“I had to take care of the bikes all that week,” he said, and stopped, upset, hoping I would figure out the rest of the story.
And I did. The soigneurs on the Tour do a little bit of everything, including watch the bikes while the mechanics eat breakfast.
“It was just Pierre and me. But there are more than twenty bikes and you know how it is: journalists snooping around, tourists sneaking around, hotel staff. They take photos and ask you questions.”
I did know how it was. The bus that carried the bicycles was usually parked on a hotel side street and always ended up becoming an improvised bike gallery. As the mechanics cleaned, greased, and prepared each bike, they left them somewhere near the vehicle: on the ground, against the wall, on their stands.
“You think someone could have come along and replaced the original in the full light of day?” I asked, incredulous.
“I’ve gone over it time and time again and I can’t remember anything, but it’s the only possible explanation. C’mon, you know Dandy and the other guys. None of them would ever do anything so vile. So it has to be someone from the outside who exchanged your bike.”
“The police mentioned some suspicious deposits in Dandy’s bank account,” I said.
“Of course! It was for the bike sales he made under the table.”
“Well, then, why doesn’t the Dandy just say so?”
“He’s not saying anything because that would mean confessing his theft: Fonar would fire him and maybe even press charges. Of course the way things are going, he may not have a choice.”
“Then what’s the problem?” I asked, impatient.
“If they buy the argument that the bike was exchanged, the cops will focus on trying to find out how the altered bike got to you. In other words, they’ll interrogate whoever was watching the bicycles that day.”
Now Axel was looking at me with arched brows and a crumpling face, on the verge of tears. It was the face of a little boy sent to the school principal’s office.
“Is that it?” I asked. I’d gotten scared; for a moment, I thought there might be something to really worry about. “We all know this is a circus and there are too many people around to take care of so many bicycles. The mechanics practically work in the street. Any one of us could testify to that, don’t worry. They’ll interrogate you for two hours, look at your past, check out your bank accounts. Then they’ll let you go and that’s that.”
“It’s just that, that’s the problem,” he said, lowering his eyes once more.
“What? Your past or your bank accounts?” I asked, more curious than anything else.
“It’s just that…I was also involved in the bike sales,” he responded in a barely audible voice.
“Fuck, Axel!”
“What we do isn’t a big deal, Marc,” he pleaded. “Fonar sells the bikes at the end of the season anyway. What’s it matter if two or three disappear along the way? We never put the ones you use at risk. We always make sure they have all the pieces and replacements they need. Do you know how much we can get from a collector for one of Steve’s bikes? Four or five times its market value. It’s a fortune for us and it doesn’t hurt anybody.”
“But why are you telling me? You should confess to the police, or to Fonar at least, so they’ll take you and any other member of the team off the list of suspects. It’s better that you took advantage of a loophole than that you killed somebody, don’t you think?” I was about to use the word “thief,” but I stopped myself just in time; my soigneur was already feeling bad enough.
“I know. I wanted to ask your advice, because I heard you’re consulting with the commissioner who’s in charge of the interrogations. Perhaps you could put in a good word about me to him.”
So he knew too. And to think I’d been convinced my meetings with Favre were a secret. Fiona always found a way to know everything. But if Axel was in the loop, the rest of my teammates probably were as well. They would see me as a collaborator. With the police squeezing our crews, it explained why so many of them were treating me coolly. I had attributed that to Lombard’s statements in the press, which made me seem out to sabotage Steve’s championship. Now I saw it probably also had to do with my closeness to the authorities. A collaborator on top of being a traitor—in the eyes of a cyclist, these are worse sins than being the inventor of cobblestones.
“I’m not consulting with the commissioner,” I told Axel. “He’s come to see me a couple of times because I was once with the military police. But, obviously, I didn’t play along. I got him off me as best I could.” I wished the whole team could hear me.
I wasn’t lying to him. I had tried to get rid of Favre; I always said as little as possible. I was no traitor, at least not yet. And even less of a collaborator. Though if anybody took a look at my phone in the past hour, they’d think otherwise. Goddamn Favre, look what he’d gotten me into. What would Fiona think knowing it was my fault they’d arrested the Dandy? How would Lombard take it? Steve? Hell, all I’d wanted was to help put a stop to a killer who was hurting my community.
“…incapable of hurting Fonar,” I heard Axel say. The words brought me out of the black hole of self-pity into which I’d fallen. “Will you say something on my behalf?” he pleaded.
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
He hesitated and, before leaving, turned and gave me a hug, as if he were saying a final farewell before being shipped off to Alcatraz.
When he pulled away he saw something on my neck and, with the confidence of someone who knows his territory well, pulled the collar of my sweat jacket aside to examine my skin.
“Where did those bruises come from?”
“What are you talking about? What bruises?” I asked, pulling away and crossing over to one of the large mirrors that tried to make this narrow room seem more expansive. In fact, I did have some purple marks on the side of my neck. They must have been the result of Giraud jerking me around outside the bus the day before. The combined genes of Colonel Moreau and Nurse Restrepo could be a blessing when it came to cycling, but they were a disaster when it came to many other things. In addition to my sulfuric sweat, my skin suffered from the sensitivity of Queen Marie Antoinette.
A little later, I saw Steve on the bus during the transfer to the starting line. I thought that he wouldn’t give me a hard time for turning the Dandy over to the police. I could tell Steve I’d drowned a twin brother in order to be an only child; he would have shaken his head and attributed it to the incomprehensible characteristics of my French-Colombian nature. I had little appreciation for my friend’s current celebrity lifestyle, and I supposed he looked down on my evenings of puzzles, jazz, and good novels. But the complete communion we had when it came to the bike neutralized any differences we might otherwise have had.
The objective for the day was the same as for the day before: to try to help Steve’s recovery and to keep the leaders from gaining any more distance. Unfortunately, this was a much tougher stretch. We would race for 137 kilometers without obstacles and then have to deal with two climbs before the finish line in Mende. Our rivals were also keeping track of Steve’s recovery, but with opposite intentions: They needed to get rid of him once and for all before he got completely well and Fonar launched its counterattack.
The stage began as predicted. Matosas and his gang set off at a dizzying rhythm, although without trying to break away or blocking in bad faith the way they’d done the day before. They were simply trying to get Steve to burn out before we reached the two final climbs, where they’d attack.
And yet I worried about a much more imminent danger I hadn’t dared mention to Giraud or even Steve. Between kilometers 44 and 59 we would confront a fifteen-kilometer descent that was pure free fall, a modality my partner had mastered better than anyone else in the circuit. But only cyclists themselves know what goes on in the head after an accident. On the Vernhette descent,
we would be flying at speeds of more than 80 kilometers per hour and it would be impossible for him to not relive the panic he’d experienced when he’d lost the tube, especially because at these speeds, an incident like that could mean death.
I’d seen real veterans become paralyzed facing a descent the day after a dangerous fall; it’s similar to the panic experienced by an automobile driver taking the first curve after leaving the hospital they’d landed in after a car accident. I also feared the opposite effect: that Steve, in order to overcome his fear, would risk more than what was necessary to suppress the panic. That would be very characteristic of my friend.
“Let’s go down slowly,” I said when we began to toboggan at kilometer 44. He arched his brow, surprised, and I looked down between my right leg and the pedal, pretending to have some sort of difficulty. He looked at me worriedly and nodded toward the front, where the three leaders had gathered. He was afraid we would fall behind.
“Nothing serious, I’ll change bikes when I stop to pee,” I said, keeping up my deception. Starting at kilometer 59, we’d race over a long flatland in which the peloton would slow down for a few minutes while most of the racers pissed without getting off their bikes. This scene is never shown on TV, although it’s as common as greased links and scrawny bodies: a Versailles-like fountain made up of one hundred colorful athletes emptying their fluids on both sides of the road.
My strategy meant losing a spare bike but it worked out. We went down with relative caution in the back of the peloton, and as soon as we got to the plain, we quickly recovered our positions just behind the leaders. Despite my anxieties, Steve’s descent was impeccable. He seemed to have galvanized his spirit against the fear that haunts other cyclists; an accident was an anomaly that had nothing to do with him, a flaw in the bike, an incident that would not be repeated.
A few kilometers later, Giraud came up in his car and handed me another bike amid stares from the mechanics. I wanted to think the wary attitude with which they checked out my bike had everything to do with the sabotage we’d experienced two days before, although I couldn’t help but notice a tinge of incredulity in the way they were looking at me. I understood that, after what happened, the mechanics had been painstaking in preparing my bike before the race, and when I asked for a change, they assumed I had had a puncture. Now that they saw that wasn’t the case, they couldn’t understand my reasoning.
I shook my head and emptied it of thought. I would confront every challenge that presented itself and only at the end would I try to compose a vision of the whole. We wouldn’t survive this stage if I mixed killers and cops with the curves and slopes that awaited us.
The next kilometers went by at a frenetic pace, but without incident. Matosas, Paniuk, and Medel kept looking over at Steve’s face, waiting for a sign of fatigue or surrender, while their domestiques brutally jerked the peloton around. They were like three impatient vultures waiting for the last gasp from a hopeless buffalo. Except that Steve refused to succumb. Only I, who knew him best, could see the tension in his jaw and the effort he was making to hide the pain he was suffering as he tried to keep his rhythm on the climb up the first of the two climbs on the last stretch.
The Sauveterre was not a particularly sharp peak, but it went on for more than nine kilometers. Steve held on, but I could tell he was bone weary. I had doubts he could get past the Croix Neuve waiting for us at the end of the stage: It was only five kilometers long, but three of these kilometers had a ten percent gradient, and he would feel that as if he were scaling a wall. I guessed that something in his ribs was bothering him; he was blinking strangely when he breathed, as if the intake of air was burning his insides. Giraud finally noticed it too. Since the beginning of the race, he’d been periodically asking Steve how he was doing and Steve had responded positively, if monosyllabically. In the past half hour of the race, though, he’d stopped answering the DS, as if he feared every word he spoke would steal energy from the next pedal.
When we started up the last hill, I prepared for the worst. If Steve collapsed at the foot of the slope, the three leaders would stand up on their pedals and end up with a two-digit lead. The Tour would be over for us. Not for you, I heard Fiona’s voice in my head, or whatever ambitious beast Fiona had awakened inside me. The voice was right. If Steve was eliminated, I was the best positioned of the Fonar racers: fifth place in the rankings. In theory, the team would work for me and I could attack those hateful leaders. In fact, I could do it right now, in the Croix Neuve, as soon as my brother was officially dismissed from the race.
But we should never underestimate the devotion in the soul of a domestique. I swatted away my demons, gathered the team, and formed a kind of diamond around Steve. These noontime roads in the Pyrenees were where I was given the name Hannibal, and I knew every one of its summits from countless hours of training. I knew about the winds from the side that would buffet us during the first part of the ascent and I found a way to control the line by letting the mountain protect us. If our rivals wanted to pass us, they’d have to peel off the wall and do it against the wind. It may not have been much, but it was a strategy.
“C’mon, champ,” I said to Steve, bringing my head close to his. “Just hold on for fifteen more minutes. Tomorrow’s stage is all downhill and then we get a day off. Let’s not let those sons of bitches cut us off today and I promise we’ll take the jersey from them in the Alps.”
He didn’t respond. Just nodded his head, like an obedient child, although the pallor of his face gave me a bad feeling. He didn’t even correct me: We had two more days before getting a day off, although right then I would have told him the moon was made of cheese so long as it got him to hold on a little longer. He managed to gather the strength to follow us when we snuck in between the mountain and our rivals.
“Defend your position even if you have to bash them; we’re going into a headwind,” I told the team over the radio or, more precisely, the four of us who were left. And it worked. In three hundred meters, when our competition felt the force of the wind, they wanted to get between us and the shelter provided by the mountain wall. But we closed ranks and they had no choice but to try to pass us, which was virtually impossible with all that gusting. They finally chose to get behind Guido’s wheel—he was the last man in our formation—and share our shelter. They would wait until the playing field changed to attack Steve again.
A few seconds later we hit them back with one of the dirty tricks that they’d tried on us: Guido dragged out his pedaling so the rest of Fonar could take some distance from our rivals. They got frantic and tried to pass him, but as soon as they lunged forward, Guido would immediately accelerate, put his elbows out, and zigzag to force them into the middle of the road, exposed to the brutal whirlwind. This went on for more than a kilometer. Steve’s weak state kept us from taking advantage of our teammate’s ruse, but I still thought it had proven fruitful. Each kilometer that we weren’t victims of an attack constituted a small victory for us.
Desperate because Croix Neuve was just ahead, Matosas consulted the other two leaders and they decided to go for it. If they didn’t attack now, they’d lose any chance of taking over the Tour once and for all. They pulled away from the wall, sent their domestiques to take turns in pairs at the front, and stood up on their bikes. I knew that on the last stretch, just as we neared the peak, we’d lose the natural barrier, and I feared the worst. But it turned out that the rival domestiques were fried after a half-dozen attacks against Guido, and, even better, when the small group was finally at the point of catching up to us, Medel sat down, physically and spiritually spent. All you had to do was look at him to understand he’d been hit by the notorious and much feared bonking: that catastrophic moment when the cyclist’s fuel tank is simply empty. Three weeks of riding had suddenly done him in.
Medel’s teammates immediately slowed down to accompany their leader. Matosas and Paniuk lost their momentum and didn’t kn
ow what to do. They had never considered the possibility that one of them would crumple before Steve. We took advantage of the situation to gain a few more meters. And that’s how we arrived at the peak eight hundred meters later. After a slight descent, we reached the finish line. We were so concerned with what was going on behind us, we never broke formation to let Steve take the lead. It was only when we crossed the line that I realized I had once more won the stage. When we added in the bonuses for first and second place, we’d managed to take a few seconds from Matosas: I got 22 and Steve got 18. It wasn’t much, but the psychological implications were enormous. Medel came in five minutes later, which let Steve knock him off third place in the general classification, something that, earlier that morning, we had thought impossible.
The gratifying sensation I got from our small and unexpected victory went to hell when I got to the hotel and discovered Axel and his hands were not there to receive me. I imagined my loyal soigneur stammering excuses and shaking before Favre’s caustic phrases and disdainful smile.
I wasn’t sure it would do any good to talk to the commissioner, but it was the least I could do for Axel. First, though, I needed to wait for Steve’s soigneur to finish his usual session with our leader, so he could get his talons in me and help me avoid the embarrassing cramps typical of the day after a stage. The two-hour wait seemed eternal since I was used to getting a massage as soon as I got off the bus, but these were Giraud’s instructions. Yet another small payback.
The thought of the Fonar DS made me run my fingertips softly over the dark bruises the bastard had left on my neck. That’s when my brain made one of those connections that can only be the result of watching too much CSI on TV. Fleming’s body had had bruises on its neck. Was it possible to compare the bruises and determine if Giraud’s fingers had been responsible for both? My forensics knowledge wasn’t that deep; in fact, it didn’t go much further than the marvelous thighs of Claude from Biarritz. In spite of how inconvenient it would be for the head of Fonar to have been responsible for the crimes, I entertained myself with the image of our haughty DS being handcuffed and shoved into the backseat of a squad car. I decided to talk to the commissioner. I didn’t even know if Fleming’s body was still at the morgue or if he had been buried or cremated.
The Black Jersey Page 17
