The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean Read Free Book Online Page A

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: throwoff 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 curledpetals 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.
    Well, people see what they expect, don’t they?
    Or do they see what they choose?
    “Pepper salami,” demanded the banker without a smile or a please .
    “That’s me,” said the boy behind the counter.

FOUR
PEPPER SALAMI
    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 giveaway 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