The Death-Defying Pepper Roux Read online

  There was a rapid flurry of clicks, a flicker of flame, and the smoke of a Turkish cigarette came through the grille, like a foretaste of hellfire. “You killed this Paul?”

  Pepper was about to deny it, being in the confessional. Flushed and feverish, he rammed his knuckles into his mouth. He had lied in the newspaper, but it was another thing to lie to a priest. To be in this box was to be in direct hearing of the saints and angels. “Yes, Father! I killed Paul Roux! Good as. I hope so. Aunty too.” Father Ignatius would have yawned by now; Pepper was rattled by the lack of yawning.

  “Your aunt, too?”

  “I meant, Aunty hopes—”

  “Your Aunty Hope?”

  It was too complicated to explain, so Pepper didn’t. “Gone to Glory, that’s what I put in the paper…. No, that was for Roche, sorry.” He was not expressing himself well: He could feel it. Given a sheet of paper and a typewriter, he could have said it all easily: L’Étoile Sud had made him quite chatty. But there was no chief copy editor here to tidy up his jumble of words. “Now Papier’s dead,” said Pepper, sinking into self-pity. “And the lemurs.”

  “The police are close at hand, son,” said the priest carefully. “You would do best to turn yourself in. If you are truly repentant, that would be the way to go.”

  Pepper started to make his act of contrition but broke off. “But I’m not sorry, Father! Not for running away. I don’t see what else I could do. I mean, if you shoot at a rabbit, it runs away, doesn’t it?”

  “Rabbit?”

  “Rabbit,” said Pepper. “That’s nature. I’m not allowed to kill myself, am I? Isn’t that right?”

  “Absolutely!” said the priest in a thin, high, peeping voice. “The sin of despair, that would be.”

  “But if a rabbit sort of actually purposely came out of its burrow and poked its head up the barrel of a shotgun, that would be pretty much like committing sui—” The thought petered out as they both, in their separate compartments, sat and pictured a rabbit with its head up a gun barrel. The problem of the ears troubled Pepper, whose thoughts were getting blurry with fatigue.

  “Do you still have the shotgun with you?” asked the priest, slowly and deliberately. There was a quaver in his voice.

  “Me? Oh no. I used a pistol at home,” said Pepper, struck by the strange turn the conversation had taken. Father Ignatius had never wanted to talk about guns.

  “I cannot absolve you of your sins unless you repent, man!” protested the priest, and so vehemently that he spat out his cigarette and banged his head as he bent down to search for it.

  “Are you all right, Father?” asked Pepper.

  “Repent the taking of life, at least!”

  Pepper reconsidered. He was very sorry indeed about Roche and Duchesse being dead. And Christophe the butcher getting the wrong idea about Henri and his wife. And the ship going down. And having to lie about the lions eating Roche. And his father, possibly rotting in jail. And his mother’s mortifying shame if it got into the papers…All this Pepper tried to put into words, for the priest’s benefit, though it all came out rather muddled and left him feeling damp, shivery, and sad. So he spoke his act of contrition as the voice beyond the grille urged him to.

  And then—damn it!—the priest still would not set him any penance but to go to the police and turn himself in! Father Ignatius had always given out easy, halfhearted penances, like a teacher setting homework she doesn’t want to mark. Say three Hail Marys and an Our Father and—please, boy, I keep telling you—don’t come back for a week. Not this one.

  Dejected, and feeling slightly sick from the Turkish cigarette smoke, Pepper let himself out of the wooden booth, brushing down his jacket, which was dusty, creased, and torn. He knew that he would not go to the police and turn himself in. They would be sure to ask him his name and (unlike the priest) would check to find out if he was lying; send for his parents and Aunt Mireille. People would force his arms back into the sleeves of his former life; turn him back into Paul Roux, that boy so overdue at the undertaker’s. And Mireille would snitch to the angels and saints about him, the very next time she went down on her knees. Mireille had always informed on him to the saints. It is my sad duty to tell them what an evil boy you are, mon pauvre.

  So Pepper’s sins stayed unforgiven. Once upon a time he had come out of church feeling cleaner and safer and better prepared for “The Hour.” Now he just felt grubby and guilty—a fugitive still, and never able to go home.

  The plaster figure of Saint Constance did not so much as turn her head to watch him go—could not be bothered to lick her cracked lips or keep safe hold of Aunty’s crumpled prayer. For someone who had taken such an interest in Pepper when he was born, she seemed to have lost all curiosity now.

  At least the priest would keep Pepper’s secrets. That was the rule for priests: They are not allowed to repeat anything they hear during confession. And Pepper, being a stickler for rules, firmly believed that other people abided by them.

  Believed it quite wrongly on this occasion.

  Father André waited until he was sure the serial killer had left his church before gathering up his courage and his robes, putting on his bicycling clips, and cycling after the plainclothes policeman who had come by the church earlier. Couldn’t describe the culprit (he gabbled breathlessly) not having seen his face…but obliged to say…killer roaming the neighborhood…armed with a pistol…stained in the blood of at least five victims (not counting the lemurs)…some of them family members…probably disposed of one body in the lions’ den at the Marseille zoo.

  The plainclothes policeman looked at him long and hard, nodding, running his eyes up and down the priestly robes, making notes but little comment. Smiling, even. He did promise to give the matter his urgent attention. Into his notebook he tucked the ten-franc note and the crumpled prayer he had picked up from the floor of the church. Evidence.

  At noon—by which time Pepper was six miles away and still walking—he was overtaken by a calèche carrying chicken feed and asked for a ride.

  “What happened to your hands?” asked the driver.

  Pepper looked down at the puncture holes in his palms, his jacket, the thighs of his trousers, and wondered himself. Perhaps the wooden eagle had done it while he slept. Or perhaps birds of ill omen were invisible and could peck a boy to the bone without his ever even seeing them do it.

  Where to hide? He had thought simply to stay out of sight of the sky and its flocks of hawkish angels. But now it seemed the police might be after him too.

  “You wanna watch yourself out here,” said the calèche driver. “The mosquitoes like an open wound.” His gesture took in the countryside through which they were riding: marshland sudsy white with salt deposits, and the sky a great blue bowl upturned over it all. Pepper’s mother (who hated having toads in her garden but was scared to pick them up) had trapped the creatures this way, on the lawn, slamming slipware cooking bowls over them and leaving them there for the gardener to deal with; china molehills that gave the occasional bump and shudder as the toads underneath panicked and jumped and concussed themselves, les pauvres.

  “There’s worse than mosquitoes, though,” said the driver glumly. “They all come here to lose theirselves. The vermin.”

  “What, like rabbits, you mean?”

  “The hyoo-man vermin,” said the driver lugubriously. “Runaways. Convicts. Gypsies. Deserters. Riffraff.” He must have felt he was not getting his point across, because he had a think, then added, “Ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?” Pepper wanted to ask whether “ghosts” included the Blessed Dead. He did not especially mind ghosts, but the Blessed Dead plucked on his nerves like harp strings.

  “Freaks of nature.” The driver was warming to his subject. “Goblins. All sorts. Jyoo-veniles gone to bad. There’s one out there now, so the nyooz-papers say. On the run.” And peering around him exaggeratedly, he brought his eyes back to rest on Pepper and to look him up and down.

  “Oh, me? I’m not—Me,
I’ve got work,” said Pepper hastily. “Quite near here. In fact, if you just let me off here…Job on a farm. Harvesting the wheat. All that.”

  Again the driver looked around him at a landscape where rice and salt were the only crops. “Best get them hands looked at, then,” he said, reining in his horse.

  Pepper stood in the roadway, waiting for the cart to roll out of sight. In whichever direction he looked, he could see no sign of a building, let alone a farm. Mentally he added the latest lie to his list of sins. He felt like a mountaineer adding rocks one by one to his backpack. When the cart was gone, he would go on walking: Sooner or later he must surely come to a farm. Or else, according to the signposts, he would reach Saint-Bonnard-de-la-Mer and find something, someone.

  Pepper eyed the sky nervously. He felt vulnerable out there in the open, as conspicuous on the vast landscape of white salt flats and bleached grass as a beetle on a white damask tablecloth. He told himself that Pepper Roux was dead, might as well be dead, was as good as dead. Happily, there was not a rook in sight….

  But there were angels.

  Just as anxiety and hunger took hold, Pepper was confronted by a hundred angels paddling in a lake. There was no mistaking them, lifting their flame-colored robes high to reveal spindle-thin legs. They were so beautiful, so otherworldly—sunsets made flesh, wading through their own peach-pink reflections. The cuts in his hands were infected, and he was alone and lost and afraid. What was the point in running? He did not even want to run from this cloud of evanescent color. He wanted to be swallowed up by it.

  Unstrung by weariness, he resolved to surrender, then and there. The angel host was the color of gentleness, not wrath. So he walked toward them, while the flies blipped him in the face and the mosquitoes gorged on his palms.

  What had seemed close proved to be half a mile away, but he finally picked his way to the lakeshore, over scabs of salt and knots of razor grass: “Here I am!” he called. “Look! It’s me!” And he put his arms straight up in the air.

  Hundreds of blush-colored shapes rose into the sky en masse.

  “Here I am, look!” he called again, but they flew on: They were in flying formation, and Pepper could see that if they tried to turn back in midair, they might collide and tumble out of the sky. Once again, he had come too late and missed his moment.

  SEVEN

  BLOODSTOCK

  When Pepper tried to retrace his steps to the road, he could not find it. So, lost, famished, and starting to panic, he was very glad indeed to come across the thoroughbred-horse breeder.

  “I like horses,” he said, when the thoroughbred horse breeder came out to ask what Pepper was doing on his land. “What are their names?”

  “Names? They’re horses. What do they want with names?” said the horse breeder.

  The horses in question were brown and black but with peculiarly light manes and almost white tips on their noses. Perhaps it was a distinguishing feature of a thoroughbred horse: a pale, shaggy mane and a cream nose. The air hummed with flies.

  “If you whistle, do they come to you?” asked Pepper.

  “No teeth,” said the man, and opened his mouth to prove it. Pepper whistled. The creatures swiveled their ears at the sound, but they did not trot over.

  “Do you ride them?” asked Pepper.

  “Nah,” said the man. “Hernia in the unmentionables.”

  “Can I ride one?”

  “You just try it, lag,” said the man, with a snort.

  There were three horses on the estate at home, but Pepper’s mother had forbidden him to ride them, for fear he might fall off and break his neck. Besides, just at the moment, he could not quite see how to negotiate a path through the barbed wire.

  “You good with horses, then?” asked the man flatly.

  “I like them,” said Pepper, hoping it sounded like the same thing. “Do you need a hand?”

  For a while it seemed as if the thoroughbred breeder must have lost his ears at the same time as his teeth, because he looked Pepper up and down, turned away, and headed back indoors. “I know who you are, you know,” he called, without bothering to turn back. “Read about you in the paper.”

  Three mosquitoes died as Pepper clenched his fists in panic.

  “If you stay, you work, right? But I don’t pay wages to scummy lags like you, right?” said the thoroughbred horse breeder.

  “I wish I was a horse,” said Pepper, standing once more at the paddock fence a week later.

  A dozen brown beasts looked back at him, blinking away flies. Can’t recommend it, said the tall one with fluffy feet.

  Pepper really had found himself outdoor work, and he was delighted with it. Well, he could have done without the five-o’clock start and dragging around bales of hay that weighed as much as he did. But the customers here were so easily satisfied: They threw up their heads and whinnied as soon as they saw him.

  There were horses in all four paddocks to north, south, east, and west of the thoroughbred breeder’s farmhouse. Well, it was not a farmhouse exactly, but a shed built from old billboards. And they were not exactly paddocks but small patches of bald ground surrounded by rolls of barbed wire. Still, the man in the shed said that he traded in “high-class bloodstock—for the cavalry and dressage and the like.” So Pepper reckoned he had stumbled into the glamorous world of jodhpurs and rosettes.

  He had no idea what Monsieur Jacques had read in the newspaper—his death notice? One of Pepper Papier’s articles? Or something about the sinking of L’Ombrage? The mystery was: How had he recognized Pepper just by looking at him—without even hearing his name? In actual fact, Monsieur Jacques never asked or used Pepper’s name, but got by calling him “scum,” “halfwit,” “bane,” “cockroach,” and “lag.” To a boy from a respectable home, it sounded nasty, but Pepper had gotten used to strange expressions aboard ship and tried not to mind. The horse dealer rarely spoke, but when he did, he stood still to do it, and the words fell out of him—splat!—so flat that Pepper could have picked them up with shovel and bucket. Monsieur Jacques was very like a horse in that respect.

  Sometimes, wild horses would come roistering through the spiny, wind-crazed scrub and stand in the distance, looking at the horses corralled behind the barbed wire. They were curd white and shaggy, so their outlines blurred against the skyline, shapeless as spray. Pepper, who did not believe in ghosts, thought the cart driver must have seen these and made an understandable mistake. He whistled to them, but they never came.

  “They want to meet you,” Pepper told the tall horse, “but they’re too shy to come closer.”

  I’ll master my disappointment, said the horse, and lashed itself with its tail.

  Pepper felt a special bond with a tall, dun cob with fluffy feet. At some time it had stumbled and fallen onto its front knees, and cankers had formed over the scarring so that the beast appeared to wear the badge of a good Catholic: devout kneecaps.

  “When did you last go to confession?” asked Pepper.

  I rarely get the opportunity to sin these days.

  “Not even unclean thoughts?” asked Pepper, who had often fobbed off Father Ignatius with “unclean thoughts” when he had nothing else to confess to.

  Hay, observed the cob. I think about hay, generally. Eternity sometimes. Do you taste soap, or is it just me?

  The wild horses, curiosity satisfied, suddenly broke into a gallop and disappeared over the horizon; they never did anything unless it was sudden. The thoroughbred bloodstock in the four paddocks all turned to face the way they had gone, and dipped their heads.

  Just once, Pepper had asked the stockbreeder if he should “let the horses out for a run.” The stockbreeder had said he would shoot Pepper’s head off if he did, and had shown him the shotgun to prove it, so Pepper did not ask again.

  There is nowhere high in the sea-fringed Camargue region of Provence: nothing much for a boy to climb. So Pepper kept a watch on the horizon and the mare’s-tail clouds that streamed out on the hot, incessant wind.
And he comforted himself that, by now, Aunty Mireille would be saying lots of Masses for the repose of his soul. (What did God do with those, he wondered: all those masses of Masses people recited in church? Were they like fresh straw for Him to walk on, or did they just make Heaven smell nice?)

  “Do horses go to Heaven?” he asked the tall horse with fluffy feet.

  Naturally, said the horse. Who do you think pulls the fiery chariots?

  The countryside around them spread out in shadeless folds: bleached patches of land stitched together with tall reeds. The air buzzed with flies and blood-sucking mosquitoes. Pepper was glad that his seagoing jacket was also bleaching in the strong light and getting stained—he must have become much harder to spot from up above.

  He did not mind at all not getting paid: He had never been paid—not even pocket money—and you can’t miss what you’ve never had. Anyway, he loved the work. Chiefly he loved being alive.

  The horse breeder’s shelter was constructed like the beginnings of a house of cards—as if Jacques had intended to build up and up, a Tower of Babel made out of words:

  COGNAC MONNET—Sunshine in a Glass!

  L’OIE d’OR—Queen of Creamy Foie Gras