The Black Jersey

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  My second reaction was more reflexive although no less terrible. Without Fleming, Stark was lost. He was in fifth place, 16 seconds behind Steve, but until today he was confident he’d gain time on the mountain stages still to come. He was a better climber than my teammate. Without Fleming’s strong defense, he would need a miracle to pass Steve.

  “Surely you understand why we need you, sergeant.”

  “No, I don’t understand.” My brain was still stuck thinking about a bathtub too narrow to contain my rival’s long, lean arms.

  “We’ve concluded the killer or killers belong to the circuit. They’ve struck with surgical precision to maximize their effect on the results of the race.”

  “Anybody could have done that,” I protested.

  I found it hard to believe that a member of our closed community would attack one of our own. In spite of our rivalries, the peloton was a family, and that extended to the mechanics, the doctors, the massage therapists, the directors, and the coaches. Any cycling fan could point to a favorite racer and tell you his strengths and weaknesses, and I said as much to Favre.

  “C’mon, Sergeant Moreau—you know no fan has access to the team kitchens or to the tub in a hotel room for a member of a team as closed as Batesman.”

  The commissioner was right on that last point. Stark and Fleming’s team was made up exclusively of British racers; all the assistants were also British. The rest of the teams were a small United Nations, with members recruited from every continent. But Batesman was an island unto itself, practically a brotherhood, which the other teams had nicknamed Brexit.

  “You should check the betting companies. There are people who stake fortunes on these things,” I said, resisting, although my argument sounded less than convincing. Still, I insisted: “There are also sponsors who risk millions, which could turn into a disaster or a boon depending on the race results.”

  “We haven’t discounted any of those possibilities and we’re investigating. But even if the motive is coming from outside the circuit, it’s obvious there’s material involvement, if not intellectual involvement, from within the cycling circuit.”

  “But why me?”

  “Isn’t it obvious, sergeant? You’ve got military police training. I checked your records myself and I know you closed about a dozen cases in your time.”

  As he said this, he placed a folder with an official seal on the little table between us. With a look, I asked permission to check it. I opened the folder and quickly scanned about a dozen pages about me, most of them faded with age.

  I supposed the commissioner wanted to show me I was more than a cyclist, that I was a member of the French state and that this folder confirmed it. I only registered the passage of time on a lightly tanned face with blue eyes and wavy hair. Different versions of my image in those documents took me back to the time before I let the bike swallow everything up.

  I remembered the three- and four-day seminars in Paris I attended a dozen years ago alongside police officers and provincial sheriffs, where I gathered vague notions about ballistics and forensic medicine amid so much cigarette smoke. And that reminded me of Claude, a pretty female agent from Biarritz with whom I’d shared some sessions dedicated to reviewing anatomy on our own.

  “Something about this amuses you, sergeant?”

  The commissioner had noticed my response to the memory. He was examining me like a mechanic turning a bicycle wheel in search of almost imperceptible damage. I supposed he wasn’t particularly happy about having to confide in someone outside the police, and I assumed this hadn’t been his idea. In fact, he was probably looking for reasons to confirm it was not a good idea. “No, nothing,” I said. “I’m just not sure in what way I’d be able to help you. Or, in fact, if any of what you say is true. I don’t know how much you know about cycling. The responsibilities a team has when it competes on the Tour are grueling and not just physical. It demands absolute concentration; it would be impossible to play detective when all I want to do is to stay alive for the next stage.”

  “ ‘To stay alive for the next stage,’ ” repeated the commissioner. “That’s a curious choice of words, Sergeant Moreau. That’s precisely what the authorities have been asking: Who among you will not be alive tomorrow? There haven’t been any victims on your team yet, but until we know what’s behind all this, you and your teammates are in danger.”

  His reasoning gave me chills. If the killer had wanted to get rid of Steve instead of Stark, that would have been me bleeding to death in that tub. I tried to remember where I was on the peloton when the fake fans blocked the Movistar team two days ago. Our team had taken over the front and we’d just gone around the curve when we heard the bikes crashing behind us. The Marseille hooligans had not come for us. An unsettling presentiment jabbed at my consciousness, but it was interrupted by the arrival of a man requiring no introduction.

  “We need you, Hannibal. This can’t go on,” said Sam Jitrik, the executive director of the Tour de France. “I hope the commissioner has explained the seriousness of the situation. We’ve gone over the police theories and we think they’re right: The accidents have been deliberate, and if that’s true, then we’re looking at the most serious threat to the Tour de France in all its history. There are still two weeks to the finish, but the authorities could close it down if these accidents continue. That’s something that hasn’t happened in more than one hundred years.” The solemn words from the most important man in cycling were punctuated by a long index finger, like a conductor’s baton. He was an imposing figure in spite of his seventy-two years.

  “They could reinforce security, limit public access on the road, seal off the hotels where we’re staying,” I responded, nervous in front of Jitrik. It was the first time I had exchanged words with the great man in spite of having participated in the Tour for more than a decade.

  “It wouldn’t do much good to seal off the public if those responsible are already inside, now would it?” Jitrik scoffed.

  “Only you can help us: You were an officer with the French army and one of the best-known and most respected members of the peloton,” said Favre, seconding him. “We can’t trust anyone else. But you can’t share what we just told you with anybody; you’d tip off the guilty parties.”

  “Let’s not forget the media circus it would cause, the panic. The Tour itself would be at risk,” said Jitrik, and then he cleared his throat and took on his solemn tone again before raising his index finger once more. “The Tour de France is one of the great institutions our country offers the world. Perhaps the greatest. We can’t allow it to turn into a circus of bloodshed and scandal. Protecting it is a state matter. I appeal to your conscience as a French citizen, as a military officer, and, above all, as a cycling professional.”

  Jitrik ended up getting emotional over his own words, and I probably would have too if I hadn’t been so worried. I wanted to tell them I wasn’t a military officer, and not even really French, and that it was very difficult for me to admit the possibility that someone in the large family to which I belonged could be willing to kill a teammate to alter the course of the race. But I didn’t say anything. I just nodded.

  Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have been a bad night. I was in tenth place in the race, which was unusually good for me and any domestique. But I slept very little, though I made sure the door was locked. The bathtub, its rust stains badly spackled over, played a starring role in the dreams I had that night.

  GENERAL CLASSIFICATION: STAGE 7

  RANK

  RIDER

  TIME

  1

  RICK SAGAL (PORTUGAL/FONTANA)

  26:40:51

  2 STEVE PANATA (USA/FONAR) +:12

  3

  SERGEI TALANCÓN (ROMANIA/ROCCA)


  :13

  4

  LUIS DURÁN (SPAIN/IMAGINE)

  :26

  5

  PETER STARK (UK/BATESMAN)

  :28

  6

  ALESSIO MATOSAS (ITALY/LAVEZZA)

  :34

  7

  PABLO MEDEL (SPAIN/BALEARES)

  :36

  8

  MILENKO PANIUK (CZECH/RABONET)

  :52

  9

  ÓSCAR CUADRADO (COLOMBIA/MOVISTAR)

  1:01

  10 MARC MOREAU (FRANCE/FONAR) +1:03

  Stage 8

  Rennes—Mûr-de-Bretagne, 181.5 km.

  “Are you worried about something, Mojito?” Fiona asked in greeting as I warmed up on the stationary bike just before the start of the day’s stage. Although there were many things to love about Fiona, her knowledge of geography was not one of them. For whatever reason, she thought mojitos were Colombian in origin and saddled me with it as a nickname years ago. In private she usually called me Dragon, but in public she preferred Mojito. Luckily, no one had followed her lead; I don’t even like the damn drink.

  “Why do you ask?” My sharp and defensive tone surprised me.

  “You haven’t turned to look at the power meter one time since I’ve been watching you. Your warm-up isn’t much good like that.”

  Fiona was right. The prep routine is intended to focus on a scrupulous method of pedaling, designed for the individual cyclist, and the point is to reach a certain number of watts per minute. To pedal without looking at the power meter is to throw energy away.

  “I got distracted. I haven’t seen Fleming all morning. The Brexit team already did two sessions on the stationary bike but he hasn’t shown up and my strategy for the day depends on what he does to put Stark in the front.” I wasn’t totally lying. I’d been waiting for the Englishman all morning, hoping his presence would reestablish some sort of normalcy in spite of what I’d heard the night before. Seeing Fleming would mean the conversation with the commissioner had been a nightmare, a bad joke.

  Fiona hesitated, which was unusual for her. As the chief inspector of UCI, in charge of enforcing regulations on all the Tour teams, she was unaware of very few things. “Fleming won’t be coming.” She lowered her voice. “Supposedly the authorities are going to release a statement at the end of the day. Last night they took him to the hospital in critical condition. That’s all I know.”

  My expression must have alarmed her because she rubbed her hand on my curved back. Generally speaking, she avoided making any kind of intimate gesture in public, even though the whole circuit knew we were lovers. Or—more accurately—that she had chosen me as her lover.

  “Come by the trailer tonight and we’ll talk, Mojito, and don’t let this affect your plans for the race.” This time her hand squeezed my neck softly as I took a quick glance at the power meter. It read 1200 watts, a number more appropriate to the final sprint of a race than a progressive warm-up.

  I could tell that Fiona knew something else. But she wasn’t about to tell me just minutes from the challenge that lay before us: 181 kilometers, mostly flat but not without risks. We weren’t expecting any kind of assault on the leaders, who were mostly saving themselves for the mountain, but days like today, when the group stays together until the very end, are the most conducive for massive falls.

  My task would be to keep my team near the front and to block any of the first fifteen in the standings from trying to make a breakaway. Should that happen, the pursuit would have to be relentless and the day could turn into an exhausting horror show.

  And yet, the day transpired uneventfully. About a half-dozen racers, none particularly important, tried to get a jump ahead, but they were absorbed by the peloton. To be honest, the cyclists sensed something wasn’t right: The average speed of 38 kilometers an hour that day was well below the 44 we had averaged in previous stages. During the ride my teammates asked one another if anyone knew anything about Fleming, and there were all kinds of rumors about the tragedies that had started to pile up. In spite of everything, the majority of us continued to attribute the bad luck that had fallen on us to simple fate.

  Five hours of relative calm and few challenges allowed me to consider the information the commissioner had confided in me in a more detached fashion. Before we’d reached the fiftieth kilometer in the race, I’d already concluded that there were only two possible rationales for the attacks. One, to try to control the winner; two, to damage the competition, regardless of who ended up winning. If that was the case, we were dealing with someone who wanted to hurt us arbitrarily over and over until they forced a suspension of the competition or, at the very least, to discredit the institution, which meant the attacks were the result of resentment or some kind of economic or athletic interest contrary to the Tour. I remembered there were teams that had been suspended in the past few years and several racers who had ranted against the organizers for one reason or another.

  My mind turned to Viktor Radek, the irascible Polish racer who was rolling just a few meters ahead of my team. Three years ago, he’d been involved in a fall he attributed to an erroneous maneuver by one of the officials on the motorcycles: It made him lose four minutes and place fifth in the general standings. The authorities had refused to compensate him for the time lost and Radek decided to leave the race, swearing he’d never come back. And yet to everyone’s surprise, he’d returned this year, signed to the Locus team. I decided to make the Pole my number one suspect.

  Almost without thinking about it, I found myself riding next to him. Every one of his gestures seemed to confirm my suspicions. Radek was the classic image of a villain personified. Although the race’s rhythm today was relaxed compared to other days, he looked like a growling feline. I wondered if he was contemplating his next violent act that very second. I remembered the dusty tub in my room and slowed my pedaling so I could get some distance from him again.

  Twenty kilometers later, I forced myself to think like a cop. Besides hate and resentment, the other great motive for committing a crime is greed. And when it came to a competition as glorified as the Tour de France, that could mean the purpose of the attacks was to modify the results of the race.

  It seemed absurd, but it wasn’t. The racers literally risked their lives in dizzying, nearly suicidal descents. If they were willing to die, why wouldn’t they be willing to kill?

  That line of thinking led me to come up with a list of those who had benefited from the tragedies of the past few days. Eight of the twenty-two teams that had begun the race remained uninjured, although only three of these, including Fonar, had been considered contenders before the Tour started. For all practical purposes, both Stark and Cuadrado had been eliminated. A look at them left no doubt about the state of their mood. Stark was pedaling out of sheer honor; it was clear his head was back at the morgue next to his friend’s body. On two occasions his teammates had to pull him out of the back of the peloton, where he’d fallen without realizing it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he abandoned the race before we got to Paris.

  Cuadrado looked better, but we all knew he’d be screwed once we got to the mountain. He was a great climber and he could certainly win a stage, but nobody can do that day after day without teammates to protect him on the great slopes. And his Movistar teammates were in the hospital.

  So the great beneficiary was Steve. Which led me to an absurd conclusion. I knew every one of his defects, but I also knew his virtues. My friend lacked the cruelty or ferocity necessary
to hurt a teammate, and his own pride would keep him from seeking a win any way other than proving his superiority over his rivals.

  In any case, we weren’t even at the halfway point of the Tour. And nothing guaranteed that Steve, or myself, or any other key member of our team wouldn’t be the next victim.

  I turned my head to make sure Steve was where he was supposed to be: pedaling behind my wheel, making the least amount of effort until he was required to do otherwise. He smiled at me with the same complicity and intimacy with which he usually recognized my sacrifice. Genuine and affectionate, without guile or malice, his smile confirmed the pact that made us an unbreakable professional pair. I was ashamed of the suspicions that had run through my head and I told myself I would do the impossible so that neither he nor I would become one more name on the list of victims.

  I spent the next 70 kilometers trying to avoid danger. I maneuvered so we would be surrounded by the squad but far enough away from the center to avoid getting dragged into any kind of fall.

  During the last third of the race, I entertained myself by considering other suspects. Setting Steve aside, there were at least three other rivals who had a chance of winning. The Italian Alessio Matosas from the Lavezza team, a veteran who’d won the Tour six years before. Two weeks ago, he’d simply aspired to enter Paris as one of the first ten. But today, he was in sixth place, and if Steve should suffer a setback, he would be one of the principal aspirants to the podium. He was a valiant climber with an innate sense for reading his rivals’ weaknesses and pouncing at the precise moment.

  Milenko Paniuk, a Czech, was another possibility. Like Matosas, he was a good climber and was counting on improving his position in the standings when we got higher up the mountains. He was in eighth place, a little less than a minute behind Steve. His team, Rabonet, still had all nine members, two of whom were excellent climbers.