The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (15 page)

“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 came 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….

“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: