The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  But he saved the obituaries till last.

  Then he would look for the names of his friends aboard L’Ombrage, before finally looking for his own name—(Roux, not Salami)—hoping and dreading he would find it. If the death of Captain Roux was announced, would his mother read it and think she was a widow? Or would his father read it, leap to his feet, and shout, “It’s a damned lie!” Aunt Mireille was probably even now scanning the Births, Deaths, & Marriages section, still hoping for proof that le pauvre had kept his appointment with the saints.

  And do the saints read the newspaper too, Pepper wondered? Do the angels sit around, like taxi drivers between fares, browsing through news of wars and epidemics, checking the obituaries for some poor soul they have accidentally missed? Could they be fooled? Was it worth a try? Pepper toyed with the idea of posting a notice of his death in the newspapers.

  He ought to place an announcement about Roche, at least, he thought, taking the unmailed letter from his jacket pocket:

  Dear Madame Roche,

  I am very sorry in deed to tell you…I did not no him very well, but I expect you did. I am sure he is happy with the saints.

  Pepper corrected his spelling mistakes. Reading the newspaper had brought one great benefit: His spelling was getting better.

  Lying back on the big bed at night, Pepper was confronted by a maze of brass tubes crisscrossing the ceiling. There were no cash registers in the Marseillais Department Store. Whenever a customer paid, the money was placed in a brass canister, the canister inserted into a tube, and the canister, at the tug of a handle, shot by compressed air along this maze of overhead tubing. It traveled far, far away, to a tiny cage where a cashier took out the money, replaced it with a receipt and any change, and sent it whizzing back through the labyrinth of pipes.

  For reasons of hygiene, there was no cash tube in the delicatessen—customers paid at nearby Dry Goods. So after the store shut, Pepper made up for lost time, running from department to department, firing canisters from everywhere to everywhere else, like an artillery barrage. It was the best fun in the world! He imagined how it would feel to be the size of a mouse and climb inside one of those canisters and be rocketed along at heart-stopping speed—around bends and corners, over the heads of customers and shop assistants, unseen, undetected but for a rattle and a musical sigh like a swanny whistle.

  Downstairs, the night watchman heard the noise and pushed back his chair, reaching for his keys and his nightstick—then hesitated. What intruder, what burglar, would be using the overhead conveyor system? Why would he? There was only one explanation: ghosts. One-time shop assistants, long-dead cashiers must be the cause of those eerie whizzes and thumps. And a nightstick is useless against the restless dead. The night watchman crossed himself and sat down again.

  As Pepper ran from room to room, he pondered: What if pipes like this could be built on an intercontinental scale, to carry money not just from Lingerie to Accounts, but from Paris to Ceylon, where poor people needed it more! Or wages from sailors to their distant wives and children! Or love letters from sweethearts separated by Fate! Letters home from runaway children apologizing for not yet being…

  Confessions! Yes, yes! If holy confession could be made this way, then Pepper would have been able to write out his three times a week and set it flying to his parish priest! Father Ignatius would unscrew the canister, read the confession inside—

  Father, forgive me for

  missing communion

  not honoring my parents

  stealing a ship and twelve rounds of sausage

  being fourteen

  —then send forgiveness back wrapped in a sheet of penances:

  Say three Hail Marys and a novena and don’t swim for half an hour after eating sausage.

  Lying back on the big bed, floating between awake and asleep, Pepper continued to muse over the amazing maze of pipes…. What about prayers! With enough tubing, you might even reach all the way to Heaven! Oh!

  This last idea wedged in his head, in the way all superstition does, and he had to get up and do it, then and there. That night and obsessively each night after, he unscrewed a cash canister in Leather Goods or Horology or Books and slipped a prayer inside it. Then he would tug the brass handle. The cash tube gave a sigh and a rattle, and Pepper’s prayer shot off across the ceiling of the Marseillais Department Store like a shooting star through space:

  Bless Mother and Aunty, and teach Father to drink tea.

  Please don’t make me go yet: I like it here.

  Amen.

  He never received an answer, and he was very afraid it might jog the saints’ memory and put them on his scent again, like bloodhounds. But he could not help himself. Praying each night was one of the rules Aunt Mireille had thrashed into him, and Pepper was a stickler for obeying rules.

  Whatever God, in His cashier’s cage, thought of Pepper, the customers of the Marseillais Department Store loved him. He sliced sausage and carved ham with more panache than Cyrano de Bergerac, his long knife flashing like a duellist’s rapier. He diced with Death at the slicing machine, paring sausages all the way down to their knotted ends with never a care for his fingertips. He ran the deadly cheese wire through cheeses like God separating night from day. He remembered the preferences of all his regulars and pitted all the olives himself, for fear the elderly might choke or break their teeth on the stones. Within a fortnight, he was a celebrity. Well, that is to say, a few regular customers came to know his face, and smile when he served them.

  Old Madame Froissart, for instance. Madame Froissart had arthritis in her hands and could no longer crack nuts. So when Suzanne arrived at work each morning—however early she arrived—she found Pepper, sleeves rolled up, shelling walnuts especially for Madame Froissart.

  “Where did you work before this?” Suzanne asked, idly fingering his discarded jacket. “On the ships?”

  “Not me,” said Pepper Salami.

  Suzanne was impressed by Pepper’s hard work, but not by his physique and crumpled clothes. Suzanne was in love with a boy called Bertrand in Leather Goods. But she had lost two fingers to the meat slicer, and now she would never win Bertrand’s heart. This was the conclusion Suzanne had come to, sitting in the hospital, and even when the bandages came off, she could no more pick up her old hopes and dreams than she could pick up a coin from the floor. Bertrand was lost to her, just like her queenly realm: the Delicatessen department.

  Pepper also knew about Bertrand in Leather Goods. It was impossible to spend one day with Suzanne without knowing about Bertrand in Leather Goods. Suzanne talked about the shape of his eyebrows, the breadth of his shoulders, the cut of his jacket, his liking for licorice and bicycles, his genius regarding all things leather….

  Pepper remembered the romantic novels in his father’s study at home. It had always puzzled him why the people in the books loved their sweethearts “hopelessly,” “secretly,” “from afar” and had to eat their hearts out for three hundred pages before the happy ending put them out of their misery. Why didn’t they just say straight out to each other, in chapter 1, I love you? Why did Suzanne not just walk over to Bertrand and say, I really admire your eyebrows and how much you know about leather—let’s get married? Pepper could see for himself that she was kind of pretty and pretty kind. If it had not been for the calluses on his knees (and being overdue in the death department), who knows?—he might have fallen in love with her himself. But people ought not waste time. If there was one thing Aunt Mireille’s dream had taught him, it was not to waste precious time.

  So one evening, he borrowed the keys from the top-floor offices, let himself into a cashier’s booth, slipped a note into a canister—Suzanne loves you, Bertrand—and sent it, like Cupid’s arrow, across the ceiling and down to Leather Goods on the floor below. Then he went back to bed and lay there imagining the happy effect next day.

  Except that suddenly, the idea had sprung a leak. And the more he thought about it, the more leaks it sprang. What if Bertran
d already had a girlfriend? What if he did not like brunettes? What if he was planning to be a priest? What if he showed the note to his fellow leather experts and they laughed about it together? What if word got out and the whole store began to point and smirk and jeer…? Hot with panic, Pepper hurried back to the cashier’s booth and wrote, on the backs of a dozen Marseillais Department Store receipt slips: Philippe loves Marguerite. Jean adores Annette. Pomme wants to marry Guillaume. As pants the hart after water, so pants Henri after Fleur. (That one sounded a bit strong, but it came from the Bible, so it must be all right.) Hercule sends a kiss to Nanette. Claude loves Gisele. He tried to think of every staff member he knew by name, tried to leave nobody out, for fear they should feel unloved. In every tube a message. In every department a mysterious note declaring love, devotion, or heartache. It would have been nice to include himself—Somebody-or-other loves Pepper Salami—but that was carrying fiction too far, what with his knees. Anyway, there was no cash tube in the Delicatessen department. Only when he had tugged the last handle and all the pipes had fallen silent overhead did his own heart quiet enough for him to return to bed.

  Downstairs, meanwhile, the night watchman scribbled a note of his own, resigning his job at the Marseillais Department Store effective immediately, On account of the unholy creatures rampaging around up top.

  Next morning, Pepper overslept. He woke to the sound of voices on either side of the bed. A woman’s hand took hold of the sheepskin and lifted it clear of Pepper’s head. He opened his eyes and found the husband’s face on a level with his own, peering at him.

  “I’m an advertisement,” said Pepper in a bleating whisper. “A Dormieux bed is better than counting sheep…. Except that I fell asleep. Just shows. Very good bed. Can’t keep awake. Would you like to try it?” And clasping the sheepskin rug around his shoulders and face, he gathered up his shoes, jacket, and tie and trotted away to the back stairs. The departmental assistant—already at his counter—should have seen him and ranted. But he was too busy reading a note he had just found inside the cash canister.

  As the hours passed, the cavernous department store filled up with an atmosphere as volatile as gasoline fumes. The least spark, and it seemed the whole place would explode. A young man fainted in Arts and Crafts. A matron in Linens needed smelling salts. Fleur from Floristry gathered up her skirts, climbed to the fourth floor, and slapped Henri in Shoes & Boots, declaring, “I’m a married woman, you panting beast!” Unfortunately, by the time she returned to her counter, all the day’s fresh red roses, newly delivered from the market, had disappeared, pilfered by a raiding party of counter assistants and a cashier or two. The Perfume department enjoyed a sudden run on eau de cologne and pomade, but sales were down in other departments, chiefly because there was no one there to serve customers. Assistants had abandoned their posts. The Marseillais Department Store prided itself on employing only the most proper, genteel, and respectable staff, but in unscrewing their little brass canisters, it was as if they had loosed laughing gas: By lunchtime hysteria had gained the upper hand.

  The phonograph in Music and Musical Instruments usually played the Moonlight Sonata endlessly to lure in passing customers. Today it played Felix Mayol singing “Amour de Trottin” in the pitch-dark basement bistro, and couples danced on the unlit dance floor to the crackle of dust on the wax cylinder and the static electricity in their hearts.

  Suzanne simply wept. All her worst fears had been proved right. Nobody could possibly love a woman maimed by a slicing machine. Nobody had sent her a note.

  “But we don’t have a cash tube in the deli!” Pepper tried to tell her. “If we had, you would have gotten a note, I’m sure!”

  But Suzanne only sat, her damaged hand cradled against her chest, and rocked to and fro, weeping for her lost opportunities.

  Then, suddenly, Bertrand arrived at the counter like a debt collector. He was wearing a flat, black leather cap that made him look fifty. In one hand he carried a pair of patent leather dance pumps he had “borrowed” from Shoes & Boots, in the other a stolen rose almost as crimson as his face. “There’s music in the downstairs,” he said belligerently.

  “There is?” asked Suzanne, rising as though on the updraft of it.

  “Yes.”

  “Lovely.”

  “So…”

  “Lovely!”

  And away they went, oblivious to Pepper, or the possibility of customers or even complete sentences.

  In Butchery there was no cash tube either, but rumor had been carried there all the same, by compressed air. Rumor said that the butcher’s wife Fleur had received romantic advances from Henri in Shoes. Christophe the butcher went in search of Henri with a meat saw.

  So there was no one in Butchery to take delivery of the game birds that arrived weekly from a local estate. Pepper ran over to do it, and the gamekeeper’s boy emptied the sacks at his feet—an avalanche of shot pheasants, limp and ruffled, eyes staring, claws dangling. At the sight of them tumbling out onto the floor, Pepper felt pure horror. As ill omens go, what could be iller than twenty brace of glassy-eyed pheasants piling up around your ankles?

  Management, scenting the fumes of passion, came sniffing across the shop floor. “Where is Christophe, the butcher?”

  “Haunching a deer,” said Pepper, quick as a wink.

  “Where is…er…the girl? With the hand.”

  “Suzanne? Helping an old lady to carry things to the tram, sir,” said Pepper, feeling the lies condense into sweat on his forehead, and a taste in his mouth like soap. If his Final Hour really had come, and angels were even now parking their fiery chariots on the roof of the Marseillais Department Store, they ought not to find him busy telling lies. The spongy flesh and clicking claws of the dead pheasants pressed against his legs and feet.

  “What’s that music I can hear?” said Management.

  “A customer wanted a demonstration of the phonograph, sir. There’s one too many pheasants, sir; would you like it?” And wrapping up a bird in pristine white paper, Pepper gave it to Mr. Management to be rid of him. Pepper was left with feathers clinging to his cuffs—left, too, with the memory of the purple tongue poking through a little crossed beak, the warning in those pheasant eyes: Run! Get away! You’ll end up like us! You think you’re all the colors of happiness—doing no harm to anyone—then suddenly one day…

  Bang! Something struck Pepper on the back. Pellets of fear and guilt lodged throughout his body.

  “You took my girl’s job,” snarled Bertrand from Leather Goods, thumping Pepper again with his black leather cap. “Suzie says you took her job while she was at the hospital. That right?”

  “I suppose….”

  “So now you’re going to give it up, ain’t you!”

  Suzanne loitered in the background, holding a nose-gay of violets, biting her lip but smiling despite herself. She had not asked Bertrand to take up her cause—had only mentioned it in passing. But she could not help delighting in Bertrand—so manly, so fierce!—ousting her usurper like some knight-errant in patent leather shoes.

  Henri from Shoes & Boots sped by, protesting his innocence, pursued by Christophe and his meat saw.

  “You going or what?” asked Bertrand, and slapped Pepper with his cap again.

  “Yes, but first I have to explain to Christophe!”

  “I’ll do that!” cheeped Suzanne, feet still dancing to the music inside her head. She ran and fetched Pepper’s jacket from the apron hook. It seemed the best way to save his life, and she had nothing personal against Pepper himself. “Explain what?”

  “About his wife and Henri. It isn’t true! It was me! I didn’t know she was married!”

  The butcher, just then doubling back to cut Henri off at Confectionery, heard Pepper and blundered to a halt, misunderstanding—“You wrote love letters to my wife?”—then simply hurled the saw at Pepper where he stood mired in a swamp of dead pheasants.

  Feathers, tendons, and claws; feathers, beaks, and eyes: They filled Pepper�
��s vision as he dived out of the path of the saw, sliding on his face across the checkered floor. Christophe picked him up by the shoulders of his jacket, dragged him to the great silver meat slicer—“You been cozying up to my Fleur?”—and set its circular guillotine blade spinning. Pepper’s flailing hands groped for the carving knife but found only the bowl of olive stones he had gouged out of the olives that morning, tipping them over, scattering the floor of the delicatessen with pits and broken china. Christophe lost his footing.

  “Excuse me!” called Madame Froissart’s frail, piping voice from beyond the counter. “I say, excuse me! I’ve come for my nuts.”

  And Pepper fled, scrabbling for purchase with the toes of his boots, skidding on the fruits of his own kindness, fleeing through the revolving doors, out onto the sunny street. A tram was passing, and he pitched himself at it and clung to its coachwork, face pressed to the painted metal as to the scalding funnel of L’Ombrage.

  The tram carried him past a war memorial to the Crimean dead, topped by a bronze angel, wings outspread. Pepper looked up at the angel now with rage and resentment. Every day for a month, he had worked with sharp blades, wires, and guillotines—expressly allowing the saints a fair chance to spill his blood. Was it quite necessary, then, for the angels to employ Bertrand from Leather Goods and a jealous butcher as assassins? Christophe, perhaps—but Bertrand? In his stupid leather cap? If the saints wanted to humiliate Pepper as well as assassinate him, they would have to try harder and run faster next time.

  Outside the town hall, the tram turned left, and Pepper was jolted free of his handholds, tumbling into the street. He half expected the fire brigade to be there to hose him down. But there was no demonstration today, no sign of civil discontent—only a single rain-smeared placard propped up against a horse trough. It said: