The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  But the police sergeant thought back to the wanted notice at the station: “Nineteen—when he escaped, anyway.”

  At which Duchesse banged the flat of his hand on the table. Pepper flinched. Yvette flinched. A legionnaire fumbled reflexively for his gun: He had seen action in Africa, and loud noises made him sweat.

  “Then might I ask you, gentlemen, to take a look at this villain, this reprobate, this sea captain, this insurance fraudster, this failed legionnaire, this twenty-year-old escapee from a chain gang, this rabble-rousing Communist agitator, this demolisher of buildings!” Holding Pepper’s chin in an ungentle grip, he tugged the face this way and that, pointing it at the forces of law, order, and military might. “I am intrigued, gentlemen. I am agog to know. Enlighten me. I cannot wait to hear your opinion on this minor but relevant matter. By all the saints and angels, what the Hell age do you think this boy is?”

  Boots shuffled. Throats cleared. There was the noise of hopes deflating, doubts scuttling in like silverfish. And a host of eyes looked at Pepper for the first time with the express purpose of seeing him.

  A small boy in his socks and an overlarge shirt, coarse, home-cut hair, and not the first sign of a beard. His boyish features were just starting to swell, as if childhood had only recently been punched out of him. A boy in the bosom of his family, sitting on the kitchen table, feet swinging clear of the ground.

  Deciding to brush aside this minor setback, the most senior legionnaire said, “Sergeant Fléau will be able to confirm such details.”

  It was the turn of the local police to moo. “Fléau?” said one of the Aigues gendarmes. “The lunatic who just tried to blow up the Constance with a barrel of gunpowder? The one running around letting off a gun in a public place? We arrested him an hour ago. He’s a maniac! Shoots horses on the Camargue—target practice. His own men said that. The ones who restrained him.”

  “A point of interest,” added Achille helpfully. “He shot my son.”

  The legionnaires glanced at one another, starting to see—like a taxi emerging from heat haze—a scandal taking shape and speeding straight toward them.

  The police sergeant’s confidence was the last to be shaken. “You! Name?” he snapped curtly, taking out his pocketbook and wagging it at Duchesse.

  “Achille Duchesse,” said the Duchess, flamboyantly fetching out his papers from the back pocket of his trousers. “And this? This is my wife, Yvette.”

  Taking her cue, Yvette laid a hand on Pepper’s hair and said, very helpfully, very sweetly, “I think a Monsieur Roche was a tenant of this apartment. Before us.”

  “And this, gentlemen,” Duchesse said in thunderous declamation, “is my thirteen-year-old son, Pepper, to whom I believe you owe an apology.” And he grabbed Pepper’s jaw again (probably to prevent him from correcting the thirteen to a fourteen; after all, Pepper was a stickler for honesty).

  With the departure of the last policeman, apartment 19 fell quiet. Only three people remained, none of them related except by the lies they had told. The Duchess decided some social niceties were called for. “Permit me to introduce Paul Roux, son of a former captain of mine. I realize you’ve met, but I thought…to clear up any…”

  Yvette reached out a hand, and Pepper shook it. “Delighted to make your acquaintance, Madame…. May I stay sitting down, please? I’m sorry about the smell. It’s creosote. Mostly.”

  Yvette went back to cleaning and bandaging the graze Fléau’s bullet had made on Pepper’s upper arm.

  “I was so scared,” Pepper confessed, letting his head fall forward in shame.

  “What’s wrong with being scared?” said Yvette.

  “It’s unmanly.”

  “Well, that’s all right, then,” Duchesse said brusquely. “Most of the world’s ills come of men being manly. They should try being womanly now and then. It has a softening effect.” He felt obliged to add, as casually as possible: “I can’t recommend staying on here. I’ve just shown my identity papers to the police. If they choose to check up…” Since the sinking of L’Ombrage, Achille Duchesse should, strictly speaking, have been dead (as Pepper had said in his newspaper), or answering awkward questions about coffin ships in a police cell somewhere. “And Big Sal’s desire for revenge will be brewing up nicely at present. I feel we should all shift ground, if you can bear to leave such elegant accommodation.”

  Yvette and Pepper looked around them at the peeling paint, the fluffy mildew, the patches of damp, the holes begun by rats who had not even liked the taste enough to persist.

  “I had a vacation once. Along the coast. In Garavan,” said Yvette. “When I was a child. I liked it.” She proceeded to write the word, in flour, on the scrubbed kitchen table: G a r a v a n.

  Duchesse was slightly shocked, and insisted on fetching a spoon to get the flour back into the bag. But before he got back, Yvette and Pepper had blown and flapped it into the air—filled the room with flying flour, so as to let it fall on their hair and clothes like powdery snow. A possibility for the future.

  “Papa’s not in prison yet, then?” said Pepper, and found he was glad. Almost. Almost glad. “If the police thought I was him, they can’t have caught him yet. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  Yvette spilled over with indignation. “Pepper, he set the police on you! You let slip the address, and he sent them straight here….”

  “Oh no. That would have been Aunty,” Pepper corrected her confidently. “Aunty always opened all the mail.” The spoon Duchesse was idly twirling and somersaulting over and under his fingers came to rest tip down on the table. “You must be pleased, Duchess. You being such good friends with Papa.”

  The neck of the spoon bent. With the other hand, Achille Duchesse fingered the scar on his face that Gilbert Roux had made one drunken night with a broken rum bottle.

  “Papa and the Duchess sailed together for years and years,” Pepper explained to Yvette.

  Duchesse could have added more information—how Gilbert Roux had gained absolute tyranny over his life. If he was ever arrested for sinking coffin ships (the captain had daily told his steward), he would be sure to take Duchesse down with him.

  But Gilbert Roux was the boy’s father, and a boy should not have to spend his life thinking badly of the man who begot him.

  “Years and years, yes” was all he said.

  “He must be hiding out. Like me.” And Pepper, through sheer habit, began to worry about other people’s problems. “I wonder if Mama and Aunty can manage.”

  The head snapped off the spoon altogether.

  “I shall find out, dear heart. Write and tell you. Care of your local post office, perhaps.”

  “In Garavan,” said Yvette, as if she were trying to fix the name in his head.

  “You can tell us when you get there,” said Pepper. “To Garavan.” He could picture the three of them living together in a little house beside the sea. Interesting, but he did not picture himself going home to Boissous-Clochet. Not ever. The idea would have been like silverfish infesting his brain.

  “No, mon brave. That I am unable to do.” Briskly efficient all of a sudden, Duchesse stood up, retied his neckerchief, swept up the flour, and returned the water bowl to the sink. A board creaked under his tread, and he rested his weight on it a couple of times more to find where it was loose. Then again, why mend a creak on a sinking ship? “I have to disappear now.”

  “Get a new name, yes,” said Pepper. “It’s easy. I’ve done it lots. You must keep Achille, though! Achille is a terrific name! I always liked…”

  But Achille Duchesse was not talking about evading capture, getting away. There are things a man cannot ever escape, things that cling to him like hot tar, things that sink their teeth into a man’s soul like a ferret’s into a rabbit’s spinal cord, and shake and shake him until all the sweet mercy of God and His saints is out of him. He brushed the flour off his pullover and with it the dreadful temptation to be happy when happiness was not his to ask.

  “I know what w
e should call ourselves!” Pepper was saying when suddenly the scar writhed on Duchesse’s face.

  He snatched open the door. “I killed a man, Pepper. If you recall, I killed that lad Kruppe in Saint-Bonnard. One dark and rainy night I pounded on him and pounded on him like some bare-knuckle thug, and a week later he was dead.” The door slammed. A chunk of plaster the shape of a bird fell off the wall, and Duchesse was gone.

  The starlings were as high-pitched as whistling kettles. They plunged and soared around the courtyard, weaving their trajectories in and out of one another at the speed of thought. Duchesse crossed the street, heading for the empty apartment where he had left his few possessions. His life would now fit into one duffel bag, if he could just leave behind all the bulky guilt and sorrow.

  “No, you didn’t!”

  The barefoot, grubby children were playing with the broken baby carriage, spinning the wheels, folding the hood up and down. A couple more were riding the telegraph bikes up and down the road.

  “No, you didn’t!”

  The cord of his duffel bag broke as Duchesse picked it up, and his swearword was like a hand grenade exploding.

  “No, you didn’t!”

  Duchesse wanted to get out, to get started, to be on his way, but the door was blocked by Pepper Roux. Standing there in his socks, gray-haired with flour, the bandage unwinding down his arm, he repeated it over and over again until at last he had Achille’s attention. “No, you didn’t. You didn’t kill Konstantin Kruppe. He was fine till he ate the drugs.”

  No one was more surprised than Pepper. Up until yesterday, he had believed absolutely that bloodhound angels had killed Konstantin Kruppe—had mistaken him for Paul Roux and sucked the breath out of him. Now, suddenly, understanding had lifted Pepper above the clouds, and he could see all sorts of things clear as clear.

  “Kruppe stole everything. He liked stealing. Bedpans. Clothes. Curtains. He ate the medicine.” Pepper scouted around for a charitable excuse for Konstantin Kruppe’s kleptomania. “He was…he was…well, he was a moron,” he concluded. “He broke into the drug cabinet and ate all the drugs like candy. That’s when he died.”

  Duchesse set down his duffel bag and sat on it, cross-legged, head up, eyes closed.

  On the way out of the hospital in Saint-Bonnard, the certainty scalding within him that he had killed Konstantin Kruppe, Duchesse had caught the sound of screaming. He had thought he must be hearing it all the way from Hell—a warning of what lay in store for him one day. But it was simply the maternity ward and the noise of women giving birth. A father, pacing up and down the corridor outside, with no one else to tell, sprang out in front of Duchesse like a mugger. “I have a son! I have a son!” Two, three, four times over he said it. And Achille caught a glimpse, at the back of the man’s eyes, of something obscure…something rare…something like cartwheeling angels.

  “I have a son! I have a son!”

  “Lucky man,” he had said.

  And now he was the lucky one.

  FIFTEEN

  AFTER FOURTEEN

  Back in number 19, Yvette pulled the newspaper out of Achille’s bag and scoured it for names. But none of them seemed to suit. Duchesse was of the opinion that a name ought to be like a dress—simple, flattering, but with a little flare.

  “I’m telling you,” said Pepper, tired of being ignored. “I know what we have to call us.”

  They presented themselves at the Lost Luggage Office—Achille Aristophe Baron, Madame Germaine Gloire Baron, and Émile Pantoufle Baron—in search of the suitcases they had lost many months before. They had been to Madagascar, they said, and been quarantined after a spell of Lassa fever. It had left their memories hazy—unable to muster the exact details: of dates, of particular trains, of where they might have lost their luggage. But might it help to know that their initials were on their suitcases?

  With a smug flourish, the lost luggage supervisor pointed out the three suitcases perched, like Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear, on the highest shelf. He handed them over in exchange for a signature in the book. If he was expecting a tip, he didn’t get one.

  Inside the cases they found their new lives. Books. Nightclothes. Shoes. Petticoats. A stethoscope. A box of chess pieces. An embroidered waistcoat. The photograph of a dog. A slice of wedding cake in a box…A few alterations would be needed, of course—a little adaptation to circumstance—but new lives, even so.

  On the way to the station, Duchesse stopped in at a church to return a priest’s robe he had stolen from the vestry. The light was lit outside the confessional booth: He could have gone in and confessed to stealing it. But now that the robe was back on its peg, he did not feel very contrite. He could have confessed to other things as well—he still felt bad about the damage at the hairdressers’ salon. Then again, if the priest forgave him the whole lot—everything he had ever done wrong—total salvation might be just too large to fit in a suitcase.

  The drowned Claude Roche would still beckon to him once in a while through the black waves of nightmares, but Achille could live with that. Rat catchers are probably troubled by dreams about rats from time to time.

  So instead, he lit two candles—one for Kruppe, one for Roche—then went out and blew the last of Big Sal’s money on a flamenco dress, by way of celebration.

  They took the train all the way along the coast to Garavan, a little town within cycling distance of the Italian border. Cut off from the sea by the railway, its inhabitants had dug tunnels under the tracks to reach the beaches. Because who can get by without the sea slopping twice daily into their lives and washing out their mistakes?

  Exe and Why received a telegram—had to deliver it to themselves—telling them where to find their bikes. They found them right enough, in rue Méjeunet; but having already been issued with new bikes, they sold the old ones and bought a sack of bones from the local slaughterhouse with the proceeds. To keep Beowulf happy.

  Garavan opened its arms to the Baron family. Their suitcases (and their names) gave them respectability. All three were hardworking, cheerful, and good neighbors in times of sorrow. These things are all a town really notices, though if Garavan had looked closer, it might have seen a happiness too large for corsets to contain.

  Achille went back to the ships and endeared himself to a series of captains, using those gifts that had made him the best ship’s steward in the merchant fleet: tenderness, invisibility, and superb scrambled eggs. The men he sailed with grew fond of his little eccentricities. He was a good man, and they appreciated him for that—though behind his back, they might sometimes refer to him affectionately as “Baronette.”

  Chère petite Yvette,

  We docked in Bois-sous-Clochet yesterday and I took the opportunity to make my inquiries at the hotel above the harbor. It would seem the captain’s house stands empty and belongs to the court now. Unable to seize the man, they seized on the house instead. Rumor has it that Gilbert Roux took work with a South American outfit based in Santiago, shipping guano from that birdlime capital of the world, Nauru. Madame Roux and her sister (with whose name I will not dirty good paper) sailed with him. I have little time for the South Americanos. Many of the captains sail without stewards, taking their wives and families instead—an evil perversion of the natural order of things, to my mind. But if it means that Pepper’s aunty must regularly visit the Kingdom of Seagull Droppings, I rejoice with all my heart. Nauru: the sky above, the sh—below. I have been there, and it is as close a place to Hell as the world possesses.

  Tell the boy as much of this as you see fit.

  Your devoted friend,

  Achille

  P.S. Excuse pencil. I have mislaid my pen.

  In later life, Pepper also traveled widely, and he earned far more than Achille Baron ever did. He became a steeplejack, working on the construction of skyscrapers in Paris and New York, sometimes so high up that cloud vapor condensed on his eyebrows. He had always liked heights, and the work gave him endless pleasure. The birds did not trouble
him—except at lunchtime when, sitting out on the girders, he ate his sandwiches with a line of teetering pigeons pestering him for crumbs.

  Some days he worked—death-defyingly—under a stampede of mare’s-tail clouds, others amid magisterial castles of creamy cumulus, the sunbeams slashing through like God’s saber…. But he never saw any angels or saints or fiery chariots swinging low. Of course not. As he well knew, the angels live quietly, keep themselves to themselves. Besides, they are tiny—barely visible. Oh, he had seen them now and then, but only cavorting about in the depths of his children’s eyes, like swimmers in a pool.

  Having a wonderful time.

  Pepper died in his sleep at the age of ninety-one. The saints had gone to such pains to keep him alive when he was young that they were taken by surprise, and snapped their fingers in vexation. Some of them said that if it had not been for the Hongriot-Pleuviez Amendment (particularly clause five), he would have made it to ninety-five.

  But then, people have a way of laying blame where blame really isn’t called for.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Let me thank, in England, Ron for liking it, Liz for taking it, Kate for checking it, Ailsa for sharing it, and John for the bits about boats.

  As to the crew in America, I must especially thank Renée for doing more with a pencil than even Pepper could have dreamed…and Catherine for being everlastingly fourteen.

  About the Author

  GERALDINE McCAUGHREAN is the Printz Award–winning author of THE WHITE DARKNESS. She has been honored with England’s most prestigious children’s book award, the Carnegie Medal, for A PACK OF LIES. She is the first-ever three-time winner of the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, most recently for NOT THE END OF THE WORLD. She also wrote PETER PAN IN SCARLET, the first official sequel to the treasured masterpiece PETER PAN, in 2006. Ms. McCaughrean lives in Berkshire, England. You can visit her online at www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk.