The Death-Defying Pepper Roux

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “No. I don’t like him,” said Yvette Roche, tugging the cigarette out of his mouth and throwing it away before lapsing back into silence.

  He experimented with wearing Roche’s clothes, too, exchanging his own bleached, torn, and shabby jacket for cotton shirts that flapped around his small frame like slack sails around a mast. There was a white sailor’s hat, too, grimy with hair grease but jaunty.

  Of course, this did mean that when he went out, Yvette was able, for the first time, to go to the peg in the hall, take down the small, braidless naval jacket, and go through the pockets.

  She found the prayers, as creased as fallen lilac leaves. She found the letter “Captain Roux” had begun long before, in pencil, aboard L’Ombrage.

  Dear Madame Roche,

  I am very sorry in deed indeed to tell you the sad news, but your poor husbund husband Monsieur Roche is dead. I did not no know him very well, but I expect you did. I am sure he is happy with the saints.

  Your obediant obedient servent servant…

  She found several yellow pellets of wadded-up paper, devoted an hour to picking them undone and flattening them out on the table. Finally she found the one addressed to herself. Informing her of the death of Claude Roche.

  When Pepper came home, she served him a supper of croissants stuffed with peas and honey, which they ate with their fingers because she had sold all the spoons. She had sold the crockery, too. Luckily, they did not need plates: The dining-room table had been scrubbed so clean that it was three shades lighter. And while they ate, Yvette Roche said…nothing at all.

  Rumor spread beyond the apartment buiding that Roche was back in town.

  Pepper had been down to the docks, looking for work on the boats without success. But as he walked home, he was busy thinking about something else: about the big woman with the baby carriage. He had seen her first near the bullring. He had seen her again at the garage, had seen her at the church where he went to make confession. Her carriage, anyway. He was sure it was the same carriage because one of the wheels was buckled and didn’t touch the ground. At the church, he had gone over to the carriage—in the same way he went up to dogs tied up outside shops—glanced inside.

  No baby. Strange.

  Pepper’s fruitless search for work had taken him in all directions, and yet the baby-carriage woman had steered the exact same course. He glanced behind him as he turned the corner into the rue Méjeunet: no sign of her, thank goodness. And when he turned back…there was the carriage, parked outside the vacant apartment building on the opposite side of the road. Pepper glanced instinctively toward the Constance Tower. That was why he collided with the three men at the foot of his stairs.

  “Is this him? This is not him. I saw him once. This is not him,” said the first.

  “Who are you?” said the second.

  “Claude Roche,” said Pepper agreeably.

  “Been ill, must have,” said the third. “You been ill?”

  “I was in the hospital for a while,” said Pepper.

  “Told you. Said he’d been sick.”

  “Going to be sicker now,” said the first, and punched Pepper in the head. He reeled from the surprise as much as the blow. “Heard you were back. Big Sal heard. Big Sal wants the eight hundred and fifty francs you owe.” And he punched Pepper again in the chest. Then, finding their range (they had been expecting a much bigger man), they continued to punch Pepper in the stomach and kidneys until he fell to the ground. Then they kicked him—unexcitedly, routinely—as if to say, Nothing personal, but business is business.

  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.

  ELEVEN

  LEGION

  “What’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 il
legal 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.

  TWELVE

  BIG SAL

  You 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.