The Black Jersey

by Jorge Zepeda Patterson

  LUIS DURÁN (SPAIN/IMAGINE)

  15:22

  8

  SERGEI TALANCÓN (ROMANIA/ROCCA)

  15:56

  9

  ROL CHARPENELLE (FRANCE/TOURGAZ)

  19:37

  10

  RICHARD MUELLER (GERMANY/THIELEMANN)

  21:16

  Stage 19

  Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne—La Toussuire–Les Sybelles, 138 km.

  I dreamed about the yellow jersey, but woke up a domestique once more. It’s what I was and that was that. Fiona and Lombard were convinced Steve had made me a domestique. But, really, it’s what I had always been: never a protagonist, always a survivor. Steve was the one who, with his Snatch project, was giving me the chance to attain personal glory. Rather than betraying him, I should be thanking him. I decided to show him as much when I saw him in the dining room that morning.

  “Eat up, bro, we’re gonna get the fifth today, right?” I grinned at him, nodding toward his calf, which I knew was tattooed with four bicycles, though it was currently covered by warm-up pants.

  “It’s already tatted; I just have to ink it,” he said, obviously pleased by my attitude. I tried to swallow my shock at his confidence. “Now we have to put you in second place, don’t you think? That way you’ll be the Tour favorite next year if I don’t come.” Steve was generous, but never humble. “How much is Matosas beating you by?”

  “Fifty-three seconds. But Giraud isn’t going to make things easy for me; he wants us to chill so we don’t tire you out. Matosas won’t have a problem keeping up. So I can’t ignore him for a second.”

  “I feel pretty good. Hit him with a strong pace when we climb the Croix de Fer to tire him out, and we’ll really test him on Toussuire.” Today’s stage, the second to last of the Tour, offered two huge peaks; one a little after the halfway point with an almost twenty-three-kilometer ascent and another just eighteen kilometers before the finish line. A true torture for our aching bodies.

  “I bet Giraud will have me handing out water. It’ll be hard to get on the podium that way. As soon as he thinks you’re safe and there are no more threats, he can get rid of me.” I thought that Giraud would surely do that or worse if he found out about the message I’d sent the commissioner the day before.

  “He won’t do that; it’ll look good for him if Fonar makes it one and two. And anyway, at this point in the Tour we don’t have to give a shit about what Giraud says.”

  “Just like that? If he sends me to pass out cans, I just ignore him?” I asked, loving the idea. My long training as a domestique didn’t leave me with much of an instinct for rebellion, but if it came from my leader, I was happy to obey.

  “Our team radio has broken before, hasn’t it?” he responded with his most radiant smile. “The signal’s terrible in these mountains,” he added, and burst out laughing.

  I laughed too and for a second it felt like it was ten years earlier, in the kitchen of our shared house, when everything was a game and the future was an Eden, rich with marvelous fruits within our reach. But a shadow suddenly took over Steve’s face.

  “But if you see me falling back, slow the pace, all right?” He shot me a mistrustful, almost resentful look. A look that also reminded me of the old days, when I’d managed to beat him at videogames.

  “To make it one and two, we need you to be number one,” I said, with the attitude and pronunciation Lombard used when he delivered his terrible proverbs. Again, we laughed, although after a few seconds I felt ashamed for mocking the old man.

  My guilt grew even heavier when I went to my room a few minutes later and found Lombard himself there. He was squeezing a document against his chest with the zeal of a rugby player carrying the ball.

  “Bernard and I have been working on this nonstop. It’s the comparative performance curves between you and Steve in the mountains over the last few days: power, heart rate, cadence. We’ve set them up against the Alpe d’Huez climb and determined the exact point where you have to pass him.” He placed half a dozen color printouts on the bed around a huge sketch of the legendary climb. “Look, at exactly four-point-five kilometers before the finish, the slope rises to nine percent. At that point, you’ll both be going twenty to twenty-four kilometers per hour. You just have to increase your speed to twenty-eight to pull away from Steve. It’s possible for you, but not for him; he won’t be able to keep up. You’ll end up with a two-minute-and-twenty-two-second lead, with a margin of error of five seconds, enough to take his jersey by more than half a minute. Bernard has checked it over and over,” he concluded, smug and beaming, as if waiting for applause.

  The mention of his son reminded me I hadn’t answered Bernard’s insistent text messages. I’d have to find him later.

  “Thank you, colonel, it’s all clear. The red X marks the spot, right?” I’d determined to stay loyal to Steve, but I didn’t want to be impolite to Lombard, not after all he’d done for me.

  “Exactly,” he answered. “On Wednesday I went down and took photos. Here, right after you pass this blue milestone, that’s the moment to attack.” He had enlarged four shots taken from the perspective of the highway so there could be no doubt about where the blow had to be delivered.

  “Leave this with me; I’ll take care of it. And we’ll see how tomorrow goes,” I said in a neutral tone.

  “Think of it this way, Hannibal: For three thousand, three hundred fifty-six kilometers and twenty days, you were his domestique. You just have to stop doing your job for the last four kilometers, for fifteen minutes. It’s not so much to ask, is it?” He smiled at me with the satisfaction of someone demonstrating a lighter to a tribe of cave people.

  “That’s a good way of thinking about it,” I said without much enthusiasm as I picked up the papers. But my brain couldn’t completely push what he said away. The numbers were clear: Fiona and Lombard were right when they said that, at that moment, I was a better racer than Steve. But the final decision had nothing to do with graphics or power meters but with decency. I wasn’t going to betray my brother.

  There was a knock on the door. Favre’s arrival put an end to the colonel’s final efforts to persuade me. My old mentor said goodbye with devastation in his eyes. I hadn’t fooled him; he knew me well enough to realize I’d already made a decision. I watched him walk down the hallway with slumped shoulders, dragging his feet, all his military uprightness abandoned. I remembered what Fiona had said about his illness, but was interrupted by Favre’s voice.

  “What’s this?” he asked, showing me his cellphone screen with my message: “It’s Giraud, not Ferrara.”

  I told him about Matosas’s visit, his confession about sabotaging my bike in response to what they thought were attacks from Fonar, the man from Protex who tried to strip the brakes on the Lavezza bus, the Italians’ hypothesis that the blown gas tank had been a faux attack, Matosas’s fear of being murdered. I argued that Conti and Leandro’s poisoning overturned the notion that Lavezza was guilty. I said nothing about Steve, about the reports he received from Protex every night or the electronic surveillance network his private guards had set up within the circuit.

  The commissioner didn’t seem surprised, but he wasn’t convinced either. His little mustache was immobile, his pupils bearing into me.

  “A surveillance camera recorded a long-distance shot of the man who was messing with Lavezza’s bus that morning,” Favre said in the end. “A tall guy, with a long silhouette, maybe like that Protex guard outside. But the shot is inconclusive; one of the Italian mechanics would also fit the description.”

  Radek or Quixote would too, I thought. There were plenty of tall, ill-defined men in this Babel of races and
nationalities.

  Favre continued. “We can’t discard the possibility that the Italians fabricated the attack on the bus themselves, and Conti’s and Leandro’s poisoning too, even if they went too far on that front. These are amateur criminals.”

  “Matosas wasn’t pretending; he’s scared.” What Favre was saying might be true, but I was an expert in reading my rivals’ expressions. The Lavezza leader wasn’t lying.

  “I will say that the breadth and complexity of the attacks,” the commissioner began in a scholarly tone, “and remembering they began weeks before the Tour, seem to exceed the capacities of a group of cyclists and mechanics, especially if they’re wrapped up in the demands of the race.”

  “Exactly,” I said. The commissioner had finally taken a step in the right direction.

  “But explain something to me,” he said, and I could’ve sworn he was enjoying it. “You already said why it couldn’t be the Italians; now tell me why it’s Giraud.”

  “He has the motive: to win the Tour at any cost in order to keep his job as Fonar’s DS. He has the means, thanks to his relationship with Protex. You said yourself this seems to be the work of a professional organization. And as far as I’m concerned, he has a requirement the other members of the circuit don’t: an absolute lack of scruples.”

  “In my line of work, we learn scruples are to passions what a drop of perfume is to a shit hole.” I tried to keep up with the detective, who was now in his philosophical mode. “Although you’re right about Protex, and we are closely investigating them. I hope you know, sergeant, that if you’re right, Steve will of course be under suspicion. Protex was hired by his sponsors, not by Fonar or Giraud. Not to mention that he’s the one who’s benefited from all these crimes.”

  “But it’s not his fault Giraud wants to make him champion.”

  “That would have to be proven.”

  “I’ll prove it, rest assured,” I said, although I would have liked to have been able to say it with greater confidence.

  “Which brings us back to the guards out there,” he said. “You’ve been the victim of two attacks. One of them was clearly carried out by the Italians, when they sabotaged your bike. But the gas tank is still a mystery. If your theory is right and Giraud and Protex are responsible, then what’s Schrader doing outside your door?”

  “Is that the Protex giant’s name?”

  “Yes. He’s someone you should treat with care. He was a member of the German army’s special forces before signing on with private contractors.”

  “You think I should ask him to leave?”

  “That would just show Protex we suspect them. Especially if it happens right after I pay you a visit.”

  “What about the other two? They’re Bimeo’s people.”

  “They’re both shady, although Bimeo is the one in control there, and he thinks of you as his ally. Anyway, there are only two nights left. I’ll put a couple of agents on the stairs,” he said. “Nobody else is going to fit in the hallway,” he added with a tired smile. “They’ll be within shouting distance. And even so, shut yourself in here with three locks.”

  “Don’t worry, if Giraud is really guilty, he already got what he wanted; I don’t think there’ll be any more incidents. Steve is going to be champion.”

  What happened the next day seemed to confirm it. From the peloton lineup at the start, I could tell Matosas had ceased to be a threat. His weary gaze seemed to be that of someone simply waiting for everything to be over.

  We suffered a few breakaways in the first half of the race from lower-ranked cyclists who didn’t want to say goodbye to the Tour without showing up on TV. We caught up with all of them at the terrible Col de la Croix de Fer; nobody had the legs to make their break in the middle of the climb.

  I followed Giraud’s instructions, running conservatively on just half power. Still, I made Fonar put some more swing into the climb than was absolutely necessary. Nothing to separate the peloton, but enough to start wearing it down. The long, twenty-two-kilometer ascent went in my favor. When we conquered that first peak, most of the peloton were far behind. Fonar kept six of our teammates in the pack, and practically all the top ten in the rankings made it. I had to respect my fellow cyclists. Their bodies felt dead and their legs were in torment, but their will to fight was undeniable. Whoever was in eighth place would leave his soul behind to unseat the man in front of him, even if he knew he would have to defend seventh place tooth and nail to keep the man he’d just passed from overtaking him. Everyone had something to die and kill for in the final kilometers—at least figuratively.

  After the summit, Paniuk, third in the rankings, descended at suicidal speeds down ravines and gorges and gained a 25-second advantage over all of us. Steve, a powerful racer on descents, wanted to follow him, but I convinced him not to. If the Czech wanted to break his neck, he had every right to do so, but there was no sense in putting ourselves at risk when the championship was already in our hands. Or in Steve’s hands. Which was the same thing.

  Regardless of what Paniuk did, we’d catch up to him at the Toussuire, the second climb. Still, I couldn’t help but admire my fellow athlete for the heroic attempt. Once every twenty years a cyclist scales Toussuire’s fifteen kilometers on his own and gets ahold of the yellow jersey, to the surprise of the other leaders, who inexplicably can’t reach him. For every one who achieves that feat, two hundred inexorably fail. But the craving for glory does not calculate probabilities. Paniuk climbed every hundred meters as if they were his last. At one point, he widened his advantage to 35 seconds; I could feel nerves shaking the group when we got the news from the screen on the motorbike that went in front of us.

  That morning, I had set off in fourth place, 31 seconds behind Paniuk. After the lead he got on us, that margin doubled. I started to wonder if we were about to experience one of those legendary days, and I felt a numbness in my temples, as if I’d swallowed an ice cube too fast.

  My only challenge of the day was supposed to be leaving Matosas behind, knocking him out of second place in the rankings, but now I was struggling not to fall behind third. I still hadn’t forced the pace I’d planned to attack the Italian with, but I’d reached an accelerated rhythm with which I planned to wear him out. Two of our domestiques had burned out after taking turns up front, per my instructions, and another two would soon abandon the group for the same reason. Within three kilometers, only Steve and I would still be there for Fonar, and then we’d attack Matosas. That had been the plan at least, but Paniuk was tearing it apart.

  A few meters later, the distance separating us from the Czech was 48 seconds. How the hell was Paniuk able to keep widening his advantage when he was on his own? I tried to calm down: We still had twelve of the eighteen kilometers to climb. I told myself the Czech was planning poorly, that he couldn’t keep up his pace. In situations like that, you can’t get desperate and set off on a pursuit that won’t bear fruit. I couldn’t leave before Guido, the last of our domestiques, was spent; that would mean wasting the energy reserves my teammate had to offer. But it was clear Paniuk was rolling faster than Guido, and that was starting to become a significant disadvantage.

  If I struck out after the Czech, Steve might not be in good enough condition to follow my wheel, which meant, in practice, betraying the leader. But to do nothing would condemn me to losing second place to Paniuk, who didn’t seem to be slowing down. Later, I’d see the images of his face in those last kilometers on TV: a frozen and unchangeable grimace of pain, a mute scream like that of a dead body at Pompeii. A dead body at Pompeii that was about to bury my hopes for the Tour.

  I told Guido to fall back from our team’s front spot, gesturing toward his power meter; he couldn’t do it anymore. We still had eight kilometers left to reach the finish line, and Paniuk was 51 seconds ahead of everyone. That meant he’d beat me by 82 seconds in the general classification.

  “
Let’s go,” I said to Steve, but he shook his head no. He seemed to be on his last legs. I wasn’t feeling good either. For some time, a pull in my hips had been shooting down the outside of both thighs. It was as if my legs were dislocated; I imagined this is what it might feel like after taking a turn on the rack during the Spanish Inquisition. But I wasn’t going to let the first podium of my career get away from me because of my old friend pain.

  I did the math again. At this pace, Paniuk could achieve a distance we couldn’t recover from tomorrow; he might even unseat Steve. This last fact was key.

  I had to wake Steve up somehow. “If you don’t watch out, he’s going to take your yellow jersey today,” I shouted as best I could at my teammate. My lungs were growing ever more jealous of what little oxygen they could get.

  Steve didn’t react for a few seconds, and I worried my taunt had failed. But then he changed gears, stood up on the pedals, and started his pursuit. Even I was stunned he was capable of it. I looked at Matosas’s resigned, empty face, like a sheep on the way to slaughter, and I set off alone after Steve. Later, I asked Steve what he was thinking in that instant, and he didn’t have an explanation. I suppose his aversion to defeat was so deeply rooted in him that it overcame his physical limitations. I didn’t have that extra fuel; after all, I’d been trained for defeat. Nevertheless, all those years of rolling in front of the leader wouldn’t let me stare at his back as he climbed on his own. Not while I had an ounce of energy left in me. He obeyed his nature and I obeyed mine.

  It took me almost half a kilometer to make up for the thirty meters I’d lost to Steve on his initial push. When he saw me at his side, he seemed to come out of his trance and understand where he was. I put myself ahead and we let our ingrained instincts replace our epic impulses. We ate up the following kilometers with no fuss but at a good pace, regulating the loss. Or that’s what we thought: We ended up catching Paniuk a kilometer before the finish line. The Czech was on his last legs; he fell apart when we passed him. He came in 34 seconds behind us. This time, I let Steve cross the finish line first. I had to recognize he’d been the protagonist of the pursuit, thanks to his unearthly leap forward.