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 y 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 Vendome, 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 car 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 Vendome.
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 Vendome, 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 Vend6me 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 Vendome, 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.
