“Felix, remember when you were asking me what happened to Sam Ho?” I’m saying. “Remember about the other film crew? The one Dimity saw me with at the Louvre yesterday?”
“Victor, please, just calm down,” Felix says. “Get a grip. None of this matters anymore.”
“Oh, yes it does, Felix, it does matter.”
“No,” he says. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Why not?” I’m asking. “Why doesn’t it matter?”
“Because the movie’s over,” Felix says. “The production has been shut down. Everybody’s leaving tonight.”
“Felix—”
“You’ve been shockingly unprofessional, Victor.”
(Jamie’s in traffic circling the Arc de Triomphe, then she’s turning down Avenue de Wagram, making a right onto Boulevard de Courcelles, heading for Avenue de Clichy to meet Bertrand Ripleis, and Jamie’s thinking that this seems like the longest day of the year and she’s thinking about a particular Christmas tree from her childhood, but it was never really the tree that impressed her, it was the ornaments adorning the tree, and then she’s remembering how afraid of the ocean she was as a little girl—“too watery,” she’d tell her parents—and then she’s eighteen, in the Hamptons, a summer dawn, freshman year at Camden is a week away and she’s staring out at the Atlantic, listening to a boy she met backstage at a Who concert at Nassau Coliseum snoring lightly behind her and two years later, in Cambridge, he’ll commit suicide, pulled toward a force he could not evaluate, but now it was the end of August and she was thirsty and a giant gull circled above her and mourning didn’t matter yet.)
“Please, please, Felix, we have to talk.” I’m practically gasping and I keep turning around to see if anyone’s watching me.
“But you aren’t listening, you little fool,” Felix snaps. “The movie is over. You don’t need to explain anything to me because it doesn’t matter anymore. It does not apply.”
“But they killed Sam Ho that night, Felix, they killed him,” I say in a rush. “And there’s another movie being shot. One you don’t know about. There’s another crew here and Bruce Rhinebeck killed Sam Ho—”
“Victor,” Felix interrupts softly. “Bruce Rhinebeck came over this morning and talked to us—the director, the writer, myself—and he explained the, um, situation.” A pause. “Actually he explained your situation.”
“What situation? My situation? I don’t have a situation.”
Felix groans. “Forget it, Victor. We’re leaving tonight. Back to New York. It’s over, Victor. Goodbye.”
“Don’t trust him, Felix,” I shout. “He’s lying. Whatever Bruce told you, it’s a lie.”
“Victor,” Felix says tiredly.
I suddenly notice that Felix’s accent has disappeared.
(Bruce replaces the cardboard frame in a piece of Gucci luggage with sheets of dark plastic that disguise the explosives, which are made up of narrow gray odorless strips. Embedded in the strips: gold-plated nickel wire. Bruce has lined up fifty-five pounds of plastic explosives end to end, then attached them to a detonator. The detonator is powered by AAA batteries. Occasionally Bruce glances at an instruction manual. Bentley stands behind him, arms crossed, staring silently at Bruce, at the back of his head, at how beautiful Bruce is, thinking, If only … , and when Bruce turns around Bentley plays it cool, just nods, shrugs, stifles a yawn.)
“I suppose I can tell you since obviously you don’t like Bruce, even though I think he’s quite charming and should have been the star of this production,” Felix drones haughtily. “You know why Bruce should have been the star of this production, Victor? Because Bruce Rhinebeck has star quality, Victor, that’s why.”
“I know, I know, Felix,” I’m saying. “He should’ve been the star, he should’ve been the star.”
“According to Bruce he has really tried to help you, Victor.”
“Help me with what?” I shout.
“He says you are under extreme emotional pressure, possibly due to a major drug habit,” Felix sighs. “He also says you tend to hallucinate frequently and that nothing coming out of your mouth is to be believed.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Felix,” I shout. “These people are murderers, you asshole. They’re fucking terrorists.” Realizing how loud this comes out, I whirl around to see if anyone’s behind me, then lower my voice and whisper, “They’re fucking terrorists.”
“He also said he thinks that you’re quite possibly an insane individual and also—however improbable the director and I thought this sounded—rather dangerous.” Felix adds, “He also said that you’d tell us they were terrorists. So.”
“He builds bombs, Felix,” I whisper harshly into the phone. “Oh fuck that—he’s insane, Felix. That’s all a lie.”
“I’m terminating this phone call, Victor,” Felix says.
“I’m coming over, Felix.”
“If you do I’ll call the police.”
“Please, Felix,” I’m moaning. “For god’s sake.”
Felix doesn’t say anything.
“Felix?” I moan. “Felix, are you there?”
Felix keeps pausing.
“Felix?” I’m crying silently, wiping my face.
And then Felix says, “Well, perhaps you could be useful.”
(In the Jardin du Luxembourg he’s hungover again—another cocaine binge, another sleepless dawn, another sky made up of gray tile—but Tammy kisses the French premier’s son, fortifying him, and in a flea market at Porte de Vanves, both her hands on his chest, he’s hooking her in with his right arm and he’s wearing slippers. “Soul mates?” he asks. Tammy smells like lemons and has a secret, something she wants to show him back at the house in the 8th or the 16th. “I have enemies there,” he says, buying her a rose. “Don’t worry, Bruce is gone,” she says. But he wants to talk about a trip to southern California he’s taking in November. “S’il vous plait?” Tammy whines, eyes sparkling, and back at the house Tammy closes the door behind him, locking it as instructed, and Bentley’s making drinks in the kitchen and hands the French premier’s son a martini glass filled to the brim with a cloudy gimlet and as he sips it he senses something behind him and then—as planned—Bruce Rhinebeck rushes into the room shouting, holding up a claw hammer, and Tammy turns away and closes her eyes, clamping her hands over her ears as the French premier’s son starts screaming and the noise being made in that room is the worst ever and Bentley wordlessly pours the pitcher of drugged alcohol into the sink and wipes the counter with an orange sponge.)
I start weeping with relief. “I can be useful,” I say. “I can be, I can be really useful—”
“Bruce left a bag here. He forgot it.”
“What?” I’m pressing the phone closer to my ear, wiping my nose with the sleeve of my jacket. “What, man?”
“He left a Gucci tote bag behind,” Felix says. “I suppose you could come by and pick it up. That is, if you can be bothered, Victor—”
“Felix, wait—you’ve got to get rid of that bag,” I say, suddenly nauseous with adrenaline. “Don’t get near that bag.”
“I’ll leave it with the concierge,” Felix says, annoyed. “I have no intention of seeing you.”
“Felix,” I shout. “Don’t get near that bag. Get everyone out of the hotel—”
“And do not try contacting us,” Felix says over me. “We’ve shut down the production office in New York.”
“Felix, get out of the hotel—”
“Nice working with you,” Felix says. “But not really.”
“Felix,” I’m screaming.
(On the opposite side of Place Vendôme, twenty technicians are at various lookout points and the director is studying a video playback monitor of the footage shot earlier today of Bruce Rhinebeck leaving the hotel, a toothpick in his teeth, Bruce posing for paparazzi, Bruce laughing mildly, Bruce hopping into a limousine with bulletproof windows. By now the French film crew has been outfitted with ear protection for when the demolition team begins detonating
the bombs.)
I start racing toward the Ritz.
(In a pale-pink room, Felix hangs up the phone. The suite Felix occupies is in fairly close proximity to the center of the hotel, which ensures that the explosion will cause as much structural damage as possible.
The Gucci tote bag sits on the bed.
It’s so cold in the room that Felix’s breath steams.
A fly lands on his hand.
Felix unzips the tote bag.
He stares into it, quizzically.
It’s filled with red and black confetti.
He brushes the confetti away.
Something reveals itself.
“No,” Felix says.
The bomb swallows Felix up, vaporizing him instantly. He literally disappears. There’s nothing left.)
24
A thundering sound.
Immediately, in the 1st arrondissement, all electricity goes dead.
The blast shatters the Ritz from the center—almost front to back—weakening its structure as the pulse spreads to both sides of the hotel.
The windows flex, then shatter, imploding.
A gigantic wall of concrete and glass rushes toward the tourists in the Place Vendôme.
A ball of fire boils toward them.
A huge mass of black smoke, multilayered, irregular, rises up over Paris.
The shock wave lifts the Ritz up, unhinging nearly all the support beams. The building starts sliding into the Place Vendôme, its collapse accompanied by a whooshing roar.
Then another deafening roar.
Chunks of debris keep falling, walls keep cracking apart, and there’s so much dust the Place Vendôme looks as if a sandstorm has struck.
The explosion is followed by the customary “stunned silence.”
The sound of glass continuing to shatter is an introduction to the screaming.
Boulders of concrete litter the streets surrounding the Ritz and you have to climb over them to get into the Place Vendôme, where people are running around covered in blood and screaming into cell phones, the sky above them overcast with smoke. The entire face of the hotel has been blown off, rubber roofing is flapping in the wind and several cars, mostly BMWs, are burning. Two limousines lie overturned and the smell of burned tar is everywhere, the streets and sidewalks entirely scorched.
The body of a Japanese man dangles from the third story, caught between floors, drenched with blood, a huge shard of glass embedded in his neck, and another body hangs tangled in a mass of steel girders, its face frozen in anguish, and I’m limping past piles of rubble with arms sticking out of them and past Louis XV furniture, a candelabra ten feet high, antique chests, and people keep staggering past me, some of them naked, tripping over plaster and insulation, and I pass a girl whose face is cut in half, the lower part of her body torn away, and the leg lying nearby is completely embedded with screws and nails, and another woman, blackened and writhing, one hand blown off, is screaming, dying, and a Japanese woman in the bloody tatters of a Chanel suit collapses in front of me, both her jugular vein and her carotid artery sliced open by flying glass, causing every breath she takes to gurgle blood.
Staggering toward a giant slab of concrete angled directly in front of the hotel, I see four men try to pull a woman out from beneath it and her leg comes off—detaches effortlessly—from what’s left of her body, which is surrounded by unrecognizable chunks of flesh from which bones protrude. A man whose nose was slashed off by a shard of glass and a sobbing teenage girl lie next to each other in a widening pool of blood, her eyes burned out of their sockets, and the closer you move to what’s left of the main entrance, the number of arms and legs scattered everywhere doubles and the skin sandblasted from bodies sits everywhere in giant, papery clumps, along with the occasional dead-body dummy.
I’m passing faces lashed with dark-red cuts, piles of designer clothes, air-conditioning ducts, beams, a playpen and then a baby that looks as if it has been dipped in blood, which slumps, mangled, on a pile of rubble. Nearby a small child lies bleeding continuously from his mouth, part of his brain hanging out the side of his head. Dead bellmen lay scattered among magazines and Louis Vuitton luggage and heads blown off bodies, even one of a chisel-faced boyfriend of a model I knew back in New York, many of them BBR (what Bruce Rhinebeck calls Burned Beyond Recognition). In a daze, wandering past me: Polly Mellon, Claudia Schiffer, Jon Bon Jovi, Mary Wells Laurence, Steven Friedman, Bob Colacello, Marisa Berenson, Boy George, Mariah Carey.
Paths are made through the concrete boulders blocking Place Vendôme, and the paparazzi arrive first, followed by CNN reporters and then local television crews, and then, finally, ambulances carrying rescue teams followed by blue-black trucks carrying antiterrorist police wearing flak jackets over paratrooper jumpsuits, gripping automatic weapons, and they start wrapping victims in blankets and hundreds of pigeons lie dead, some of the injured birds haphazardly trying to fly, low to the ground above the debris, and later the feet of children in a makeshift morgue are being tagged and parents are being ushered out of that morgue howling and bodies will have to be identified by birth-marks, dental records, scars, tattoos, jewelry, and at a nearby hospital are posted the names of the dead and injured, along with their condition, and soon the rescue workers outside the Ritz are no longer in rescue mode.
23
I sit in a revival theater on Boulevard des Italiens. I collapse on a bench in the Place du Parvis. At one point during the day I’m shuffling through Pigalle. At another point I just keep crossing then recrossing the Seine. I wander through Aux Trois Quartiers on Boulevard de la Madeleine until the glimpse I catch of myself in a mirror at a Clinique counter moves me to rush back to the house in the 8th or the 16th.
Inside the house Bentley sits at a computer in the living room, wearing a Gap tank top and headphones from a Walkman. He’s studying an image that keeps flashing itself at different angles across the screen. My throat is aching from all the smoke I inhaled and when I pass a mirror my reflected face is streaked with grime, hair stiff and gray with dust, my eyes yellow. I move slowly up behind Bentley without his noticing.
On the computer screen: the actor who played Sam Ho lies naked on his back in a nondescript wood-paneled bedroom, his legs lifted and spread apart by an average-looking guy, maybe my age or slightly older, also naked, and in profile he’s thrusting between Sam’s legs, fucking him. Bentley keeps tapping keys, scanning the image, zooming in and out. Within a matter of minutes the average-looking guy fucking Sam Ho is given a more defined musculature, larger pectorals, what’s visible of his cock shaft is thickened, the pubic hair lightened. The nondescript bedroom is transformed into the bedroom I stayed at in the house in Hampstead: chic steel beams, the Jennifer Bartlett painting hanging over the bed, the vase filled with giant white tulips, the chrome ashtrays. Sam Ho’s eyes, caught red in the flash, are corrected.
I bring a hand up to my forehead, touching it. This movement causes Bentley to swivel around in his chair, removing the headphones.
“What happened to you?” he asks innocently, but he can’t keep up the facade and starts grinning.
“What are you doing?” I ask, numb, hollowed out.
“I’m glad you’re back,” Bentley says. “Bobby wants me to show you something.”
“What are you doing?” I ask again.
“This is a new program,” Bentley says. “Kai’s Photo Soap for Windows 95. Take a peek.”
Pause. “What does it … do?” I swallow.
“It helps make pictures better,” Bentley says in a baby’s voice.
“How … does it do that?” I ask, shivering.
The sex-scene photo is scanned again and Bentley concentrates on tapping more keys, occasionally referring to pages torn from a booklet and spread out on the table next to the computer. In five minutes my head—in profile—is grafted seamlessly onto the shoulders of the average-looking guy fucking Sam Ho. Bentley zooms out of the image, satisfied.
“A big hard disk”—Bent
ley glances over at me—“is mandatory. As well as a certain amount of patience.”
At first I’m saying, “That’s cool, that’s … cool,” because Bentley keeps grinning, but a hot wave of nausea rises, subsides, silencing me.
Another key is tapped. The photograph disappears. The screen stays blank. Another two keys are tapped and then a file number is tapped and then a command is tapped.
What now appears is a series of photographs that fill the screen in rapid succession.
Sam Ho and Victor Ward in dozens of positions, straining and naked, a pornographic montage.
Bentley leans back, satisfied, hands behind his head, a movie pose even though no camera is around to capture it.
“Would you like to see another file?” Bentley asks, but it’s really not a question because he’s already tapping keys.
“Let’s see,” he muses. “Which one?”
A flash. A command is tapped. A list appears, each entry with a date and file number.
“VICTOR” CK Show
“VICTOR” Telluride w/S Ulrich
“VICTOR” Dogstar concert w/K Reeves
VICTOR Union Square w/L Hynde
“VICTOR” Miami, Ocean Drive
“VICTOR” Miami, lobby, Delano
VICTOR QE2 series
“VICTOR” Sam Ho series
VICTOR Pylos w/S Ho
“VICTOR” Sky Bar w/Rande Gerber
“VICTOR” GQ Shoot w/J Fields, M Bergin
“VICTOR” Café Flore w/Brad, Eric, Dean
“VICTOR” Institute of Political Studies
“VICTOR” New York, Balthazar
“VICTOR” New York, Wallflowers
“VICTOR” Annabel’s w/J Phoenix
“VICTOR” 80th and Park w/A Poole
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