The Death-Defying Pepper Roux Read online

  As his hand closed over the pages, another closed over his; a hand twice the size. The editor had been standing behind him, reading over his shoulder. And, after twenty-five years as a hack journalist, the editor knew a good story when he saw one.

  What the editor had been looking for was an excuse to fire Pepper. (He liked firing people.) What he got was a scoop. First he scrutinized every word, looking to find fault. (He liked to find fault—almost as much as he liked firing people.) Tugging the sheets of paper from Pepper’s grip, he combed through each sentence, looking for signs of invention, of fiction. But though the spelling was erratic, and the pencil handwriting hard to read, the content was both sensational and precise. It even contained the chart position at which L’Ombrage had been deliberately scuppered in midocean, taking with it one seaman, a steward, and the captain. The fate of everybody else is unknown, read the last line.

  Oh yes, there was one fiction the editor had failed to spot. Pepper had allowed Captain Roux to repent his crimes and go down with his ship. Captain Pepper was dead. Now it had to be true. It was in the newspaper.

  “It’s a couple of months old,” said the editor grudgingly, “but it’ll do. Find out where the captain lived and get the grieving-widow angle.”

  A picture came into Pepper’s head, then, of a dozen journalists beating at the door of his home—wanting to know, demanding to know—their knocking sending the rooks screaming into the sky….

  “The captain wasn’t married, sir,” said Pepper.

  The story was picked up by the national papers and syndicated all over France. Pepper had no idea what syndicated meant: All he heard was the sin part of it, and Aunt Mireille had taught him everything about the wages of sin.

  The owners of Maritime Sud & Cie were asked to comment, but declined and quickly called in their lawyers.

  The police arrived at the offices of L’Étoile Sud.

  Terrified, thinking they had found him out to be Captain Roux of L’Ombrage, Pepper jumped up from his desk, meaning to run. Where to run? The only way out of the print rooms was through the front office, and the front office was full of police officers. So he clambered up the iron-runged ladder that rose toward the wrought-iron trusses of the metal roof. Below him the journalists—all fat, lethargic men who moved with the slowness of meat pies—gaped up at him in disbelief.

  “Where you going?” called Poulet.

  “Don’t worry! The boss won’t hand you over to the cops!” called Dulac.

  But Pepper kept climbing, until he reached the service hatch in the roof and pulled himself through into fresh air, scattering the pigeons that roosted along the roof ridge.

  For a moment, the immensity of the sky made his head spin. For a month he had hibernated in the print rooms below, living on words and piecrust and coffee. His heart said that he had been to Quombier and the Marseilles zoo and Beaulieu and Grand Pré and the Church of the Bleeding Heart: meeting people, collecting stories. But the feeble muscles in his arms and legs, the blinding sunlight in his eyes, told him that he had in fact been nowhere for a month. Now he sat down on the steeply sloping corrugated iron roof, clutched his knees to his chest, and wondered what it would be like in prison.

  The pigeons looked at him, heads cocked like pistols. The metal of the roof was as hot as a ship’s funnel. The sky encircling him was shot with the red of evening, as if the clouds had impaled themselves on the trees and were bleeding into their crumpled shirts. He was fourteen years and thirteen weeks old, and he had not been to confession for ninety days. Was this where his luck ran out? He walked along the roof ridge to the end of the building, but the gap between this and the offices next door was much too wide to jump.

  Meanwhile, down in the front office, the editor looked the police squarely in the eye. They asked him where he had gotten his information about the sinking of L’Ombrage. He refused point-blank to tell them. He would not—he could not reveal his sources, he said. The establishment could put him up against a wall and shoot him if they wanted: He would protect his sources with his last drop of blood!

  For his whole life the editor had wanted to print the kind of story that would bring the police to his door, demanding to know how and where he had found it. He was not going to waste the moment now by telling them.

  “So which of your people wrote this article, then?” asked the police sergeant, smacking the offending newspaper with the back of his hand.

  “That I cannot tell you! I must protect the identity of both the author and his informant! That is the unwritten law of my profession!” And the editor stood tall and unblinking, secretly hoping the police would think he had written it himself.

  The police shuffled their feet, shrugged, and went away. The owners of Maritime Sud & Cie had all been arrested the day before, and were being interrogated about seven deliberate sinkings, seven fraudulent insurance claims. It no longer really mattered just who had snitched on them to the press or who had exposed their crimes in the newspapers for everyone to read about.

  “You can come down now, petite taupe,” called Dulac through cupped hands. “The cops have gone.”

  Pepper crossed himself and said a Hail Mary. Inside his sun-hot head, an idea had somehow risen, baked and browned: The police were really angels in disguise hunting the runaway Paul Roux. And yet they had gone without catching his scent, without smiting him down, without even circling the roof on triple seraphim wings! He climbed back down into the print rooms, legs shaking; sat at his desk; and, just to celebrate, wrote a story about a chicken in Bagnol that had laid forty-three eggs in one day. Around him the printing machines flailed like windmills, and the giant rollers spewed out page after page of news, cut wafer thin. The chief setter said, “Have you heard? Circulation’s up thirty percent. Happy days.”

  The editor came back from the front office, mopping his forehead with a handkerchief. Laughs, like hiccups, kept breaking free from his throat. “I believe a glass of wine might be in order, gentlemen,” he said. “Go and get us half a dozen bottles of red, will you, Papier?” And he pulled out his wallet.

  The heat was dying out of the day, so Pepper put on his jacket to go to the wineshop. His head was full of new ideas for stories: about a parakeet that could translate Malay into French—about a cure for baldness involving marmalade—about a boy who receives a mysterious envelope on his fourteenth birthday, and inside it a fancy iron key to a chateau along with a note saying I want you to have it….

  So he did not notice the sound of footsteps behind him, keeping pace with his, until he was almost at the shop. Glancing back, he saw the figure of a man stop sharply and lift one finger to point at him. A chill went down Pepper’s spine, as if the iron key in the story had been dropped down his collar. The bright lights of the wineshop were comforting and reassuring once he was inside: the rows of wine bottles a palette of glorious oily reds, pinks, greens, and golds. Pepper had never been in such a shop, never bought wine before, and never drunk it except at Holy Communion. He was enchanted by the huge array of shapes perched like statues around a church. The labels bore lilies, port cullises, castles, eagles, boars, rearing horses, and crowns. Some bottles wore little helmets of silver wire, others sackcloth tunics like monks doing penance.

  “Six bottles of red, please,” said Pepper, and the vintner laughed out loud and spread wide his arms to indicate the choice.

  Then someone outside the shop put his face close to the window, hands cupped around the eyes to peer through the glass. Condensation at once blotted out the face, so only the shape of the head showed, hands curving like tusks away from the cheekbones.

  Pepper emptied the money out of his fist onto the shop counter. “Sorry. Please. Sorry. Give this back to the editor at L’Étoile, will you? Say Papier’s sorry, but he had to go.” Then he squeezed between the racks of wine, setting them chinking and rocking; forced open the back door of the shop; and tumbled out into an alleyway. The alleyway had only one exit—back onto the main street. As Pepper walked briskly to
ward the streetlights, the same figure stepped into the alley’s opening: a silhouette against the streetlamp, a halo of gaslight around his hat.

  “Roux!”

  Pepper turned back and ran. He ran at the alley’s end wall, dislodging mortar with the toes of his boots, scuffing his knees, reaching up. There was barbed wire along the top of the wall. A clothesline in the garden beyond that caught him in the throat and threw him on his back. But not until Pepper had vaulted three fences did he feel any pain other than fear.

  SIX

  CONFESSIONS

  The best time to get killed is immediately after going to confession. Well, after doing penance, too, of course, but that’s the easy part.

  A long time ago, Aunty Mireille had explained how the rules worked: If, when he died, Pepper was carrying any unforgiven sins around with him (such as a dirty handkerchief or five out of ten for his math assignment, or second helpings at dinner), he would have to go to Hell and have those sins burned away before he could present himself in Heaven. There was no guarantee he would be allowed into Heaven at all—not after eating cake with his fingers instead of a fork—but while he was larded in sin, there was no point in even trying.

  She had said this one day while a leg of pork was roasting over the fire. Together, hand in hand, they had stood and watched the fat run down the roast and drip into the grate, making the flames jump, and Mireille had held his hand so tightly that his knuckles crunch-crunched inside her fist. “That will be you,” she whispered under her breath, “if you don’t go to visit Father Ignatius every day.” Aged six at the time, Pepper had been deeply impressed.

  Running and fear made him warm, but midnight turned his sweat to rivulets of cold under his clothes, and he took refuge in a church. Curling up on a pew, he slept like a sardine on a drying rack until, rolling off onto the floor by accident, he discovered a row of little cushions hanging from the pews in front and lined them all up into a bed.

  As the first light of day jimmied its way through the stained-glass windows, Pepper parted his eyelids and whimpered. On all sides, saints were emerging from the shadows. Invisible at midnight, a dozen of them stood there now, plainly shocked into stillness at finding Paul Roux on their premises. Gradually other familiar sights loomed out of the gloom—memorials, plaster angels, candle sconces, flower vases, and shining brass—and Pepper surfaced from sleep cramming his terror back into his chest. But a moment later he found himself looking at a banner embroidered by local housewives:

  MOTHERS’ UNION OF THE CHURCH OF SAINT CONSTANCE

  it said in cross-stitch.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” said Pepper, though he never ever swore. How could a boy hope to win against such odds? Of all the churches he could have hidden in, he had to pick the one devoted to blessed Saint Constance: the saint who had spoken his doom to Aunty Mireille. He did not believe in coincidences. Whole churches were probably moving around like chess pieces within France, just to demonstrate to him the pointlessness of running, the hopelessness of hope.

  So which of the plaster figures was Saint Constance, then? Pepper picked out the statue that looked most like Aunt Mireille and knelt down in front of it.

  “Oh, excuse me a minute,” he said, and went back to fetch a hassock to kneel on. The church at home did not have these little cushiony things. (And Aunt Mireille would never have let him use them.) But Pepper could not resist placing one at the saint’s feet to protect his poor knees from the chipped stone floor.

  “Please, could I—” No, no. He was forgetting his manners. He must not ask for something until he had made the right polite remarks. “Blessed art thou, Saint Constance, and I hope you’re well. I have a message for you somewhere. From my aunty.” He pulled out the wad of crumpled, torn, dog-eared prayers he had been carrying around for months, and leafed through them for the one addressed to Saint Constance. “I’m sorry. I was supposed to give this to you myself. In person. In Heaven. But just in case I don’t…for a while…” He looked for somewhere to lodge the slip of paper, but statues come in one big lump, and the sculptors never think to give them pockets. Looking around, he saw that the carved eagle holding up the Holy Scriptures was looking at him all too keenly, its glass eyes fixed on him as on a small, edible rabbit.

  Quickly, Pepper lit a candle for the Duchess, and another for Roche, then moved the second farther along the candle rack, because Duchesse could never abide Roche, the pig. In between, he lit a candle for his father (in case he was languishing in jail on account of Pepper’s snitching newspaper article). He lit another for his mother—and quickly a fourth for Aunt Mireille, because Aunt Mireille had always held his hand over the candle flames if he forgot this little courtesy. For a moment he thought he could almost feel the burn on his palms, but it was only the holes made by the barbed wire, getting infected. He lit a fifth candle for himself and stuffed a ten-franc note half into the slot because he did not have any small change.

  Saint Constance looked down with dull, painted eyes, unimpressed. There were chips in her cheeks and painted hair. Perhaps the blessed saints did not go gray and wrinkly with the passing centuries but simply flaked color. He had meant to ask for a stay of execution—another year or two of being alive. After all, a thousand years is but a day in the eyes of the Lord. He had meant to be abject and terribly, terribly polite….

  But the protesters in Marseille had stirred him up inside. Injustice at the Marseillais Department Store had taught him how to feel angry and resentful. And journalism had filled his head with questions. “Why do I have to die at fourteen?” he burst out. “Whose idea was it? Was it your idea?”

  Saint Constance stared blankly back, not quite meeting his eye. Her chipped red mouth looked as if she had been eating crusty bread and had not licked her lips clean. Duchesse would have licked his lips clean. Duchesse would have said something encouraging.

  “Was it your idea? What for? Why fourteen?” He found he had gotten to his feet, ducking his head this way and that to try to make eye contact. But Constance continued to look around him, through him. In sheer vexation, he put out his hands to give her a push…. Then a thought: What if she could not see him because he no longer existed?

  A door opened, and a draft snuffed out his candles: one, two, three, four—easy as that—leaving only his own flame trembling on its wick. Pepper, still bristling with fright, squirmed back between the pews and lay hidden.

  “I’ve seen no one of that description at all, I fear,” the priest was saying as he came in, to someone close behind him. “No one unknown to me. No one to rouse my suspicions. When did he break loose? He’ll be making for the wide open. It’s common among the prison types—to hide out in the salty places. Or the seaside. It’s all strangers and rogues on the seashore these days.”

  Together the two men walked through the nave, their shoes scuffing stone dust. Pepper wondered who this was, asking about some fugitive ne’er-do-well: the police? the navy? Or someone in a beret and halo with a fiery chariot parked up nearby? He dared not put his head out and see. They stopped for a moment by the candle rack but then walked on up to the altar and back down the other side. A bell rang. Maybe Saint Constance was trying to alert them to the wretched boy hiding near her perch.

  Another chilly draft, and the policeman was gone, no closer to catching his fugitive but spreading the word from parish to parish, alerting people to the danger, warning them to be on their guard….

  One glance up at the saint’s statue showed Saint Constance still dull eyed and inert, and Pepper realized that the noise of a bell had not come from her: It was the priest’s doing. The door of the confessional creaked, then thudded shut. Like a café opening for business, the wooden booth was inviting customers in to confess their sins.

  Pepper had not made confession for weeks. For years he had been to confession every other day. The habit had been drummed into him, like brushing his teeth or changing his pants. A boy accustomed to having his hair washed every other day would start to feel filthy after
a week of leaving it dirty. So already he felt grimy in his soul, flea-hopping with sin. The habit of a lifetime hauled on him now. It hauled him onto his callused knees, and he crawled down the aisle to where the twin booths of the confessional stood side by side like coffins propped up in an undertaker’s back room. He glanced back at the carved eagle on the lectern, talons spread, wooden beak quite sharp and hooked enough to tear the face off his head. If “The Hour” was near, Pepper ought to give himself a spiritual wash-and-brush-up before Heaven caught him.

  Besides: He longed for someone to forgive him and say everything was all right.

  The priest had entered the confessional by the left-hand door; Pepper sprinted across open ground into the right-hand booth, slamming shut the door. The priest gave a startled yelp, then collected himself and put away his library book.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned!”

  “When were you last at confession?”

  “When I was thirteen,” said Pepper in his deep, gruff, fourteen-year-old voice.

  Now, back in Bois-sous-Clochet, Father Ignatius—bored to distraction with the tedious little Roux boy’s tedious little sins, and anxious to get back to his beehives—had trained Pepper at least to get to the point quickly. “I won’t waste your time, boy, if you don’t waste mine,” he had in fact said.

  So over the years, Pepper had rather let slip the niceties, the fancy words, the slow run-up. Now he put his mouth close to the grille and said, “Bless me, Father, for I’ve killed someone.”

  There was a sharp whistle on the other side of the lattice, as the priest sucked in sudden air through his false teeth.

  “Claude Roche and maybe even the Duchess too, because he only stayed back because I wouldn’t get off, and I know he wasn’t there when I woke up, so I think he must be gone too. And I know I shouldn’t have run, and the Lord’s hand will catch up with me and grip me somewhere sooner or later. And the saints and angels are really pissed off with me because I won’t go along quietly. But it was them or me, wasn’t it, and they should’ve aimed better with the block and tackle if they were going to get me on my birthday, and not taken out Roche instead—because he’s got a wife even if he is a pig. What did they want me to do? Stand still? People don’t! I mean, a seagull flies over—you move, don’t you? You jump out of the way, don’t you? And I gave them plenty of chances afterward. And I don’t see what the harm is, myself, so long as Paul’s dead and gone. And he is.”