Glamorama (61 page)

“Victor,” Bobby warns, after someone’s handed me a packet of cocaine, reminding me of my assignment tomorrow. “And hey Bentley, pay attention.”

Bentley’s glassy-eyed from spending most of the day in a tanning bed and he’s spacing out on good-looking teenage guys in muscle Ts. My foot has fallen asleep, the tingling moving slowly up my leg, my eyes glancing over at my name on tonight’s invite. Photographers are taking pictures of our table. Tammy gazes away, her mouth caked with Urban Decay lipstick.

“He’s madly in love with that busboy.” Jamie smiles, lighting a cigarette.

We all turn our heads.

“I read an article about good-looking busboys in
Time
magazine.” Bentley shrugs. “What can I say? I’m easily influenced.”

“We’re not going ahead with the Venice project,” Bobby says loudly, over the din of the party.

“Harry’s Bar?” Bruce asks, turning away from Tammy.

“No.” Bobby shakes his head while waving to someone across the room.

Idly, without asking, I realize this means Harry’s Bar will not be blown up.

In the darkness downstairs at Natacha an MTV camera crew interrupts Bobby’s discussion of something called the “Band on the Run” project. A VJ begs Bobby and Jamie and Bentley to move closer together so the camera can get all three of them in the frame. Happily, they comply.

“It’s about attitude as lifestyle,” Jamie’s saying.

“You’re starting to sound like a Calvin Klein ad, baby, and I don’t like it,” Bobby growls.

Jamie waves playfully at the camera until Bobby’s asked about his involvement with Amnesty International. I turn away, notice Dennis Rodman striding confidently around the room in a loincloth, a giant pair of wings and a diamond nose ring. When I turn back to the table the VJ is asking Bentley how he likes Paris.

“I love everything but the Americans,” Bentley yawns, being
vaguely entertaining. “Americans are notoriously inept at foreign languages. My idea of tedium? Listening to some nitwit from Wisconsin try and order a glass of ice at Deux Magots.”

From behind me I hear the segment director say to someone, “We’re not running that.”

“You should let people proceed at their own pace, Bentley,” Jamie says gently, leaning in, plucking an unlit cigarette from his hand. “Don’t have a tizzy.”

“What are you all wearing?” the VJ asks, lights and a camera swinging around to the rest of us. “Just go with it.”

It’s freezing in Natacha, everyone’s breath is steaming and we’re waving away flies, the floor littered with piles of confetti, and the smell of shit is even more pervasive after I do a couple of hits from the packet of coke that I reluctantly hand back to Bentley. Markus Schenkenberg, who thinks he’s my friend but who is not, pulls a chair up next to mine, another photo op, another black snakeskin jacket to show off, another chance for him to tell me, “We’re not infallible, Victuh.”

“Is that on the record or off the record?”

Markus yawns as Beatrice Dalle catwalks by, then glances back over at me.

“He’s a terrorist,” I tell Markus, motioning to Bobby.

“No,” Markus says, shaking his head. “He doesn’t look like a terrorist. He’s way too gorgeous.”

“Reject the hype, girlfriend,” I sigh, slouching deeper into my chair. “That guy’s a terrorist.”

“No,” Markus says, shaking his head. “I know terrorists. That guy doesn’t look like a terrorist.”

“You’re a daredevil,” I yawn, giving him shark eye. “You’re a total renegade.”

“I’m a little out of control,” Markus admits. “I’m thinking of jamming out right now.”

“He’s the villain,” I sigh.

Someone from Camden is leaning into Jamie, a French guy named Bertrand who was Sean Bateman’s roommate, whispering something in her ear, both of them staring at me. Jamie keeps nodding until Bertrand says something that causes her to stiffen up and stop nodding and she has to push Bertrand away, her face falling apart. Bertrand
glares at me while folding back into the crowd. Mario Sorrenti and David Sims materialize, surrounding Markus. Bobby starts table-hopping with Shoshanna Lonstein, a former Talking Head, the magician David Blaine and Snoopy Jones. In tears, Tammy runs away from Bruce, who has China Chow perched on his knees, and a dealer Bentley sent over named the Grand Poobah whispers “Have you been experienced?” in my ear and arrangements are made.

32

A shot of Scotch tape being applied with rubber gloves to a white metal gas canister. This shot—with the camera slowly pulling back—is intercut with one of me taking a shower, slowly soaping my chest, my legs, the camera gliding gratuitously up over my ass, water cascading down the flexing muscles in my back. Another shot of the thick metal canister sitting on a Hans Wegner ottoman. A quick montage of my character dressing—slipping on Calvin Klein boxer-jockeys, a lime-green Prada turtleneck, a Yohji Yamamoto suit with a close-up of the label for the audience’s gratification. A close-up of my face, a hand entering the frame to slip on a pair of black Ray-Bans (an instance of well-paid product placement). Another close-up: a Xanax tablet placed on my tongue, a bottle of Volvic water tilted toward my lips. A shot of the gas canister being packed into a Louis Vuitton tote bag.

An exterior shot of Hozan. A brief interior shot of me eating a late lunch and in this shot the Christian Bale guy walks past me but I don’t notice because I’m concentrating on the patrolmen walking by carrying submachine guns, because I’m distracted by the arm that has fallen asleep. Shots of me moving down Rue de Fourey toward the Seine. A shot of me on Pont Marie crossing the Ile Saint-Louis with Notre Dame looming up above me, the sky gray and overcast. Then I’m crossing the Seine onto the Left Bank. A shot of me turning right on Boulevard Saint-Germain. A shot of me descending into a métro station. This shot lingers for several seconds on a crowd of straggling tourists.

A shot of me on a train, where I’m sitting down with the Louis Vuitton tote bag. Directions: Place the bag under your seat, casually open a copy of
Le Monde
, furrow your brow, pretend to read, look up at the handsome teenage boy flirting with you. A shot of Victor forcing a smile, looking down, a subtle refusal, a small movement of the head, a gesture that says I’m not interested. Another shot of the boy: a shrug on his part, half a grin. I’m repeating a song lyric under my breath—
when Jupiter aligns with Mars when Jupiter aligns with Mars
—and since I haven’t been told what’s in the Louis Vuitton tote bag it’s easy to slip it under the seat. Later I will find out that the bomb was placed in a 35-pound gas canister along with bolts, shards of glass and assorted nails and that this is what I was carrying around in the tote bag I checked at Hozan during the lunch I had earlier this afternoon, the tote bag I carried effortlessly while strolling through the streets of Paris.

The blast will be blamed on an Algerian guerrilla or a Muslim fundamentalist or maybe the faction of an Islamic group or a splinter group of handsome Basque separatists, but all of this is dependent on the spin the head of France’s counterespionage service gives the event. I don’t control the detonator. An image from childhood: you’re on a tennis court, you’re raising a racket, Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
plays on an eight-track somewhere and it’s the beginning of summer and your mother is still alive but you know there are darker times ahead.

Fifteen minutes after I leave the train, just after 6 p.m., at the juncture of Boulevard du Montparnasse and Boulevard Saint-Michel, across the street from Closerie des Lilas, the bomb kills ten people immediately. Seven others die during the following three days, all of them from severe burns. One hundred and thirty are treated for injuries, twenty-eight of them in serious condition. Later a scene will be shot in which Bobby expresses his anger that the bomb didn’t explode underground, where the damage would have been “far greater,” instead of on the Pont Royal, which is partially in open air. It was, he stressed, supposed to go off at the Saint-Michel-Notre Dame station, along the Seine, just as the doors opened onto the platform opposite the cathedral.

Instead: a flash.

A shot of the windows on the train imploding from the force of the blast.

A shot of doors folding in half.

A shot of the train lurching forward, burning.

A shot of a scattering crowd.

Various shots of people blown apart, extras and stuntmen thrown out of the lightweight steel car and onto the tracks.

Shots of body parts—legs and arms and hands, most of them real—skidding across the platform. Shots of mutilated people lying in piles. Shots of faces blown off. Shots of shredded melting seats. Survivors stand around in the thick black smoke, coughing, bursting into tears, choking on the stench of gunpowder. A shot of the Christian Bale guy grabbing a fire extinguisher, pushing through the panicked crowd to reach the burned-out hulk of the subway car. Over the sound track Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je T’Aime” starts playing.

A montage: hundreds of police officers arriving at the area beside the bridge that crosses the Seine and leads to Notre Dame. Victor walking by the Gap while someone in an oversized Tommy Hilfiger shirt Rollerblades by. Victor having a drink at a brasserie on Rue Saint-Antoine, playing with his Ray-Bans. The French premier flying to the scene in a helicopter, while Tammy and the French premier’s son—shot by the second unit—fritter away the day at Les Halles after being called away from the Louvre (a call Bruce made from a phone booth on Rue de Bassano, near the Arc de Triomphe) and they’re wearing matching sunglasses and Tammy seems happy and she makes him smile even though he’s hungover from a coke binge that went on so long he started vomiting blood. She hands him a dandelion. He blows on it, coughs from the exertion.

And then: shots of security checks carried out on roads, at borders, in various department stores. Shots of the damaged train being towed to a police laboratory. A montage of the sweeps through Muslim neighborhoods. A Koran—a prop left by the French film crew—along with computer disks disclosing plans to assassinate various officials, is found in a trash can near a housing project in Lyons and, because of a clue Bobby planted, an actor cast in the role of a young Algerian fugitive is shot to death outside a mosque.

31