The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (12 page)

Neighbors gathered at the top of the stairs, intrigued. Yvette came out and threw a saucepan down the stairwell, and the attackers decided to leave. Pausing to retie his shoelaces, one leaned close to Pepper’s ear. “Don’t play poker if you can’t afford to lose,” he remarked, and parked his chewing gum on Pepper’s forehead.

They had seen the naval cap, heard the right name, seen the person they wanted to see: Pepper could not blame them for beating him up. He had set out to fill the place of Claude Roche, and from what he knew, Roche probably deserved it.

“So how much did he…How much did I…How much do we owe? In debts,” he asked Yvette as she dabbed at his face with a washcloth.

And the woman laughed—a hollow, horrible laugh. Her arms spread wide, limp at the twig-thin wrists, like broken wings. She looked for a moment like Roche awash in the hold of
L’Ombrage
. She said nothing, but that gesture said it all. Gambling debts, fines, rent, loans: Roche had sunk her a thousand fathoms deep in debts—then left her to drown alone beneath them.

That night Pepper dreamed that Roche was in Heaven, wearing the standard-issue wings and that malevolent grimace of his. He swooped down, brass bucket hooks for claws, his white gown glowing red with the reflection of fire. “Why are you in Heaven?” Pepper asked, and Roche replied, “’Cause you took my place in Hell, Skeleton Man.”

Pepper reviewed what he knew about earning money quickly and easily.

What would his father have done? Sunk a ship.

What would Roche have done? Stolen something, pawned something, sold something that did not belong to him. No! No, Roche would have made a bet and then made sure of winning it.

So Pepper insured his life:
L’Ombrage
had taught him all about insurance. There were premiums to pay, of course, but within days he had the necessary francs. After all, life had taught him a thing or two.

What had his time in Jacques’s billboard shack taught him? That elephants smoke Nile cigarette papers, and that real men join the Foreign Legion.

“W
hat’s your name?”

“Roche, sir,” said Pepper.

The sergeant scowled. He had known a man called Roche once, in Nantes. “Knew
of
him, leastways. Claude Roche. Killed a friend of mine. First name?”

“Legion,” said Pepper wisely.

The sergeant put down his pen. “Are you trying to be funny?”

“‘My name is Legion: for we are many,’” said Pepper.

“What?”

“It’s from the Bible.”

“It’s from the Bible,
sir
!”

“It’s from the Bible, sir!” But Sergeant Fléau, who (it
was said) could bayonet men with his insults, was at a loss for words. As a small boy he had learned, from the back of his mother’s hand, never to hit anyone with the Bible. He wrote out a form for Legion Roche—did not even quibble when the boy refused to give his home address: Recruits commonly did.

What he saw when he looked at Pepper’s earnest little fourteen-year-old face was anyone’s guess. But he needed his quota. Operations in the Sahara were going badly. For every yellow telegram sent home after a death, a replacement soldier had to be recruited and shipped out to Africa. What the sergeant needed was names on forms. Besides, the boy could shoot straight—which was more than any of the others could: the immigrant builder, the laborer without identification papers, the unlicensed smelter, the Gypsy salt shoveler.

While Pepper signed the forms, all these others were having second thoughts. The night before, up at Le Petit Caporal bar, over the hairdresser’s shop Cheval Cheveux in the rue de la Ravette, it had seemed like a good idea. If they could stick it for two years, they would earn French citizenship. After a few free drinks, they had all been feeling patriotically French. As
patriotic as skunks, to be honest. Now that they had sobered up, the lure of adventure had waned.

Arriving at the recruitment office next day, seeing Pepper sitting in the recruiting line, each in turn had laughed. But when the boy proved to shoot better than they did, they had decided he might bring them luck. Little Legion could be their mascot. Being religious—well, he could quote from the Bible, couldn’t he?—made Legion even luckier, just as a holy medal is luckier than a rabbit’s foot.

From Pepper’s point of view, the Foreign Legion was ideal. Men who enlisted were never, ever asked about their backgrounds, where they lived, or why they wanted to join up. Criminals and illegal immigrants, bigamists and debtors joined the Foreign Legion to lose their pasts. Quite often they lost their lives, too, but what with the insurance policy and his overdue appointment with death, that suited Pepper very well.

Twenty or so recruits turned up and were enlisted. To assess their merits as soldiers, and to pass the time while they waited for the next naval transport ship, Sergeant Fléau took them all out onto the salt flats. The weather obliged with African heat and a plague
of sand flies. He made them run a mile, rifles held over their heads. He had them down on hands and knees, polishing one another’s boots. He had them standing to attention in the full sun until one by one they fainted. And all the time he promised worse to come in Africa. Mustafa, Norbert, Albert, and Nadir cursed and howled and looked to Pepper to make himself useful and die before they did, so that Fléau would have to relent. But Pepper did not weaken. Aunt Mireille (when Mother wasn’t looking) had frequently subjected Pepper to just this kind of pastime, telling him, “Better to suffer in this life than the next.” He was an old hand at torment. No, Pepper endured the sergeant’s games with patience and goodwill.

He was looking ahead to Africa. He was looking, in fact, even farther ahead than that—to the life insurance check Yvette would receive when he died in Africa. Pepper was looking ahead as far as Hell itself, and the fact that he would have to go there unless he could pay off Roche’s debts—his sins and his IOUs—before the saints and angels caught up with him. True, he was in pain a lot of the time and frequently wished he were dead. But at night his dreams had become so
fearful that he no longer dared to sleep. The sergeant seemed soothing by comparison: His threats did not disturb Pepper. It was simply a shame the sergeant felt the need to shout.

“What I don’t understand is why he doesn’t just ask nicely,” Pepper would say as they bedded down among the thistles. And then Mustafa, Norbert, Albert, and Nadir would stop cursing Fate and roll around laughing instead.

Things didn’t begin to go wrong for Pepper until they got on to bayonet practice. The sergeant set up a dummy stuffed with straw, and the new recruits were encouraged to charge it, bayonets fixed, and to stab it enthusiastically with a ripping motion. It was not a very realistic dummy; it didn’t even have a head. But there was something reproachful in the way it bled straw from its guts after Pepper bayoneted it. For the first time, a nagging doubt edged into Pepper’s head. His plan to be a telegram boy had almost failed for want of a map; now he was starting to think that, in joining the Foreign Legion, he had overlooked a major snag.

He had done well with a handgun, because the target had been an inanimate object. At home he had shot
empty rum bottles off gateposts with his father’s pistol. But not rabbits or deer. Not even the rooks. Never anything living. “Will we have to…I mean…I suppose in Africa….” But even he could see that the question was too stupid to ask, and he stopped short of asking it.

“Enough of the baby games!” bellowed the sergeant. “Your enemy don’t sit around waiting for yuh! Moving targets!” And he actually smacked his lips at the prospect of his idiot recruits’ failing miserably to hit a moving target. A picture formed in Pepper’s head of Claude Roche coming for him, coming at him, running at full tilt. His gun was almost a comfort.

But the moving target Sergeant Fléau had in mind was not. It was absolutely not.

A troupe of wild white horses had just materialized out of the sun’s glare: clouds forming over a mountain-side, spray breaking over rocks. The recruits fumbled halfheartedly at their cartridge belts.

“Head or heart. That’s the only thing that’ll bring ’em down,” said the sergeant. “Aim at the head or heart.”

The horses looked. The recruits looked back. Not a rifle was raised.

“They’re not moving, sir,” said Norbert.

“They will when you start shooting.”

“They’re protected, sir,” said Pepper.

“So’s the Empire, lad,” said the sergeant. “And we’re the poor sods who have to protect it. So make the first shot count, ’cause you won’t get a second chance where you’re going.”

“Do they come at you on horses in Africa, sir?” asked Albert.

“Are you trying to be clever, soldier?”

Go!
thought Pepper.
Run!
He thought it so hard that the thought solidified in his brain, hard and round as a bullet.
Go!
he thought, words exploding in his head, aiming the thought at head and heart of the horses. His tongue curled into the shape of a trigger.
GO!

Quite suddenly, the white horses turned and melted out of sight. The legionnaires breathed out as one. The sergeant swore.

Then he marched them, double-time, through the heat of noon, to the shore of a salt étang. The lake was aswarm with flamingos.

“When I stir ’em up, you fetch ’em down,” said the sergeant. “I want one dead for each and every one of
you, or you’ll be sorry your mothers ever bore you. In fact, you’ll be sorry your grandmothers ever met your grandfathers.” And away he went, muttering the kind of threats he thought might encourage them.

“At least there are plenty of them,” said Albert, taking out his teeth and putting them in his shirt pocket: The rifles did kick.

Already some of the others were taking aim, wanting to be ready as soon as the sergeant scared the birds into the air. Horses had felt wrong—they had balked at horses. But looked at the right way, these were birds, just birds. And there were so many that it would be hard to fire and not hit at least one of them, despite the glare.

The whole scene wavered in the heat, unreal, insubstantial. Mirages filled the landscape with pools of nonexistent water. Groups of flamingos glided in various directions, to and fro, currents within currents, hundreds within thousands, as beautiful as any sunset.

Thou shalt not kill.
Pepper wondered how he had ever overlooked such a big drawback. Hell-bent on getting killed, he had overlooked the other aspect of life in the Legion: You had to kill people. In Africa it would be people, not horses or flamingos. Pepper reached an
important conclusion. He was not a man after all. He could no more shoot someone than fly.

Sergeant Fléau, keeping well clear of the firing line, raised his pistol. The recruits tried to make sense of their safety catches. Over the horizon, where thick haze swallowed the nearby highway, a small dot appeared—a noise no louder than a fly buzzing. The shape grew to the size of a lump of sugar, a die. The sun flashed on a car’s windshield. Irritably, Fléau lowered his gun. Now he would have to wait for the car to pass. Strictly speaking, it was probably not legal to use flamingos for target practice.

In the heat-warped landscape, the vehicle appeared to float high off the road—to approach through midair, humming. Spellbound, the recruits watched as it took on more solid shape: shining bumper, smiling grille. When it was on a level with them, it turned off the road and came bumping over the grass, caked in dust. The driver’s door opened a crack as he cruised past the line of recruits.

“Taxi for Roux?”

Pepper fell to his knees. The chariot had finally swung low to carry him away, and just in time to prevent him going to Africa and killing people.
Unhesitatingly he got in.

The sergeant was stretched up to his full height now, like a meerkat, trying to see, through the distorting haze, what was happening back among his recruits, why the car had stopped, who was undermining his authority. As the taxi pulled away, he started to run back. The car backfired.

The flamingos on the lake rose up—a volcanic upheaval of red and pink. Most of the trainees were staring after the taxi, slack jawed, but a few, already scared into blind obedience, heard the bang and opened up on the flamingos as the birds flew overhead showering down water drops and guano.

One bird landed dead on the roof of the taxi, wedged on the roof rack, its long, rosy neck snaking limply down behind, so its beak tap-tapped and its feathery cheek smeared to and fro across the rear window. Pepper put his arms over his head, drew his knees up to his chest, and slid into the gap between front and back seats. As the car jolted its way back to the highway, the driver’s seat back pounded him in the face like a debt collector.

It was not a long ride to Heaven, and most of it was on the flat. When the engine died, and Pepper finally plucked up courage to look up, the driver—who must have been a North African, cocooned entirely inside a black hooded kaftan—was hunched over the steering wheel. “Here you is,” he wheezed.

It was rue Méjeunet, and at the top of the cracked, concrete stairs Yvette Roche was waiting with a meal of scrambled eggs topped with grated cheese. The apartment had bizarrely broken out in Christmas, because Yvette had found herself work assembling tree decorations: fifteen centimes apiece. Baubles, stars, and fairies. Angels. After supper, they sat opposite each other, slotting the wings onto angels.

“Did you send the taxi?” he asked.

“Taxi?” she said.

They should have talked more. Yvette, at thirty-five, had a wider general knowledge than Pepper. For instance, she could have told him that deserting from the Foreign Legion is punishable by firing squad.

Then again, if he had known, Pepper would only have worried. And life was too short for worry. Pepper’s life, anyway.

Y
ou could say Beowulf the dog was to blame. But maybe it was the singer who started it.

Chantal, the would-be opera singer, threw a brick through the window of the telegraph office. “That telegraph boy lied!” she warbled, and threw another brick.

Those few simple words—
the telegraph boy lied
—were enough for the telegraph supervisor to invite her in, sit her on a stool in the front office, and hear her out: how the telegraph boy had told her she had been rejected by the Paris Conservatoire only because the maestro was in love with her. His lie had cost her a trip to Paris and humiliation at the hands of an aging maestro, who had thrown her out on her ear.

“So he must have invented the message and not fished it out of the canal at all!” Chantal concluded.

The supervisor was appalled. He did not care much for opera, but, to him, tampering with the official mail was high treason. He pointed to Exe and Why, but Chantal said that neither was the boy who had lied to her. So it had to be Zee.

Luckily, the supervisor had no memory for names. “Zee.
Zee!
” he yelled, snapping his fingers at Exe and Why. “What was his real name?”

Exe and Why looked at Chantal and the bricks on the floor. They recalled their roommate, the various ways he had turned bad news into good. Exe shrugged. Why shook his head. They could not remember Zee’s real name, they said. Chantal went away unsatisfied. Justice was not done.

So it
was
Beowulf’s fault, really.

Next day, Why was cycling past the shop of Gaspar the grocer when he thought of trash cans. Life in the loft apartment had come to revolve around Beowulf the dog. He and Exe had discovered just how deeply a hound can sink its teeth into a boy’s affections. They adored the beast—made it their life’s work to put food in Beowulf’s
ever-empty stomach. So, seeing Gaspar’s trash cans, Why stopped to look and found, to his delight, a ham bone carved down to its gristle, three stale baguettes, some slimy brisket, and a broken jar of morello cherries. He was just loading these into a vegetable crate when Gaspar grabbed him from behind and propelled him into the outhouse, jamming the door shut.

“Got you! Got you! Got you!” he bawled childishly through the rotten wood door. The next time Why heard voices, Gaspar was excitedly telling a police officer, “I knew it was him straight off—by the hat! He worked for me a while back—stole from me!”

Why, who had spent an hour eating morello cherries and watching maggots crawl over a rank hambone, was in no mood to be arrested for something he had not done. Gaspar, who never looked at faces, thought Why was the boy who had robbed him, but Why was having none of it. “You mean Zee, that’s who you mean. His name’s Konstantin Kruppe, if you want to know, and he
used
to do telegrams, but he
doesn’t now
!” And Why thrust his armband in the grocer’s face.

By the time they all got to the police station, the crime had shrunk, rather. On paper, the theft of five
coconut-cream cakes did not look like a hanging offense. But the name
Konstantin Kruppe
was faintly familiar to the desk sergeant. His eye drifted to the wall of peeling wanted posters.

WANTED

KONSTANTIN KRUPPE

(aged 19 years)

Escaped felon.

REWARD PAYABLE
for information leading to recapture.

Such notices are never updated: They accumulate. Prisoners are caught, join the Foreign Legion, escape the country—maybe even die in hospital beds in some nearby town. But the misleading wanted notice stays on the police station wall for years after.

“This Kruppe character—he’s a menace, you know,” he told Why. “Escaped from a chain gang. String of convictions. You know him by sight. If any of you telegram boys spot him in the street—”

“Telegraph
operatives
,” said Why, pointing to his armband.

“There’s a reward,” said the sergeant.

And there it was. A month before, chain gang or no chain gang, “pepper” or no “pepper,” they would not have delivered up their ex-friend to the law for love or hard cash. But Beowulf cost a fortune to feed. They had responsibilities. So the idea of a reward had them cycling the streets in the early morning and after work at night, scouring those parts of the city where a criminal on the run might turn up. They studied every face they passed on the pavement, hoping for a glimpse of Konstantin Kruppe. They wanted that reward. If they found him, it would be the end of the line for Zee.

Meanwhile, Pepper and Yvette Roche filled their apartment so full of Christmas decorations that children from up and down the rue Méjeunet came to see. Pepper (who liked to make people happy) drew the curtains shut, lit candles, and called it a “magic grotto.” He told the children stories—first the ones he remembered from his father’s library but then ones of his own inventing. They tasted rather soapy—stories are only lies with a plot, after all—but he could not see the harm. He told them of sea monsters and pirate treasure, of rainbow-colored lemurs who stole from
trash cans, and of fiery flying chariots—adventures so exciting that the little girls squealed and shivered and chewed one anothers’ braids.

Unfortunately, these happy children were not a paying audience, and all the Christmas baubles, when they were finally packed and delivered, paid just 237 francs.

“Maybe Big Sal will let us pay in installments,” said Yvette doubtfully.

“But this money’s for the rent!” Pepper was shocked. He was sure there were more important debts to pay off before Roche’s gambling debts.

“If we don’t pay the rent, the landlord will only send in the bailiffs,” said Yvette. “If we don’t pay Big Sal, he’ll send those men again to beat in your head. Anyway….” She seemed to be of two minds about whether to go on. “Anyway, I paid the rent already. That’s to say, a friend of mine did. Paid the rent.”

Pepper was even more astonished. Yvette had changed, true, since her dead husband’s homecoming: Her skin was clearer, her hair shiny and combed. Her lips no longer flaked (except when she was eating croissants, like now), and she was not so thin. She even smiled sometimes—even spoke and went outdoors. But he had never realized she had
friends
. Suddenly he remembered all
those romances in his father’s library. “Oh!” he exclaimed delightedly. “Do you have a lover, then?”

The croissant exploded. Peas skittered across the table. Yvette coughed. The cough became a laugh—a high, bright, sunny, ringing laugh the like of which Pepper had never heard before. Not even at home in Bois-sous-Clochet. “And me a married woman?
La!
” she said, sweeping peas and crumbs into a pile with the sides of both hands, trying to make a serious face.

Pepper was disappointed. He knew he was ignorant for fourteen—being kept home from school and everything—but a lover would have been a big help to Yvette. After Pepper was dead.

He put on the cap and shirt that made him feel most like Claude Roche and pocketed the 237 francs. “I’ll take this to Big Sal now. In case I don’t come back, I think you ought to know: I have life insurance.” Saying it made him feel older, less of a green boy.

After he had gone, Yvette searched his belongings again and found the life insurance. She did not laugh at finding it. In fact, for quite a long time she stood at the window and cried.

Big Sal ran a gambling den in a cellar under the Cheval Cheveux hairdressers in the rue de la Ravette. He sat at the bar now, underneath the coil of the cellar steps, beside his moll, a blonde who was busy opening new packs of playing cards with her long red fingernails. Big Sal was unimpressed by the boy in the sailor’s cap and overlarge shirt.

“Where’s Roche?” he said.

“I’m Roche,” said Pepper, and laid the money down on the mirror-tiled bar.

“Didn’t know he had a son.”

“He doesn’t. I’m Claude Roche.”

“Well, you’ve got noive. Coming here. Seeing what you done to my boys.”

The protester in Pepper protested: “What? Did I graze their shoes with my face?”

“And paying me back with dough you took off my own collectors? Funny man, ain’t yuh!”

“
I
took—?”

It was Little America. Everyone at Big Sal’s spoke with an American accent—spoke French, but with an American accent. Pepper, who had never met an American, thought they must have their mouths full of food.

Big Sal’s bartender rounded the end of the bar, making a noise with his cocktail shaker like an angry rattlesnake. “Yuh flattened ’em, that’s what yuh did. Yuh flattened ’em. With a baby carriage.”

The lights overhead flickered ominously.

Pepper could not imagine who had flattened Big Sal’s thugs. But he picked up his envelope off the bar again: He would sooner pay the next month’s rent with his hard-earned francs; the landlord at least swore in a proper French accent. The envelope was spattered with water drops—perhaps the cocktail shaker was leaking.

Big Sal snapped his fingers. The bouncer climbed the stairs to lock the street door. The light socket fizzed.

“What’s he doing here, Sal baby?” asked Sal’s moll. She was wearing sunglasses, which meant she could not see the cards or very much of what was occurring.

The bouncer was in a tussle with a newcomer at the door—“Let me in, you fool!”—and the resident stripper pushed past him, muffled up (despite the heat) in a full-length fur coat. “What’s going on?”

“Just getting set to kill someone,” said the bartender.

Pepper looked upward, thinking there could be no birds of ill omen in a basement. But there it was,
sure enough: a raven-shaped stain spreading darkly across the ceiling. Big Sal snatched the envelope out of Pepper’s hand and looked inside.

“Well, look at that. The guy’s here to gamble! Right? Can’t stay away! Am I right?”

“Addict,” said Sal’s moll, chewing. “Should I deal the cards, Sal honey?”

“I only know pairs,” said Pepper, not liking the way things were going. He fixed his thoughts on the life insurance and determined to see things through to the bitterest of ends. On the whole he would have preferred to be assassinated by angels. At least they operated above ground and probably spoke French without American accents.

Big Sal was amused, intrigued, possibly even drunk. He pushed a pack of cards into Pepper’s hand and watched him deal them facedown on the bar. “I don’t know this one,” said Sal’s moll. “How come he don’t play poker, this guy?”

“There’s another good reason to kill him,” said the bouncer.

“How d’you play it?” asked the bartender.

“K.K.! It’s little K.K., isn’t it!” exclaimed Mièle
Rosette, slipping out of her fur coat and knocking off Pepper’s cap so as to ruffle his hair. “What’s my little K.K. doing here, Sal?”

“You know this guy?”

“Sure! He’s a telegram boy! Konstance Krunch or some mouthful the like of that.”

“Says he’s Claude Roche.”

“That pig? No way. He’s long gone.”

The staff of Big Sal’s were slow to pick up the rules of pairs, they being more used to blackjack and poker. But soon they were all gathered around the bar—waiters, a bouncer, a pianist, a moll, and the cloakroom girl—picking out two cards at a time, cursing or congratulating themselves.

“Tell you what,” said Big Sal, flapping Pepper’s money. “I’ll just call this a fine for what you did to my boys.”

Clouds of red mustered behind Pepper’s eyes. “I didn’t do a thing to your ‘boys.’ Yvette and I earned that making Christmas decorations!”

“Ah! Sweet!” mewed Sal’s moll sentimentally. “I love Christmas!”

“I heard Claude Roche was dead,” said Mièle Rosette loudly and clearly.

“I got a pair!” said the bartender.

“He hit my boys with a baby carriage,” said Sal, slapping down his palm in the middle of the bar, scattering the cards. “Kill him anyway.”

Then the lights went out.

Water began to gush down through the ceiling roses, along the wires and onto the bulbs, causing short-circuiting. In the darkness, the sound of rushing water was terrifying. Bottles of liquor and the glass lights behind the bar fell with a crash. The playing cards washed off the bar. Pepper felt something brush against him, slick as a wet otter, as Mièle swept her coat up out of the wet. “Get out of here, kid. You got friends waiting,” she said in an undertone so soft, he thought he had imagined it.

Pepper felt his way toward the stairs as more and more stalactites of water streamed down the wiring, cold and startling in the dark. So close to the sea, it was easy to imagine that the tide had somehow overreached itself, was pouring into the cellar, and would quickly fill it to the brim. So the others too were making for the only exit, competing for use of the stairs that wound up and over the bar, toward the street door. So
Pepper climbed up the
outside
of the banister.

Not for nothing did Big Sal hold sway over the gambling underworld of Aigues Mortes. He knew it was not the sea pouring into his swanky premises. “I’ll kill those bastards upstairs!” he raged, groping his way instead toward the bar takings and the jacket with his wallet in it. A lump of plaster fell from the ceiling and caught him between the shoulder blades.

“I locked it! It’s locked! Just wait, will you!” said the bouncer, fumbling at the padlock, but someone jostled him in the dark, and he dropped the key. Water and lamplight were pouring now through the gaping hole in the ceiling: Street lighting was one thing the hair-dressing salon enjoyed that the basement nightclub didn’t. The bouncer barged against the door with one shoulder but bounced back, lost his balance, and fell down the stairs, dislodging the bartender and a flurry of curses. Leaning out from the banister as far as possible, Pepper felt around with one foot for the surface of the bar and lowered himself onto it. Big Sal, on hands and knees, was feeling his way up the stairs, crawling over his fallen staff members. When he reached street level, there was a bang and a flash as he fired a gun at
the padlock. Only then did he look back and see the shape of little Claude Roche, arms stretched upward, rising through the new hole in the ceiling. Big Sal fired again, but the bullet hit the wall mirror, which disintegrated. Shards of noise cut ribbons in everyone’s hearing.