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 cam- corder 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 carbut 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 Hotel Crillon, past a door flanked by dark-haired, handsome guards, Tammy mingles with Amber Valletta, Oscar de la Renta, Gianfranco Ferre, 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.