The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (5 page)

The phonograph in Music and Musical Instruments usually played the
Moonlight
Sonata endlessly to lure in passing customers. Today it played Felix Mayol singing “Amour de Trottin” in the pitch-dark basement bistro, and couples danced on the unlit dance floor to the crackle of dust on the wax cylinder and the static electricity in their hearts.

Suzanne simply wept. All her worst fears had been proved right. Nobody could possibly love a woman maimed by a slicing machine. Nobody had sent her a note.

“But we don’t
have
a cash tube in the deli!” Pepper tried to tell her. “If we had, you would have gotten a note, I’m sure!”

But Suzanne only sat, her damaged hand cradled against her chest, and rocked to and fro, weeping for her lost opportunities.

Then, suddenly, Bertrand arrived at the counter like a debt collector. He was wearing a flat, black leather cap that made him look fifty. In one hand he carried a pair of patent leather dance pumps he had “borrowed” from Shoes & Boots, in the other a stolen rose almost as crimson as his face. “There’s music in the downstairs,” he said belligerently.

“There is?” asked Suzanne, rising as though on the updraft of it.

“Yes.”

“Lovely.”

“So…”

“Lovely!”

And away they went, oblivious to Pepper, or the possibility of customers or even complete sentences.

In Butchery there was no cash tube either, but rumor had been carried there all the same, by compressed air. Rumor said that the butcher’s wife Fleur had received romantic advances from Henri in Shoes. Christophe the butcher went in search of Henri with a meat saw.

So there was no one in Butchery to take delivery of the game birds that arrived weekly from a local estate. Pepper ran over to do it, and the gamekeeper’s boy
emptied the sacks at his feet—an avalanche of shot pheasants, limp and ruffled, eyes staring, claws dangling. At the sight of them tumbling out onto the floor, Pepper felt pure horror. As ill omens go, what could be iller than twenty brace of glassy-eyed pheasants piling up around your ankles?

Management, scenting the fumes of passion, came sniffing across the shop floor. “Where is Christophe, the butcher?”

“Haunching a deer,” said Pepper, quick as a wink.

“Where is…er…the girl? With the hand.”

“Suzanne? Helping an old lady to carry things to the tram, sir,” said Pepper, feeling the lies condense into sweat on his forehead, and a taste in his mouth like soap. If his Final Hour really had come, and angels were even now parking their fiery chariots on the roof of the Marseillais Department Store, they ought not to find him busy telling lies. The spongy flesh and clicking claws of the dead pheasants pressed against his legs and feet.

“What’s that music I can hear?” said Management.

“A customer wanted a demonstration of the phonograph, sir. There’s one too many pheasants, sir; would
you like it?” And wrapping up a bird in pristine white paper, Pepper gave it to Mr. Management to be rid of him. Pepper was left with feathers clinging to his cuffs—left, too, with the memory of the purple tongue poking through a little crossed beak, the warning in those pheasant eyes:
Run! Get away! You’ll end up like us! You think you’re all the colors of happiness—doing no harm to anyone—then suddenly one day…

Bang!
Something struck Pepper on the back. Pellets of fear and guilt lodged throughout his body.

“You took my girl’s job,” snarled Bertrand from Leather Goods, thumping Pepper again with his black leather cap. “Suzie says you took her job while she was at the hospital. That right?”

“I suppose….”

“So now you’re going to give it up, ain’t you!”

Suzanne loitered in the background, holding a nose-gay of violets, biting her lip but smiling despite herself. She had not asked Bertrand to take up her cause—had only mentioned it in passing. But she could not help delighting in Bertrand—so manly, so fierce!—ousting her usurper like some knight-errant in patent leather shoes.

Henri from Shoes & Boots sped by, protesting his innocence, pursued by Christophe and his meat saw.

“You going or what?” asked Bertrand, and slapped Pepper with his cap again.

“Yes, but first I have to explain to Christophe!”

“I’ll do that!” cheeped Suzanne, feet still dancing to the music inside her head. She ran and fetched Pepper’s jacket from the apron hook. It seemed the best way to save his life, and she had nothing personal against Pepper himself. “Explain what?”

“About his wife and Henri. It isn’t true! It was me! I didn’t know she was married!”

The butcher, just then doubling back to cut Henri off at Confectionery, heard Pepper and blundered to a halt, misunderstanding—“You wrote love letters to my wife?”—then simply hurled the saw at Pepper where he stood mired in a swamp of dead pheasants.

Feathers, tendons, and claws; feathers, beaks, and eyes: They filled Pepper’s vision as he dived out of the path of the saw, sliding on his face across the checkered floor. Christophe picked him up by the shoulders of his jacket, dragged him to the great silver meat slicer—“You been cozying up to my Fleur?”—and set
its circular guillotine blade spinning. Pepper’s flailing hands groped for the carving knife but found only the bowl of olive stones he had gouged out of the olives that morning, tipping them over, scattering the floor of the delicatessen with pits and broken china. Christophe lost his footing.

“Excuse me!” called Madame Froissart’s frail, piping voice from beyond the counter. “I say, excuse me! I’ve come for my nuts.”

And Pepper fled, scrabbling for purchase with the toes of his boots, skidding on the fruits of his own kindness, fleeing through the revolving doors, out onto the sunny street. A tram was passing, and he pitched himself at it and clung to its coachwork, face pressed to the painted metal as to the scalding funnel of
L’Ombrage
.

The tram carried him past a war memorial to the Crimean dead, topped by a bronze angel, wings outspread. Pepper looked up at the angel now with rage and resentment. Every day for a month, he had worked with sharp blades, wires, and guillotines—expressly allowing the saints a fair chance to spill his blood. Was it quite necessary, then, for the angels to employ Bertrand from Leather Goods and a jealous butcher
as assassins? Christophe, perhaps—but
Bertrand
? In his stupid leather cap? If the saints wanted to humiliate Pepper as well as assassinate him, they would have to try harder and run faster next time.

Outside the town hall, the tram turned left, and Pepper was jolted free of his handholds, tumbling into the street. He half expected the fire brigade to be there to hose him down. But there was no demonstration today, no sign of civil discontent—only a single rain-smeared placard propped up against a horse trough. It said:

D
OWN WITH THE
H
ONGRIOT
-P
LEUVIEZ
A
MENDMENT
(C
LAUSE
5)!

Pepper caught the coastal train to Abaron. Its wheels—huge and remorseless as a dozen meat slicers—sliced the journey into wafer-thin petals of time that fell away into the dust, never to be recovered. Taking off his jacket in the hot carriage, he found a ragged tear in the sleeve—so either the saw or the meat slicer had caught him, after all. There was a matching bruise on his arm. It was time to change lives again; time to slice Pepper Salami so wafer thin that the light would shine through—time to slice him invisible.

S
omeone’s dead,” said Pepper, and immediately felt better.

“Fill in the form,” said the woman behind the counter of the
Étoile Sud
newspaper offices.

And so Pepper announced his own death, not so much for the benefit of any taxicab angels browsing through the paper, or even his aunt Mireille, but more to convince himself that
le pauvre
was indeed dead to the world. He was no longer Paul Roux and never would be again.
Maybe you’ll leave me alone now,
he found himself thinking.

The woman behind the counter saw him struggling to fit all his words onto the form. “That’ll cost you,” she said. “Words don’t come cheap.”

“

“What about the free press?” asked Pepper, who had heard of it and thought it meant you didn’t have to pay.

“Nothing’s free in this life. Put your head out the window and shout—there’s free speech. Us you pay for,” said the woman, snatching back the form and crumpling it up. “In here it costs two francs a line.” She had a face like a dishcloth being wrung out. Pepper thought she must spend too much time reading about tragedies in the newspaper.

When he grasped that it cost money to put a death notice in the newspaper, he asked for another form and rewrote his entry in as few words as possible, paying with one of the notes rolled up in his pocket.

ROUX, Paul
formerly of
Bois-sous-Clochet
Drowned at sea 11 July.
Sadly missed.
“The sea shall
give up her dead”

“Gone to Glory
’s cheaper,” said the woman, so he changed the quote, though it seemed a terrible lie. He
crossed through
Sadly missed
as well. That probably wasn’t true either. Besides, he still had to pay for the announcement about Roche.

Presumably the shipping company would no longer be sending Roche’s wages to his widow, knowing full well the ship was on the ocean bed. So there was no longer any point in pretending he was alive. Roche’s wife
needed
to know she was a widow, and he had not plucked up the courage to notify her. Was it kind to let her read about her husband’s death in the paper? Well that depended on what she read, didn’t it?

Pepper could not say that Roche had gone down with the ship, because then she would start having the same dreams as Pepper: terrible, terrible dreams…. No, Claude Roche deceased must be all the things Claude Roche alive could have been if he had tried harder (and if he hadn’t been such a natural-born pig).

“Someone else died,” he said, and the woman pursed her lips but gave him a third form to fill in.

He wrote of the death of one Claude Roche of Aigues Mortes, a seaman who, having newly escaped a shipwreck, heroically sacrificed his life while on a visit to the Marseille zoo. Seeing a child fall into the lion pit, he had unhesitatingly thrown himself in too, as an
alternative meal for the lions. Lifting the child onto his shoulders, he had been able to pass her into the arms of her mother before the lions attacked. Pepper even afforded Roche a “Sadly missed” as well as a “Gone to Glory.” The notice cost a small fortune.

A door opened behind the woman, and noise burst through from the print rooms. Pepper glimpsed the presses—giant cylinders, windmill paddles wafting huge sheets of newsprint. A man entered in shirtsleeves and a beret; the woman’s eager smile and fluttering hands said that here was the editor.

The editor of
L’Étoile Sud
was no good at listening or at looking people in the face, but he gobbled up the written word wherever he found it. He had clearly also heard that words cost money, because he was constantly in search of them. He sipped and sucked them up—off tickets, public notices, other shop signs, match-boxes, food packaging, and calendars. After glancing through the day’s mail, he let his eyes stray along the counter, reading advertisements and announcement forms:

“…three cob mares sound in wind and limb…”

“…to Godet-Dupont a son 5 pounds…”

“…Lebec-Belot at the Church of the Bleeding Heart…”

“Limoges, Albert, suddenly at home, aged 89. Gone to Glory.”

Unsatisfied, his eyes came to rest on the death notice Pepper had just filled in. Snatching it up, he turned the form this way and that to read the extra words written up the sides for lack of space:…
placing himself between the ravening beasts and the child…

“Did we cover this? I don’t remember us covering this? Who posted this? A relation? Local? Did we cover this story?”

Pepper was all set to creep away, but the woman pointed him out as the culprit.

“What are you? A relation?” demanded the editor.

“No,” said Pepper.

“There’s a story here, isn’t there? A good story?”

“Oh yes, sir, probably,” said Pepper, who hated to disappoint.

“How come you’re posting the death, then?” The questions were sharp and aggressive, like a hand pushing him in the chest. Pepper retreated, starting to panic. What if an
Étoile
journalist went to the Marseille zoo
and asked about the man in the lion pit? Pepper was not even sure Marseille
had
a zoo.

The editor picked up a telephone and wound a handle beside it. “Who’s free to do a story in Marseille?”

“I am!” blurted Pepper, and then, when the editor paid no attention: “I’ll write it!”

“You?” said the editor, absently browsing through the telephone bill and an invoice for staples.

“Why wouldn’t I?” said Pepper. He was starting to get the journalistic hang of this talking in questions.

“You’re a journalist?”

“Would I offer if I weren’t?”

“What’ve you done before?”

“What haven’t I?” But that came out sounding cocky, so Pepper quickly added, “You remember that Hongriot-Pleuviez Amendment? A scandal…particularly clause five.”

The editor coughed and ran a finger around the collar of his shirt. Studiously he read a dropped shopping list and bus ticket lying on the floor. “You covered that story?”

“Didn’t you?” said Pepper.

“Freelance?”

“Yes and no,” said Pepper, who had no idea what it
meant but liked the sound of the
lance
.

“Who do you work for right now?” said the editor, reading the maker’s label inside Pepper’s jacket.

“For you, sir, don’t I?” said Pepper. And found that he did.

Well, people see what they look for, don’t they? And people who never look at their fellow men get what they deserve. Thus Pepper stepped into
L’Étoile Sud
, a silo of words, hoping the words would close over him like grain and bury him from sight.

They found him a desk and asked him to fill seventy-five column inches each week with newsworthy stories. The other journalists peered toward him through dense palls of cigarette smoke, screwing shut their eyes. The paper was losing money: Maybe the editor was bringing in younger, cheaper men, to save on wages.

Pepper had no idea how to fill seventy-five column inches. He only knew that he did not want
his
stories to be as depressing as all the ones he had read by candlelight, in bed, in the Marseillais Department Store. First he wrote up the story of Claude Roche, making it even more racy and heroic than before, throwing in a
dying wish for good measure:
Roche was heard to shout, before the lions attacked, “Tell my wife I love her!”

And after that, he wrote the kind of stories he would himself have liked to read, curled up under the sheepskin rug in the Soft Furnishings department. Take Henri Leclerc, who won nine thousand francs in the lottery and so was able to marry his childhood sweetheart:

“Where’s Quombier?” called the typesetter from the door of the setting room. “I never heard of it.”

“Eight houses, two barns, and a water mill,” replied Pepper at once, because, in his head (if not in person), he had been to Quombier and interviewed Paul Blois and his ancient mother and joyful fiancée. He had shared in their happiness, even though,
strictly speaking
, these people did not exist.

He made them up. Every last one of them. He invented their names and their ages—even sometimes their villages. He invented their tremendous good luck or selfless bravery, their goodness, and their marvelous adventures. Like little flares they were lit one by one, to brighten up the lives of
L’Étoile
’s readers and to
make them feel that perhaps, after all, the world was not as bleak and lonely and angry and scary and hard as they feared.

As he feared.

Like the cash canisters in the Marseillais Department Store, Pepper fired his stories off into space and saw them—miraculously!—appear in print between the advertisements for hair oil and chest rub, between accounts of war atrocities and reports of murder trials
and escaped convicts roaming the countryside. The chief copy editor put them into better French (because copy editors cannot read anything without changing it), so Pepper was able to read them afresh when they were printed, and feel proud—to share in the happiness of his invented characters all over again. Pepper planted his stories around like little night-lights to keep nightmares away. Because, he reasoned, the readers almost certainly suffered nightmares.

Just like his.

Pepper dreamed of a giant squid embracing
L’Ombrage.
He dreamed of Roche beckoning, beckoning, calling out to him, through bloodied lips and two thousand fathoms of water:
Throw down a line! Pull me back up!
He dreamed of being driven in a tumbrel toward a guillotine like a giant meat slicer; of wading waist deep among soft, decaying pheasants toward a hangman’s gallows. At the foot of the gallows steps stood his father, holding a noose and a placard, protesting about his son’s crimes. At his shoulder stood Aunt Mireille, looking at her pocket watch, its ticking so loud that it drowned out Pepper’s excuses. He dreamed that the fire brigade was hosing him down
with ink, indelible ink, and that ink-black rooks, as thickly strewn as the pheasants, were stuffing up the sky, blocking out the sun. Time and again they would swoop down and slash at his face, trying to pull it away, trying to see who he was under the mask….

“This piece about the creature that’s been discovered, Papier…,” said the editor.

“With the rainbow fur, sir?”

“With the rainbow fur. And a taste for…what was it again?”

“Crows, sir.”

“Crows, yes.”

“And candles.”

“And candles.”

“And household rubbish, sir.”

The editor’s insatiable eyes trailed over Pepper’s latest article. “Do you have any pictures?”

“No pictures—no, sir.”

“Pictures would help, Papier. A photograph.”

“I could describe it to the designer man and he could sketch one, sir.”