The Death-Defying Pepper Roux by Geraldine McCaughrean

syndicated meant: All he heard was the sin part of it, and Aunt Mireille had taught him everything about the wages of sin.
    The owners of Maritime Sud & Cie were asked to comment, but declined and quickly called in their lawyers.
    The police arrived at the offices of L’Étoile Sud .
    Terrified, thinking they had found him out to be Captain Roux of L’Ombrage , Pepper jumped up from his desk, meaning to run. Where to run? The only way out of the print rooms was through the front office, and the front office was full of police officers. So he clambered up the iron-runged ladder that rose toward the wrought-iron trusses of the metal roof. Below him the journalists—all fat, lethargic men who moved with the slowness of meat pies—gaped up at him in disbelief.
    “Where you going?” called Poulet.
    “Don’t worry! The boss won’t hand you over to the cops!” called Dulac.
    But Pepper kept climbing, until he reached the service hatch in the roof and pulled himself through into fresh air, scattering the pigeons that roosted along the roof ridge.
    For a moment, the immensity of the sky made his head spin. For a month he had hibernated in the printrooms below, living on words and piecrust and coffee. His heart said that he had been to Quombier and the Marseilles zoo and Beaulieu and Grand Pré and the Church of the Bleeding Heart: meeting people, collecting stories. But the feeble muscles in his arms and legs, the blinding sunlight in his eyes, told him that he had in fact been nowhere for a month. Now he sat down on the steeply sloping corrugated iron roof, clutched his knees to his chest, and wondered what it would be like in prison.
    The pigeons looked at him, heads cocked like pistols. The metal of the roof was as hot as a ship’s funnel. The sky encircling him was shot with the red of evening, as if the clouds had impaled themselves on the trees and were bleeding into their crumpled shirts. He was fourteen years and thirteen weeks old, and he had not been to confession for ninety days. Was this where his luck ran out? He walked along the roof ridge to the end of the building, but the gap between this and the offices next door was much too wide to jump.
    Meanwhile, down in the front office, the editor looked the police squarely in the eye. They asked him where he had gotten his information about the sinkingof L’Ombrage . He refused point-blank to tell them. He would not—he could not reveal his sources, he said. The establishment could put him up against a wall and shoot him if they wanted: He would protect his sources with his last drop of blood!
    For his whole life the editor had wanted to print the kind of story that would bring the police to his door, demanding to know how and where he had found it. He was not going to waste the moment now by telling them.
    “So which of your people wrote this article, then?” asked the police sergeant, smacking the offending newspaper with the back of his hand.
    “That I cannot tell you! I must protect the identity of both the author and his informant! That is the unwritten law of my profession!” And the editor stood tall and unblinking, secretly hoping the police would think he had written it himself.
    The police shuffled their feet, shrugged, and went away. The owners of Maritime Sud & Cie had all been arrested the day before, and were being interrogated about seven deliberate sinkings, seven fraudulent insurance claims. It no longer really mattered just who hadsnitched on them to the press or who had exposed their crimes in the newspapers for everyone to read about.
     
    “You can come down now, petite taupe ,” called Dulac through cupped hands. “The cops have gone.”
    Pepper crossed himself and said a Hail Mary. Inside his sun-hot head, an idea had somehow risen, baked and browned: The police were really angels in disguise hunting the runaway Paul Roux. And yet they had gone without catching his scent, without smiting him down, without even circling the roof on