The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  He could barely credit how close he had come to finding Pepper. And yet it came to nothing—that glaring clue—that divine shove in the right direction! Though Duchesse wandered the Camargue’s wild places, the trail had gone cold again. The fluke, though, had lit in him the determination to find Pepper Roux, no matter how long it took.

  The guise of plainclothes policeman had worked, so Duchesse found other disguises likely to draw secrets and confidences out of strangers. In Saint-Bonnard-de-la-Mer, while dressed as a nun, he was informed of a miracle at the local abattoir—a boy who had disappeared from mortal sight—probably plucked up to Heaven—when he stood in the path of stampeding horses.

  “Redeemed the Lord’s dumb creatures from bondage, he did,” said one woman, tucking into a platter of rare beef. “Then got raised up to glory.” (Funny how people’s vocabulary took on a biblical quality when they thought they were talking to a nun.)

  “Then my looking got me in a spot of trouble,” said Duchesse, with an airy wave of one hand, though the scar by his eye puckered so tightly that it pulled the eyelid out of shape. He glossed over the next part of his story, wishing he could gloss over what had happened—paint it out of the picture and never have to look at it ever again.

  In the middle of a torrential downpour—broom-bristle rain sweeping people off the seaside promenade—Duchesse caught sight of a figure running for shelter. He ran after him, his nun’s habit flapping and slapping wetly around his bare legs. The two plunged into the same arcade of shuttered shops, under a leaking leaded-glass roof. The navy cloth he snatched hold of was bleached, frayed, stained, but to someone who had both sewn on and unpicked its naval braid, there was no mistaking Pepper’s uniform jacket.

  “It’s me, boy! Don’t run! It’s just me!”

  But when he turned around, the boy wearing the jacket was not Pepper.

  After three or four punches, Duchesse meant to stop, to ask what the thief had done to Pepper, where he had left him stripped of jacket and money. But he found somehow he could not stop. From pillar to post Duchesse had trailed Roux’s son, only to find that this thieving little hood had gotten to him first. “Did you kill him? Did you stab him? What? Did you?”

  And suddenly the thief was lying crumpled at his feet, having answered nothing at all. A flicker of lightning above the arcade roof, the sound of police whistles, and Duchesse was sent flapping, vampirelike, into the public toilets to hide.

  All this Duchesse reduced to a sentence or two, devoid of detail. “When the kerfuffle died down, I went back to my convent,” he said, forgetting for a moment to keep his voice buoyant and bright.

  “You joined a convent?” Pepper was hugely impressed. He had blended in with a lot of backgrounds lately, but he would never have dared attempt a nunnery.

  “No, no, chéri. But I’d ‘borrowed’ the habit from their clothesline, see, and I make it a rule always to return what’s borrowed. Jewels beyond price are the good Sisters of Troyes. Keep their doors open to strangers and their thoughts to themselves. Faultless on the hospitality front.” Duchesse suddenly swore under his breath, recollecting. “But it was the feast of Saint Troyes, wasn’t it? And the only sister who could drive a vehicle was in bed with gallstones. They needed a driver. Annual pilgrimage, see? Three-hundred-mile round trip. I had to drive them. It was a week before I could get back to Saint-Bonnard—to the hospital—make inquiries, you know?”

  All the while he was chauffeuring nuns through the French countryside, Duchesse’s mind revolved around only one thing: the theft, the thief, the jacket. Was Pepper lying somewhere, dead or dying in a ditch? Or had the thief simply filched the coat from a chair back or coat hook in a café? Or had Pepper swapped jackets with him willingly? Perhaps they were friends! Since Duchesse had set on him, had the youth described his attacker to the nurses and patients at the hospital? Were the police making inquiries even now at all the local convents? Duchesse could not rest until he found out.

  As soon as he had returned the good sisters to their convent, he went to the hospital, exchanged his habit for a doctor’s white coat, and attempted to pay the lad a visit.

  But Konstantin Kruppe lay dead on his bed, a sheet drawn up over his head, a lilac prayer on his chest with the added words Rest in peace.

  Up on the roof of the Constance Tower, Duchesse said nothing of his feelings on seeing that boy-size body. Death, he knew, was very like a hole knocked in the hull of a ship: Nothing would stop an ocean of catastrophe from welling through.

  The police were already at the hospital. Duchesse stood at the bedside of Konstantin Kruppe, helpless, appalled, aghast. A police officer tapped him on his white-coated shoulder and asked, “Can you tell us the cause of death?”

  “Yes,” breathed Duchesse. “I—”

  Then suddenly a nurse appeared from somewhere, sniffling, saying her bicycle had been stolen from the rack outside. Duchesse simply slipped away, the lilac prayer curled so tightly in his fist that when he threw it aside, the words Rest in peace were printed in reverse on his palm.

  There could be no remedy now—he knew that. He had meant well. All along, he had meant well. But, as the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

  He got out. Achille Duchesse got out. There was nothing in his mind but escape. Hitchhiking to nearby Aigues Mortes—a town far bigger than Saint-Bonnard—he went to ground. He was dimly aware that this was the home of Roche’s widow—recalled well enough the address from all those abandoned letters of condolence in the captain’s cabin. But he could not call on her—not her, of all people! For three months and more he had been trying to put Yvette Roche out of mind.

  Nor could he allow himself the luxury of some respectable boardinghouse where the landlady would share shelled walnuts with him. So he hid himself under the fringes of the underworld: He was, after all, a criminal now.

  A murderer.

  Twice over.

  Besides: This landlady could comfort a man in ways walnuts never could. All the sailors between Perpignan and Nice took their troubles to Mièle Rosette.

  “Thought you were dead, honey!” Mièle said when she opened the door. “Read a notice in the paper. Someone having a joke, were they?” Beyond that, she asked no questions. She was fond of Achille Duchesse and glad to see him alive. From Perpignan to Nice, everyone was fond of the Duchess.

  She offered to get him work as a bouncer at Big Sal’s nightclub, or as a debt collector. But Duchesse only drew his fists into his sleeve ends and shook his head. He knew his capacity for violence now, and he meant never to let it out of its cage again. In fact, he put himself under a kind of house arrest, sitting in the back bedroom of the boardinghouse, reading the newspaper or staring out at the garden, thinking of Konstantin Kruppe.

  And the other man he had killed.

  Cash was a problem. He had parted with all his spare money, given it to Pepper. Aboard the Malay cargo ship, while unpicking telltale braid from the boy’s jacket, he had pushed a roll of banknotes into the pocket—dirty money—money earned in the coffin trade, sinking ships: glad enough to be rid of it. Unfortunately, now he could barely afford another week’s rent for Mièle. He put the fact out of mind. Tried. Tried to put everything out of mind. His tally of crimes was so long now, so haunting, that it was like putting a dozen cats out at night, only to have them come mincing and meowing in again through the window.

  Opening the newspaper to look for an honest job, he saw the terse official notice of Konstantin Kruppe’s death and gave a gut-wrenching grunt of guilt.

  Glancing over his shoulder, Mièle said, “Well, look at that. The lies they tell in the papers! Little K.K. ain’t dead.”

  He tried to break it to her that she was wrong—word might not have reached her yet—that this was one item of news he could say for certain…

  But, “No, no,” she assured him. “Little K.K. was here yesterday, right as rain. Came with a telegram. Such a darling. You musta seen him—no, you were asleep, maybe. Yeah. The te
legram boy. Little K.K.”

  And suddenly the search was on again—like it or not—not a cool, collected gathering of intelligence but a rampaging hunt for telegram boys among the streets and canals of Aigues Mortes. It started at the telegraph office and ended with his kicking in the door of a loft apartment in the rue de la Poste.

  Nothing. Two boys and a dog. But no Pepper.

  Duchesse punished himself the best way he could. He called on Claude Roche’s widow. No longer would he struggle to put her out of mind.

  Or the fact that he had killed her husband.

  As Claude Roche had raced, swearing, murderous, and naked, along the deck of L’Ombrage, swinging a bucket hook at the back of Pepper’s head, Achille Duchesse had stepped from his cabin wearing a snowy broderie anglaise nightdress, and extended one foot. Roche had tripped, stumbled sideways, collided with a winch hawser, and pitched headfirst into the hold, impaling himself on scrap metal. It had happened so fast that he barely had time to cry out—though plainly there was time to call down a curse on the man who had tripped him. Duchesse could feel the curse in his hair, like guano.

  Up on the roof of the Constance Tower, Duchesse brushed at his stone-dusty hair as if preparing for a job interview. He spoke nothing of the deaths, though they hung at the center of his life’s story like a noose from a scaffold.

  “I chanced to look in on Madame Roche—was passing through, you know?” he said breezily. “What likelihood, eh, mon brave? That we would both pay her a visit? Life is full of coincidences. That was how I found you in the end.”

  Somewhere a bird was singing in the dark, sensing a need to break the silence. An owl, too, came to rest on a sill of the lighthouse—round pale face, boggling eyes. It voided a pellet of undigested mouse parts: its own little explanation of what it had been up to lately.

  “And you’ve been following me ever since,” said Pepper.

  Duchesse tugged at his hair with finger and thumb, as if debating whether or not he was in need of another haircut. “Here and there,” he said with a shrug. “Now and then. When I had a minute to spare. Keeping an eye. Keeping things shipshape.”

  “Helping,” insisted Pepper.

  Achille Duchesse sucked in a tuft of cold night air. His coarse hair scraped the back of Pepper’s neck as he looked up at the moon. “I hardly think so, dear. Making things ten times worse, certainly. Helping, no.”

  Big Sal’s debt collectors were strolling along the rue Méjeunet, discussing what they thought of women like Yvette Roche, who threw saucepans at them just because they were beating up her husband. Grigiot was saying how saucepan throwing was the sign of a passionate nature; Pogue said it was a waste of good food and that saucepans were for cooking in.

  Then they turned a corner, and a huge woman in a headscarf and tweed skirt hit them with a baby carriage. There was no child in it—only a pair of rope-soled sandals—but the experience was no less shocking. She went on laying into them with the carriage until two of its wheels fell off.

  Afterward, she leaned over them, lifting each head a short way off the pavement by the hair, and snarled, “You bother those two again, beloveds, and I’ll hit you with a train.” Then she helped herself to all the debt money they had collected that morning, retrieved her rope-soled sandals, and strode off, dragging the carriage behind her. Its splayed spokes made a scraping noise on the pavement that set their remaining teeth on edge.

  They pretended to Big Sal that Claude Roche had beaten up and robbed them; it would have reflected badly on their manhood to blame a woman in a headscarf and tweeds.

  “My trouble is I’m a rough man,” said Duchesse. “Afflicted by spleen. No finesse.”

  Pepper could not quite make out why, but this sounded ridiculous coming from a man who was weeping bitterly. The steward’s shoulder blades were pressed up against his, so he could not fail to feel them shaking.

  “You got me out of the Foreign Legion, though,” suggested Pepper, who had just worked this out.

  Duchesse shrugged. “What? Oh. Yes. One of those kepi caps can be very fetching if you have a good square jawline, but on the whole I think you might have found the Legion…stultifying, dear. All that sand. All those flies. All that dying.”

  “And you rescued me from Big Sal’s place.”

  Duchesse wiped his face with the cuffs of his pullover. “Ye-e-s. I feel bad about wrecking that hairdresser’s, but I had to do something to get you out of there. You went in blind, see—no clue what I’d done on your behalf, as it were, to those thugs of his. How sick was I when Yvette said you’d gone there! In all ignorance? Like a lamb to the slaughter? Couldn’t sit and do nothing, could I? I asked Mièle to win me some time, but you were going to get minced, chéri. Steak tartare! So I broke into that Cheval place and turned on the taps. Put the dampers on Big Sal and his lovable crew. Hmm. I feel bad about those hairdressers, though.”

  They sat for a long while in silence, contemplating the accidents and mistakes that had brought them both to the roof of the Constance Tower. The owl revolved its head and voided another pellet, as if it were trying to teach them by example: Spit it out, men.

  Why? (Pepper should have said.) Why did you bother about me at all?

  Then Duchesse could have said, Because you are the son I would like to have had but never will.

  Sadly, such things rarely get said.

  Instead, Duchesse remarked, “I fear my contribution has been one of two things, petite fraise. Either we are going to jail shortly or we are going to get killed. I seem to make an extremely poor guardian angel.”

  At which Pepper uttered a kind of snarling groan and said, “Bloody angels.”

  FOURTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  Pepper got to his feet. “Excuse me, but I have to get killed now,” he said, whereupon he stepped onto the parapet. “I think you could say this is checkmate.”

  After a campaign as disorganized as the French transport system, the angels and saints had finally managed to corner him. Fate was closing in from all sides, in the shape of the army, police, gangsters, and friends. “They don’t know you’re up here,” he told Duchesse. “Keep out of sight, and you can slip out after the door’s unlocked.”

  Duchesse sat down sharply and very hard: an anchor trying to stop a ship from drifting onto rocks. “Get down, sir. Suicide’s a sin. I don’t hold with…It’s not…” But as the grains of soft, salt-rotten stone crumbled from under Pepper’s socks, his words fell away into space, and he could not muster a sensible sentence. Only bafflement. “Why? Why do you always…? Why so Hell-bent on this death palaver…?”

  Pepper looked down. The fact that he could see the pavement at all meant that morning had crept up on them. A horse-drawn van was delivering bread to a café. He did not want to land on the horse—he liked horses. He shifted around the parapet, the crumbly stone making a high, gristly whistle under his feet. Two boys on bikes were parked below, a dog lying between them. He did not want to land on them—especially the dog. Since there was going to be a delay, he might as well explain.

  So Pepper explained to his steward about le pauvre; about Saint Constance and Aunt Mireille; about his fourteenth birthday and the bumbling incompetence of the angels. His voice was tired and irritable. The chase had worn out his socks: He could feel the stone of the wall through holes in their soles.

  Duchesse did not interrupt—well, not loudly, stridently—Don’t be stupid, boy! Don’t be absurd!—but now and then, here and there, he did make mild corrections in an undertone—quiet, pencil-light amendments such a the editor might have made at L’Étoile Sud. “No, that was me, Captain…. No, that was just Roche being his lovable self…. A note from the owners to your father…Illegal immigrants—that’s to say parakeets for the pet-shop trade…A taxicab is easily hired, mon brave…. Birds are a little miracle, I’ve always thought…. People see what they expect to see…. People see what they want.”

  The boy on the parapet did not appear to be listening. But as Pepper talked
and as he lived things through again, inside his head, the angels and saints who peopled the plot started to look somehow different. The drivers of fiery chariots switching on their taxi meters, the saints stepping out of the shadows, the angels hovering in alleyways and hospital corridors…for the first time he could see their faces in his mind’s eye. And they were all Achille Duchesse.

  Out of the blue, in the middle of describing the view from the roof of the Hôtel du Gare, Pepper screwed up his face so tight that it looked like the scar on Achille’s cheek. Shouting with rage, he swung around to face Duchesse. His heels were over empty space now. “Are you trying to say saints and angels don’t exist?”

  Cramp seized Duchesse in the calves, for all the world as if he were the one balancing on a parapet. “Don’t be bloody ridiculous, child,” he snapped, rubbing vigorously at his legs. “Of course they exist! How else would I have tracked you down?”

  The horse and van moved off—clip-clop—down the street, the savor of fresh bread so strong that it reached Pepper and Duchesse, high up as they were. Delicious.

  Duchesse reined his voice back to a restrained undertone. “But did it never occur to you, Captain—sir—dear heart—that when your aunty Mireille told everyone about her…her dream…well…she might have been lying?”

  Pepper blinked, took stock of the question, looked for a true answer. “No,” he said.

  Well, he had to be honest. And there it was: the pattern woven into his fabric. If Pepper’s life were a coat, Aunty Mireille and Saint Constance would have made it for him. His whole life had been cut out by them, tacked and machined together by them. His whole life had been fashioned by Aunt Mireille’s vision the night before he was born.