The Black Jersey

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  But now there was a more pressing matter I needed to take up with the detective. I had no idea where they could be interrogating Axel, and even if I knew, I didn’t have the means or the pretext to just show up there. So I had no choice but to send the commissioner an urgent text asking him to come find me. I wasn’t entirely clear what I would say, except to testify to my friend’s professionalism and good heart, an argument about as useful as a thumbtack in the path of a bulldozer. Favre finally had the leverage he’d been looking for. He would describe the horrific prison where they would be sentenced for stealing those bikes, unless, of course, the Dandy and Axel were willing to tell all they knew about the other members of our circuit. And soigneurs and mechanics knew things: tricks and cheats, subtle forms of anti-doping, closeted homosexuality, adulteries, betrayals, and, yes, even felonies. In other words, the usual dirt that’s part of any semi-closed society. In the hands of the commissioner, devoid of context and the mutual trust and solidarity involved in a team, that information would be a tool for extortion that could break wills and blood oaths. Favre might or might not find out who the killer was this way, but I had no doubt the process would ruin reputations and devastate lives. The ringing of the hotel room telephone brought me out of my worry.

  “Monsieur Moreau,” said Ray Lumiere’s ceremonious and unmistakable voice on the phone. “Could I take up a few minutes of your time?”

  I said yes and hurried downstairs to see the old journalist, even though experience had shown me that every time someone said that to me I ended up losing more than mere minutes.

  The celebrated reporter was sitting on a cozy couch in the lobby of the lodge where we were staying that night. He was so famous his byline simply read “Ray”; he was the same reporter who had published Lombard’s deafening declarations in Libération just days before. He was a romantic, cloaked in the hermetic shield of cynicism, and a legendary figure in the cycling world. He was almost seventy but looked almost the same as he had forty years ago, when he began to cover the Tour. When the dinosaurs disappeared and a bicycle emerged from the haze, Ray had been there to describe it.

  But his fame wasn’t entirely due to his apparent immortality. His pen had been responsible for many of the best lines ever written about cycling, or about any sport for that matter. For many of us, the finest reward that could come from winning the Tour was the possibility of being, finally, the subject of one of his articles. No racer could truly enter the pages of cycling history until they had inspired a legendary phrase from the poet of the pedal. The tennis star Rafael Nadal, a cycling fan, once said the only thing he regretted was that, after winning at Roland-Garros, there was no Ray to transform what he’d accomplished into a literary feat.

  “Monsieur Moreau,” Ray began on seeing me, “sorry to bother you, but you must understand that the circumstances demand acting with a certain poise.”

  I nodded, although I didn’t exactly understand what he meant. Ray spoke in short phrases, but there always seemed to be more behind his words, like sharks or mermaids under placid surface water.

  “There’s someone among us who is causing havoc and it would be much better to find out who it is before the police do, don’t you think?” Ray said.

  “I don’t know what to tell you; the information is quite confusing,” I responded, trying to gain some time.

  “The information is not confusing. The hits have been committed in plain sight. It seems to me that the only thing that’s confusing is the identity of the person who’s doing this.”

  I decided to be honest with the old journalist. Ray was a kind of cycling alter ego, a defender of the pure and epic nature of the sport. There were rumors he had tipped off the police about a cargo of drugs destined for the Festina team in 1998. It was the first great doping scandal. Although his role was never confirmed, many had assumed he did so with the hope of deliberately unleashing a purge to take out the trash his sport had been accumulating.

  “Our mechanics are being run over by Commissioner Favre and that worries me. A lot of people could be hurt,” I said, finally letting it all out.

  “It has taken a lot of work to get over Festina and Lance Armstrong; I don’t think we could survive a third scandal.”

  “And what do you suggest, Ray?”

  “We were mistaken in how we handled doping. We should have never let the scandals play out in the press and in civilian courts. This time we have to figure out the problem and fix it ourselves.”

  Once more, I found myself imagining marine monsters under the surface of his words. What the devil did Ray mean by “fix it ourselves”? Up until this moment, I’d thought my responsibility was to help identify the guilty party and, once I’d accomplished that, to let the police know. They’d take care of it from there. But now, the reporter was proposing something terrible without quite saying it. To get rid of the killer? Make him disappear in a ditch and act like nothing had ever happened?

  I stared at Ray, wondering if the old man had lost his mind. He was an odd guy, with hairy ears and a reputation as a wild and reckless driver, but with enough influence to terrorize the rest of the members of our circuit, police included. One character among the many in our circus. His parents had been killed in Treblinka and he had experienced great poverty during his postwar childhood. From a young age, he’d found a refuge from the horrors of the world in cycling, and he clung to the last vestiges of what he considered heroic in the sport with the desperation of a castaway. Now, it seemed to me, the demons from his childhood had come back to reclaim him.

  “I don’t see what we could do. We aren’t cops and we don’t have their resources. I don’t see myself shaking up poor Dandy to make him confess who he sold the goddamn bike to,” I said carefully, assuming Ray already had all the information I did. “I have a better chance of wearing the yellow jersey than I have of figuring out who is trying to kill me.” I was disheartened to find I actually believed this, but there was a certain relief in talking to someone else who had been pondering this same question.

  “You’ve always been able to wear the yellow jersey; you just never had it as a goal,” he said with certainty. “But that’s neither here nor there. What I’ve come to tell you is that we have something the police lack. There are few things on the Tour that could escape the combined forces of Fiona, you, and me.”

  I ignored the first part of his comment and focused, for a moment, on the alliance he was proposing. The old man was right. Among the three of us, we had strategic positions that were also complementary.

  “What about Lombard…?” I added, thoughtfully. My mentor had a lot of time on his hands and a talent for making friends with the mid-level functionaries of the organization, the officials who coordinated the patrol cars and the motorcycles, and the drivers and assistants who make up the daily framework of our spectacle.

  “You know things, I know other things, and Mademoiselle Fiona must know more than the two of us put together,” he said, ignoring my suggestion to bring Lombard into the group. “If we could exchange information about the strange incidents from these few weeks, we might be able to figure out what’s going on. And let’s be honest, Monsieur Moreau, the situation is limited to four teams: Fonar, Matosas’s Lavezza, Paniuk’s Rabonet, and Medel’s Baleares.”

  “Let’s suppose we find the responsible party, then what?”

  “We neutralize them, we threaten to reveal their identity unless they stop, I don’t know,” he said, exasperated. “It really depends on who it is and what this is about. I’d do anything before I let another scandal destroy cycling’s credibility.”

  In a way, the old man was right: A yellow jersey win because of the intervention of a killer could be the coup de grâce against the Tour. The race was just now starting to shake off the perception many people had that behind every winner there was a new illegal drug when, in fact, tough new rules had made drugs marginal. The overwhelming majo
rity of cyclists raced without the help of banned substances or illegal transfusions, although many outside the sport continued to think that wasn’t the case. One more scandal would send cycling’s image on a journey of no return.

  “All right. I’ll talk to Fiona today. Just promise me one thing. If we find out who it is, swear you won’t do anything unless the three of us decide together.”

  Ray stayed quiet for a moment and then nodded. It wasn’t much but I had to live with it. Then I told him what I knew: that Matosas and Giraud risked being fired at the end of the season, about the bicycles sold on the black market by the Dandy and Axel, the summary report about the gas-tank explosion in Fiona’s trailer, the autopsy report on Fleming’s body, and, after some hesitation, about the purple marks my DS’s fingers had left on my neck.

  He listened, expressionless. I don’t know how much he knew already. Neither did I know how much of what he told me in return was true or simply nonsense cooked up by an obsessed old man. He claimed that two of Medel’s domestiques had had several nights of clandestine visits from women before Baleares’s DS found out. It later turned out the women, who they’d thought were genuinely interested in them, were actually prostitutes sent by an anonymous benefactor. He’d learned that a very good climber with Partak, the Russian team, had gotten a generous financial offer to leave the race in the third week, and he imagined there must be other isolated cases. He said that the diarrhea that had affected various racers with the AG2R team the second week of the competition had been induced by a powder laxative used to spike their food.

  A lot of these incidents struck me as the kind of stupid pranks typical of a college fraternity rather than the threatening designs of a criminal like the one the police were looking for. And yet. An orgy and its subsequent insomnia would affect a couple of domestiques enough that a mid-tier team wouldn’t be able to surprise anyone. And the dehydration caused by a leaky stomach could be as effective as a leg fracture to unravel a rival. These were very easy, practical measures that could be taken by anyone in our circuit.

  If what Ray said was true, the extent of the cases and the diversity of the resources pointed toward a well-planned conspiracy. Something thought out over a long period of time and executed by a network of collaborators. A group that had no problem murdering a cyclist in the tub or blowing my brains out by planting a bomb in a trailer, but that also didn’t mind using a childish trick to get rid of a competitor. When you looked at the big picture, the killer had managed something remarkable: The ten or twelve most competitive teams had suffered some kind of setback that kept them from operating at one hundred percent, except for the squads of Matosas, Medel, and Paniuk. And Fonar, which survived thanks to whatever forces had allowed me to escape the two attempts on my life in the past few days.

  I thought it might be good news that the attacks seemed so well planned. Maybe the criminals wouldn’t be able to improvise a third attack on the seven stages that were left, especially now that we had been warned and that Giraud, the police, and Steve’s bodyguards were all shielding the Fonar team. Right now, there were two thugs standing between us and the lobby entrance without the slightest interest in disguising their presence. Through the window I could see a patrol car in front of the hotel and several cops leaning on it.

  Ray and I exchanged phone numbers and said goodbye. He told me he was staying at a hotel thirty kilometers away and that, as a precaution, he wanted to leave before it got dark. It being summer, we still had two hours before that would happen, but it wasn’t a bad idea for the old man to be extra careful. I imagined cars, motorcycles, and pedestrians leaping to the side as Ray’s green Renault lunged forward faster than his age and eyes should have permitted.

  I checked my phone for messages. There were two. One was from the commissioner: “Impossible to see you now. Unexpected turn of events. I’ll bring you up to speed tomorrow.” Favre used texts like a telegram, as if each word had a price on it. I decided not to ask what an unexpected turn of events could possibly mean. On the contrary, I felt relieved at not having to see him that night, even if it meant not being able to intervene on poor Axel’s behalf. I easily squelched my guilt by telling myself I had tried. And I completely forgot about my soigneur when I read the other message in my inbox. “Ask me to sleep over,” wrote Fiona.

  That night we did what we’d never done during three weeks of racing. We knew we had two of the least demanding stages of the Tour before us and then a day off. Or maybe we just had a need to feel alive and together after the danger and the anguish of the past few days.

  Fiona came from cold climes, but her body exhibited all the colors of summer. I started with the green of her eyes, then the cherry of her nipples, and wound up in the rose between her legs. In turn, she worked on my body unhurriedly, lingering over each moment, knowing it would be a long time before we could enjoy each other again.

  We rested, grateful and silent, listening to the sounds of the Tour being dismantled. Little by little the voices of the mechanics and the assistants working around the buses under our window faded away. When the darkness and the silence were complete, I began to talk. I brought Fiona up to date on Ray’s proposal as she caressed my chest with her calloused hand, attentive and quiet.

  I described my experience of the past few days in detail—Favre’s visits, my fears about the killer, and my fragile hope about the yellow jersey.

  “Giraud or Matosas: One way or another, it has to do with one of them,” she said with a raspy voice after a long pause.

  “I feel the same way, but the attacks against me would have to eliminate Giraud,” I said, almost disappointed. “He’d be harmed the most if Steve was beaten.”

  “He’s the biggest son of a bitch in the entire circuit; I would expect almost anything from him. Although I agree, something’s not right in all of this. The other person it could be is Ferrara; he’s a total shit.” Fiona talked like the mechanic she was.

  “I guess he could have found out about the sale of my bike from the Dandy and Daniela, and gotten one of his people to buy it. He would know what to do with the tubular glue and how to stick the bike in with the others so it would come back to me. Do you think the mechanics who work with him might know anything?”

  “I’ll see. Although I’m confused about the gas tank in the trailer. Any mechanic would have realized immediately that it was almost empty: Once you open the hatch that protects it, the meter is right there. The only explanation is that they were trying to scare you but they wanted it to look like an accident. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. And I won’t dismiss Giraud or anyone else around Steve,” she said. My chest flinched on contact with her fingers, as if they’d suddenly become live coals. “Your director and Fleming hated each other—you knew that, right? Back when Giraud was coaching an English team, he wanted to win at any price, like always, and he forced the guys to take drugs. Fleming refused and turned him in to the executives. There was a brief investigation and then the matter was discreetly forgotten. Giraud never worked with the Brits again. He spent months drinking and unemployed, and more than once he was heard saying that if he ever got his hands on Fleming, he’d kill him, that Fleming had made everything up.”

  I remembered the impassioned eulogy that Giraud had given about the dead man, and I felt an acid punch at the base of my stomach. I agreed with Fiona: Someone like that was capable of anything. He was the kind of guy who, if you saw him with red eyes at a funeral, it was only because he was allergic to flowers. I wasn’t sure why she had said she wouldn’t discount other people around Steve. I wanted to ask her but I didn’t want to break the loving complicity we were enveloped in. If you ignored the deadly content of our conversation, we were talking like a married couple at the end of the day about the gossip in the neighborhood and the things that had to be done around the house. Moments like that were the closest thing to home I’d ever had.

  I slowly started to fall aslee
p, but when I realized I had forgotten to ponder the state of the rankings, an image of them gradually filled my mind. Steve was in third place and I was in fifth. Things could be much worse, I thought, just before sleep overtook me.

  GENERAL CLASSIFICATION: STAGE 14

  RANK

  RIDER

  TIME

  NOTES

  1

  ALESSIO MATOSAS (ITALY/LAVEZZA)

  56:02:19

  He’s the killer, there’s no doubt.

  2

  MILENKO PANIUK (CZECH/RABONET)

  0:22

  Main accomplice.

  3 STEVE PANATA (USA/FONAR) +4:31 So long as he’s alive, there’s hope.

  4

  PABLO MEDEL (SPAIN/BALEARES)

  5:06

  The Spaniard drops in the third week.

  5 MARC MOREAU (FRANCE/FONAR) +8:04 I could overtake Medel, at the very least.

  6

  ÓSCAR CUADRADO (COLOMBIA/MOVISTAR)

  9:56

  7

  LUIS DURÁN (SPAIN/IMAGINE)

  10:25

  8