The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “They’re after me, blessed Constance! Everyone! What do I do? What do you want me to do?”

  Saint Constance said nothing.

  The Constance Tower is the last remaining stump of an ancient fortress. On top is a little turret that was once a lighthouse where a fire could be lit to warn off misguided ships. Unlit now, it had been no more to Pepper than a finger of dark pointing up at the stars. And at its domed tip, unreachable, the only sign of Saint Constance was the sound of cloth flapping in the wind. Here was no plaster statue, stony deaf. Here was the flap of a woman’s dress, the same sound Aunt Mireille had made descending the stairs at Bois-sous-Clochet. Pepper had seen the silhouette so often from a distance, convinced himself that it was Constance herself…. Now he wanted some means of coming face-to-face with her.

  He circled the lighthouse, but there were no rungs up to the dome. His legs were still shaking from the climb. “Excuse me. Excuse me! But why is it so important? I don’t mind…I don’t mind…but…but yes I do mind, because…yes I bloody well do mind! I don’t know why you told me when I didn’t want to know! Other people don’t know! I wouldn’t have minded then, I wouldn’t! If it was a surprise. If it came out of the blue. I can’t help running! I try not to run, but I can’t help it! It just happens! It’s like sneezing—you can’t help sneezing, can you? I can’t help running.

  People shoot at you and you run, don’t you? You would, really you would!”

  Saint Constance said nothing.

  Pepper sat down in the dark and hugged his knees to his chest. He knew his manners had slipped. He knew he was not being genteel, but how you do be genteel to a saint? You can hardly ask them if they’re well.

  Saint Constance said nothing.

  “What did you die of?” he asked. “Were you martyred?” But the question only made him sound resentful and glum. Most of the martyrs got done to death in really horrible ways, but they generally had a choice about it. Nobody had ever asked Pepper if he minded being done to death. “You shouldn’t have warned us. If you just hadn’t warned us, I wouldn’t have stepped out of the way, and you could’ve got me on my birthday!”

  Crack, crack went the flapping fabric overhead, but the only other noise was the grumbling roar of some ship in the harbor being laden with salt. The town lights blinked out one by one and left only the lights of the Hôtel du Gare and city hall rising like the rungs of stumpy ladders, too short to reach the sky: Had they been within reach, he would have climbed them anyway, without a backward glance. How easy! Simply to fulfill his fate. Whatever waited for him after death, it couldn’t be as complicated and tiring as this somersaulting from life to life, from bad to worse.

  But Saint Constance said nothing at all.

  The moon was late rising. The roof was pitch-black. He tripped on a baton of wood left over from the construction of the scaffolding and grazed the heels of his hands. Something wet trickled over his hands—it felt like blood, but his groping hands found a big can of creosote knocked over onto its side. It was while he was picking himself up that he heard the scaffolding scratching at the walls of the tower, creaking under the weight of another climber.

  He could picture Big Sal’s gangsters clambering up after him, the legionnaires with their rifles across their backs—“Head or heart, men. Aim for head or heart!” To these, his sleep-starved brain added Christophe the butcher, cleaver in hand, Gaspar the grocer, Jacques and Jeanne in their motorcycling jackets, the woman with the baby carriage, the landlord, the police, the navy and, of course…

  “Father?” Pepper tried to think he had imagined it: the grunt of exertion, the scrape of timber against stone. The high places were his sanctuary: Nobody had ever followed him up high before. “Who’s there?” No answer but the soft sob of exertion, of someone climbing slowly but inexorably up the scaffolding. Pepper was cornered on the roof, and with so many enemies that he had no idea just whose hand would, at any second, reach out of the dark, whose face was about to appear over the rim of ancient, crumbling stone.

  Where were the angels when you needed them? Where were the chariots swinging down from the sky? Where were the trench coated saints with their switchblade knives of light, ready painlessly to puncture his rib cage and let out the clamoring panic? His heart beat so hard that his whole chest quaked. His collarbones could hardly bear the strain.

  “Go away! Go away! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Go away!” he said, though his mouth was too dry for the words to make a sound. Around and around the little lighthouse tower he ran—a building no bigger than the funnel of a ship and just as smooth. No hiding place. He felt around him until he found the chunk of wood he had fallen over. He could maybe use it for a weapon to defend himself—swing it at whatever face emerged above the parapet—so long as it was not a flamingo or a horse. All the nightmares he had dreamed swirled like smoke around the Constance Tower, making the darkness even darker, making him cough and gag.

  A hand groped its way into sight. White crab of a hand.

  “Go away!” Pepper shouted, and swung the log of wood—missed the hand, but hit one of the wooden uprights of the scaffolding. A loud roar of fear was shaken from someone a few feet below—a man, plainly a big man with a rich repertoire of swearwords. Pepper struck again. Nails securing the timber slats to one another were jarred loose and tinkled downward to the street—ting, ting, ting. Like some big old wisteria wrenched away from a house wall, the scaffolding loosened its grip on the tower and keeled outward.

  “Stop, lad! Stop!”

  One more blow and Pepper might send it—some of it—crashing to the ground. All he wanted was time alone with Saint Constance! All he wanted was for people to leave him alone, to look away, to lose interest in him, to let him lapse like a forgotten idea. “Go away! Go away! Go away, please!”

  The moon had cut its way out of the sea like a giant meat slicer and turned the mounds of mined sea salt to silver.

  “I am not a great one for heights,” said a voice out of the darkness. “The sea’s more my level. I know I brought it on myself, dear heart. But I’d be awfully glad of a word.”

  THIRTEEN

  SALT AND PEPPER

  “Duchesse!” Pepper fell on his face and peered over the coping. “Are you a ghost?” The scaffolding was sagging away from the stonework, a crevasse of darkness separating captain from captain’s steward. “Come up! Come up here!”

  “God’s garters, boy, if I move a muscle, this whole wicker basket will fall apart. While I accustom myself to the thought, could you tell me: Why the high places? Why are we here?” The scaffolding swayed slightly, like a tree loosened at its roots. Clinging to it, holding unnaturally still, clamped to a timber upright, Duchesse was frozen with terror. He was a man waiting to fall, defying gravity by sheer force of will. “Speak, Captain. I’m intrigued.” His hair appeared to turn white in the instant, but it was just the moon breaking free of the sea, rising into the sky, its beams overtopping the tower.

  “To see her! To see the blessed Constance!” Without looking away from Duchesse—Pepper too was willing the scaffolding to hold together—he gestured toward the lighthouse roof. He expected Duchesse’s face to register awe, rapture, for surely he could see Constance up there in her blowing gown? Duchesse’s face was a blank. So turning, Pepper looked up at the figure on top of the lighthouse dome, haloed now by the risen moon.

  A flagpole tangled in a threadbare flag.

  The mast top was round, like a head, but only a fool could have mistaken it for a woman, let alone a saint.

  “Are you working for them, Duchesse?”

  “Me? I’m freelance. Who would employ me, dear heart? I have messed up to some considerable degree. Working who for?” He tried to adjust his grip, and the timber sagged and shivered. The scar beside his eye contracted like the shutter of a lens. “Hades, lad, I don’t think—”

  But Pepper had withdrawn to the far edge of the turret roof. From there he ran full tilt at the lighthouse and jumped high enough to grasp the mulli
ons of its windows. There was no glass, and the stone was thick, a handhold thick. The toes of his socks scrabbled for purchase on the curved wall. Luckily, generations of names, carved by vandals into the stone, had roughened its surface like a cheese grater. Scrambling up to the rim of the dome, he transferred all his weight to the dismal, ragged flag. Had he managed it an hour before, he would have been clinging to the skirts of Saint Constance. Now it was just a flag…and he wanted it all the more.

  Instead of the cloth ripping free as he had expected, the whole flagpole lurched over sideways and left him hanging from the flag, legs flailing. Then the metal rod uprooted itself from its rotten clay footing and dumped him back down on the roof. A flagpole and six feet of crisp rag landed on top of him. He ran with them to the parapet.

  “Grab hold!”

  Duchesse shook his head. “You couldn’t take my weight, son.” His teeth were clenched so tight that the words could barely get out.

  “No! Just tie the flag to the scaffolding!”

  Being a sailor, Duchesse found tying the knots a comfort rather than a challenge. Concentrating so intently on the task blinkered him to the swaying view, the gaping drop. He tied the filthy rag of flag to the wood of the scaffolding. Pepper, holding the flagpole, began to pull. The nails holding the timber squirmed in their holes. But the trellis swung back toward the wall, swung in, leaned closer, twisted…and began to buckle and to break up.

  The upper scaffolding smashed up against the wall of the tower. Their foreheads clashed; then Pepper’s hands were gripping the steward’s jacket, while Duchesse grabbed anything stone, anything solid and immovable, slithering over the parapet, grazing all the buttons off his jacket.

  Behind him, sagging joints burst apart; timbers and planks went tumbling, end over end, down onto the sturdier carpentry below, spilling matchwood slivers onto the cobblestones of the street, along with a hailstorm of bent nails.

  “You could have waited till morning, dear heart, and come up the stairs,” said Duchesse. “I think they unlock this place in the morning.”

  They sat back-to-back in the moonlight, and Achille Duchesse recounted the journey he had made, in parallel to Pepper’s, that had brought him too to the roof of the Constance Tower. He did not make it sound like much, as if the detour had not taken him so very far out of his way. He was an old salt, recounting a farfetched story to pass the time.

  “Your father used to talk about you. Somewhere toward the end of the second bottle, he’d start complaining about the wrongs Fate had done him: harridan sister-in-law, a son not much rejoiced in for some reason. ‘Pepper.’ I was faintly inclined to feel sorry for said son—but mostly on account of the name. Pepper. What kind of a name is that for a lad?

  “When you first came aboard L’Ombrage, I thought, Roux’s sending the son and heir now to do his dirty work. Apprenticing him to the coffin trade, I thought. Or maybe this was a takeover bid: enterprising son snatching the reins from his father. By the time I got things straight, you’d waded up to your neck in it. My fault. My mistake.

  “Then you started talking about going down with the ship. Well. That was a…deciding moment, you might say.”

  Duchesse, unable to abandon both ship and conscience, had let the rest of the crew go without him and turned back to save Pepper from the suicidally noble gesture of going down with the ship. At the very moment the miniature Captain Roux keeled over from the effects of rum, L’Ombrage keeled over from the effects of scuppering. Grabbing up both boy and ship’s log, Duchesse scaled the steeply angled deck toward the second lifeboat, only to find it jammed in its davits. If it had not been for Roche’s stolen rowboat stowed on the afterdeck, the water would have closed over his story then and there.

  He was struggling to unlash the boat when one of the fire buckets Roche had lifted down made a rush at them. In his effort to shield Pepper, Duchesse suffered a cracked shinbone. The Malay cargo ship arrived at the prearranged rendezvous and picked up the men aboard both boats. Its Malay captain (a disappointed doctor) confined Duchesse to bed with an elaborate system of pulleys to keep his leg in traction. L’Ombrage’s crew was quickly transferred to another vessel, but bedridden Duchesse and the unconscious little Captain Roux stayed aboard as far as Marseille.

  “Couldn’t persuade them to take the contraption off me, could I? More chance of persuading those damned parakeets to peck through the ropes. Result being: You left the ship ahead of me. All well and good, you might say,” Duchesse continued in his casual, matter-of-fact drawl. “I hadn’t exactly done you any favors—letting you get mixed up in the scuppering business. But I got to thinking: Where’s he going to go? How will he manage?”

  A boy with a good heart in the heart of a bad city.

  “Soon as I was able, I went looking,” said Duchesse. “Faint hope. Marseille is a big place.”

  Duchesse found lodgings with a pleasant elderly widow suffering from arthritis, and he spent a deal of time picking up dropped stitches in her knitting, filling saucepans for her, and fetching in logs for the boiler. Her name was Froissart, and she had such a partiality for walnuts that he never saw her eat anything else. For someone with arthritic hands to crave walnuts sounded to Duchesse like one of God’s unkinder jokes. But Madame Froissart brought hers home ready shelled and insisted on sharing them with her lodger. “Little Pepper Salami at the Marseillais Department Store shells them for me himself,” she said one day. “Especially for me, every morning! Such a dear, kind boy.”

  Hearing this, Duchesse put two and two walnuts together and made for the Marseillais Department Store. It was not simply the name that was familiar, but the nature of the act. Voluntarily shelling a couple of pounds of walnuts before starting a day’s work—it bore all the hallmarks of Pepper.

  Hobbling uphill, on a half-mended leg, to the Marseillais Department Store, Duchesse found the place in unprecedented chaos. Every cheek was pink from running, fighting, or blushing. Every display had been overturned. The floor was treacherous with olive pits and walnut shells. The delicatessen counter was abandoned. In answer to Duchesse’s questions, the butcher at the meat counter suggested that if Pepper Salami ever showed his face in the shop again, he would have to carry his head home in a basket.

  “I scouted about the city for a while,” Duchesse recounted, idly checking his jacket for spare buttons to replace those just lost. “You had plainly moved on. It wasn’t till I read Roche’s obituary in the paper that I had something to go on. Then the article about the sinking. Strange thing, to read your own death in the newspaper. A trip is called for, Duchesse! I told myself. A trip to this paper’s offices…. And I saw you, dear heart! I actually laid eyes on you!”

  The streetlamps had just been lit in Abaron, and, along with them, new hope kindled in Duchesse of finding Pepper Roux. Thanks to Pepper’s article, he was out of a job, dared not go home—might even be wanted by the police. But on seeing that small figure sauntering along from the newspaper offices toward the wineshop, he felt only delight.

  “Roux!”

  The boy took off and ran. Hardly surprising! What a fool—to call out the surname! What a fool, when the boy had made such efforts to convince the world Captain Roux was dead! Within a few steps, Duchesse was forced to a hopping standstill, obliged to watch Pepper flee down the dark alleyway, clamber over a fence, and melt into the dark. He asked at the newspaper office. They never revealed their sources, they said, And no, they did not employ anyone by the name of Roux. He asked at the wineshop whether the boy was a regular.

  “Never saw him before,” said the vintner—which came as no surprise either. After all, no one knew better than Duchesse the little captain’s sobriety.

  A finger of cloud had begun to scratch at the risen moon. Duchesse scratched at the stubble on his jaw. The stone beneath them was growing cold. “I remembered those prayers of yours…,” he said tentatively. “And you knowing the funeral service by heart. That hinted to me of a…ah…regular churchgoing.” He trod warily: Sailing m
en could get very touchy at the suggestion that they were good Christians. “They weren’t your prayers, I realize: the color of paper, the use of pen and ink…. But you carried them around with you and—well, that gave me the idea.”

  It was not the first time Duchesse had had the task of tracking down a wayward sailor, but the first time he had gone looking for one in church. Whorehouses and pubs were generally more the mark. But priests were almost as good as whores, after all, at knowing when someone new was in the area. So Duchesse got himself a haircut, turned up the collar of his coat, and became a plainclothes policeman, traveling from church to church, asking clergy if they had seen a stranger in their parish. He had read in the papers about a man who had escaped from a chain gang locally and was on the run. He suggested something similar about the boy he was seeking—a delinquent, a runaway.

  At the candle rack in the Church of Saint Constance, he made such a miraculous find that his newly cut hair bristled.

  “Reckon those plaster saints were on my side!” said Duchesse, laughing at his own absurdity. And he took out of his pocket the lilac prayer he had found on the church floor, and the ten-franc note, and handed them back to their owner.

  Lord, now lettest thou thy servant Paul Roux depart in peace, according to thy word.

  Your devoted servant,

  Mireille Lepont (Miss)

  “You must’ve been there—right there! But of course I assumed you’d been and gone.”

  Duchesse had never thought of himself as a believing man—not until the fluke of finding that prayer, and what followed. He was hurrying, thinking maybe to catch up with Pepper on the road, when the priest, one Father André, came racing after him, apoplectic with fright. He told of his ordeal in the confessional: how the fugitive had cornered him there and poured out his iniquity—confessed to committing crime upon crime since his escape—murdering sailors, relations, and lemurs and rabbits…. It was all Father André could do to get his words out. It was all Duchesse could do not to laugh.