The Black Jersey

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  Generally speaking, I was amused and flattered by these brotherly affections, but very aware that I was a transient figure in the Panata family. I took it for granted that sooner or later our destinies would diverge. When Steve won his first yellow jersey, he felt very badly that I didn’t want to get a tattoo of a little bicycle on my calf, like he did, commemorating “our” triumph. But I thought it was excessive: It was one thing to accept that the Panatas had informally adopted me, but to brag about Steve’s victory as if it were mine struck me as pathetic.

  Lombard found the entire thing pitiful. He had originally sent me to try out with the Ventoux team with the secret hope they’d choose me to replace their star racer, Bijon, whose retirement was imminent. It must have been a huge disappointment to the colonel to realize the team had chosen Steve, and that I’d accepted becoming a domestique for the indefinite future. And worse yet, that I had found a family but not with him. In many ways, I was more his son than Bernard was. The boy had grown up living with his mother and had never had an interest in cycling, his father’s passion.

  As if in response to Diana’s attentions, Lombard came over to visit more and more frequently. When he found out Diana called and talked to both me and Steve on Sunday mornings, he got in the habit of calling Saturdays after training or competition.

  When he realized it was impossible to compete with Diana when it came to domestic advice, he opted to concentrate on the technical aspects of training and to churn out father-son speeches about the meaning of life that came straight out of a self-help book. At some point, I said something to Steve about that, and it became an inside joke between us. “Everything happens for a reason” was one of his favorites, and we began using it for just about everything. When we were out on dates or hanging with our friends and there was a moment of silence, we’d repeat the enigmatic, “You have to live like you think; otherwise you’ll end up thinking like you live.” We would say it with a very serious and absolutely convincing tone while trying to hold back gales of laughter.

  I’ll never be able to apologize enough for how hurt he was when he realized we were mocking him. One day when he called, Steve got on the phone to ask him something about a power meter about to go on the market, chatted briefly, and then hung up, or so we thought.

  “He told me early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” he said, laughing, turning around and stepping a few feet away from the kitchen counter, where the phone rested.

  “It’s true, the early bird gets the worm,” I responded.

  “Lose an hour in the morning and you’ll be all day hunting for it.”

  “No, the devil is in the details.”

  We went on like that, cracking ourselves up with nonsense refrains until I went up to the kitchen counter to get a glass of water. A little green light on the phone let me know the line was still active, that Steve hadn’t hung up properly. I picked it up and heard labored breathing on the other end. Then a click cut off the communication.

  In the following weeks the colonel acted as if he hadn’t heard anything, although I could tell from the stiff and measured way he treated me how offended he was. I never again made fun of his refrains. He himself went back to them a few days later. Lombard and Steve entered a state of mutual tolerance, but neither ever understood the importance of the other in my life.

  Stage 14

  Rodez—Mende, 178.5 km.

  In the same way that I thought about the rankings before going to bed each night on the Tour, the first thing I did when I got up was visualize the stage that awaited us. Last night I’d broken my habit and that morning I did so again. Surviving two attempts on your life in four days would disrupt anybody’s routines.

  Instead of analyzing the course, my mind concentrated on how to stay alive for the next few days. I concluded I had two possible scenarios before me. If the killer was looking to have one of the three leaders—Matosas, Paniuk, and Medel—win in Paris, he was well on his way. With a little bit of luck, he would be satisfied with the lead they had and leave us alone. Of course, there was the possibility that, once Fonar was eliminated, the killer would concentrate his attacks on two of the three leaders to make sure his champion definitely won the yellow jersey. Matosas was still my main suspect. I felt sorry for Paniuk and Medel, although only a little, considering what they’d tried against us the day before yesterday.

  But there was a second and much worse scenario. We hadn’t gotten to the Alps yet; four days among those great peaks could change everything, including the five minutes they had over us. With the powerful English team, Batesman, and the Spaniards from Movistar crippled with injuries, Fonar was by far the strongest team on the high mountain. Precisely because attacking steep inclines was not Steve’s strength, our team was made up of climbers. I figured if the killer knew even a little about cycling, and it was obvious he did, he wouldn’t let us reach Ventoux and the other Alpine peaks in one piece.

  I hadn’t left my room yet, but I assumed there had been a guard all night at my door. I wouldn’t die like Fleming, drowned by an intruder in the bathtub. Still, the imagination and the resources the killer had shown in making Fiona’s gas tank explode and destroying my bicycle led me to conclude a third attack could come from anywhere. Today we would ride 178 kilometers of open countryside, which left us vulnerable for almost four hours.

  Until now, whoever was responsible for these tragedies had been relatively successful in making them look like accidents. But if they decided to change tactics, there was no defense on the road against a sniper or a murderous motorcycle. After giving it some more thought, I set that possibility aside. That kind of killing would probably mean canceling the Tour, and I had long ago discarded Radek or any of the other race’s enemies as the possible author of those attacks. No, whoever was behind this wanted to crown their man in Paris. And to do that, they needed to make sure their next incident looked equally accidental.

  Favre was right: The only way to stop the next death was to find out who the killer was before he had a chance to attack. Instead of holding the commissioner in such disdain, I should have been working with him to find some evidence of guilt among the mechanics or eliminate them as suspects once and for all.

  I went over the profiles of the five Fonar mechanics and decided to concentrate on the two who were responsible for preparing my bike: Marciel, aka the Dandy, and Joseph, the family man. In theory, any of the other three could have done it, but it would be difficult without the two in charge of my Pinarello noticing. I immediately set my sights on the first one. The Dandy was a little frivolous and tended to look down on his co-workers. Joseph was the opposite, a shy man dedicated to his numerous offspring and his wife. I set him aside for the moment. The mere suggestion of something risky would probably make him sick. If poor Joseph had been a part of any kind of sabotage, he would have cracked in the first hour of the interrogation.

  I did a quick review of what I knew about the Dandy’s private life, but I couldn’t come up with any revealing facts. Then I remembered someone had recently mentioned he was suffering from heartbreak. The start of the race had buried the memory, but now I began to try to put it together, like someone trying to rescue a ring from a drain with nothing more than a fragile toothpick.

  I knew there was something else, something important. Frustrated, I got dressed to go to breakfast, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the matter. Now it was like something caught in a tooth I couldn’t stop obsessively picking with the tip of my tongue. I went out in the hallway and said hello to the officer struggling to stay awake while sprawled out on a little bench. And that’s exactly when I recovered the ring from the drain and got what was bothering me out of my teeth: The Dandy’s sorrows were the result of a love affair involving Daniela, Di Salvo’s sister. Di Salvo was an Italian cyclist who’d recently retired. Daniela was a beautiful woman with an explosive temperament that we all knew well because s
he’d gone out with half a dozen cyclists; apparently she didn’t think much of going out with a mere mechanic and broke things off quickly with the Dandy.

  I was walking down the hall when an even more pertinent bit of information hit me. Di Salvo was from southern Italy, like Conti and Ferrara, Matosas’s men. If I’d been a character in one of Lombard’s comic books, an imaginary lightbulb would have gone on above my head. I then did what no one ever does in those classic comics. I pulled out my cell and texted the information to the commissioner. When I finished I realized I had half a dozen messages from Axel and one from Fiona.

  I still had the cell in my hand when I received Favre’s response regarding the Dandy: “He’s our main suspect. Today we confirmed he made deposits greater than his salary. That he has a girlfriend with ties to Matosas’s people could be the key. Well done, Sergeant Moreau, please continue.”

  The commissioner’s orders made the whole situation feel less like a game. To accuse the Dandy gave me a bad taste in my mouth; even though he wasn’t a particularly nice guy, he was still a member of our team. I tried to shake off my discomfort by telling myself I was doing the right thing. In the end, if he was innocent, the whole incident wouldn’t be more than a bad afternoon for him.

  When I went into the dining room, I looked over at the mechanics’ table and saw they were all there. A quick look at their faces made it clear none of them had slept very much. If Favre was trying to break them from sheer fatigue, it didn’t look like it would take much more for them to confess to being responsible for Kennedy’s assassination.

  The Dandy was among them, wearing his little gold bracelet but without his usual poise, his eyes nailed on the cereal bowl before him. My teammates were rattled. Turning to me, Guido said the police had let the mechanics go at about five in the morning so they could do their work. Murat the Beast raved against the authorities and about the need for Fonar to protect its people against the abuse they were now being subjected to, slipping in a Catalan insult every other word. The rest of the table agreed and I nodded, fidgeting in my chair. It was touching that the cyclists stood in solidarity with the mechanics in spite of the sabotaged bike. Being a witness to this made me feel just a little shittier. And the worst was yet to come.

  Minutes later, two of Favre’s assistant detectives, followed by three police officers, walked into the dining room and went straight to the mechanics’ table. They ordered the Dandy to come with them. It was clear that the commissioner had decided to make a scene. Three teams were staying at that hotel, among them Matosas’s team, Lavezza. That means forty or so people started hitting their glassware with silverware to show their disapproval of the Dandy’s arrest.

  Several of my tablemates were standing now, and I could still see the backs of the police when my cell lit up next to my plate. Fortunately, no one was paying attention to me or my phone. “Your intuition was correct, sergeant. Daniela di Salvo and Ferrara are from the same town, Reggio Calabria. I will interrogate M. until he confesses. I can’t set him free because he will flee.”

  I immediately looked around until I found the Lavezza team. Their chief of mechanics, Ferrara, was presiding over the table, the picture of someone who could blow your brains out without a pause in his breakfast. It was hard to imagine that man and the Dandy’s ex, the exuberant Daniela, came from the same town.

  Town. That’s what Favre had said, but from what I remembered, Reggio Calabria was much more than just a town. I checked the internet and it turned out it was a city with a population of 180,000. Ferrara must have been around fifty years old and Daniela was maybe thirty; it was hard to imagine them as classmates. That didn’t mean their families might not have known each other, although it was a stretch from that to any kind of evidence of complicity. If I trusted that line of thought, having grown up in Medellín, I would be a member of a drug cartel. But it’s that line of thought—my line of thought—that had led to the Dandy’s arrest. I felt like a Judas in disguise.

  “Stevlana heard about my fall and wants to come,” Steve said from his seat next to me. He seemed to be the only one not paying attention to the scene that had just unfolded, involved as he was in exchanging text messages with his girlfriend. Even at a distance, Stevlana could demand, and be, the center of attention, or at least my friend’s attention.

  “Tell her you’re fine, that she should meet up with you in Paris. The Alps are going to be really tough and you don’t need her all over you.” Although it was just an expression, I couldn’t avoid imagining her in bed, literally over Steve, shaking her breasts in the air.

  “I know,” he said, “but how do I make her understand that?”

  “Tell Benny to distract her with something else, to earn his salary.” Benny, Steve’s agent, was an ingratiating kind of fellow who would lay his kid down in a ditch and walk over him in order not to get his fancy shoes dirty.

  “She hates him right now because the tickets he got us for Bob Dylan’s farewell concert were in the twentieth row.”

  “Who doesn’t she hate?” My question was meant to be rhetorical, but Steve actually answered.

  “I don’t think she hates Margaret,” he said. Margaret was the director of his foundation, dedicated to helping street kids. The foundation’s efforts were focused in Colombia, something for which I’d have to be grateful to Steve for the rest of my days. They’d channeled millions of dollars into rough neighborhoods in Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali.

  “That’s it then: Tell Stevlana that Margaret is on the verge of resigning and that she is the only person to whom she would listen, or whatever. Plead with her to go to New York to talk to her, say you would do it yourself if you weren’t in the middle of the Tour.” Stevlana had traveled a couple of times to Colombia with Margaret to raise funds and visit favelas and had been very satisfied with her own good deeds. And, in fact, she had done a great deal of good: A number of millionaires had signed fat checks after she gazed into their eyes and said please.

  “Perfect. Stevlana loves to save the day. I’ll talk to Margaret so she can get her performance ready. That could keep her busy for a whole week,” he said enthusiastically. “You’re brilliant today, Mojito.”

  “Don’t you dare call me that,” I said, although I was pretty pleased myself. I only wish finding the killer and winning the yellow jersey were that easy.

  As if he’d been waiting for the precise moment to reawaken my pessimism, Axel the soigneur came into the dining room, sweaty and agitated.

  “Why aren’t you answering my texts?” he complained. “Are you finished? Can we talk for a moment?”

  “I’ll leave you two alone; I don’t want to know any intimate secrets,” said Steve, laughing.

  By that point most of the diners had left or were about to leave. Our own table had emptied. “I didn’t get a chance to look at your messages yesterday,” I said by way of apology. “What’s going on?”

  “The cops are killing the mechanics. They’ve had two sleepless nights in a row.”

  “I know, but there’s nothing I can do,” I said and felt my ears get hot and probably red. I’d never be a good poker player. Although Axel wouldn’t be either, since he didn’t seem to see anything out of the ordinary in my response. “Anyway, my sabotaged bike is the only clue the police have, so they can’t actually charge anybody.”

  “It’s just that the Dandy and the rest of them are all innocent,” he said, contorting his body as if he couldn’t wait one more second to pee.

  “Come on, Axel, you’re not going to tell me you think it was an accident. In 2008 it could be seen as a mistake, but not now. The adhesive for aluminum they used on my wheel has been banned for a long time on the circuit. Somebody was trying to mess with me. And that could only have been done by whoever worked on my bike just a few minutes before I got it.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you since last night. It was your bike
…but it wasn’t.”

  I stared at him, trying to figure out what he was saying. Axel could be a joker, although when it came to work he was sensible and responsible, and his anguished face didn’t belong to somebody who was playing around.

  I asked him to explain what he meant, and he did: At the beginning of the season each cyclist gets five bicycles; some, like Steve and me, get a few more. Over the course of several months, the bikes are cannibalized in order to create two or three with optimum conditions and those are the ones used in the competition. A hit here, a worn gear there, and you have to replace the handlebars or the pedals. Axel told me that, with a little bit of hustle, some mechanics on the circuit manage to steal enough pieces from the inventory to put together whole bikes that they then sell at astronomical prices. Steve’s bikes and mine—although mine not as much as Steve’s—are the most sought after from Fonar.

  He reminded me that, during Il Giro two months earlier, I’d had two harmless falls. They had resulted in two rigged reports that exaggerated the damage. The result had been an impeccable bike sold on the black market for twenty thousand euros.

  “That was the sales pitch: ‘It’s the one Marc Moreau uses on the Tour,’ ” said Axel, using air quotes around the last part.

  “I can see where you’re going with this. That black market bike could have been the one that was sabotaged. But that doesn’t explain how I wound up on it, does it? It would have had to go through the Dandy or Joseph, who are in charge of my equipment.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said, his eyes downcast, “and that’s why I wanted to talk to you alone.”

  “What?” I asked, more intrigued by the minute.