Gull (3 page)

Randall looked at the model again, not knowing where else at that moment to look. Suddenly he frowned. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but there is one slight problem with this.’ He gave it back: ‘No doors.’

DeLorean’s own frown lifted. He ran a finger along the model’s undercarriage, pressed something... pressed again, a little more firmly. A portion of each side of the car rose up slowly, coming to rest finally in perfect symmetry, like the wings of a bird riding a current.

‘There are your doors,’ DeLorean said.

That was it for Randall; that was the moment the flame was lit. It flickered at times; it was all he could do at others to protect it, such were the winds whipped up, not least by DeLorean himself, but it never, ever, until the very end, went out.

*

On his way back from the airport he had the cab swing by Pattie’s place, her parents’ place once upon a time. He had shaken her father’s hand on this porch: sealing the deal, the old man said. A week later he was dead. Brain haemorrhage. A week after that Pattie and Randall were married. He wasn’t the only one who had issues then, or now.

She opened the door to him, a smile on her face from whatever she had been doing in the moments before he knocked, which withered on the instant.

‘You’re supposed to give me forty-eight hours’ notice,’ she said from behind the screen door.

The TV was on. He could see over her shoulder the back of Tamsin’s head, dark against the scalding oranges and yellows and pinks of her cartoons. Pattie shifted her weight, from left foot to right, closing off the view. That’s what they had come to.

‘I’m thinking of moving to Detroit,’ Randall said. Pattie’s eye narrowed. ‘With work, I mean.’

She shrugged away any suggestion that it mattered to her what he was going for. ‘Well that ought to make things easier for everyone.’

Randall made the same left-right switch in his weight, gaining momentary advantage. Cartoons, Tamsin’s head. ‘Do you think since I’m here...?’

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ Pattie said.

*

Word got around pretty quickly that the editor had told him not even to bother working his notice, but to collect his things and go: the last thing this paper needed was someone working there whose heart wasn’t in it.

Randall was clearing his desk when Anderson from the business pages wandered over and leaned his not inconsiderable bulk against the partition between Randall’s desk and Hal Lewis’s, though Hal had, in the time it had taken Anderson to get from one side of the room to the other, made himself scarce. There was another man with him, soberest of sober suits, hair going white at the temples. Anderson did not introduce him but instead lit himself a cigarette and stood for a moment watching, smoking.

‘So,’ he said at last, ‘you’re going to work for John Z.’

‘That is correct.’ Randall pulled open a drawer. Paperclips and thumbtacks. He pushed it shut with his thigh.

‘Going to make your fortune.’

‘All we talked about was making cars.’

‘Cars, of course.’ Anderson let that sit a moment then jerked his thumb. ‘This is Dan Stevens. Dan started in Chrysler when Walter Chrysler himself was still running the show, 1935. He knows the industry better than any man alive.’

Dan Stevens inspected his fingernails during this brief encomium. He looked up now, blinking against the smoke of Anderson’s cigarette. ‘I suppose Mr DeLorean was telling you that Bank of America has already pledged eighteen million dollars.’

‘It came up in the conversation,’ Randall said, ‘yes.’

To be precise it had come up as they walked downstairs to the lobby at the end of lunch (an apple, a banana and three lychees), Randall’s mind already made up.

‘And Johnny Carson, I’m sure... half a million?’

‘That came up too.’ And Sammy Davis Junior, Randall did not say, and Ira Levin, and Roy Clark.
Hee Haw
!

Anderson smiled, practically licked his lips. ‘And did it also come up that John Z was arrested back when he was at college for selling stuff that wasn’t his to sell?’

Randall couldn’t help it, he froze.

‘Advertising space for the Detroit Yellow Pages. An old scam. Lucky not to do time for it.’

Dan Stevens frowned. His entire demeanour suggested that unlike Anderson he took no pleasure in communicating any of this. ‘The way I hear it his departure from GM wasn’t quite how he has been describing it. The board had his letter of resignation ready and waiting for him to sign when he went in looking for a showdown.’

Anderson took another draw then crushed his cigarette in the ashtray Randall had just that moment emptied. ‘The man is a liability. He loves the limelight too much. Nobody in the industry will touch him any more.’

Randall stared at the last of the smoke drifting up from the butt then he tipped it into the wastebasket and shoved basket and ashtray both into Anderson’s arms.

‘Bullshit,’ he said, and with a nod to the other man as he headed for the door, ‘A pleasure meeting you, Mr Stevens.’

*

That was the summer that Liz and Robert bought the orange Morris Marina. Only four years old and less than seventy thousand miles on the clock. They took it a day here and a day there over the July fortnight: Ballywalter, Castlerock, Whitepark Bay, the Ulster American Folk Park, which was as close, Liz had thought, walking around its reconstructed settlers’ cabins, as they were ever likely to get to the real thing. They had talked about a package holiday on the continent – Torremolinos, Benidorm – had gone as far as making an appointment with Joe Walsh Tours in Castle Street the first weekend after Easter, but even at their rates, what with the new car and everything... No, it was just too much of a stretch. Maybe next year, they said, just as they had the year before. Instead, the next year Liz buried her brother, Pete, and felt guilty enough those first few months just breathing in and out, never mind lying sunning herself somewhere on the Costa Brava.

Anyway, a day here, a day there... Meant you weren’t tied, didn’t it?

The team that DeLorean was putting together was still under half a dozen strong when Randall moved into the on-loan Kimmerly offices. Besides being temporary landlord Tom Kimmerly himself was acting as the company’s attorney and chief secretary. His was the name entered in the Michigan State Business Register next to number 190407, the DeLorean Manufacturing Company. Bill Collins the chief engineer was another GM refugee – another former Pontiac man – who had felt the life, and the spirit, being slowly squeezed out of him by the sheer weight of the behemoth. Almost the first thing he and DeLorean had done together on his defection was fly to Europe, to the Turin Auto Show, searching for a designer they could work with. Actually, searching for one particular designer, Giorgetto Giugiaro, whose concept car for Lotus – more space-age architectural sculpture than automobile – had been shown in Turin the same year as DeLorean’s last ever Vega was being unveiled in Chicago.

(‘You can drive yourself nuts in this world comparing things that bear no direct comparison,’ DeLorean told Randall. ‘Or you can spur yourself on.’)

Giugiaro was intrigued by their vision: a high-concept design in the mass-produced quantities he had recently achieved with the Volkswagen Golf...

The scale model Randall had seen (it was epo-wood, he had since discovered, not balsa) was the first fruit of their three-way collaboration, although by the time DeLorean handed it to him the plans had already been modified. It was clear even without the benefit of a full-size prototype that the Safety Vehicle name was not going to stay the course: too awkward on the tongue – too much drag. They settled instead on DMC-12, the concluding digits a reminder to everyone involved that despite the name change the ambition of delivering a safe – and ethical – car at an affordable price remained undimmed.

Also notionally installed in Long Lake Road was Dick Brown, who had made a name for himself with Mazda, taking it from nowhere to fourth in the American export market in just two years, and whose job it was to build up a network of dealers willing to part with $25000 in advance for the rights to sell the DMC-12 at a profit to them of $4000 a car. His target was a hundred and fifty dealers nationwide in the first twelve months, hence ‘notionally installed’.

More rarely sighted still, but of even greater importance to the whole operation, was Roy Nesseth, Big Bad Roy, one of the few people Randall encountered in those circles taller than DeLorean, six-six, with the heft to go with it. Roy had started out as a dealer himself – still had an interest out in the ‘field’, as Randall quickly learned to call it, Wichita direction, and still had some of the abrasiveness with which members of that trade were traditionally associated, unfairly you might think, unless you had actually met Roy. The more other people complained about his manner – and other people did complain about it, a lot – the more it seemed DeLorean valued him. He it was who coined the nickname, and revelled in using it at every opportunity. ‘Most times you run up against a wall you are able to find a way around it. Other times you have no option but to go straight on through. Those are the times you need Big Bad Roy.’

DeLorean talked at times like a football coach (he had a share in the San Diego Chargers) deploying his specialists according to the play. Roy was his gunner, bearing down on the opposition’s punt returner, putting the fear of God into him. It wasn’t always pretty, but you couldn’t argue with the results.

As for Randall he was, to borrow from another code, a classic utility player. Whatever needed doing, he did it. Technically he was in the employ of Tom Kimmerly and the DeLorean Manufacturing Company, which controlled the DeLorean
Motor
Company, but at any given moment of any given day in the years that followed he could be acting for the John Z. DeLorean Corporation, the DeLorean Sports Car Partnership, the DeLorean Research Limited Partnership, or the Composite Technology Corporation, whose function it was to oversee development of the Elastic Reservoir Moulding process for the car’s body.

JZDC

DSCP

DRLP

CTC

DMC squared

Almost from the start there were accusations – Randall’s old pal Anderson ran one of the first in the
Daily News
– that as much energy and imagination was expended on moving capital from company to company as on designing and developing sports cars. DeLorean invoked Preston Tucker again, and his ill-starred attempt in the post-war years to break the Great Triopoly of Chrysler, GM and Ford. Tucker’s problem wasn’t so much that he had only one basket: he had only one
egg
. He left himself too get-at-able.

Besides, walk into any boardroom, or barroom, anywhere in the country and what else would you hear but talk of investment opportunities, rates of return, tax-saving options,
making money work
? Some made it work harder, and more effectively, than others, but not to have made it work at all was not just unprofessional, it was close to un-American.

The state of Delaware, anybody? Second smallest in the Union, but holding the registration for
half
of its publicly traded companies, including General Motors and the Ford Motor Company?

Another friend, Herb Siegel, head of Chris-Craft, the powerboat manufacturer, had given DeLorean the use of a suite in his building on Madison Avenue whenever he was in New York, which once the first prototype was ready was more often than not. Before very long Randall was there too with a third-floor walk-up giving him a view over – but alas no key to – Gramercy Park and a salary that made what he had been earning at the
Daily News
look like a pittance.

(As if to further prove the wisdom of his decision the
Daily News
itself – struggling all the time he was there – had, since he left, suffered the greatest ignominy that a newspaper could: it had folded.)

They had the Detroit headquarters, the New York offices, and a queue of people wanting to invest. All that was missing was a factory.

DeLorean had told Randall all along he did not want to commit until he had found the perfect site, although from what Randall could see it was the sites that came to him, trying to convince him of their perfection. Delegations arrived from half a dozen points on the North American compass: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia (so much for no one wanting to touch him); there had been an enquiry from Spain, another from Portugal. One guy turned up at Long Lake Road from Dublin, Ireland. He had been driving from Chicago when he caught an item on the car radio – Detroit itself was preparing a bid for the factory (hear that, Anderson? Detroit) – and decided to detour out to Bloomfield Hills and offer to make representations to the Irish government, for whom he was some kind of unofficial ambassador. It sounded far-fetched – farther fetched for some reason than Portugal or Spain – but DeLorean insisted on following it up.

Limerick was the city mentioned (Randall up to then did not even know there was an actual Limerick city), sitting at the head of the Shannon estuary, giving ready access to the North Atlantic – a three-day crossing in the right conditions – and with an airport half an hour out of town used to handling transatlantic freight.

‘The Irish are our kin,’ DeLorean said. ‘They sent their people here to escape hunger and want. They know what it is to struggle against oppression.’

By a tyrannical neighbour in their case, he meant, by the Big Three in his.

*

Liz read a report in the
Belfast Telegraph
. Car plant, Limerick, though to be honest it was the photo of the man behind the whole operation that caught her eye: the square jaw, the silver hair, the open-neck shirt and leather jacket, the name that the voice in her head made
Delloreen
of. There was a big man called DeLorean, whose something-something-something obscene. She turned the page. Prison dispute, men in blankets. She turned again. Tonight’s television: 1, 2, and UTV. Hopeless, hopeless and worse than hopeless.

*

The unofficial ambassador arranged a dinner with Irish businessmen and politicians in Pittsburgh. DeLorean was irked that the invitation had not included Cristina, even though she was out of town herself, auditioning for a part in a TV movie with Larry Hagman, acting, as Randall had heard her husband say many times, having always been her first love. He had no sooner left the office for the airport than she rang to wish him luck.