“Precisely, the Blue Galleon is so small, it only has one security camera; it’s of terrible quality and placement. But, nonetheless, we were able to see a figure, apparently a man, crossing the lobby and going up the stairs at two fifty-four A.M. Fleming’s death took place between two and four. The receptionist that night didn’t see anything. He is also the hostel’s bookkeeper, so when it gets quiet, he tends to work out of a small office where he keeps the books. Anybody with the slightest talent for opening locks could have come into the hotel and opened Fleming’s door. None of the locks were forced.”
Inevitably, my mind turned to the legion of mechanics who keep the squads moving, every one of them capable of taking apart a bike and putting it back together in an instant. For most of them, opening a lock would be child’s play. I thought of Fiona. She would be waiting for me in her trailer, probably worried because of the delay. Well, maybe. There wasn’t much in life that worried that woman.
I got up to let the commissioner know we were done talking but, as if he’d read my mind, he had one more thing to say.
“There’s no need to let Mademoiselle Fiona know what we’ve spoken about. Of course, it would be very useful if you could find out if she or anyone from her office has seen anything unusual in the past few days.”
I nodded in silence, held my hand out as a way of signaling farewell, and headed for the trailer. And, yes, the commissioner was right: Few things escaped Mademoiselle Fiona’s attention.
In the same way the anti-doping office was in charge of making sure cyclists didn’t give themselves an advantage by using banned substances, Fiona’s office was in charge of making sure all racers on all teams complied with the strict regulations that applied to our bikes, instruments, and attire. The weight—six kilograms—and the dimensions of each bike were meticulously checked to make sure the competition didn’t turn into a purely technological confrontation. Contrary to Formula One racing, cycling authorities wanted the wins to depend on the effort, strategy, and personal talent of the racers, not on technical expertise or the size of the sponsors’ wallets.
Yes, it was possible Fiona already knew something. The challenge was trying to figure out how much of what she knew she would want to share with me. When I got to the trailer, I saw the lights were out and concluded tonight we would share absolutely nothing.
Back in my room, I spent another restless night on top of the sheets, going over two lists: that of the suspects and that of the general standings at the end of the last stage. Matosas, Paniuk, and Medel were on both lists. Steve too.
GENERAL CLASSIFICATION: STAGE 8
RANK
RIDER
TIME
NOTES
1
RICK SAGAL (PORTUGAL/FONTANA)
31:01:56
Not a rival, will fall in the mountains.
2 STEVE PANATA (USA/FONAR) +:18 He’ll rise to first place working against the clock.
3
SERGEI TALANCÓN (ROMANIA/ROCCA)
:23
Has no team.
4
LUIS DURÁN (SPAIN/IMAGINE)
:26
Weak team.
5
ALESSIO MATOSAS (ITALY/LAVEZZA)
:34
Dangerous.
6
PABLO MEDEL (SPAIN/BALEARES)
+:40 Dangerous.
7
MILENKO PANIUK (CZECH/RABONET)
:42
Dangerous.
8
PETER STARK (UK/BATESMAN)
:58
Dismissed, poor Fleming.
9
ÓSCAR CUADRADO (COLOMBIA/MOVISTAR)
1:05
They knocked his team over.
10 MARC MOREAU (FRANCE/FONAR) +1:07 I won’t be able to make Fiona happy.
2005–2016
I will never understand the reasons why Fiona chose me and not Steve, but sometimes I’ve asked myself if that wasn’t the first crack in a friendship that until then had withstood everything.
Eleven years ago, during our first professional campaign with the Ventoux team, we both worked as domestiques, cogs in a machine in service of the team’s historic leader, Bijon the Belgian, who was competing in his last season. There was all sorts of speculation about who would take Bijon’s place the next year. The team didn’t have the resources to recruit a star racer from the circuit, so it was a given that the DS would have to promote someone from within the team’s own ranks. And the options came down to me and Steve.
For the Ventoux management, it wasn’t an easy problem to solve. At that time we both had similar attributes when it came to quality and talent. Most of the experts leaned toward me. Historically, the Tour’s champions are the best mountain climbers, and I had everything going for me to become one of them. Besides, I was twenty-four years old, and that seemed to make me a more appropriate team leader than Steve at twenty-two. The truth is we were both too young, but his age would turn out to be an anomaly in the circuit’s history.
In the end, two circumstances did me in. The Spaniard Miguel Induráin had dominated cycling all through the nineties without being a particularly extraordinary climber. Half a dozen of his rivals usually beat him on the mountains. Still, he was a sublime stage racer and the best of his generation when it came to individual time trials. During those solitary races against the clock he usually managed to build up an advantage that cushioned him on the mountain days, when he was also helped by his team’s defensive strategy; they had plenty of good climbers who were able to cover for him during the rough ascents. And that was precisely Steve’s profile. An unbeatable racer, except on the mountains. Ventoux bet Steve would be the new Induráin.
The second factor was perhaps more decisive. The team needed new and more solid sponsors, and there was no greater promise than in the great American sports brands. If they could make the golden boy a star, the team’s financial future was assured.
“The real reason was you,” Fiona told me every time the topic came up. “Ventoux bet on Steve in spite of his weakness on the mountains because you were there to cover for him. They wouldn’t have dared without you. They knew that, in terms of sheer power, they had the best climber in the circuit and decided to sacrifice him to benefit Steve. If, instead of the Induráin model, they’d used the Merckx or the Pantani model, you’d be number one in the world today.”
Generally speaking, I appreciated the confidence Fiona had in that hypothesis, but I didn’t take it very seriously. I imagined it had something to do with the grim but always unconditional love she had for me and the lack of sympathy she had toward my friend and his hangers-on.
Deep down I knew it wasn’t just the Ventoux directors who had been responsible for the decision that sealed our fates. During those months of doubt, Steve and I swore we would support the choice, whatever it was, and the loser would become the other’s best squire. We completely believed in what we were saying. We faced the future with the conviction of two warriors who’ve sworn to fight shoulder-to-shoulder.
We were more than inseparable. Living in our own bubble, we grew into adulthood compensating for our weaknesses with the other’s strengths. My presence and my temperament helped put a stop to my friend’s outbursts; his desire to conquer the world
and his limitless confidence challenged my shyness and the insecurities I’d harbored since realizing my parents found me a nuisance.
“We have a date tomorrow, buddy,” he’d said just a few weeks after we’d met. Steve had managed to go out the previous Saturday night with one of the few young women we’d run into in the relative isolation of our training camp in Gerona. He tended to date girls who worked in nearby stores and restaurants. Even so, I never understood how he managed to engineer meet-ups during the few minutes we had free from training.
“We do?” I asked, surprised and a little worried. Neither my military service nor my shyness had been much help in developing an exciting love life. Women were magical and fascinating to me, while remaining inaccessible and the source of untold obsessions and anxiety.
“Susy is bringing her best friend and they’ll come get us,” he said, and then opened a drawer and pulled out a couple of condoms he threw in my direction. “They’re my lucky brand.”
I thought the possibility that a first date could end up in “that” was inconceivable; in my experience, sex had always been the result of siege-like crusades. And, in fact, our double date was a failure. God only knows what Susy told her friend Elena to get her to come out that Saturday, but it only took one look for her to let me know she had been expecting a second Steve.
Still, my friend wouldn’t give up. He would do without Susy or any other solo conquest to make sure I had company. Little by little, I began to relax, to get caught up in Steve’s spontaneity and to lose my fear about talking to whatever girl had been brought along. Even so, it took me four months to use the first of the condoms I carried, religiously and optimistically, on each date.
Deep down, I knew I was really responsible for Ventoux choosing Steve as our team leader. I realize now I regressed during those months. I don’t know if I was afraid of the pressures a leader carries on his shoulders, including justifying the rest of the team’s sacrifices with a win. It’s also possible I knew, in spite of our mutual promises, that Steve would never stand to be relegated to second place. When the decision was made, I felt an unspeakable sense of relief. I assumed that was the best way forward for both of us, the only path that would allow us to continue together. I told myself I was the stronger of the two, the one who had the ability to endure adversity and keep standing. The truth is the Eddy Merckx who Fiona swears is in me died before he ever showed his face.
In the next few years, we both moved to the French team Fonar, and Steve became the circuit’s David Beckham: His athletic feats were notable but his talent as a global celebrity who attracted multimillion-dollar sponsorships was even greater. And I became the best climber who never went up to the podium or wore a winner’s jersey—the best, or nearly the best, domestique in the circuit. My only rival had drowned in a bathtub in a three-star hotel the night before.
Steve kept our pact impeccably. His triumphs made me rich, and I became a clause in every contract for any team that wanted him. He never failed to thank me from the podium, and I was always the first person he hugged when he came down. I still warmly remember how he tried to pull me up to the winner’s circle when he won his first Tour de France, which the organizers didn’t allow.
Does this mean I’m a loser? A wimp? Was this what my father had sensed? Did this explain his disdain? Was it cowardice or loyalty I’d felt for so long? I’d never thought about it like this, not until Fiona’s insinuations that I was a better racer than I realized. Or, maybe, I only thought about it now because I finally had a chance to climb the podium when we got to Paris, even if it was thanks to the work of a killer. For the first time ever, being a domestique didn’t seem enough.
But no. What Fiona and my father, while he was alive, never understood was how naturally the relationship between Steve and me evolved. From the very beginning, the two of us experienced our wins as mutual. And in many ways, they were.
By my side, he could conserve as much as twenty-five percent of his energy on a steep slope. I lived to save him during the half-dozen stages we ran through the Pyrenees and the Alps, where his enemies would otherwise destroy him. When the rest of our teammates lagged behind, I kept pace with Steve like a relentless tugboat until my lungs exploded and my legs gave out, which never happened until the very last stretch of the race. By then, his rivals could do him little harm. I didn’t care about collapsing in that moment or being passed by dozens of mediocre racers. I never finished a Tour among the first fifteen spots, an anomaly considering I was the only climber in the circuit who could keep powering at 800 watts for more than ten minutes during a climb. The respect those stats inspired among my peers and the trophies won by my teammate thanks to my efforts were enough for me.
In time, we established our residence in a pair of houses next to each other among the hills of Lake De Como, close to the preseason training camp for the Fonar team. And, except for the brief vacations we took in December, him to Colorado and me to nowhere, we were together practically all year round. On more than one occasion, our routines were interrupted by some girlfriend of Steve’s moving in, but they usually moved back out after a few months, overwhelmed by the abandonment a life dedicated to cycling condemned them to.
We became addicted to training, going much further than the schedule established by the trainers. I’d go get him at five in the morning and we’d bike side by side for six or seven hours through the mountains of northern Italy, even in the winter cold of those preseason months. They were never relaxed rides: We talked very little, measured ascents and descents, modified our challenges and objectives every day, practiced strategies for pursuit and tailing. Basically, we aimed for extreme pain and fatigue. But we found something very comforting in the absolute exhaustion with which we concluded each day: the feeling that we had done our duty.
And we certainly had. We developed such synchronicity that, many years later, when the technicians made us race in a computer-moderated wind tunnel to optimize the angle and the distance where my body offered his the greatest energy savings, its findings coincided exactly with what we had discovered intuitively in our long, lonely sessions. We responded to changes in intensity or wind direction like a flock of birds—making small adjustments we were barely aware of that allowed us to keep going at maximum speed. We became the fastest duo in cycling history, and by quite a lot. We were a pair, a couple, in more than one sense, unaffected by the women who passed through our lives.
Until Fiona came along.
Stage 9
Vannes—Plumelec, 28 km. Individual time trial.
I woke up with the sense that I was missing something important in my list of suspects, like when you leave the house and know you’re forgetting something, even though you can feel your keys, wallet, and cell in your pocket.
Up until now, my list had been limited to those who would benefit from the killer’s attacks: Paniuk the Czech, Matosas the Italian, Medel the Spaniard; Steve’s circle, including Giraud; and Radek the Pole, motivated by his hate and resentment.
But the night before, Favre had approached the matter in another way: to look for the guilty party based on the modus operandi of those attacks. His police logic took into account not only motive but also alibis and abilities. That made me remember certain loose fragments from the criminology seminars Lombard had made me take thirteen years back, although they were immediately erased by a smiling Claude from Biarritz and that small caiman tattooed on her belly. It had left a vague, salty taste in my mouth.
I forced myself to refocus on the damn modus operandi: the mechanics and their talents for opening locks, the doctors and their particular knowledge about sleeping pills and toxins, the soigneurs and their powerful hands that could’ve caused the bruises on Fleming’s body. Dozens of faces passed through my mind, some well known to me, others anonymous participants in the vast personnel that surrounds the cyclists who race the Tour each year.
But I wasn’t going to
get anywhere by that route. The list of suspects could go on indefinitely. And, anyway, I didn’t have access to the report about each attack, a description of the scene of the crime, the specific time or the precision with which it took place. Without that, it would be impossible to hunt down suspects or discard the innocent.
I tried to refocus on the day ahead. If I didn’t dedicate myself to being a cyclist in the next few hours, I’d end up watching the Tour on TV in the next few days. For a lot of cyclists, the Tour’s individual time trial is the real test: We run a shorter distance than in the other stages but we do it as if we were being chased by a tax collector. It’s a solo battle against a stopwatch, without help, without domestiques, in which every pedal, every meter, and every second are decisive. This is where Steve was the absolute king. The question was not who would win this stage but rather with how much of a time advantage he would win. There were three or four great time-trial racers in the peloton, but none of them were team leaders or had a chance of winning the overall race, so we weren’t worried about them.
For a lot of the climbers, this stage could become a real Waterloo. Especially because, for this occasion, the sadistic organizers had chosen an unusually long stretch of forty-two kilometers. If Steve performed at his peak, he could finish with three or four minutes over his rivals, which would determine this year’s winner in one fell swoop.
In the warm-up area, anxiety flooded the air like a toxic cloud. I saw Matosas, his two thick dark eyebrows fused into one; he was standing and stretching while his DS gave him loud instructions, but he wasn’t paying attention to anything that wasn’t coming from his earphones. I wondered if he was listening to that horrible Italian pop music he loved, although for all I knew he could have been listening to arias. I decided that was improbable: Matosas was an Italian pop culture cliché, although a good version of that.
The Black Jersey Page 6
