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
Wearing an Armani suit lined with Kevlar, I usher Jamie past the metal barricades the police erected in front of the Ritz because certain Japanese diplomats are staying at the hotel this week and even with my invitation and Jamie's appearance in the show, "for precautions" we still need to produce our passports so they can be compared with our names an lists that are scanned at three separate checkpoints by the time we get backstage. Metal detectors supply totally inadequate protection, as Jamie slips through them effortlessly.
