The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Duchesse needed to stand up, to ease the cramp in his calves. He used the broken flagpole to pull himself to his feet. While he stood there, head on a level with the round, rusty-metal knob at the top of the pole, he wetted a finger and cleaned a patch of dirt off its round face.

  “I like the saints, myself,” he said quietly. “No dirty laundry. No axes to grind. Just waiting around to make themselves useful. No hobbies ’cept hymn singing and being agreeable…. Well, they wouldn’t get the job otherwise, would they? Not if they showed a nasty streak? Like mine. Or if they hung around with vicious bitches like your aunty.”

  Pepper kept his eyes shut. He was bouncing gently on his toes now. A police car drew up in the street below. Stone dust from the rotting parapet sprinkled its roof like icing sugar. Suddenly Pepper opened his lids very wide. “Why would she? What for?” he shouted.

  Duchesse winced, patted the air, watched the ancient stones crumbling under Pepper’s instep. “Perhaps she mistook,” he whispered. “I could be maligning her—maybe she had this one vivid dream—mistook!—genuinely thought—”

  “No! She dreamed it lots of times! Lots of separate times! And she said! She told us! Saint Constance has very good diction!”

  Duchesse, caught off guard, laughed out loud. A big belly laugh. Roosting birds, pocketed by the Constance Tower overnight, burst into the air now in a single explosion of feathers and whistling. Pepper was so startled that he almost lost his balance. Duchesse leaped forward, reached out a hand.

  “The wretched woman was jealous!”

  Pepper frowned. Having just begun to make sense of things, he wanted to understand but didn’t. “What do you mean, jealous? I don’t understand. Jealous of what?”

  “Of her sister, of course! Jealous of her sister having a child when she didn’t—wouldn’t. God’s crib, I know I am! Me, I’d give anything to have had a son like you…. If I were the marrying kind of man, that is.”

  Pepper thought. He flicked his way back through the story of his life—the breeze of it lifted and shifted the curls of hair on his forehead. He folded down certain pages where Aunty Mireille appeared: her inventive cruelties, her busy timetables of Masses and confessions; the candle burns on his palms; no secondary schooling; hatpins impaling her prayers to his wall; her monopoly on godliness; her part in the ruination of his knees.

  Pepper spread his arms wide from the shoulders, as if about to attempt flight—“No, Captain! Please!”—and stepped back down onto the roof. Clapping his hands together over his head, clicking finger and thumb, Pepper said, “Well then! What we need now, Duchess, is creosote!”

  At the foot of the Constance Tower, several police officers ate breakfast at the pavement café and waited for the curator of the monument to arrive with the keys. Their pleasure in the rich black coffee was spoiled by a sergeant in the full uniform of the Foreign Legion, who was standing nearby, pistol drawn, and had been for many hours. All night, duty had pinned the man to this one spot, like a tent peg. At first he had been surrounded by a dozen new recruits, motley in African robes, dungarees, or Sunday suits. But they had drifted away, too bored or weary or hungover to persist with the idea of enlisting in the Legion. The excitement at the hairdresser’s shop below Le Petit Caporal had stopped them from actually signing the recruitment forms. Looking at Sergeant Fléau now, they began to think they had had a lucky escape.

  The sergeant was going nowhere. He had vowed to capture and execute “Legion Roche,” the recruit who, in the middle of basic training, had defied his authority and made him look like a fool by deserting aboard a taxicab.

  At a nearby table, Big Sal’s “debt collectors,” Grigiot and Pogue, competed to see who could smoke the most; the ground around their feet was snowy with cigarette butts. Billy, the bartender from the club, arrived and threw himself down dejectedly alongside them. Big Sal’s poker club was a wreck, he told them—would be shut for months—and the firemen sent to pump it out had helped themselves to all the liquor from behind the bar. Apparently, Big Sal wanted Claude Roche sliced up thinner than salami. Those were his precise instructions to Grigiot and Pogue: “thinner than salami.”

  Astride their bikes, Exe and Why stood looking up at the domed peak of the Constance Tower, wondering if they had done the right thing, and what to do with the reward money. Beowulf lay between them, his twitching nose detecting hot croissants, beignets, and fresh-baked bread. Suddenly, a thousand starlings exploded into the sky and dispersed to all points of the compass. The dog sat up and barked.

  A moment later, a figure appeared on the parapet of the tower and jumped off it.

  He was wearing a harness of rope and dropped a yard or so, the soles of his feet against the stonework, his body skewed by the weight of the creosote tin hooked on one arm. Drops of creosote spattered the pavement below, like blood.

  Sergeant Fléau, who had sunk into a kind of trance during the hours of darkness, discovered his pistol hand had gone to sleep and began frantically rubbing it.

  “Klupp? Kronk? Krapp!” said the police, clattering their coffee cups, scraping back their chairs, hastily buttoning their jackets.

  “Zee?” said Exe and Why.

  “Legion Roche!” bellowed the sergeant. “Surrender yourself!”

  “Hundred francs says he falls and kills himself,” Grigiot bet Pogue.

  “There’s someone else up there,” said the café manager, hastily making up his customers’ bills for breakfast.

  With a brush as stiff and unwieldy as a dead beaver, Pepper began to dirty the newly whitewashed wall of the tower.

  “Bulls!” called Duchesse from the roof. “They love bulls around these parts!”

  Pepper dabbed at the white rendering. “Bull can’t read, though!”

  “God’s pajamas, boy, I wasn’t suggesting the bulls would read it.” Duchesse shut his eyes, dizzy and sweating. “We really will have to differ over your liking of heights, Captain. I cannot see the appeal.”

  Pepper broke off for a moment to watch the starlings ball, scatter, and regroup, making their huge swirling turns across the blue morning. And he realized that, for some time now, he had not checked the sky once for fiery chariots, meteorites, or black horsemen, for armored seraphim or the slings and arrows of outraged saints. The starlings looked too busy enjoying themselves to be omens or portents. He really did like high places. What had started off as sentry duty had turned into a pleasure.

  “If I have enough creosote, I’ll put bulls on the other side,” he promised.

  Early risers on their way to work stopped beside the café to look up at the slogan being daubed on the most revered building in the city.

  “What does it mean?” said Exe to Why.

  “What does it say?” said Pogue to Grigiot, having never learned to read. Grigiot struggled to tell him: He could tackle most words, but names were harder because you couldn’t get clues from the words around them.

  “Is he a Communist, then?” asked a policeman. “Name sounds kind of Russian. Konstantin.”

  His colleague bristled. “You don’t have to be Russian to be a Communist, comrade,” he said.

  “A year it took them to paint that place,” said the café owner. “Little vandal.”

  Sergeant Fléau said nothing. He simply flexed his gun hand once or twice, took aim with his pistol, and fired.

  That brought everyone to their feet.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What the—”

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “You’re not in Africa now!”

  The sergeant, though his cheeks had flushed very red, was unrepentant. “The man is a deserter. In the Legion we shoot deserters!”

  “Not in Aigues you don’t!” said a gendarme.

  “Not outside my place you don’t,” said the café owner.

  Pogue and Grigiot smirked at each other. Big Sal had told them to kill Claude Roche—difficult under the noses of the police. They were happy enough to let the Foreign Legion do i
t for them.

  Near the top of the tower, Pepper tipped the can sideways on his arm to stop the creosote from leaking out through the bullet hole. There was precious little left in any case: He would have to cut his message short, especially if he was to give the bulls a mention. The rope that ran between him and Duchesse creaked and shed a dusty green mold; it was, after all, the rope from the flagpole and had been exposed to years of weather: How much strain could it take before snapping? Out of sight, the voice of Duchesse remonstrated with him. “Get yourself back up here! What, are you mad? You’re a sitting duck! Captain? Did he hit you?” But, because of the rope joining them, Duchesse was powerless to look for himself: If he moved forward toward the parapet, he would only succeed in lowering Pepper farther down the tower. “Look, sir…Captain, dear heart! Arrest is preferable to death! Get back up here, will you?”

  Pepper began walking his way around the tower, lying almost horizontally on his back on the sweet-smelling air, looking up at the bright blue morning sky. And on the other side of the tower he daubed his steward’s suggested message to the city of Aigues Mortes.

  Down on the street, the curator of the Constance Tower arrived to find his monument the center of everyone’s attention. A journalist had arrived from the local paper. An officer of the Foreign Legion was circling the building with a drawn pistol. A dog was cocking its leg against the fresh whitewash. The curator looked up—looked where everyone but the dog was looking, and read:

  Repeal Hongriot-Pleuviez Amndmnt!

  Two police constables, their jackets buttoned up wrongly, instructed him to unlock the tower at once—immediately!—without delay! From the other side of the tower came another gunshot. Two telegraph boys, white faced and high pitched, let their bikes crash to the ground and ran at the gendarmes: “He’s mad! Arrest him, can’t you? Take his gun off him!”

  “Unlock the door!” the policemen told the curator.

  “Regrets,” said the curator. “I cannot assist in the suppression of free speech.” He only really meant that the police would have to unlock the tower themselves—he intended to hand them the keys—but then the Foreign Legion officer reappeared and, hearing the curator’s words, pointed his pistol at the man and screamed, “Communist scum!”

  The curator retorted, “I have that honor, you lackey of the state oppressors!” and threw the keys down a storm drain.

  Big Sal’s bouncer emerged from the other side of the tower, where he had been for much the same reason as the dog, and reported, “Bulls at twelve.” Pogue and Grigiot looked blank. “Says on the other side: Bulls at Twelve.”

  Exe and Why conferred, then cycled off in two directions, Exe to spread the news of a political demonstration in the Place Constance, Why to announce a bull run at noon. All thought of the reward money had melted away at the sight of the sergeant using their friend Zee for target practice.

  Sergeant Fléau said he was commandeering the café as his base for military operations and told everyone to leave. The café owner told him to ride his camel up a drainpipe and not to bother coming down again.

  Office workers on their way to work read the slogan on the tower and stopped to discuss it. A gendarme tried to play it down—“Just some little hoodlum holed up—on the run”—so they knew at once there must be more to it than that: The police never told you the whole truth. Grigiot, who had not been awake at this hour for twenty years, felt oddly hazy and began remembering his own days as a young hoodlum on the run.

  “I planned on going to Oklahoma,” he told Pogue. “Rustle cows.”

  The sergeant, on the prowl again, fired his pistol a third time. An almost-empty can of creosote hit a pile of fallen scaffolding, bounced, and rolled away down the street, bleeding blackly.

  Up on the roof, Duchesse hauled Pepper over the parapet, and the crumbling green rope coiled between them like an umbilical cord. To the ragged grubbiness of the navy jacket had been added a hole and a dark patch of blood.

  “Now can we give ourselves up?” Duchesse implored him.

  But Pepper, eyes full of cloud reflections and the speeding flecks of starlings overhead, had other ideas. “Never say die, Duchesse!” he said, clutching the wound in his arm. “Never say die!”

  Aigues Mortes was not as big as Marseille, but it was a thinking kind of a town. At that particular time, its bars and restaurants were always lively with debate—about the campaign in Africa, about immigrants getting French citizenship by joining the Legion, about Communism and patriotism and unemployment and the salt trade. This particular Wednesday grew into one of those clammy, oppressive days when the air felt quilted with salt and sweat and stale dreams. So when the rumor spread of a demonstration in the Place Constance—that someone had been shot—that the Constance Tower had been occupied—hundreds of clerks, factory hands, civil servants, and vacationing teachers hurried in the direction of the city’s favorite landmark. Once there, they milled around, asked questions of one another, and invented the answers. True, no one could be found who could explain the precise ins and outs of the Hongriet-Pleanier Amendment. (Well, it was quite hard to read: Pepper might have gotten to grips with pen and ink, but lettering with creosote while hanging from a rope was still a skill to be mastered.) That did not stop people from thinking they had read about it in the newspaper and that it was a disgrace. Some said it had to do with immigration, others the campaign in Africa, some that it was a move to make Communism illegal. Somebody insisted it had to do with trade tariffs on salt. The police told them to disperse, insisted there was nothing going on—just some escaped prisoner hiding in the tower. So the crowd instantly knew there was more to it than that: The police never told the whole truth about anything. The artists among them mustered the makings of placards.

  Meanwhile, those who had no interest in politics but did like thrills were delighted to see, emblazoned on the rim of the Constance Tower, the news of a bull run at noon. Why had they not known about it before? What was the occasion? Bull runs were generally the stuff of public holidays: Aigues Mortes loved them even more than politics. If Pepper had had creosote enough to mention the pope, he could have gotten the attention of the entire city that day.

  “There will be no bull run today,” the police assured them—at which the local bookies tapped their noses and filled their knapsacks with change. The police would say that: They were always trying to spoil people’s fun.

  The builders who had been renovating the tower arrived. They were enraged to find a section of their scaffolding lying in ruins in the street.

  By ten, the Place Constance was awash with crowds. The lunch cafés had all opened early. Ice-cream sellers were cycling up and down, scoops strung over their shoulders like the boy David with his slingshot. Scuffles broke out between Moroccans and Algerians. Wine broke out among the local journalists who had gathered, scenting a juicy steak of a story. The police tried to break down the door of the Constance Tower using a bench from outside the Constanza Inn, but the customers at the inn made a counterattack to get back the bench and finish their beer in comfort. An African market miraculously appeared, selling fruit. Exe and Why cruised back into the square and sat astride their bikes in the shadow of the tower. To everyone’s relief, the sergeant had disappeared. Young men combed their hair and loosened their belts—the first because they were about to draw the gaze of the girls; the second to let them run faster when the bulls were let loose.

  Inside the massively thick walls of the tower’s stairwell, the noise was nothing but a distant murmur.

  “Why didn’t Yvette tell me you were here in Aigues? Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Pepper, sliding one hand over centuries-old rock as Duchesse carried him down the spiral stairs. Duchesse ignored the question, but Pepper just went on asking.

  “I’m a wanted man. Unfit company. Now hush up, will you, Captain? Dear?”

  “No, you’re not,” Pepper contradicted him. “You’re dead. I announced it in the papers. You’re as dead as you like.” He winced as Duchesse cam
e to an abrupt stop; he felt, too, the almighty shudder that went through the man and was instantly sorry. Perhaps Duchesse didn’t think being dead was as wonderful a disguise as a nun’s habit, a priest’s robe, a kaftan, tweeds, or a red satin dress.

  The farmer who usually supplied the bulls for bull running in Aigues Mortes complained that no one had told him about the day’s sport. What bulls were they using? Why was he being slighted? He would bring his bulls anyway! Overhearing him, other bull owners decided to fetch theirs as well, though time was running short: It was almost eleven o’clock. Skirmishing had broken out between left-wing and right-wing students over the Hangriol-Pleuriez Amendment. The fire brigade was sent for, to turn their hoses on the demonstrators and empty the square, but (unaccountably) the fire brigade never answered the call.

  Meanwhile, the recruiting sergeant returned triumphant, having finally mustered reinforcements. He proposed to storm the tower.

  “And how do you think you are going to do that, then?” asked the curator with a sardonic sneer.

  “With gunpowder and a fuse!” retorted the sergeant. And it was true. Sergeant Fléau kept a secret cache in a metal cabinet at Le Petit Caporal bar: gunpowder, bayonets, and smoke grenades to test the mettle of his recruits out on the marshes.

  “The man up there is expressing his political beliefs!” bayed the curator. “He is Babeuf! Darthé! Buonarotti!”

  “He’s a deserter from the Legion!”

  The curator mustered his full store of pompous authority. “This is public property, and I will do what I must to prevent damage to it!”

  The sergeant responded by drawing his pistol again. The crowd nearby scattered in alarm. Fléau gave the command for his men to place the explosive against the door.

  Legionnaires Mustafa, Norbert, Albert, and Nadir were boyishly excited. Caught between the horrors of basic training with the sergeant and the terror of setting sail for Africa, they were happy to be in beautiful Place Constance blowing the door off a castle: It was a schoolboy dream. Powder keg. Fuse. Match….