Gull (2 page)

The audience took it: hung on it.

The young women had opened the car doors and were perched sideways on the front seats, long legs elegantly crossed.

‘So,’ said DeLorean, ‘does anyone have any questions?’

The first one came from so far to the right it was practically in Dodge territory.

‘Is it true that you’ve been promised the presidency of General Motors before your fiftieth birthday?’

‘Hey!’ DeLorean’s eyebrows rose theatrically. ‘Let a guy get used to being forty-seven before you start talking to him about fifty.’

‘But it’s only a matter of time, right?’

‘The birthday or the presidency?’ The comedian, banished now to the sidelines, could not have bettered it for timing. ‘But what about this beauty here behind me, anything you want to ask about that? Yes, at the back there.’

He pointed straight down the room, straight at Randall, who was as surprised as anybody, looking up, to find that his hand was indeed raised. He cleared his throat. ‘It’s not a question so much as an observation. I hear what you say about looking to the future, but the only thing that looks different to me from last year is the depth of the bumper.’ The reporters immediately in front had turned to look at him – to scowl – and the reporters in front of them and in front of them again. Randall faltered. ‘I mean, is that the most we can hope for from the future?’

DeLorean held his gaze, jaw set. It was a weapon, that jaw. (Randall later learned that he had had reconstructive surgery on his chin. ‘The people who say it was vanity don’t know the pain I used to be in.’) He kept it trained a moment or two longer then smiled. ‘Well, you see, it was a question after all,’ he said and when the laughter had died down turned to address the audience at large as though Randall had been a mere plant. ‘Like I said, there are three hundred improvements and if you care to come on up here I am sure these two delightful ladies would be only too happy to point them out.’

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than there was a rush towards the dais. Randall, still smarting from the put-down, took advantage of it to lose himself in the Auto Show crowd, or that at least was the idea.

‘Hey! Hold on there!’

He looked over his shoulder to see GM’s president-in-waiting striding towards him. The stride was something else he had in his armoury. The stride and the height – six four or more to look at him, closing fast – that powered it.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Randall. Edmund Randall.’

‘What do your friends call you, Ed? Eddie?’

‘Pretty much everyone calls me Randall.’

DeLorean nodded (hair could not grow that black) as though it were a marketing matter they were discussing. ‘I prefer Edmund,’ he said and before Randall could respond had offered his hand. ‘John DeLorean.’ Randall’s hand in comparison was like a child’s. ‘You’re new to this, aren’t you, Edmund?’

‘Well, if you mean what I said back there, I didn’t mean to offend, but I thought it was my job to ask questions.’

DeLorean rocked back on his heels as though amused at his innocence then snapped forward again, bending at the waist and speaking out the corner of his mouth. ‘Your job is to print the lines the manufacturers spin you in return for getting your cock sucked.’

Randall pulled his head back out of range. ‘What makes you think I want my cock sucked?’

(A woman passing too close put her hands over her grade-school son’s ears.)

‘I never met a man yet in this industry who didn’t.’ DeLorean drew himself up to his full six-foot-four-or-more and glanced back at the Vega stand. The reporters on the dais were paying as much attention to the very tall young women as they were to the car. His eyes slid round on to Randall again. ‘Actually, there is a party later, ought to be a blast.’

‘Thanks, but I have a review to write.’

The weapon of a jaw shifted to one side then the other. Another nod. ‘I should probably be getting along myself. I’m expected back in Detroit for dinner.’

This time it was Randall who called after him. ‘What about the party?’

DeLorean barely broke stride to answer. ‘Oh, I only like organising them.’ He waved above his head, his voice already three strides fainter. ‘Be kind!’

‘I’ll be honest,’ Randall shouted, though whether it reached its intended target is anyone’s guess. Still, plenty of other people heard him, and after that, well, what else could he be?

‘What is this crap?’ the auto pages editor asked, handing him back his copy. ‘Three hundred improvements and all you can talk about is the bumper?’

Two days later a memo landed on his desk informing him of his transfer, a week Monday, from autos to real estate.

‘At least I am staying in the building,’ he told Pattie.

‘For now you are,’ she said.

They were both beginning to realise that they had maybe married in too much haste. The marriage counsellor they had started seeing dwelt a lot on the timing of their meeting, a mere month after Randall’s return from his tour of duty. She had seen it before, she said, with vets. Despite all that they had been through over there they missed the heightened emotions... ‘They used those exact words?’ Randall asked. ‘“Heightened emotions”?’ Maybe not those exact words, but the point was they would do anything, some of them, to make the colour flare again, even for a single (wedding) day.

‘Talk about being wise after the event,’ said Pattie.

‘And what was your excuse?’ he asked her.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Just don’t.’

So when a few years later the phone rang on his desk early on the second Wednesday in June – the middle day of the middle month of the middle year of the decade – Randall was a recently divorced father of a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Tamsin, who he had to go through a lawyer to see.

He picked up the receiver on the third ring. ‘Apartments and Condos?’

‘Edmund?’ said the voice. ‘So this is where they have you hidden away.’

‘Who is this?’ he asked, though he already knew the answer: no one had a voice quite like that, and no one, other than his mother, called him Edmund.

‘John DeLorean.’

‘This is a surprise.’

‘Is it? I was thinking we might have lunch.’

‘You’re in Chicago?’

‘Detroit. If you leave in the next forty-five minutes you can make the eleven-thirty flight. There’ll be a ticket in your name at the desk. Tell your editor you are comparing prices in Kenilworth and Bloomfield Hills.’

Randall pushed his chair back from the desk. The motion only added to his feeling of light-headedness. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Where will I meet you?’

He spent thirty of the forty-five minutes before he left in the microfilm library, figuring that whatever John DeLorean had been doing in the years since he had last seen him it was unlikely to have gone unreported.

He did not have far to look: 1 April 1973, resigned from General Motors, walking away from a $600,000 salary as well as that promised presidency, becoming instead president of the National Alliance of Businessmen in Washington with a pledge to increase the number of young black kids in America’s largest corporations (‘I started on the same side of the tracks as them’); same month married for the third time, to Cristina Ferrare, a model whom he had fallen for after seeing her photograph in
Vogue
. (The story got cuter: he had torn out the photo spread and carried it in his wallet until he met her in person at a Gucci show where she was modelling the fall range.) Both articles reported his dream of setting up his own motor company. ‘One day,’ they were quick to add. ‘One day.’

Last thing Randall did before walking to the departure gate was buy a tie, tweed-knit: he was going for lunch with John DeLorean.

There was, besides the ticket at the desk, a man waiting for him at the other side – from that day on there would always be a man waiting for him at the other side – who led him, this first man of many, to a car that drove him the thirty or so miles to Bloomfield Hills. They passed the Country Club, they passed any number of likely and inviting-looking restaurants and hotels. (Randall, for all that he was nervous, was beginning to feel very hungry too.) They stopped finally before a concrete and steel triple-decker of an office building, the name Thomas Kimmerly, Attorney at Law, prominently displayed on the lawn sloping down to the road.

‘Is this it?’

The driver, who had not spoken more than half a dozen words in the forty air-conditioned minutes he and Randall had spent confined to the car together, nodded. ‘This is where I was told: 100 West Long Lake Road.’

For a fleeting instant Randall imagined some retrospective action for his temerity at the Auto Show.

The driver turned in his seat. ‘I have somewhere else I am supposed to be.’

‘Sorry.’

He let himself out into midday, mid-year – who knows: mid-decade, maybe – Midwest heat and walked up the winding path to the door where he hesitated again, checked back... but the car was already gone.

The receptionist had been monitoring his stop-start progress. She had one hand on the phone as he entered.

‘I was hoping you could tell me where to find...’ Randall began, but got no further.

‘Hey, you made it!’ DeLorean was leaning over the first-floor stair rail, gone greyer than seemed mathematically or biologically possible, and looking somehow younger for it, dressed in a denim shirt and jeans, finished off with a pair of tooled silver-on-black cowboy boots. The receptionist took her hand from the phone. Randall put his hand to the knot of his tie. ‘Come on up!’

By the time Randall had reached the top of the stairs DeLorean was already halfway along the landing and was holding open a door – Suite 206 – for Randall, when he had caught up, to pass through. The only thing about him that did not always seem to be in a hurry was his voice.

‘Tom is letting me have the use of a couple of hundred square feet here until we have the prototype ready to show investors.’

Inside, Suite 206 was part office, part workshop, with drawing boards and flipcharts between the desks and file cabinets and a full exhaust up on one table as though for dissection.

So it was true.

‘You’re really doing it? You’re making your own cars?’

‘GM and their cronies at Chrysler and Ford will probably do everything they can to stop me, like they stopped Preston Tucker, but, yes, I am, even if I have to go somewhere else to do it.’

He strode through the room, indicating as he passed it a large platter of fruit – ‘This is lunch, by the way, help yourself’ – stopping finally before a table, just along from the exhaust, on which stood a model – balsa wood, Randall wanted to say – maybe twelve inches long. He picked it up with the fingertips of both hands.

‘And this is what they are all afraid of.
This
will change everything. We’re calling it the DSV – DeLorean Safety Vehicle, the world’s first ethical car. Forget the
minimum
requirements, this car will have, as standard, features no other company has even thought of before, or if they thought of them it was only to say they were too expensive: airbags for a start, on both sides, side impact strips, copper facings on the brake discs for fade resistance, rustproof stainless steel, and an integral monocoque structure – that means the chassis and the body are a single unit – spreads the stress in the event of a collision...’ (‘Integral monocoque structure,’ Randall repeated to himself: there could be a test after this for all he knew.) ‘It’ll be light too: two thousand pounds. We’re using a brand new process, ERM, stands for Elastic Reservoir Moulding.’ (Randall’s brain had reached the limit of its own elasticity.) ‘I’ve bought exclusive rights in it... Here.’

He held out the model to Randall whose first instinct was to fold his hands behind his back.

‘I have to warn you, I come from a long line of klutzes.’

‘Take it.’

And how could he refuse a second time? The lines were sleeker than the Safety Vehicle name suggested, sportier. He was conscious as he turned it about of DeLorean’s eyes on him.

‘It’s... It’s... Wow,’ he said, a different kind of ineptitude.

DeLorean nodded nevertheless, accepting the compliment on the model car’s behalf. ‘How much do you think a car like that ought to cost?’

There was no getting a question like that right, not that DeLorean was inclined to wait for an answer. ‘Twenty, twenty-five thousand, would you say?’

‘About that.’

DeLorean smiled. ‘Try twelve.’

‘Twelve thousand dollars?’ Randall didn’t have to feign the astonishment.

‘Within reach of two-thirds of American households. Cheap to run too.’

‘The People’s Sports Car,’ Randall said and thought as he did that he caught out the corner of his eye a decisive movement in that formidable jaw.

‘It stayed with me,’ DeLorean said, measuring the words, ‘what you said in McCormick Place about wanting more from the future... Oh, don’t get me wrong’ – the thought had barely had the opportunity to form in Randall’s head – ‘I had been contemplating something like this for a while, a long, long while. The thing is, I am putting together a team here. I want you to join it.’

The model slipped in Randall’s hand. He righted it at the second attempt. ‘You know I have no experience in this business? I didn’t last six months on the auto pages.’

‘You have something better than experience: you have a nose for bullshit. That ’73 Vega? You were absolutely right, the only new thing about it
was
the bumper. It’s a year on year racket to part people from their money.’

‘I spent twelve months running supplies in the An Hoa Basin,’ Randall said, out of embarrassment as much as anything. He almost never spoke about that time to anyone who hadn’t been there. ‘If you didn’t have a bullshit detector before you went there you sure as hell had one by the time you left.’

DeLorean seemed to assess him differently. ‘Don’t tell me, the further up the chain of command you went the worse the smell got?’ It sounded like another potential trap of a question, but no. ‘I did a couple of years myself: ’43 to ’45,’ DeLorean said. ‘Never made it out of the US. I kept telling them ways they could improve their basic training, they kept sending me back to take it again. They hate it when they can’t make you exactly the same as them. I guess that’s why we’re both here.’