The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “Legion Roche! Surrender yourself or face the consequences!” bawled the sergeant, his whole body arching in a rictus of triumph.

  Mustafa looked at Norbert. Albert looked at Nadir. Legion Roche? Their fellow recruit? Little Legion, who looked about thirteen? Inexhaustible little Legion of the ready smile? Uncomplaining little Legion, who was named after somebody or other in the Bible? The boy who could conjure taxicabs magically out of the heat haze?

  “We can’t blow up Legion, sir. He’s our lucky mascot!” said Norbert.

  “Light the fuse!” bawled Fléau, the veins knotting purply in his neck.

  “Flamingos is one thing,” said Albert under his breath, and he picked up the powder keg resting against the door and pulled out the fuse. The sergeant pointed his pistol at both man and gunpowder. Mustafa, finding a heroism he did not know he possessed, took the keg out of Albert’s arms. Nadir, who had only joined the Legion in order to be with Mustafa, stepped in front of the pistol.

  On the other side of the heavy timber, at the foot of the spiral stairs, Duchesse gently set Pepper down on his feet.

  “Do you think we have drawn enough of a crowd yet?” Duchesse said.

  “I never saw so many people!” said Pepper, as perkily as he could manage.

  “Are you fit to run, chéri?” Pepper nodded. His steward, creature of many years’ habit, wiped the door handle with his neckerchief before turning it.

  Locked.

  Sergeant Fléau saw the huge iron loop of a handle scrape a half circle on the outside of the door. He turned his pistol from Nadir’s forehead to a three-hundred-year-old slab of timber and fired into it as if it were the head or heart of Africa itself and he the last true Frenchman standing.

  Splintered wood and iron, bullets and noise, all found their way into the gloomy stairwell of the Constance Tower. Then daylight, solid as a butcher’s cleaver. The door swung open, the oil inside its mangled lock flickering with pretty little flames. Three people found themselves face-to-face. For quite a long time none of them moved.

  Then Sergeant Fléau pointed his revolver at Pepper’s chest and pulled the trigger.

  For several seconds more, the triangle held: three people face-to-face. Sergeant Fléau looked at his handgun and fired it again. Surely only one chamber would dare to be empty, would dare to betray him? But no—indeed—after his onslaught on the big old lock, there were no bullets left in his gun.

  Dauntless—possibly unhinged by the moment—he tried to step toward the enemy, to engage them in hand-to-hand combat—only to find that Mustafa had grabbed the back of his shiny uniform belt. Mustafa gave a pull. Sergeant Fléau fell on his back. Albert set the keg down on his groin. Nadir tied his hands with cotton fuses. Norbert gave Pepper a wink and a halfhearted slap on the butt—for good luck—as he and Duchesse stepped smartly over the pile of people in the doorway and plunged into a tidal wave of sunlight and noise.

  Chanting protesters, singing ice-cream sellers, market traders foamed around the base of the tower, a spray of noise breaking from them that brought Pepper to a halt. The policemen had seen him but were more concerned with the keg of gunpowder just then rolling free across the cobblestones for anyone to lay hands on. The keg knocked over a trestle table.

  Grigiot and Pogue had seen him and were smiling, rising slowly and smugly to their feet, settling up on a bet before coming after him, pointing him out to their friend Billy the bartender. Beowulf was quicker off the mark. The dog came bounding, wagging, grinning, slavering, thudding against Pepper’s thigh and knocking him over—but only to get at the food spilling from the overturned trestle table.

  Even with one arm still in working order, Pepper found it unaccountably hard to get up again. His limbs were heavy, his energy gone. Exe and Why saw him struggling and rode their bikes toward him, fencing him in to right and left with tubular metal and rubber.

  Grigiot, Pogue, and Billy swung their jackets over their shoulders and, still chewing the remains of their breakfast like gum, walked their American-gangster walks, nonchalant and slow, toward the sinner on the ground—the one who had caused them to be beaten up by a woman with a baby carriage; the one who had trashed Big Sal’s brand-new nightclub; the one they had been told to slice up thin as salami. From inside their jackets they drew out their delicate weapons—steel-bladed oyster knives as used by the best Parisian chefs. Cutlery was one area in which they were ready to admit the French excelled over the Americans.

  Exe and Why ran in opposite directions, yelling like banshees, letting their bikes keel over, clash together, and intermesh over Pepper’s head—a cage of handlebars, crossbars, and spinning spokes. Grigiot and Pogue squatted down and grinned at Pepper through the spinning spokes.

  Billy the barman didn’t.

  He alone appreciated that Exe and Why were not the cowards they looked to be. They had ridden in close to rescue Pepper, but time had run out and they had done the only thing sensible in the face of four large bulls hurtling, heads down, toward them. Toward Billy too.

  The crowds in the Place Constance scuffled and scattered. Young men, fruit sellers, barmen, journalists, gangsters, and demonstrators screamed with fear or roared with sheer bravado, racing along in front of the bulls before taking shelter behind the Constance Tower.

  Confronted with a bright, whirring pile of spiky moving metal in their path, the bulls peeled off to either side—a river of meat flowing around an island of bike parts—and galloped on in the direction of the causeway. All they left behind were their sharp, small hoofprints cut into abandoned placards:

  Duchesse was slow to realize that Pepper was not close behind him. He turned back, swimming against the current, as people streamed out of the Place Constance, trying to get out of the way of the bulls. Meanwhile, Exe and Why had crept out from behind the Constanza Inn. Looking to right and left, as if for dangerous traffic, they returned to Pepper’s side.

  “Sorry, Zee,” said Exe. “Very sorry.”

  Why jabbed Exe with an elbow: There was no point in apologizing for a betrayal Zee did not even know about. They no longer meant to claim the reward money; then again, they did not want to offer him sanctuary, either. There were just too many people after Zee.

  One of those people appeared now. As Exe and Why wrestled to separate the handlebars and baskets of their interlocking bikes, a big, sweating man wearing a neckerchief came and stood over them. They noticed blood on his pullover, which was not heartening.

  “Hello, boys,” he said gruffly.

  “Hello, Father,” they said, freezing, rigid as their bikes.

  “Borrow your bicycles, boys?”

  “If you want, Father,” they said—stick insects—invisible if they could just keep still enough. Duchesse did not look much like a priest just now, but the scar on his face was memorable, and the last time they had seen him, he had been wearing ecclesiastical robes and frenziedly taking apart their apartment in his search for “pepper.”

  “Obliged. I shall let you know where to retrieve them.”

  “Thank you, Father,” they said, and Exe actually took off his cap as a mark of respect.

  Pepper and the Duchess mounted the cycles—property of the Postal and Telegraphic Service of France—and rode away, Duchesse leaning across to hold one handgrip of Zee’s handlebars.

  “What do we tell the Kaiser about the bikes?” said Exe.

  “Say the bulls ran us down,” suggested Why. “Say the Communists threw them in the canal.”

  But Exe had had a better idea. “Nah. Say the Foreign Legion commandeered them for Africa!”

  There was nowhere to go but back to the rue Méjeunet. A hospital might have been nice, given the bullet wound in Pepper’s arm, but Achille seemed to have developed a loathing for hospitals. Also, Yvette would be worrying herself sick. Also, in an empty and derelict apartment across the street, Duchesse had left what little he owned in the world, guarded by an army of rats and cockroaches.

  Anyway, Pepper was exultant. He did not c
are about the pain in his arm. He was alive and he was fourteen, and suddenly both things were allowed.

  Aunt Mireille had lied!

  What were the Legion, the navy, and the criminal underworld, so long as the heavenly militia was not after him?

  Aunt Mireille had lied!

  What did bulls and bullies matter if the saints were content to overlook him? The siege of Constance Tower was nothing in comparison with being besieged by the ranks of the blessed, and Pepper had just escaped both!

  Aunt Mireille had lied! Suddenly everything and anything seemed possible…particularly with friends like Yvette and the Duchess.

  “I wish you were my…family,” Pepper said as they cycled. Not “father.” He did not say father. As the word dentist smells of disinfectant, father was a noun that reeked to Pepper of drink and distance and disappointment.

  Duchesse only coughed and replied rather tersely that “family” was something Pepper ought to be giving a thought to. His mother at least, who must be “waxing desolate by now.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Pepper assured him. “I wrote last week. I thought I should.”

  They propped their bicycles against the water fountain in the courtyard. The drowned sparrow was gone from under its rim.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Pepper asked when his ship’s steward stopped at the bottom of the chipped stairs.

  “I’ll watch you safely to the top, sir. You get that arm seen to quick sharp. Sun’s over the yardarm, I reckon. All’s well.”

  “Where are you going?” called Pepper, but Duchesse was already across the courtyard and out of the gates. So Pepper turned and knocked at the peeling door of apartment 19. For the first time in his life, he felt that hand-into-glove, key-into-lock, wagging-dog, touch-the-mezuzah, hello-crucifix, supper’s-cooking, place-at-the-table, come-on-in, shut-the-door feeling of arriving home.

  Duchesse, who glided swayingly as a rule, and took his time about it, could shift fast if he wanted. He shouldered open the door of his squalid “crib” and snatched up a duffel bag. Into it he crammed such disguises as he had not returned, a newspaper, his shaving brush and soap.

  Thinking he did not bother with. Thought he did not pack. Thought there was no room for. To his annoyance, he found that he still had Pepper’s bloodstained navy jacket knotting its arms around his throat and pulled it loose: A ragman would not give ten centimes for it. The lilac prayers in the pocket? He pulled them out and leafed through till he found all with the name Mireille Lepont on them. These he impaled on the hook provided for torn paper in the water closet. Write home to that spiteful witch? Why? Why would you?

  Silverfish infesting the floor of the WC shimmered around his feet, fleeting and repulsive as thoughts. He stamped down on them with a rope-soled shoe. Turning, he walked through a cobweb, and a spider lodged in his hair, like a memory. He brushed it onto the floor. No point in memories, remembering. Shelled walnuts or lit candles; Christmas decorations or death notices; letters of condolence with the address neatly written out in childish pencil…He had written home? To those unnatural, coldblooded, hook-clawed Roux reptiles? Of course he had written home. It was typical of him. Manners. Always the good manners. He was a boy raised by ill-mannered people to be polite. At home, Pepper had been the one expected to supply the good manners, as other children are expected to bring in the coal….

  “Holy Mary and Joseph and the camels!” said Duchesse; he dropped his duffel bag and slapped his head. He was down the stairs, over the broken baby carriage, and across the street in a twinkling. The stairs up to Yvette’s apartment felt as steep as the sloping deck of L’Ombrage when he was carrying a boy in his arms. The front door stood open.

  “Pepper! Pepper, lad!” he called. “Did you put an address? When you wrote home, you didn’t—”

  Number 19 was full of people. Not since the neighborhood children had come by for stories had the living space been so crowded. But whereas the children had settled to a wading sort of depth, the large men there now reared up like angry breakers over the heads of Yvette and Pepper. The police were big Marseille men, but they were in turn dwarfed by the military police of the Foreign Legion.

  When the Life Assurance Company was asked to insure the life of a man who put on the form as his employment “Foreign Legionnaire,” they wrote back saying no thank you. They did not insure reckless idiots who voluntarily went to Africa to fight in a disastrous war, they said. (Well, they worded it differently, but that was the gist.) Thinking that Roche might already be serving in Africa, they sent a copy of their letter not only to his home address but to the administrative offices of the Foreign Legion. The address in rue Méjeunet was clearly visible in the top right-hand corner.

  And that was how the Legion ran to earth the recruit who had deserted during basic training.

  No such detective work was needed by the police. They simply received a letter from the Roux family telling them where they might find the notorious Skeleton Man, Captain Roux. They were ashamed (the letter said) ever to have given succor to a man who deliberately sank ships for profit. They were eager (the letter said) to help the forces of law and order track him down and put him behind bars.

  In the face of all these people in her living room, Yvette Roche had become a silent ghost again, wordless, head down, dabbing a soft cloth in hot water, turning the water red. Pepper himself sat on the table, his face as white as any abattoir sheep, blood trickling down his arm, while debate raged over who should take him into custody. Everyone saw the culprit they wanted.

  Well, people see what they expect to see. Or do they see what they want?

  “We shall take him to police headquarters in Marseille,” said the highest-ranking policeman. “If you people go through the proper procedures, you may be permitted to interview the prisoner in connection with other matters.”

  “Why waste everyone’s time?” the Legion retaliated. “We take him. We shoot him. We bury him. No lawyers. No paperwork. No prison food. Savings all around.”

  “Excuse me,” said the Duchess from the doorway. It was not a polite interruption and was said with sufficient command to make all eyes turn to him. “Whom are we discussing here?”

  “Roche. Deserter,” said the voice of the Legion.

  “Roux,” said the police. “Captain of the merchant vessel L’Ombrage, sunk in dubious circumstances.”

  The local police were last to arrive. They came panting up the stairs now (already disheveled from chasing bulls out of a department store) and bottlenecked in the doorway.

  “And you?” asked Duchesse with the air of a man showing superhuman patience.

  “We have received information of the whereabouts of one Konstantin Kruppe—”

  Those already in the room burst out laughing at the ridiculously exotic name—yet another name. The police sergeant at the doorway became suddenly three headed, for behind him lurked Grigiot and Pogue, the informants who had brought the police to apartment 19.

  “Russian communist agitator!” Pogue piped up.

  “We would like to question him concerning willful damage committed upon the premises of Cheval Cheveux, one coiffuring establishment, and for—”

  “Terrorism!” Grigiot threw in.

  “—trespassing at the Constance Tower, plus incitement to riot.”

  “He’s also known as Claude Roche,” said Pogue, smiling at Pepper, sliding one hand inside his jacket to remind Pepper where the oyster knife was sheathed. The three kinds of police—military, Marseille, and local—competed to outshout one another.

  “Tell me,” said Duchesse, lowering his voice in the way that had quelled many a dockside brawl. “Tell me, gentlemen. Satisfy my curiosity. At what age can a man join the Legion?”

  “At whatever age he chooses to put on the form,” sneered the military policeman. “’S up to the recruit to tell the truth.”

  “Very well.” Duchesse waved a dismissive hand. “The life insurance application: What age was on that? And what age must one be t
o make one?”

  The neighbors, unable to contain their curiosity, ventured out onto the landings and into the courtyard below, arms folded, stretching their necks this way and that to see what was happening at Yvette’s place.

  “What age was Claude Roche?” inquired Duchesse. Yvette looked as if she might speak, but Duchesse forbade it with the merest lift of one finger and, pushing his way out onto the landing, asked: “What age was Claude Roche?”

  The women only giggled with nervousness at being suddenly the center of attention. So Duchesse leaned over the stairwell and called down. “What age was Claude Roche?”

  Tentative voices called back, puzzled, uncertain, guessing. “Thirty-five?”

  “Nah—older.”

  “Forty.”

  “Something like that.”

  “Thirty-eight, say…. Why?”

  Duchesse pushed his way back through the crush of blue police uniforms, taking the opportunity to wrench Grigiot and Pogue backward by the elbow and, with a foot behind their ankles, tumble them backward onto the landing. Catching sight of them, a neighbor pointed and called out: “There’s those mongrels as beat up the storyteller!” and the crowd gave a moo of agreement and moved closer, like cattle.

  It was too much for the pair. They had been trapped in a flooded basement, kept up all night, knocked down by bulls, given the slip by Roche, and accused of assault and battery in front of two police forces and the Foreign Legion. They moved off, absented themselves, limped down the chipped staircase, and skulked their way—almost unscathed—through the herd of onlookers.

  “And how long does it take to become a captain of the merchant fleet?” Duchesse asked no one in particular. No one in particular answered him, but eyes flickered toward the table, toward the ashen-faced, bloodstained culprit wilting in the airless heat. “Too hard? An easier question! What age is the escaped criminal Konstantin Kr—” The name did not quite emerge—as if all those spiky consonants had snagged in the man’s throat.