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First we sipped Stolis at Quo Vadis in Soho for some European MTV benefit, then we arrived at the party in Holland Park in two Jaguar XK8s, both of them red and gleaming, parked at conspicuous angles in front of the house. People definitely noticed and started whispering to each other as the six of us walked in together and at that precise moment Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je T’Aime” started playing continuously for the rest of the evening. There was no discernible center at the party, its hosts were invisible, guests had to come up with strained explanations as to why they were there and some had completely forgotten who had invited them, no one really knew. Emporio Armani underwear models moved through a crowd consisting of Tim Roth, Seal, members of Supergrass, Pippa Brooks, Fairuza Balk, Paul Weller, Tyson, someone passing around large trays of osso buco. Outside there was a garden filled with roses and below tall hedges children dressed in Tommy Hilfiger safari shirts were drinking candy-colored punch made with grenadine and playing a game with an empty bottle of Stolichnaya, kicking it along the expanse of plush green lawn, and beyond them, just night. Smells floating around inside the house included tarragon, tobacco flowers, bergamot, oak moss. “Possibly,” I muttered to someone.
I was slouching in a black leather armchair while Bobby, in a suit he found on Savile Row, kept feeding me Xanax, whispering the sentence “You’d better get used to it” each time he departed. I kept petting a ceramic cat that was perched next to the armchair I was frozen in, occasionally noticing an oversized book lying on the floor with the words Designing with Tiles on its cover. There was an aquarium filled with cumbersome black fish that struck me as essential. And everyone had just gotten back from L.A. and people were heading to Reykjavík for the weekend and some people seemed concerned about the fate of the ozone layer while others definitely did not. In a bathroom I tranced out on a bar of monogrammed soap that sat in a black dish while I stood on a shaggy wool carpet, unable to urinate. And then I was biting off what was left of my fingernails while Sophie Dahl introduced me to Bruce and Tammy before they drifted off to dance beneath the hedges and there were giant banana fronds situated everywhere and I just kept wincing but Sophie didn’t notice.
Almost always in my line of vision, Jamie Fields somehow managed to completely avoid me that night. She was either laughing over a private joke with Amber Valletta or shaking her head slightly whenever a tray of hors d’oeuvres—almojabanas specially flown in from a restaurant in San Juan—was offered and she was saying “I do” to just about anything that was asked of her. Bentley stared as an awkward but wellbred teenage boy drinking pinot noir from a medium-sized jug developed a crush on me in a matter of seconds and I just smiled wanly at him as he brushed stray bits of confetti off the Armani jacket I was wearing and said “cool” as if it had twelve os in it. It wasn’t until much later that I noticed the film crew was there too, including Felix the cinematographer, though none of them seemed fazed, and then a small patch of fog started parting and I realized that maybe none of them knew about Sam Ho and what happened to him, the freakish way he died, how his hand twitched miserably, the tattoo of the word slave blurring because of how hard his body vibrated. Bobby, looking airbrushed, handed me a napkin and asked me to stop drooling.
“Mingle,” Bobby whispered. “Mingle.”
Someone handed me another glass of champagne and someone else lit a cigarette that had been dangling from my lips for the past half hour and what I found myself thinking less and less was “But maybe I’m right and they’re wrong” because I was yielding, yielding.
4
38
The film crew follows Tammy into the dining area, where she has a tense breakfast with Bruce. She sips lukewarm hot chocolate, pretending to read Le Monde, and Bruce hostilely butters a piece of almond bread until he breaks the silence by telling Tammy he knows horrible things about her past, keeps mentioning a stint in Saudi Arabia without elaborating. Bruce’s hair is wet and his narrow face is flushed pink from a recent shower and he’s wearing a pistachio-colored Paul Smith T-shirt and later he will be attending a prestigious rooftop luncheon somewhere in the 16th arrondissement that Versace is throwing to which only good-looking people have been invited and Bruce has decided to wear a black body shirt and gray Prada shoes to the rooftop luncheon and he’s really going only because of a canceled booking last month.
“So you’ll be appreciated,” Tammy says, lighting a thin cigarette.
“You don’t appreciate me.”
“Don’t be absurd,” she mutters.
“I know who you’re seeing this afternoon.”
“What else are you doing today?” she asks tonelessly.
“I’ll go to the Versace luncheon. I’ll have a club sandwich. I’ll nod when it’s appropriate.” Pause. “I’ll stick to the script.”
The camera keeps circling the table they’re sitting at and nothing’s registering on Tammy’s face and Bruce’s hand shakes slightly as he lifts an Hermès coffee cup and then without sipping any café au lait puts it back on its saucer and closes his green eyes, lacking the energy to argue. The actor playing Bruce had a promising career as a basketball player at Duke and then followed Danny Ferry to Italy where Bruce immediately got modeling jobs and in Milan he met Bobby who was dating Tammy Devol at the time and things just flew from there. A vase—a prop—filled with oversized white tulips sits nonsensically between them.
“Don’t be jealous,” Tammy whispers.
A cell phone sitting on the table starts ringing and neither one of them moves to pick it up but it might be Bobby so Bruce finally answers. It’s actually Lisa-Marie Presley, looking for Bentley—whom she calls “Big Sistah”—but Bentley’s sleeping because he got in at dawn accompanied by an NYU film student he picked up at La Luna last night because the NYU film student had a tinted-blond chevron that accentuated already enormous lips and a penchant for nonblood-letting bondage that Bentley couldn’t resist.
“Don’t be jealous,” Tammy says once more, before leaving.
“Just stick to the script,” Bruce warns her.
As Tammy casually picks up a Vuitton box sitting on a chrome table in the hallway, the opening piano strains from ABBA’s “S.O.S.” begin playing and the song continues over the rest of Tammy’s day, even though on the Walkman she wears throughout the city is a tape Bruce made for her—songs by the Rolling Stones, Bettie Serveert, DJ Shadow, Prince, Luscious Jackson, Robert Miles, an Elvis Costello song that used to mean something to both of them.
A Mercedes picks Tammy up and a Russian driver named Wyatt takes her to Chanel in Rue Cambon where she breaks down in an office, crying silently at first and then gasping until Gianfranco arrives and gets a sense that maybe something is “off” and scurries away after calling for an assistant to calm Tammy down. Tammy’s freaked, barely gets through the fittings, and then she meets the son of the French premier at a flea market in Clignancourt and soon they’re sitting in a McDonald’s, both wearing sunglasses, and he’s three years younger than Tammy, sometimes lives in a palace, hates the nouveau riche, fucks only Americans (including his nanny, when he was ten). Tammy “ran into” him on Avenue Montaigne outside Dior four months ago. She dropped something. He helped pick it up. His car was waiting. It was getting dark.
The French premier’s son has just returned from Jamaica and Tammy halfheartedly compliments him on his tan and then immediately inquires about his cocaine problem. Has it resolved itself? Does he care? He just smiles evasively, which he realizes too late is the wrong move because she gets moody. So he orders a Big Mac and Tammy picks at a small bag of fries and his flat is being painted so he’s staying at the Presidential Suite at the Bristol and it’s freezing in the McDonald’s, their breath steaming whenever they talk. She studies her fingertips, wondering if cocaine is bad for your hair. He mumbles something and tries to hold her hand. He touches her face, tells her how sensitive she is. But it’s all hopeless, everything’s a label, he’s late for a haircut. “I’m wary,” she finally admits. He ac
tually—Tammy doesn’t know this—feels broken. They make vague plans about meeting again.
She walks away from the McDonald’s, and outside where the film crew’s waiting it’s warm and raining lightly and the Eiffel Tower is only a shadow in a giant wall of mist that’s slowly breaking up and Tammy concentrates on the cobbled streets, a locust tree, a policeman strolling by with a black German shepherd on a leash, then she finally gets back into the Mercedes the Russian named Wyatt is driving. There’s a lunch at Chez Georges that she’s just going to have to skip—she’s too upset, things keep spiraling away from her, another Klonopin doesn’t help—and she calls Joan Buck to explain. She dismisses the car, takes the Vuitton box and loses the film crew in the Versace boutique on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. No one knows where Tammy is for the next thirty-five minutes.
She hands the Vuitton box to a strikingly handsome Lebanese man slouching behind the wheel of a black BMW parked tightly against a curb somewhere in the 2nd arrondissement, actually not far from Chez Georges so she changes her mind and decides to show up for the lunch where the film crew is waiting and the director and Felix the cinematographer keep apologizing for losing her and she dismisses them by shrugging vacantly, muttering “I got lost” and greeting people sweetly. She’s told good news by her agent: Tammy has the next cover for British Vogue. Everyone’s wearing sunglasses. A discussion about “Seinfeld” and ceiling fans commences. Tammy declines a glass of champagne, then reconsiders.
The sky is starting to clear and clouds are dissolving and the temperature rises ten degrees in fifteen minutes so the students eating lunch in the open courtyard at the Institute of Political Studies start sunning themselves as the BMW the Lebanese is driving rolls to a stop on the Boulevard Raspail, where a different film crew is waiting on neighboring rooftops prepared to record the following events with telephoto lenses.
Below them everyone’s sighing with pleasure and students are drinking beer and lying shirtless across benches and reading magazines and sharing sandwiches while plans to skip classes start formulating and someone with a camcorder roams the courtyard, finally focusing in on a twenty-year-old guy who’s sitting on a blanket weeping silently while reading a note from his girlfriend who has just left him and she’s written that they will never get back together again and he’s rocking back and forth telling himself it’s okay, it’s okay, and the camcorder angles away and focuses in on a girl giving another girl a back rub. A German television crew interviews students on the upcoming elections. Joints are shared. Rollerbladers whiz by.
The instructions the Lebanese received were simple: just remove the top of the Vuitton box before leaving the car, but since Bobby Hughes lied about when the bomb will go off—he simply told the driver to park the car and leave it on Boulevard Raspail in front of the institute—the driver will die in the blast. The Lebanese, who was involved in the planning of an attack in January on CIA headquarters in Langley, is eating M&M’s and thinking about a girl named Siggi he met last month in Iceland. A student named Brigid walks by the BMW and notices the Lebanese leaning over the passenger seat and she even registers the panic on his face as he lifts something up in the seconds before the car explodes.
A simple flash of light, a loud sound, the BMW bursts apart.
The extent of the destruction is a blur and its aftermath somehow feels beside the point. The point is the bomb itself, its placement, its activation—that’s the statement. Not Brigid blown apart beyond recognition or the force of the blast flinging thirty students closest to the car forty, fifty feet into the air or the five students killed instantly, two of them by flying shrapnel that sailed across the courtyard and was embedded in their chests, and not the other section of car, which flies by, lopping off an arm, and not the three students immediately blinded. It’s not the legs blown off, the skulls crushed, the people bleeding to death in minutes. The uprooted asphalt, the blackened trees, the benches splattered with gore, some of it burned—all of this matters just as much. It’s really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that’s just decoration.
A stunned silence and then—among the conscious covered with blood, not always their own—the screaming starts.
Fifty-one injured. Four people will never walk again. Three others are severely brain-damaged. Along with the driver of the BMW, thirteen are dead, including an older man who dies, blocks away, of a heart attack at the time of the blast. (A week later a teacher’s assistant from Lyons will die from head injuries, raising the number of dead to fourteen.) By the time the flashing blue lights of ambulances start arriving at the darkening scene, the film crew has packed up and disappeared and will show up later in the week at another designated spot. Without staring through the lens of the cameras, everything at that distance looks tiny and inconsequential and vaguely unreal to them. You can tell who is dead and who is not only by the way the bodies look when they’re picked up.
And later that night at a very cool, sexy dinner in an upstairs room at the Hôtel Crillon, past a door flanked by dark-haired, handsome guards, Tammy mingles with Amber Valletta, Oscar de la Renta, Gianfranco Ferré, Brad Renfro, Christian Louboutin, Danielle Steel, the Princess of Wales, Bernard Arnault and various Russians and Vogue editors and everyone is into very serious slouching and some people just got back from Marrakech—a few less jaded because of that trip—and others pay their respects to Tammy as she huddles in a corner gossiping with Shalom Harlow about how all the girls are dating so many inappropriate people (nobodies, gangsters, fishermen, boys, members of the House of Lords, Jamaicans with whom they have no rapport) and Tammy’s fanning herself with an invitation to a party at Queen that a boy who looks just like Christian Bale offered her but she’s going to bypass it in favor of one in the 16th arrondissement that Naomi’s throwing and then sashimi’s served and more cigarettes are bummed then lit and Tammy leans into John Galliano and whispers “You’re so nuts, baby” and she’s drinking too much red wine and switches to Coke and more than one lesbian vaguely comes on to her and someone wearing a kimono asks how Bruce Rhinebeck is and Tammy, gazing at a figure prancing by in the darkness, answers “Wait” dreamily because she’s realizing it’s really just another difficult evening.
37
A giant set—high-tech and industrial with hints of Art Deco and Mission—appropriating an apartment in either the 8th or the 16th arrondissement is where Jamie Fields, Bobby Hughes, Bentley Harrolds, Tammy Devol, Bruce Rhinebeck and myself live during autumn in Paris. We’re inhabiting a 5,000-square-foot triplex that has been paid for with Iraqi money washed through Hungary. To get into the house you have to deactivate an alarm and walk through a courtyard. Inside, a swirling circular staircase joins all three floors and the color scheme is muted olive green and light brown and soft pink, and in the basement there’s a gym, its walls lined with Clemente drawings. An expansive open kitchen designed by Biber contains cabinets made from Makassar ebony and dyed tulipwood and there’s a Miele oven and two dishwashers and a glass-door refrigerator and a Sub-Zero freezer and custom-made wine and spice racks and an industrial restaurant sprayer installed in a stainless-steel alcove with teak-lined drying racks holding gilded polka-dotted china. A giant mural by Frank Moore looms above the kitchen table, which a silk Fortuny shade hangs over.
Serge Mouille chandeliers are suspended over sparkling green-and white terrazzo floors and rugs designed by Christine Van Der Hurd. Everywhere there are glass walls and giant white citronella candles and glass-box towers filled with CDs and white glass fireplaces and Dialogica chairs covered in Giant Textiles chenille and padded leather doors and stereo systems and Ruhlman armchairs in front of TV sets hooked up to a digital satellite system that picks up five hundred channels around the world, and bookcases filled with bowl arrangements line the walls everywhere and piles of cellular phones lie in heaps on various tables. And in the bedrooms there are blackout curtains designed by Mary Bright and rugs by Maurice Velle Keep and Hans Wegner’s lounges and o
ttomans in Spinneybeck leather and divans covered in a Larson chenille and dwarf fruit trees often sit next to them and the walls in all the bedrooms are leather upholstered. The beds were made in Scandinavia and the sheets and towels are by Calvin Klein.
A complicated video-monitoring system runs throughout the apartment (and the outside cameras are equipped with built-in illuminators) along with a vast alarm system. Codes are memorized and, since the sequence is changed weekly, rememorized. The two BMWs parked in the garage have been equipped with global-positioning tracking systems, as well as untraceable license plates, bulletproof windshields, run-flat tires, blinding halogen lights in front and back, ramming bumpers. The apartment is swept twice a week—phone lines, outlets, PowerBooks, lampshades, toilets, everything electrical. Behind locked doors are rooms and behind those rooms are other locked doors and in those rooms dozens of pieces of luggage—mostly Vuitton and Gucci—are lined up waiting to be used. In other hidden rooms there are heavy-duty sewing machines, strips of explosives, hand grenades, M-16 rifles, machine guns, a filing cabinet containing battery chargers, detonators, Semtex, electric blasting caps. A closet contains dozens of designer suits lined with Kevlar, which is thick enough to stop bullets from high-powered rifles or flying bomb fragments.
All the phones in the house analyze callers’ voices for subaudible microtremors that occur when a speaker is stressed or lying, giving the listener constant LED readings. All the phones in the house are installed with analyzers that send electrical pulses down the line and, bouncing them back, provide an affirmative reading for the listener if the call is being traced. All the phones in the house have a digital binary code scrambler that converts voices to numbers and allows the person on the other end of the line to decode it but keeps third parties from hearing anything but static.