The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean Page B

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 servecustomers. 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.
    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 boyemptied 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; wouldyou 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