The Death-Defying Pepper Roux (4 page)

While he had lain there unconscious, every piece of braid had been laboriously picked off his uniform jacket—who by?—leaving him drab. That was fair, he supposed. It probably said something in the Bible about gold braid:
Vanity of vanities, all braid is vanity, saith the preacher
. Naturally, ranks were not allowed in the underworld, he quite understood that. No rank, no escape, no saying sorry. But it was strange to find Aunty’s prayers still in his pocket…along with a
slender roll of banknotes that had not been there before.

Demon droppings fell like hail as the door opened and a Malay sailor brought in a bowl of rice and a cup of water.

“May I ask questions?” asked Pepper.

But the Malay only bowed and smiled, set the food down, and bowed again before leaving, no more able to understand the French language than he could the squawks of the parakeets tethered to the cargo crates.

When Pepper went up on deck (the door of the cell was not locked, but two days passed before he thought to try it), a sight rose out of the sea that was very like the Gates of Heaven, shimmering. Perhaps, after all, the angels had caught him in their nets and were drawing him home according to plan.

But the vision proved to be only the city of Marseille, gilded yellow by its usual pall of pollution. After the ship docked, the crew presented Pepper with a gift of small macaroons and an umbrella, gesturing toward the shore, smiling and bowing. Pepper descended the gangplank.

All Pepper lacked now was a reason to set one foot in front of the other. For what use is a sea captain without a ship—or a crew—or a steward with an array of jolly costumes? Anyway, he did not want to be Captain Gilbert Roux, defrauder of insurance companies, drink-sodden sinker of ships. There must have been better lives to hide inside.

It was a bright, sunny day, but as he walked down the street, he felt water drops on his face and put up his new umbrella. The water was coming from fire hoses at the end of the street. The local fire brigade was hosing down a group of protesters gathered in front of the town hall. The water pressure was low, so the demonstrators were not being knocked off their feet so much as gently doused, like potted plants watered from a high window. They milled around—men, women, and students—carrying placards and chanting doggedly up at the closed windows of the town hall. They had the look of clerks or shop assistants, in grays and browns. But their faces were bright with excitement and outrage, as if the protest had livened up a tedious week. Even the hoses were only making them gasp and giggle.

Pepper couldn’t make out what they were chanting.
He went closer to read the words painted on their soggy placards:

R
EPEAL
C
LAUSE
F
IVE OF THE
H
ONGRIOT
-P
LEUVIEZ
A
MENDMENT
!

R
EPEAL
I
T
N
OW
!

Pepper gave his umbrella to a woman who had curled her hair that morning and wanted to keep it nice. The demonstrators closed around him, like schooling fish, and he found himself part of the protest, given a placard to hold:

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

“Excuse me…I don’t quite know what the—” he began, but the chanting scribbled out his words.

The women had started up a simpler chant:
“Hear what we say! Repeal the HPA!”

In his drab, braidless jacket, Pepper was a tadpole in a pool of other tadpoles. Water ran down his neck, his shoes squelched, but apart from that, it was a good
feeling. The dockside clock struck noon, and the fire brigade stopped for lunch.

So the demonstrators went to buy their lunches from the grocery store on the corner. Rather than stand alone in a puddle outside the town hall in a strange town, Pepper tagged along. The grocery store was closed. The students of philosophy accepted this philosophically, with a shrug, but the clerks were in a reckless mood and decided they would go up to the grand department store at the top of the hill and buy sausage from the delicatessen there. It would be an outrageous extravagance, but demonstrating had made them all feel slightly bigger, bolder, more deserving than on a normal working day. Hungrier, too.

Inside the store, they formed an orderly line, speaking in low voices, as if they were in church. Indeed, the Marseillais Department Store was almost as grand as a church, with its high vaulted ceilings and checkered marble floors. The delicatessen was a harvest festival of deliciousness laid out in a side chapel—yellow cheeses as large as collection plates, and great organ pipes of sausage dangling at the back. It was also crypt cool, and there was nobody behind the counter.

The water ran down out of their clothes and formed a pool on the checkered marble. The umbrella—which proved to be a parasol—began to drop sodden shreds of dyed paper pulp. Assistants at the dried-flower and pastry counters looked across disapprovingly at these shabby invaders. But they did not offer to serve. Nobody did.

The line of people began to shiver. The delicious array of quiche, pâté, olives, and giant hams was making them hungrier than ever. Each pointed to the kind of sausage they liked best, and said how thick they would ask for it to be cut:

“Every slice a mouthful, that’s my style!”

“Oh, I prefer mine wafer thin! It feels like more.”

But still nobody came to serve them. Pepper handed out the little macaroons the Malays had given him. Ten minutes passed. A teacher took out her knitting.

“We must get back before the fire brigade,” said the woman with Pepper’s parasol. “Otherwise they’ll think they’ve won!”

They discussed buying a loaf of bread and sharing it. But as demonstrators, they had developed a stubborn streak not normally in them. They had set their
hearts on sliced sausage and would not—could not—turn their backs on the idea.

“We’re not stylish enough to serve, that’s what,” complained a secretary.

“The rich live to eat and the workers eat to live,” mused a student of politics.

“We won’t eat at all if someone doesn’t come soon,” said a housekeeper joining the line.

After her came a banker, banging on the counter with his rolled-up newspaper, as if to say,
Serve me, I’m a busy man!
He then rattled open his paper and used it as a wall to separate him from the disheveled folk in front of him in the line. A late news item on the back page caught Pepper’s eye:

Ship Lost in Biscay

FRENCH COASTER FOUNDERS

It was Captain Roux’s doing; Pepper knew it.
His
doing. He looked down at his braidless jacket and noticed a darker patch near the cuff where Roche’s blood had stained it, and his whole body blushed with shame. He wanted to shake himself like a dog: throw
off his borrowed identity like water drops. That shining silver meat slicer over there reminded him of the guillotine. There was even a splatter of bright crimson on the wall behind it. His crime weighed on him like scrap iron. The wickedness of it impaled him like a rusty iron fence. The pain was almost unbearable.

Pepper ducked under the counter, took off his jacket, and hung it on the apron hook.

“You work here?” said the woman with the parasol.

“I do now.”

“About time!” said the banker.

“Should you be doing that?” asked the secretary.

“Ten slices of chorizo cut good and thick,” said a clerk with inky lips.

“The knobbly green one for me,” said the teacher with the knitting. “Wafer thin.”

Pepper bent his body over the spinning guillotine blade.
Scuff, rip, crack
went the great silver blade into the flesh of each giant sausage; the crowd watched, greedily spellbound, as it sliced and slashed its way through meat, peppercorns, and fat. They winced as Pepper’s fingers came closer and closer to the blade. When the greaseproof paper below was piled high with curled
petals of deliciousness, he folded it inside another plain, white wrapper and presented it on the palms of both hands. The people in the line gave him a little round of applause.

In this way, Pepper Roux stepped out of his father’s unwearable, unbearable life and into the empty space behind the delicatessen counter of the Marseillais Department Store. Nobody really noticed: Their attention was diverted by the whirling silver blade and their rumbling hunger.

“Pepper salami,” demanded the banker without a smile or a
please
.

“That’s me,” said the boy behind the counter.

E
very day, Pepper read the newspapers for word of
L’Ombrage
, for further details of the sinking, for news of survivors. But ships sink all the time, and other news floods in, like sea into a hold.
L’Ombrage
was soon lost under a thousand fathoms of newer news, and Pepper could find no mention of Berceau or the engineer, of Gombert, of Annecy or the Duchess.

Suzanne-of-the-delicatessen-counter returned to work next day, her hand hugely bandaged where she had sliced off two fingers on the meat slicer in a moment’s carelessness. She did not question why Pepper had taken her place behind the counter: She supposed the management was within its rights to give
away her job while she was at the hospital, and the boy plainly had talent. She hovered, tried to make herself useful, tried to help, like a magician’s assistant.

Pepper, for his part, waited for Suzanne to tell him that he was not needed and to go away. When she did not, he assumed that he was her assistant and she his senior. He never dreamed that he had robbed her of her crown, her status, her realm of cured meats and cheese.

The floor manager did not query Pepper’s presence: Why would anyone turn up and work unless management had employed them? Nobody does anything for nothing. If Pepper had tried to draw wages, then he would have been found out at once. But he did not.

Well, he did pay himself a
kind
of wage: Every evening, he cut himself twelve rounds of salami, each about the size of a coin, and helped himself to a handful of olives, like small change. Each evening, the Bakery department cleared its shelves of perfectly good bread, and this completed Pepper’s supper.

After spending one terrifying night sleeping in an alley, he resolved never to do it again. So when six o’clock came, and everyone else laid dust covers over their counters and went home, Pepper did not leave
the store. Instead, he migrated to the Soft Furnishings department and slept there, in a splendid double bed, under a sheepskin rug.

A penny candle lent him enough light to read the day’s newspapers, which he gathered from the waste cans in the top-floor offices. Word by word, column by column, Pepper scanned news of wars and murders, scandals and road accidents. He read the business pages (though they made no sense); the sports results (though his mother had never let him play rough sports); reviews of exhibitions and concerts (though he had never been to either a concert or an art gallery). He studied the advertisements and the cartoons, the births and the marriages.

But he saved the obituaries till last.

Then he would look for the names of his friends aboard
L’Ombrage
, before finally looking for his own name—(Roux, not Salami)—hoping and dreading he would find it. If the death of Captain Roux was announced, would his mother read it and think she was a widow? Or would his father read it, leap to his feet, and shout, “It’s a damned lie!” Aunt Mireille was probably even now scanning the Births, Deaths, &
Marriages section, still hoping for proof that
le pauvre
had kept his appointment with the saints.

And do the saints read the newspaper too, Pepper wondered? Do the angels sit around, like taxi drivers between fares, browsing through news of wars and epidemics, checking the obituaries for some poor soul they have accidentally missed? Could they be fooled? Was it worth a try? Pepper toyed with the idea of posting a notice of his death in the newspapers.

He ought to place an announcement about Roche, at least, he thought, taking the unmailed letter from his jacket pocket:

Pepper corrected his spelling mistakes. Reading the newspaper had brought one great benefit: His spelling was getting better.

Lying back on the big bed at night, Pepper was confronted by a maze of brass tubes crisscrossing the
ceiling. There were no cash registers in the Marseillais Department Store. Whenever a customer paid, the money was placed in a brass canister, the canister inserted into a tube, and the canister, at the tug of a handle, shot by compressed air along this maze of overhead tubing. It traveled far, far away, to a tiny cage where a cashier took out the money, replaced it with a receipt and any change, and sent it whizzing back through the labyrinth of pipes.

For reasons of hygiene, there was no cash tube in the delicatessen—customers paid at nearby Dry Goods. So after the store shut, Pepper made up for lost time, running from department to department, firing canisters from everywhere to everywhere else, like an artillery barrage. It was the best fun in the world! He imagined how it would feel to be the size of a mouse and climb inside one of those canisters and be rocketed along at heart-stopping speed—around bends and corners, over the heads of customers and shop assistants, unseen, undetected but for a rattle and a musical sigh like a swanny whistle.

Downstairs, the night watchman heard the noise and pushed back his chair, reaching for his keys and
his nightstick—then hesitated. What intruder, what burglar, would be using the overhead conveyor system? Why would he? There was only one explanation: ghosts. One-time shop assistants, long-dead cashiers must be the cause of those eerie whizzes and thumps. And a nightstick is useless against the restless dead. The night watchman crossed himself and sat down again.

As Pepper ran from room to room, he pondered: What if pipes like this could be built on an intercontinental scale, to carry money not just from Lingerie to Accounts, but from Paris to Ceylon, where poor people needed it more! Or wages from sailors to their distant wives and children! Or love letters from sweethearts separated by Fate! Letters home from runaway children apologizing for not yet being…

Confessions! Yes, yes! If holy confession could be made this way, then Pepper would have been able to write out his three times a week and set it flying to his parish priest! Father Ignatius would unscrew the canister, read the confession inside—

—then send forgiveness back wrapped in a sheet of penances:

Lying back on the big bed, floating between awake and asleep, Pepper continued to muse over the amazing maze of pipes…. What about prayers! With enough tubing, you might even reach all the way to Heaven! Oh!

This last idea wedged in his head, in the way all superstition does, and he had to get up and do it, then and there. That night and obsessively each night after, he unscrewed a cash canister in Leather Goods or Horology or Books and slipped a prayer inside it. Then he would tug the brass handle. The cash tube gave a sigh and a rattle, and Pepper’s prayer shot off across the ceiling of the Marseillais Department Store like a shooting star through space:

He never received an answer, and he was very afraid it might jog the saints’ memory and put them on his scent again, like bloodhounds. But he could not help himself. Praying each night was one of the rules Aunt Mireille had thrashed into him, and Pepper was a stickler for obeying rules.

Whatever God, in His cashier’s cage, thought of Pepper, the customers of the Marseillais Department Store loved him. He sliced sausage and carved ham with more panache than Cyrano de Bergerac, his long knife flashing like a duellist’s rapier. He diced with Death at the slicing machine, paring sausages all the way down to their knotted ends with never a care for his fingertips. He ran the deadly cheese wire through cheeses like God separating night from day. He remembered the preferences of all his regulars and pitted all the olives himself, for fear the elderly might choke or break their teeth on the stones. Within a
fortnight, he was a celebrity. Well, that is to say, a few regular customers came to know his face, and smile when he served them.

Old Madame Froissart, for instance. Madame Froissart had arthritis in her hands and could no longer crack nuts. So when Suzanne arrived at work each morning—however early she arrived—she found Pepper, sleeves rolled up, shelling walnuts especially for Madame Froissart.

“Where did you work before this?” Suzanne asked, idly fingering his discarded jacket. “On the ships?”

“Not me,” said Pepper Salami.

Suzanne was impressed by Pepper’s hard work, but not by his physique and crumpled clothes. Suzanne was in love with a boy called Bertrand in Leather Goods. But she had lost two fingers to the meat slicer, and now she would never win Bertrand’s heart. This was the conclusion Suzanne had come to, sitting in the hospital, and even when the bandages came off, she could no more pick up her old hopes and dreams than she could pick up a coin from the floor. Bertrand was lost to her, just like her queenly realm: the Delicatessen department.

Pepper also knew about Bertrand in Leather Goods. It was impossible to spend one day with Suzanne without knowing about Bertrand in Leather Goods. Suzanne talked about the shape of his eyebrows, the breadth of his shoulders, the cut of his jacket, his liking for licorice and bicycles, his genius regarding all things leather….

Pepper remembered the romantic novels in his father’s study at home. It had always puzzled him why the people in the books loved their sweethearts “hopelessly,” “secretly,” “from afar” and had to eat their hearts out for three hundred pages before the happy ending put them out of their misery. Why didn’t they just say straight out to each other, in chapter 1,
I love you
? Why did Suzanne not just walk over to Bertrand and say,
I really admire your eyebrows and how much you know about leather—let’s get married
? Pepper could see for himself that she was kind of pretty and pretty kind. If it had not been for the calluses on his knees (and being overdue in the death department), who knows?—he might have fallen in love with her himself. But people ought not waste time. If there was one thing Aunt Mireille’s dream had taught him, it was not to waste precious time.

So one evening, he borrowed the keys from the top-floor offices, let himself into a cashier’s booth, slipped a note into a canister—
Suzanne loves you, Bertrand
—and sent it, like Cupid’s arrow, across the ceiling and down to Leather Goods on the floor below. Then he went back to bed and lay there imagining the happy effect next day.

Except that suddenly, the idea had sprung a leak. And the more he thought about it, the more leaks it sprang. What if Bertrand already had a girlfriend? What if he did not like brunettes? What if he was planning to be a priest? What if he showed the note to his fellow leather experts and they laughed about it together? What if word got out and the whole store began to point and smirk and jeer…? Hot with panic, Pepper hurried back to the cashier’s booth and wrote, on the backs of a dozen Marseillais Department Store receipt slips:
Philippe loves Marguerite. Jean adores Annette. Pomme wants to marry Guillaume. As pants the hart after water, so pants Henri after Fleur.
(That one sounded a bit strong, but it came from the Bible, so it must be all right.)
Hercule sends a kiss to Nanette. Claude loves Gisele.
He tried to think of every staff member he knew by name, tried to
leave nobody out, for fear they should feel unloved. In every tube a message. In every department a mysterious note declaring love, devotion, or heartache. It would have been nice to include himself—
Somebody-or-other loves Pepper Salami
—but that was carrying fiction too far, what with his knees. Anyway, there was no cash tube in the Delicatessen department. Only when he had tugged the last handle and all the pipes had fallen silent overhead did his own heart quiet enough for him to return to bed.

Downstairs, meanwhile, the night watchman scribbled a note of his own, resigning his job at the Marseillais Department Store effective immediately,
On account of the unholy creatures rampaging around up top.

Next morning, Pepper overslept. He woke to the sound of voices on either side of the bed. A woman’s hand took hold of the sheepskin and lifted it clear of Pepper’s head. He opened his eyes and found the husband’s face on a level with his own, peering at him.

“I’m an advertisement,” said Pepper in a bleating whisper. “A Dormieux bed is better than counting sheep….
Except that I fell asleep. Just shows. Very good bed. Can’t keep awake. Would you like to try it?” And clasping the sheepskin rug around his shoulders and face, he gathered up his shoes, jacket, and tie and trotted away to the back stairs. The departmental assistant—already at his counter—should have seen him and ranted. But he was too busy reading a note he had just found inside the cash canister.

As the hours passed, the cavernous department store filled up with an atmosphere as volatile as gasoline fumes. The least spark, and it seemed the whole place would explode. A young man fainted in Arts and Crafts. A matron in Linens needed smelling salts. Fleur from Floristry gathered up her skirts, climbed to the fourth floor, and slapped Henri in Shoes & Boots, declaring, “I’m a married woman, you panting beast!” Unfortunately, by the time she returned to her counter, all the day’s fresh red roses, newly delivered from the market, had disappeared, pilfered by a raiding party of counter assistants and a cashier or two. The Perfume department enjoyed a sudden run on eau de cologne and pomade, but sales were down in other departments, chiefly because there was no one there to serve
customers. Assistants had abandoned their posts. The Marseillais Department Store prided itself on employing only the most proper, genteel, and respectable staff, but in unscrewing their little brass canisters, it was as if they had loosed laughing gas: By lunchtime hysteria had gained the upper hand.