finish line. If you looked closely, the photos were all different.
‘Attack on World Hour Record by Tony Rominger, Bordeaux, 5-11-1994’, it said underneath. ‘Tom Koster,’ said André, ‘graphic designer, great bloke. He died four years ago. I bought work from him regularly. Running, cycling, skating. One day he realizes: I can’t make any headway, what’s wrong with me? He goes to the doctor and the doctor says: Tom, my friend, you’ve got lung cancer. Nothing they could do. Lived another eleven months. Sold all his paintings to pay for the funeral and that was that. He’d just bought a new bike, shame. Was always concerned with time and suddenly time was up.’
I looked at the photos and tried to see the differences.
‘Stasis is movement,’ said André. ‘Movement is stasis. We all do our best, we all try to improve on our own world endurance record, and what’s the result?’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘Rominger’s world endurance time was scrapped from the record books,’ I said. ‘Because of his bike, I think. Or because he established it in the EPO period. Whatever the case, all for nothing.’
‘The most beautiful thing he left was this work,’ said André, ‘except that Rominger doesn’t know about it. I should call him. It might be a consolation.’
Someone came into the room. I turned around and thought I was going crazy. She shook hands with me and introduced herself, but I was momentarily lost for words.
‘This is Bart,’ said André. He pretended not to notice my astonishment. ‘I told you about him. Bart Hoffman, Dustin’s second cousin.’
‘Bart!’ said the woman. ‘André has told me a lot about you. I’m glad to meet you at last.’ She had an English accent.
‘Ludmilla,’ said André. ‘Tolstoy. You’re looking at the genes of War and Peace.’
‘Stop it, André,’ said Ludmilla.
I was speechless. Laura. André had found her again, in Russia, in England, Rotterdam, or God knows where. Perhaps he’d had her copied by a friendly plastic surgeon from his coke customer book.
It was Laura aged 35. She ran her hand through her hair in exactly the same way and had the same look in her eyes, that look halfway between embarrassment and challenge.
Ludmilla said she was popping into town. ‘See you later,’ she said. ‘I assume you’ll be staying for dinner.’
‘That’s right,’ said André, when she had gone. ‘I thought at first that I was having visions. But it was real. Look not and ye shall find. Once you start looking, you lose.’
I got my Pinarello out of the car and put the front wheel on. André was waiting on his Pegoretti, with one leg on the ground. He was wearing a red-and-black jersey of the Amore & Vita team. On the chest was the big M of McDonald’s.
I set the kilometre counter to zero and got on. We had to cross the Maas; we were going to do André’s training circuit, a ‘River Rotte run.’
‘You’re sponsored by the pope,’ I said.
‘Yes, I spread the Holy Word. No abortion, no euthanasia, just love and hamburgers. Got it from Ludmilla. Little moralist.’
After a kilometre we reached the Erasmus Bridge. ‘This is my mountain stage,’ said André. ‘When I feel like it I charge up and down it ten times. On the outer section, good for power.’
‘You’re taking it seriously.’
‘I live like a monk. No drink, no nicotine, no drugs. I stand on my head for an hour a day. Yoga. Rest, purity, regularity, that’s my motto now. And lots of cycling, to keep the head clear. Looking back, I think it’s a shame I didn’t ride out with you back then.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When you came and asked if I would come and race, don’t you remember? I was lying on the sofa with a comic. Maybe I could have built up a nice career in cycle racing. I had the genes. And I was mean enough.’
He stood up on the pedals and rode ahead of me. I looked out over the river. Nice escape, coke dealer at the front, crime journalist on his wheel. We rode through the city, until we reached the Rotte and turned north-east along the river.
I asked when he had started cycling.
‘About a year ago. On my old man’s Raleigh. Part of my inheritance, you could say. Had it done up and rode it until last month. Cycling with my dead father, that feeling. Had long conversations. Good conversations. Of course, he didn’t think what I was doing would amount to anything. I’ll tell you another time.’ He paused for a moment. ‘That bike is bewitched.’
‘I know that. I sometimes think that with every cyclist you come across, there’s an invisible peloton riding along with him.’
‘Recently I had the feeling that we’d finished. That I had more or less told him everything. Then I thought: time for something new. That Raleigh was made in 1977, so it was about time. And I thought it was rather a weird idea, that bike. That’s not that odd, is it?’
‘No. I wouldn’t want to ride one metre on it.’
We came to a white drawbridge. We crossed, after which we headed for town again along the other bank of the Rotte. On the Crooswijk bend, André cycled alongside me and put his arm on my shoulder. Then he stood up and pulled away from me. A little further on he sat up and stuck his arms in the air.
I was happy, too.
I clumped into the room in my cycling shoes. André gave me a towel and showed me where the bathroom was. The floor was covered in black marble. When I looked more closely at the dark-red tiles with hieroglyphic motifs on the walls, I saw little Egyptian figures on racing bikes.
Ludmilla Laura had prepared a Russian speciality, something with ground beef and cabbage. We ate in silence.
‘What did you think,’ asked André, ‘when you saw me in court? What a bastard?’
‘I’ve passed that stage.’
‘I wouldn’t have blamed you for thinking that. I was a bastard. And I enjoyed it.’
‘You don’t have to defend yourself.’
He smiled and took a second helping.
‘I was a sophisticated trader, make no mistake about it.’ He said ‘trader’, not ‘dealer’. ‘I saw politicians on TV pretending to be squeaky clean, though I had delivered a fresh supply to them the day before. Well-known names from TV, captains of industry, bankers. Oh, Bart, do I have to tell you that? You’re a journalist, aren’t you? Why do you think I got away with it?’
I said nothing.
‘Exactly. Your father used to say to us that what you knew was power, and he was quite right. And who you know is even more power.’
‘And now?’
‘Now it’s finished. My name has been in the paper, I’m tainted. All I can do is descend to regular trade, and I don’t want to do that. That would make it vulgar. Anyway, I don’t need to anymore. Actually I was glad I had to draw a line.’
‘What are going to do, then?’
‘Maybe something with vintage cars. Old Peugeots and Citroëns. I’ve got four of them in a shed outside of town. I tinker about a bit. Sit in them. You can smell the past in cars, did you know that? I’ve got a 1968 DS that I swear you can smell our nursery school in.’
‘Yum yum.’
‘And I read books about medieval poetry and philosophy. I go to auctions of incunabula. Do you know what they are? Do you remember, the library of the Walburgiskerk, with those books on chains? We went once a year with the class. I thought it was fascinating even then.’
‘André, bullshit. You were always tugging at those chains. You drove