* *
At the bus I am told Fabrice is already inside, getting an impromptu massage from the Butcher. Rafael stands on the steps, looking over the small car park, surveying the detritus of a finished stage: bikes, camping chairs, piles of dirty kit.
I deposit my bike with the mechanics. The air smells of WD-40. They are already working on Fabrice’s bike. A mechanic polishes the frame with a tan chamois. My attention is drawn to the top tube of the bicycle. I count the little line of wings: five. There is another one since the morning.
Rafael sees me looking at the sticker. “You did well,” he says. “You are getting closer.” He goes back inside the bus.
On the ride home, I sit next to Johan. “How are things?” I say.
“I hate mountains,” says Johan. “I’m sick of being dragged up hills. I’m tired of staring at Sebastian’s behind.”
“It’s tough,” I say.
“It’s the time of the tiny little men,” says Johan. “They can barely climb the steps of the podium. How can you compete against men who will do that to themselves? Do the podium girls want to be kissing those men?”
“I don’t think they want to be kissing any of us,” I say.
“How are you a professional sportsman?” he says.
We make our way down the mountain to our hotel, lurching around switchbacks. Johan falls asleep, his chin on his chest, his head rolling left and right with the motion of the bus. The sun, still high, cuts through the forest around us. Bars of shadow rake through the bus, caressing the faces of resting riders.
My phone rings. I can see from the screen that it is Liz. I am glad, eager to share the successful stage with her. “A solid day,” I say.
“Hello? Sorry?”
“The stage.”
“Oh.” She pauses. There is a different impulse within me then, a sudden sense of dread. I have gone too quickly, I think, neglected my earlier concern. “I . . . I have news,” she says. I know it. I know it as she is saying it, and feel I have brought it upon us in that very moment of complacency. “I’m detained, Sol,” she says. I wait. “It’s about the contents of the car.”
The bus judders into another turn. A water bottle skitters down the central aisle. “They have something on you?” I say.
“The police apprehended me.” Liz’s voice is steady but fragile. She talks as if someone else is listening to her. “They looked in my car. They found controlled substances for which they say I have no legal use. They have taken me into custody.”
I pause. Next to me, Johan still sleeps perfectly peacefully.
“Where’s Barry?” I say.
“He’s here,” she says. “He’s sleeping. They haven’t put us in a cell. Having a baby counts for something.”
“Where’s the police station?” I say.
“It’s near the Spanish border,” she says. “In a small mountain town.”
“You had to cross the border?” I say.
“Yes,” she says.
“You didn’t tell me that,” I say.
“No,” she says. “I didn’t.”
“This is terrible,” I say. “Getting caught crossing the border.”
“Apprehended,” she says, brittle. “Apprehended on suspicion.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I wasn’t apprehended at the border anyway.”
“I’m just trying to work out what has happened.”
“I was speeding,” she says. “That’s all. I was confused, very nervous. I gave them cause for suspicion, I suppose.”
“Yes?”
“They asked to search the car.”
“And that was that?”
Someone says something in the background. I hear movement. The phone is put down. Liz speaks just out of reach of the receiver. She returns. “They don’t want you to ask so many questions,” she says.
“Why?”
“We are not to discuss the ongoing investigation,” she says.
“Why?”
“In case we corroborate,” she says, exasperated. “In case we get our stories straight.”
“Right.”
“I couldn’t get through to Rafael. His phone was engaged.”
“You’ve been trying to get him before me?”
“Of course,” she says. “This is his business. What they are alleging.”
“But you’d tell him before me?”
“I’m in a police station,” she says.
“Yes, but . . .”
“This is not the time,” she says. She laughs an exasperated, mirthless laugh. “Just talk to him, please.”
I stand. Johan is asleep. I push past him. He does not wake. He wrinkles his nose and shifts position.
I make my way down the bus toward where Rafael sits. He is leaning across the aisle, in conversation with the Butcher. Rafael looks up at me. “What?” he says.
“My wife is being held in a police station.”
He looks at me, thinks. “Really?” he says. His tone is light. “Why?”
“Activities on your behalf,” I say.
A glare betrays his irritation at my speaking so openly. “No,” he says. “This is a confusion.”
“I just talked to her,” I say.
“She is in an unfamiliar country. She does not know the language so well. I can assist, of course. Your family, my family.” He joins his hands in front of him. His eyes are still fierce.
“It’s serious,” I say.
“Calm,” he says. “Please.” He looks at the Butcher, then back at me. “Find a seat on your own. Relax.” He rises from his place and turns to look behind him. He sees Sebastian three seats back. “Get out of the way, Sebastian. Find another place.” He turns back to me. “Go and sit. I will work on it. I will talk to some people.”
I call the police station, and I am told that Liz is not available. I ask for an explanation, and the policeman says only, “Not now.” He puts down the phone.
I sit. We are in the valley now. There is a river to our left. The road clings to a steep hillside. We move in and out of tunnels. To our right one can see rock walls stretching above us. I feel totally blank now. Others around me sleep. We go into an illuminated tunnel and the body of the vehicle is suddenly flooded through with yellow light. I study the stitching of the seat in front of me. I feel a nauseous emptiness, a yawn at my center. We emerge back into the open air. Time passes. I look to the front of the bus. Rafael’s head is moving, a phone clamped to his ear. He throws up a hand as he says something.
We stop at the hotel. The other riders wake, oblivious. They take some time disembarking. They pass down the aisle bleary-eyed. I stay in my seat, and no one seems to notice this.
The Butcher goes to help the riders to their rooms. The driver gets off the bus to begin unpacking gear from beneath it. Only Rafael is still on the vehicle. He rises from his seat, walks back toward me. “I’m in contact with a lawyer,” he says. “I’m making up a strategy.”
I nod. He walks back to the front. He begins a call as he does so.
* *
Marc is in the reception when I get off the bus. He guides me to my room. “Somebody is a little exhausted,” he says.
When I enter the room, Tsutomo is sitting on the bed, staring ahead of him. His bags and mine have been stacked by team helpers against the wall. Next to them, the bathroom door is partly obscured by jars, placed like an old-fashioned supermarket display. There must be two hundred jars of baby food.
I lie on the bed. Our son is in a jail, I think. Will he be picking up Liz’s panic? I think of walking through London with him on my front, the sense that he was this little feeling thing—alternately excited, fearful, grumpy, overawed—a small absorber of the emergent temper of the city. Tsutomo, on his own bed, has taken one of the jars of baby food and begun eating from it with a hotel teaspoon. He looks at me with sympathy but does not ask the cause of my discontent.
There is a rap on the door. I open it to Rafael. “So . . . ,” he says. He beckons me ou
t.
We walk down the corridor. Rafael frowns, unready to embark on what he has to say. “Your room is suitable?” he says.
“Fine,” I say.
“Good,” he says. He clucks his tongue. I can smell the aniseed on his breath.
We reach the end of the corridor. He opens the door of a room. “They think I am important,” he says.
“Who?”
“The hotel people. They have given me the honeymoon suite.”
The room is four times the size of mine and Tsutomo’s. There is a large bed piled with cushions against the right wall. There is a minibar next to the bed. The other side of the room is mostly empty, as if whoever designed the room ran out of things to put into it. Two high-backed armchairs have been placed in front of the window, facing each other obliquely. Rafael gestures toward these. I pick a heart-shaped pillow from the seat before I sit down. Not knowing what to do with it, I hold it in my lap. Rafael takes his place in the other chair.
“I have contacted a lawyer,” he says.
“And?” I say.
“He is on his way.” Rafael shrugs. “They have twenty-four hours to charge your wife. The policemen are a little bit, shall we say, confused by what they have found. It will take a little while to play out.”
“How long?” I say. “She’s in prison with my son.”
“Jail,” he says, “technically.” He has his normal composure. He does not respond to my tone, my anger.
“How long?” I say, again.
“They will do tests on the materials, determine their origin, their status as controlled substances. When they know what they are doing, they will put her in front of a judge. We will know more after tomorrow’s stage.”
“After the stage.”
“Of course.”
“I will race?”
“Of course.” He leans forward and studies my face.
“That’s all?” I say.
“That’s the plan. The lawyer is good, I think, and not too expensive.”
“Why would you say that?” I say.
Rafael thinks. “I am a straightforward man,” he says. He stands. “Let me get you a drink.” He points at the minibar behind him. “The drinks are highly priced, but considering the circumstances . . .” He shows me his open palms. “You would like some carbonated water?”
“They’re not just disposable,” I say. “We’re not talking about a dodgy doctor. This is my wife and son.”
“Yes,” says Rafael. “What do you mean ‘disposable’?” He walks toward the minibar. He squats, out of view, in front of the built-in refrigerator.
“This is my family, in detention.”
“They have procedures for this situation,” he says. “This is not a totally barbaric country. That first hotel your wife was in was poor, unfortunately. Her location tonight is quite similar but, well, operated by the gendarmerie.” He rises above the bar, back into my sight line. He holds a bottle of Perrier. He smiles in what I think he might intend to be a sympathetic expression. I feel shame, I realize. I am here with this man, and I do not know what to say. He ambles back across the room, cradling the glass bottle. He cracks the seal, hands it to me. “Please,” he says. “Enjoy.”
I wait.
“Hydrate yourself,” he says. “You will feel better.”
I drink, and the water is cool, welcome. This in itself feels like a defeat. “It is good?” he says.
“I don’t believe this,” I say.
“Quite understandable,” says Rafael.
I think of B and Liz in an institutional building, unfamiliar, chilly, the sounds of doors opening and closing, no sense of what is occurring, of what should be occurring.
“You said this wouldn’t happen,” I say.
“I suppose I am not infallible.”
“Shit,” I say.
“Yes, it was a disappointment to find this out for me also.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It was a joke,” says Rafael. “I was feigning ignorance.”
“My wife and child are in prison.”
“Jail. I was trying to leaven the mood.”
This time yesterday I was speaking to Liz on the phone. “I am not unaware that he can be manipulative,” she said. Our downfall is in that: in the sentiment, in the mannered way she expressed it, as if it were all a game.
“We have had a hard few days,” says Rafael.
“I’m going to go to the jail,” I say.
“But that won’t help anything.”
“I’m going to go though.”
“You have a strategy?” he says. “A daring jailbreak?” He looks at me as if I am a prodigious child, his eyes playful. The thing I feel more than anger is humiliation. We have given ourselves over to him, Liz and I, to this look of mild amusement at our plight.
I stand from the armchair. I walk around the room. The sun is low, the evening beginning, the sky turning. I am aware, again, of the tiredness of my legs. I sit back in my place in the armchair.
“I can’t talk to her on the phone,” I say.
“Not now the lawyer is involved,” Rafael says. “That is the priority, is it not? Getting her out?”
I don’t know what to say to this, how to productively resist him. Rafael strolls over, faces me.
“For now, you are most useful riding, doing your job, letting the lawyer do his thing.” He stands over me and extends a hand toward mine. “Dinner is soon being served,” he says. “You have done a lot to deserve it, and you will need it. There is a big day in the mountains coming up.” He looks at me in a funny way. There is a pity there. His eyes are unusually quiet. He waits patiently. My wife and I are small to him, so much less than we imagined. This was clear for both of us to see, and yet we did not attend to it. We thought our assent to his plans worldly and pragmatic, when really it was the opposite. He has always been sure we could be moved to his will.
He is right that I cannot help Liz, perhaps correct that to race is the rational thing to do, though of course he has his own motives, another game. Yet is to consider his agenda—even to consciously reject it—to let him trespass into my reasoning? There is one thing to do, one correct choice to be made. She is pragmatic, I think, had called Rafael first. She wants me in this job, wants me successful in this life. She will guess my reasoning. I think of our conversation discussing the drugs, as we awaited B. “Don’t put a face on for me,” she had said.
This is our characteristic even now, I tell myself—the resilience that others do not have.
Maybe I also want her to feel her share of the shame I feel in this room, here, with Rafael: the smallness, the searing sense of having been so easily taken in.
“This is some very bad luck, my friend,” he says. He is waiting. I take his hand. He leans back. His built-up shoes ruck the carpet a little. I rise to a standing position. I take my own weight. “Dinner,” he says, turning. “Then a sleep. Then a ride. Then things will look different.”
Chapter 12
Sometimes, in this life, I arrive in a town and realize that I have visited it before. Routes overlap each other. We are transported to regional races and training camps without much idea of where we go. We drift into and out of familiar landscapes. We are forever coming upon sections of previous courses, passing back through towns we once flashed by. Occasionally I will turn a corner and I will find myself recalling the features of the road the way one might recognize a passage of music.
There are the famous climbs, those which one has no doubt one is repeating. But more striking are the minor coincidences: the way a veteran rider may realize that he is traversing a roundabout he went around fifteen years ago, as a junior; the way one might descend a road one climbed previously. Our histories, in this sport, are spread over minor roads used most of the time for nothing more than the simple acts of living.
I come to a realization in the town square from which we will start this morning. I climb down from the bus, and look at the town hall and the café on the
corner and the war memorial, and know that I was here many years ago in one of my early amateur races. Back then I arrived in a borrowed car with a couple of other aspirants. I adjusted my own gears, stuffed my pockets with energy bars, the wrappers of which I had made small nicks in so that they might be opened easily during competition. There was no team bus then, no support car, few journalists. It is tempting to wish for a return to those days, to harbor some kind of retroactive sympathy for my younger self who left them, who could not have imagined my predicament this morning. That would be too easy though, because that man was hungry, and that past era seems good to me now only because of the way I fought my way out of it, the way I came to satisfy this hunger and to know this sport to its full extent.
* *
I slept badly last night. I woke to some news from Rafael, passed to him through the lawyer. The lawyer was at the police station, I was told. An early morning meeting had been arranged. Katherine was on her way to the small town.
Meanwhile Rafael is intent on supressing the news. My teammates do not know. Tsutomo, with whom I roomed, and whom I probably disturbed with my sleeplessness during the night, does not know. Rafael is considering Liz’s predicament in terms of press coverage. He is worrying about keeping her case out of the papers if she is charged.
For now, I sit on a canvas chair in the start area. I drink coffee. I fidget. I try to come around to the task ahead.
Last night I thought of what Liz must have been enduring. I wondered whether the cell was warm, comfortable, whether the food she was served was good, whether she could care for B as she needed to. Without contact, I have struggled to keep faith in her understanding, in the extent of her endurance, or in my own reasoning. I wondered whether she thought of where I was and whether she could have imagined that, as she sat in her cell last night, Fabrice, Tsutomo, and I still had injections: syringes that were supposed to contain microdoses of anti-inflammatory hormones but, because those substances sat in an evidence locker, actually held just water and glucose. Amongst our trio, only I was aware of the lack of efficacy of these treatments. I submitted though. I offered my assent to the notion that they should make us stronger today.
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