was it from his nightly studies of the map? He was sure he had never cycled along it before.

  Iron or wooden gates—once splendid—led off the road into hidden courtyards strewn with litter. And on three sides of each courtyard there rose up high, shabby apartment buildings. The crying of babies intertwined into a continuous wail, like distant wolves. There was a smell of drains, pigeons, sorrow. Bellpulls had been ripped out, leaving only stalks of rusty wire. There were no numbers on the doors: a mailman’s nightmare. He would have to ask around for number nineteen.

  A tarnished courtyard fountain featured a cherub spewing water. Pepper propped his bike against it, but the bike fell over. Children with dirty faces squatted down and set the back wheel spinning.

  “Mind your fingers,” said Pepper. Laundry draped over ropes high above dripped on his head like tears. He took out the telegram to check the name.

  Like the bike wheel, the buildings around him suddenly began to spin. His mouth turned dry as dust. His legs would not carry him. He bent to drink from the fountain. Hidden by the rim—Pepper didn’t see it until he ducked his head to the spout—was a dead sparrow. Waterlogged little body, claws curled tight shut.

  It was Roche under 2,600 fathoms of ocean.

  In snatching his head away, Pepper scraped his forehead. Damping his fingers in the drinking fountain, he opened the telegram:

  WE REGRET TO INFORM…BELIEVED

  DROWNED…SS L’OMBRAGE

  FOUNDERED…

  Then he wadded the slip of paper into a tiny yellow pellet, thrust it deep into his pocket, and pedaled home at breakneck speed.

  He was no sooner through the door than Exe and Why grabbed him by the lapels and pushed him backward onto the landing—“Go! Get out of here!” Pepper leaned against their rigid arms, resisting. Inside, Beowulf began barking. Starlings stood on the far side of the little eaves window and watched expectantly, tapping the glass with their beaks. The latch hung off the door, the wood around it splintered.

  “Someone came looking!” said Why, the fear still in his face.

  “A priest,” said Exe.

  “Some priest!” said Why. “Customs officer undercover, more like!”

  They had just gotten home from work. A knock at the door. Being a week behind with the rent and having an illicit dog on the premises, they did not answer. Exe looked through a crack in the wood. Beowulf began to bark and growl, but the priest outside barked louder.

  “Pepper? You got Pepper in there?” he demanded, and a boot slammed against the door, smashing the lock. The priest burst in and searched the bathroom, alcove, boxes, shut the dog in a cupboard, overturned the beds, screamed after them as they fled down the stairs, “Where is he?”

  “We didn’t dare come back till he was gone. Now look!” said Why, and relented enough to let Pepper see the wreckage for himself.

  “‘Pepper’?” said Pepper. “Are you sure?”

  “‘Pepper,’” said Why. “That’s drugs, right? Gangster talk for drugs, right? Something you put up your nose. We told him no one lived here but us.” But the two drew back from him, severing acquaintance. They did not wish to see him killed by any evangelical priests or arrested by Customs, but Zee had taken one step too far into the world of crime, and they no longer wanted him for a friend.

  “No wonder you told us not to open the door!” they called after him down the stairwell, their voices full of disappointment and hurt feelings.

  “Crazed,” said Exe, turning back into the loft. “Told you he was.”

  “Crazed…,” Why agreed. “Do you think we can keep the dog?”

  “Where’s number nineteen?” Pepper asked the children in the courtyard off rue Méjeunet, but they were too young for numbers. “Number nineteen?” he called up at an open window, and a man leaned out and pointed. The cracked and stained stone staircase had long since lost its handrail, but that helped, since Pepper was carrying his bike as he climbed. He knocked on a door scabrous with peeling paint. After a long wait, a woman opened it as far as the chain would allow.

  Yvette Roche’s skin was the color of damp salt. Even her brown hair, unbrushed and shineless, was salt streaked, her lips bloodless. The permanent frown between her blank, bleak eyes was the shape of a rook. At some time in the past, her nose had been broken.

  For a while, they looked at each other: the woman, the boy. Seeing his cap and armband, she grudgingly took the chain off the door. Deep in his pocket, Pepper fingered the tiny ball of wadded-up telegram. Stepping past her into the hall, he took off the cap and hung it on a coat hook.

  “Hello, dear. I’m home,” he said. “How are the children?”

  TEN

  THE GOOD HUSBAND OF AIGUES MORTES

  There were no children, luckily. Pepper was relieved. He quite liked children, but not as much as dogs.

  Do people see what they expect? Or do they see what they choose? Yvette Roche said nothing about her husband’s unexpected return. Or how much he had changed. But then Yvette Roche said nothing anyway. She never spoke. Her bruise-colored eyes followed Pepper warily around the apartment as he hung up his jacket, washed the dishes, poured himself a glass of water, browsed
through the cupboards for something to eat. At least when he took out the trash, carrying two large bags of it downstairs to the courtyard bins, she did not lock the door on him.

  True, she was not so wifely that she hurried to serve him scrambled eggs with grated cheese on top or pour him a rum, but then there was no food or drink in the whole apartment. Pepper could see he would have to stop buying dog biscuits and start buying food instead.

  It seemed a bit of an imposition to be there, getting in the way. (Aunt Mireille had always said what a nuisance men were around the house.) But he knew it was his responsibility to provide for his wife, to put food on the table. Now that he was Claude Roche.

  He could not go back to the Telegraph Office—clearly the saints were onto him—so Pepper got himself a job as a grocer’s delivery boy instead. Gaspar the grocer took no interest in him, beyond his name—“Claude Roche, sir!”—and how little he would cost.

  “If your work is satisfactory after one week, I may employ you.” That was the deal.

  Every day Gaspar laid out a row of shopping lists on the back counter and, taking each one in turn, Pepper would assemble his deliveries. Fetching the items from the shelves—soap, coffee, rice, cheese—he packed a large flat-bottomed basket, then lashed it to the front of his bike and wobbled his way around to the customer. The customers liked him, liked his good manners and the little extra errands he ran for them: walking their dogs, mailing their letters, pumping up their tires, finding their spectacles. They paid their grocery bills cheerfully enough—though not to Pepper; Gaspar would never have trusted a grocery boy to handle money.

  Gaspar alone did not pay his debts. One week’s probation turned into two, and still there was no mention of wages. Pepper did not mind. He had already adapted—as endangered animals do—to his new habitat. The last basket of the day he filled with things for Yvette Roche—pâté, coffee, eggs, cakes, honey, bread—and cycled home with them balanced on the front fork of his little bike, gradually stocking the kitchen cupboard with things he remembered seeing at home.

  Still Yvette said nothing—though she was quick enough to eat the food, working her way backward through any meal: coffee, dessert, salad, pepper salami…. He watched her eat—covertly at first, but then quite openly, knowing she would never look up while there was food on her plate. Her skin was a grimy gray, her eyelids flaky; and her red lips peeled and bled where she constantly bit them. And when she was not eating, she could sit perfectly stock-still—as birds do when a cat is passing by. Only when his back was turned did Pepper sometimes feel her eyes resting on him; when he turned back, she would start eating again—quickly, eagerly, as if harpies might swoop in at the window and snatch the food away. Meanwhile, Pepper kept up the kind of conversation he thought married people ought to be having: “The price of fish is up again.” “Honestly, the traffic these days!” Pepper Papier would have turned every sentence into a question. Pepper Roche never did, because he knew he would not get an answer.

  At night Pepper curled up on the split and sagging sofa, and its broken springs drove nightmares into him through spine, hips, and head. Yvette Roche was as gauzy thin and silent as a suit of clothes hanging from a hospital coat hanger. But Claude Roche, who haunted his dreams, was solid as a side of bacon, as real as a punch or a kick. He hunted Pepper through the bilges of the sunken Ombrage, through schools of drowned sparrows. Pepper gasped for breath, woke up with his lips tight pursed against drowning. The dreams were as real as real as real. By comparison, Yvette Roche was shadowy: a noise in the next room, a perfume on the stairs. Pepper found himself wondering whether she was really there or had died before he arrived and left only her ghost eating meals from back to front.

  Her flaking lips put Pepper in mind of the statue in the Church of Saint Constance. Throughout his childhood, the saints and Aunty had watched over him like prison warders, but now that he had escaped, he rather missed their tyranny. So without knowing it, he began to bring things to Yvette like oblations to the feet of a holy statue—honey and cheese, lentils and wildflowers, scallions and artichoke hearts. He brought her herbs that sounded like incense: turmeric, sassafras, coriander, oregano…. They filled the apartment with strange scents—sharp, sweet, experimental. Yvette experimented with cooking them. One day, she set in front of him a plate of pasta. It was seeded with pine nuts and vanilla pods, stranded with cress and egg, anchovies and honey, and it tasted like—nothing he had ever eaten before.

  “Mmm! That was delicious! Thank you,” he said, putting down his spoon (there were no knives or forks, only spoons). Yvette herself was eating honey, holding the jar in her lap, out of sight, taking quick, furtive sips off the tip of a spoon. All the pasta was on Pepper’s plate. Only when he pushed the plate away from him did she reach out a finger and surreptitiously ease it within reach, spooning up what was left. He wanted to ask: Is there only one plate? He wanted to ask how she could eat cold pasta. But Yvette’s wrapper of silence was like a dead man’s shroud: He would have been scared to look inside.

  He wanted to ask why she had opened the door, why she had let him in, why she had believed…But each day these unspoken questions just had to curl up a bit tighter and make room for fresh ones. Lie still, he told them. I am Claude Roche. She believes me, look. I am Claude Roche. I used to be a real pig, but people can change, can’t they? I am Claude Roche now.

  He dreamed that a telegram came from the angels:

  PIG DUE AT ABATTOIR STOP PORK BEST WHEN PIG IS YOUNG STOP AM SENDING

  CHRISTOPHE THE BUTCHER

  Pepper woke screaming. A hand was in his hair! Christophe’s hand!

  But it was only Yvette, standing stiffly beside the sofa, stroking his hair from arm’s length, making a soothing, shushing sound that sank in an instant to silence. Seeing him free of his nightmare, she turned and went back into her room.

  The neighbors heard the screaming and thought it was Yvette. Claude Roche must be home from the sea again, the pig: He always gave his wife cause to scream when he was home between voyages. They shook their heads and wondered why God had not done the decent thing and drowned the man long since. They did not go to Yvette’s aid, exactly, but they did what they could. They snitched to the landlord.

  So, soon after that, the landlord came beating on the door. Yvette stood in the bedroom doorway, clutching closed her dressing gown, biting her lip white. A voice bellowed: “Three months behind with the rent, Roche! Heard you were home, Roche! Cough up or get out. Last warning! You got till the end of the week!”

  Claude Roche had run up all kinds of debts and left them all to his wife when he died. Now it was Pepper’s job to pay them off, to take over his debts. After all, he had taken over the rest of the man’s life. That evening, by way of an apology, he brought home five coconut cakes, each with a glacé cherry on top, like the flame on a white wax candle.

  “Tomorrow I’ll ask him for pay,” he said emphatically. “I will.”

  Yvette Roche wiped the cream off her nose and nodded. “Yes. You should do that,” she said. It was the first thing she had ever said to him.

  The cakes, though, were a mistake. It so happened that coconut cakes were a particular passion with the grocer. Gaspar resented parting with them to customers—he often ignored them on grocery orders. When he had to sell one, he felt like a man who has had his pockets picked; he kept track of the exact number left on the shelf, looked forward to taking them home for his supper. So when five Holy Candle cakes disappeared at the end of the day, all sweetness went out of his nature, too. He was waiting for Pepper the next day, hands on hips, a grim smirk of satisfaction clenched between decaying teeth.

  “Thieving little lifter,” he said. “They transport boys like you to the swamps of Australia. Feed ’em to crocodiles. I’m calling the police.” Power tasted almost as sweet to Gaspar as coconut cream.

  But he should have waited for Pepper to dismount. As it was, the thief sank all his weight on the bike pedal and sped away, shouting over his shoulder, “T
ake it out of my wages, cheapskate!”

  Pepper was not unduly worried about losing his wageless job. But for the first time ever, he felt the need of money. Wives were not like dogs; they could not get by on biscuits. He needed pay.

  He tried at the town theater first. If there was one skill he had mastered, it was changing roles, and he thought that fitted him very well for acting. But the theater manager looked at him for two seconds and said, “Go home, lad. You’re a child. What are you—fourteen?” and turned him out of the theater.

  Pepper had to return to the glare of sunshine outside, where people either squinted at him, one eye closed in suspicion, or never bothered to look at him at all. He walked down to the sea, but none of the fishermen at the poste des pêcheurs needed a deckhand. He asked at the department store, but his clothes were now so shabby, they disguised any skill Pepper might have with slicing machines or pneumatic cash systems.

  And as he roamed the city looking for work, a familiar feeling settled on him like snow: the feeling of being watched. He could no more throw it off than he could slough off his own shadow. He glanced toward the Constance Tower, with its woman on the roof—just to be sure she was still up there, in her right and proper place. It was just the idea of her, wasn’t it, that prickled the back of his neck? He began to run—could not help himself—down the steep stone steps, between the tightly packed houses, across the canals by way of the narrowest bridges.

  He experimented with being someone else—someone more like Konstantin Kruppe or Roche. After all, Yvette had married him, so she must like that kind of man. He practiced swaggering; he oiled his hair flat against his head, smoked cigarettes, and whistled at a woman in the next street. It had an effect, but not quite the one he was after.