Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  Randall felt his brow furrow. At a time like this he was buying shirts? Imported tailor-made shirts?

  Of course he was. No matter how parlous the situation he was still the public face of the company, a face, moreover, whose appearance on the cover of a magazine could generate millions of dollars of desperately needed publicity.

  What was he to do, go about in a hair shirt?

  ‘You don’t have to explain anything,’ Randall said.

  DeLorean walked across the floor and embraced him, fists tightening between Randall’s shoulder blades. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said and Randall could not deny that to be seen by him – to be so warmly welcomed – was good too.

  ‘I’m not going to pretend that I thought it would ever come to this,’ DeLorean told Randall when he returned next day, rested, back to his old self, as good as, ‘and I am certainly not going to pretend that it is character-forming or any such crap, but we will take what benefit we can from the changes being forced upon us and we will come back stronger than before.’

  Later that day, sitting in the new office (Randall thought he looked a little hunched as though the unaccustomed eight floors above him was an actual physical weight), DeLorean told him he had decided, some weeks ago, when it had become inevitable that operations here in Park Lane would have to shrink, to take the opportunity to clear up some of the other... clutter that had accumulated over the years. ‘I believe I may have given the wrong impression about my father in the past, not just to you, to almost anyone I spoke to about him. I may have suggested that he was from Alsace-Lorraine.’ (I believe I may... I may... Even decluttering had to be approached with circumspection.) ‘He wasn’t, he was from a place called Alba, in Romania, Transylvania, to be precise, which, you can imagine, was part of the problem when I was a kid.’ He raised his hands, making claws of the fingers. ‘Son of Dracula...’ His lips settled again over the teeth he had momentarily bared. ‘You know how other kids are. It was a problem for the old man too, or he got it into his head that it was. He had ambitions as an inventor, you see, making improvements to the tools they used then on the line – I saw them myself, carved out of wood – but he couldn’t get anyone at GM to look at them: no pedigree. I think that’s where Alsace-Lorraine came from.’

  ‘Bugatti,’ said Randall.

  DeLorean nodded, smiled wryly. ‘Not that they wanted to know even then, but once he’d made that journey in his head there was no going back. Or maybe I’m not even remembering it correctly, maybe’ – circumspect again, testing the hypothesis – ‘it was just something he talked about doing, inventing a new back-story, and then later I just ran with it: insecurity.’ He stopped. ‘Does that seem strange to you?’

  ‘That you were insecure? After what you described? No.’

  Another nod, another not-altogether smile. DeLorean opened a drawer and passed across the desk a sheet of heavy writing paper embossed with an eagle that Randall mistook at first for America’s own until he noticed the cross held in the beak, the downward sweep of the wings. He looked at the address: Bucures¸ti.

  ‘I made contact with their Industry and Economic and Financial Activity Commission, who passed me on to the Foreign Policy and International Economic Cooperation Commission, who sent me this.’

  Randall read down, do not anticipate a need for your product... our own excellent Dacia Brasovia... however, on the matter of buses...

  Randall looked up. ‘Buses?’

  DeLorean shrugged. ‘I figured lower individual car ownership, greater need for public transport: we pilot them there then target the whole of the Eastern Bloc.’ He had his hand out to take the letter back. ‘You’ll see it doesn’t close the door entirely. I guess it does no harm that I am second-generation Romanian-American...’

  Yes, thought Randall, you are now, aren’t you, and might in time be Alsatian again, or Austrian, if that was what it took to protect the brand, stop the void that Dan Stevens had talked of from opening and swallowing all of them, the factory at Dunmurry first.

  *

  Liz was on her back contemplating a rotor, the precision of it, as irrefutable in its composition as its own name – and the lustre... like a platinum disc, near, something valuable anyway, awarded then kept out of sight under the stairs. The things you never knew you never knew about. She unhooked the bungee rope holding the calliper clear of the rotor and began to assemble. She greased the guide pins and slid them into place, turning them just enough to hold them for now, then rubbed lubricant on to the faces of the brake pads. Copper. She tried to remember from her schooldays if there had been an actual Copper Age, tried to imagine the circumstances of its first being smelted – wasn’t that what you called it? – I mean, for someone to look at a lump of this greeny-browny rock and think, I know, I’ll heat it up and chuck in some... What was it you did chuck in? Nah, gone. She slotted the pads into their allotted calliper cradles – the pad with the wear indicator to the inside – before returning to the pins, tightening each one in turn. Wheel on, hubcap on and that would be it, locked away under the stairs until the fifteen-thousand-mile service.

  She worked her way out from underneath the car, using the heels of her hands and the balls of her feet to propel the dolly. There was not a living soul within thirty yards of her. Somebody far distant was whistling ‘Tonight’ from West Side Story, jauntily, with flute-band trills and flourishes.

  She had completely lost track of time. Yet if she could have captured one moment and held it out of all the hours she had spent there since her miraculous return – the many hundreds of hours since she first walked through the door – this would be it.

  Every bit as miraculous as the return was the fact that she, along with Anto and TC, had survived the end of May cull. They had no way of explaining it to themselves, had been, in truth, more embarrassed than elated the day the announcement was made and had stood at the locked gates with the thirteen hundred of their workmates who would not now be going back in, or who were not expected to be going back in until a portion of them took matters into their own hands and climbed over again to set up camp in the canteen.

  The occupiers were cordial and philosophical when, the next morning, they came face to face with Liz and the others in their overalls. Every calamity had its survivors, after all, and it was simply wrongheaded to blame your fate on them. They even – those without work – shared the tea they brought in with them – for they were occupying the canteen, not looting it – with those who still had work to take a break from.

  The ‘two hundred’, meanwhile, were doing what those endless tours around the factory before ever production began had been preparing them for, though it had sounded like just a bit of crack then, the nuclear outcome, in which the very few had to fill in for the great many, carrying out the tasks of the departed as well as their own, hanging doors as well as fitting seats, wiring dashboards and putting on wheels, and before the wheels the brakes.

  She replaced the tools in the pouches of her roll then picked up the dolly and moved round to the other side of the car where she worked her way underneath, head and shoulders first, to start work on that rotor.

  *

  On his return from the States Randall had made straight for the canteen – past the banners that read We Want Work and DeLorean Workers Demand Their Rights – to talk to the men and women staging the occupation. It was not what you would call a warm reception.

  Where had he been when they were getting their cards? Not a manager to be seen the whole day.

  He couldn’t speak for the any of the rest, he said, but for his own part – truthfully? – he had been at home with his head down the toilet bowl.

  ‘Oh, good,’ said a guy at the front (Randall recognised him from the dive bar in Wilmington), ‘wishes sometimes do come true.’

  ‘Well, you must have been wishing pretty damned fervently,’ Randall said, ‘because I never in my life felt anything to compare with it. If you were able to work the same trick wishing for new finance...’ He to
ld them, as truthfully as the head down the toilet bowl, how he saw things, which was hopeless... if it had been up to anyone other than John DeLorean to try to pull it round. There were no lengths he would not go to (in his mind’s eye Randall saw that Romanian eagle): literally no lengths. And as he looked around their faces, saw the anger, the anxiety, lose their grip a little, he realised that DeLorean was the one person in all of this they still trusted, because in coming here in the first place he had trusted them.

  He repeated this speech half an hour later in the assembly shop, only just managing to keep a rein on his confusion at seeing Liz, looking as though she had never been away, although he had checked the list after the confrontation back in February (the fury in her eyes that day...) and had seen her name plain as day among the laid-off. Some of the workers applauded when he had got to the end of his last line – ‘Keep the faith, in the management here, in John Z. DeLorean, and together we will ensure there is life in this plant after October nineteenth.’ Liz merely nodded, to herself as it might have been: all right, faith pledged.

  DeLorean’s calls in the weeks that followed were, more often than not, from international airports: Dubai, Singapore, Frankfurt on a layover, Zurich, though not in the end Bucharest. There was always a deal just starting to take shape, taking the place of the last deal, which had broken down over some stupid bureaucratic detail or outrageous demand. (‘The Romanians basically wanted me to kiss Ceausescu’s ass.’) He was in the truest sense of the word indefatigable. And as June turned to July, July to August, August to September, Randall thought he detected a note of anxiety creeping in that for all the tens of thousands of miles he was covering – the lengths he was going to – he was getting nowhere.

  So when the call came from LA with news of another deal in the making, Randall was relieved as much by the buoyant note he struck as by the prospect of the financing package: buoyant enough to be taken in another, less abstemious person for booze-assisted. The words were coming out faster almost than Randall could take them in. There was a consortium, though – Randall got that: entirely American – he got that too, several times, their Americanness was a big, big part of the attraction – and ready to invest tens of millions of dollars ‘within weeks’.

  ‘But, Edmund, none of this yet to Prior or his people, not until I have all my ducks lined up.’

  A voice somewhere else in the room said, ‘Quack-quack’, which was the first that Randall knew, in all the time they had been talking, DeLorean was not alone.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you had company.’

  ‘Oh, that was just Jim being funny. You remember Jim Hoffman?’

  Randall swallowed a yelp. ‘Is he part of the consortium?’

  ‘He sure is,’ said DeLorean, ‘and a damn fine job he is doing too, aren’t you, Jim?’

  ‘If you say so, Captain,’ Hoffman said. Whatever about DeLorean, Hoffman had definitely been drinking, and not a little either. What time was it there? Three? No: two in the afternoon. Captain, he had called him. Captain.

  Randall was unable to settle to anything at all for the next several hours. (Captain... No other way to say that but with a smirk.) In the end he did what he ought to have done the first night he had seen him in the lobby of the Sheraton Universal.

  Hal Lewis who had sat once upon a time at the desk next to his at the Chicago Daily News was working now at another Daily News, over in LA, keeping real well, real well, thanks, he said when Randall rang him, enjoying the weather a lot more on the west coast, that was for sure... But what about Randall, had he stuck with DeLorean? Hard times there, Hal heard.

  Yes, Randall had stuck with the company, and, yes, things had been kind of tough lately, but that wasn’t what he was calling about.

  ‘I need a favour,’ he said.

  ‘Shoot,’ said Hal.

  ‘I’m trying to find some information on a guy, James Hoffman – Jim. Has a business partner by the name of Morgan Hetrick.’

  ‘What’s he done to you?’

  ‘He hasn’t done anything. Just someone I met here in Ireland told me he was related and wondered if I had ever come across him, you know the way Irish people are, they think America is a village.’

  ‘That’s your official reason?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not a very Irish name. Hoffman.’

  ‘He’s not a very close relation. Probably how come they lost touch.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do... Not promising anything, you understand.’

  ‘Of course,’ Randall said.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, Hal rang back.

  ‘That person you met in Ireland will be pleased to know that long-lost cousin Jim has been doing very well for himself indeed: him and his partners. Business contacts far and wide, though mostly far, if we take far to mean up and down as opposed to wide’s side to side.’

  ‘And by up and down you mean...?’

  ‘Mostly down: south of the border.’

  ‘Mexico way.’

  ‘And beyond, quite a bit beyond.’

  ‘That’s certainly interesting.’

  ‘And all perfectly above board, I hasten to add.’

  ‘Should I be detecting a hint of sarcasm?’

  ‘No, that one is straight... Whatever insinuations anyone might try to make.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Randall. ‘I hear you better now.’

  For two days after that he did little else but write and rewrite the script of the next conversation he needed to have. It rose up in his mind like a mountain that he had to surmount: it would be his triumph if he succeeded, but if he put a foot, or a word, wrong there would be no second chance, that would be him, gone.

  So: a question mark next to that word, a line through that... Do not for a single moment allow the thought to form that you have gone behind his back.

  He was still tussling with the big reveal (‘My pal Hal rang looking for a quote about the October nineteenth deadline...’?) when DeLorean, mistiming his cue, phoned him.

  ‘Edmund, I’ve got it, the answer to all our problems.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘I’m just through telling Don, I wanted to let you know myself... a company in London, connected to Lloyd’s, they’re in for one hundred million – tax-haven money – the Brits know all about it, seems they don’t mind havens as long as they are the ones benefiting. We pay them off straight away, we clear our debts and we still have money to upgrade the plant, invest in a huge new PR campaign: sedan, right-hand drive, twin-turbo...’

  ‘If I wasn’t actually speaking I would say I’m speechless.’

  ‘I know. We have to put up twenty million of our own before it can go ahead, but I’m working on that as well.’ There goes the ranch for sure now, Randall thought, the estate in Bedminster too, perhaps. ‘I’ve been talking to some people out in Virginia, I think they will be good for the loan.’

  Another loan. ‘You think they will be?’

  ‘Know. We’ve as good as shaken on it.’

  Randall could have wished they had actually shaken, but at least the government was backing this plan, and at least Hoffman and his consortium had been jettisoned along with all the other fleetingly sure things. Of course DeLorean had to explore every offer that came along, and if that meant carrying on for a few hours like an old drinking buddy of some unsavoury character then so be it. Randall felt guilty for having doubted. He put his script in the garbage and put Hal’s call right out of his head.

  19

  Cork showed up at the plant at the start of the week with Jeanne Farnan, one of those ‘people out in Virginia’, willing to make the twenty million dollar loan. She did shake Randall’s hand, with a surprisingly strong grip. Everything about her, in fact, suggested a reassuring firmness of purpose. Even her hair seemed set.

  She and Cork shut themselves away in an office for most of the morning. Peggy, who brought them in coffee and cookies from the canteen, reported that there were papers all over the desk and
floor, barely enough clear space for her to set down the chocolate teacakes. When she went in later to lift the leavings, of which there were few, the papers had all been tidied away again and him and her, Peggy said, were sitting laughing and joking, which had to be a good sign, hadn’t it?

  Lovely teeth she had, said Peggy. All the women ‘over there’ had but, hadn’t they? ‘My husband used to say they’re made out of different stuff from ours... Joking, like,’ she added in case maybe Randall hadn’t worked it out himself.

  *

  The American woman and Sir Kenneth Cork stopped in the assembly shop to talk to the workers, who emerged from inside and underneath cars – as though from inside and underneath shelters – at their approach. News of her good humour as she and Cork were winding up business in the office (and of her teeth, of course) had gone before her. What had not – Peggy, the bearer of those titbits not having been privy to any of the actual conversation – was her evident knowledge of the car itself, which she displayed now in a series of questions on everything from tolerance variations in the fibreglass to how the bonnet – hood to her – was bonded to the frame.

  ‘Here, are there stripes across my back?’ TC asked when they had moved on to the next interrogation. ‘I feel like I’ve just been grilled.’

  ‘What do you think?’ asked Liz, ignoring him. ‘Is she the real deal?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Anto. ‘Maybe.’

  They had been following the various proposed rescue plans as best they could, a combination of what they read about and heard about in the news and what was carried their way in the constant swirl of rumour and speculation that seemed if anything to travel faster now that the factory was nine-tenths empty.

  They were officially Not Getting Their Hopes Up over anything, but – human nature – it was hard to keep your thoughts from running away with themselves. ‘What if... Just say... Imagine...’

  The management in large part left them to their own devices. What was there to be gained after all in urging them on to finish the cars faster? Once these parts were used up, that was it. Better the deadline expire – if expire it must – before the factory.