Free The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean Page B

bales where he slept at night, like a pencil-drawn stick figure. He liked reading his own (invented) name in the newspaper. If he did not think about the taste, he liked the pies his fellow journalists never finished at lunchtime. Above all, he loved sweeping together words—like dead flies from a windowsill—onto a sheet of white paper and seeing them come to life: events! characters! places! living, breathing news….
    He had no idea how to go out and find a true news story—something that had really occurred. Everything that happened out there—outside the street doorway—was cruel, dangerous, or sad: You only had to read the newspapers to know that. Murders. Fights. Thefts. Dangerous prisoners on the run.Train crashes. Arson. Anyway…
    Anyway. By now angels might be lurking around any and every corner, collars turned up, stiletto knives in their pockets. Saints were probably stopping boys in the street, demanding to see their identity cards, bundling them into the backs of black vans or flaming chariots. But if Pepper stayed put and had to write the truth, there was only one truly newsworthy story he knew—and that was untouchable.
    It hung in his head like a hornet’s nest, that story, that secret, that piece of knowledge. For weeks it had buzzed between his ears, stung the backs of his eyes until the tears ran down. What a relief it would be to write it, to put it on the outside for a change; to turn it outdoors along with the nightmares. So, threatened with losing his job, his home, his identity, his sanity, Pepper Papier wrote down the story of L’Ombrage ’s last voyage. He started out not knowing how to begin. He came to the end not knowing how to stop. He wrote it rocking forward and back in his chair so savagely that the journalists and copy editors stopped clattering at their typewriters and watched. He wrote it crying so hard that his jacket cuffs were soaked and the papercrinkled like seersucker. Looking up, Pepper saw them staring and blushed scarlet.
    “The lemur story’s dead,” he said. “He killed my lemurs.”
    Then he went to crumple up his article about the coffin ship L’Ombrage . Of course he could not really allow the newspaper to print it. There would be Hell to pay. And Aunt Mireille had taught him all about Hell.
    As his hand closed over the pages, another closed over his; a hand twice the size. The editor had been standing behind him, reading over his shoulder. And, after twenty-five years as a hack journalist, the editor knew a good story when he saw one.
     
    What the editor had been looking for was an excuse to fire Pepper. (He liked firing people.) What he got was a scoop. First he scrutinized every word, looking to find fault. (He liked to find fault—almost as much as he liked firing people.) Tugging the sheets of paper from Pepper’s grip, he combed through each sentence, looking for signs of invention, of fiction. But though the spelling was erratic, and the pencil handwriting hard to read, the content was bothsensational and precise. It even contained the chart position at which L’Ombrage had been deliberately scuppered in midocean, taking with it one seaman, a steward, and the captain. The fate of everybody else is unknown , read the last line.
    Oh yes, there was one fiction the editor had failed to spot. Pepper had allowed Captain Roux to repent his crimes and go down with his ship. Captain Pepper was dead. Now it had to be true. It was in the newspaper.
    “It’s a couple of months old,” said the editor grudgingly, “but it’ll do. Find out where the captain lived and get the grieving-widow angle.”
    A picture came into Pepper’s head, then, of a dozen journalists beating at the door of his home—wanting to know, demanding to know—their knocking sending the rooks screaming into the sky….
    “The captain wasn’t married, sir,” said Pepper.
     
    The story was picked up by the national papers and syndicated all over France. Pepper had no idea what