Gull (31 page)

‘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 told 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.

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.

She remembered from the early days of training, before there was even a shop here to tour, one of the videotapes that was shown in the old carpet factory: DeLorean sitting on the edge of a desk. She was that busy looking at the stuff surrounding him – a bronze bust with the back of its head to the camera, photo frames facing the wrong way too, a telescope in front of the window – that it took her a while to catch up with what he was talking about... duty to the customer. She was looking right into his face when he said there were no shortcuts to quality. (He had a slight tremor in his bottom lip between sentences. For all his fame he was nervous doing this.) Even at Pontiac where they were doing four thousand cars a day he had told his workers that: prepare each new car as though it were your own new car.

She didn’t know that she had always managed to live up to that before, but she was doing it now, because each car she worked on was in a very real sense hers alone.

She and Robert were barely speaking. If it wasn’t silence it was shouting. ‘I don’t understand you at all. I could have had a job all lined up for you. Surely to God you can see it, the place is never going to recover.’

‘Oh, yes, Fount of all Knowledge?’ She gave as good as she got. ‘And how come you’re so sure about it when even the government isn’t?’

‘Because it’s Belfast! It’s what happens here!’

The boys shouted at the two of them – ‘Would yous for God sake quit it?’ – and nine nights out of ten stomped out of the house to see their gormless mates.

*

It was the end of the first week of October before Randall heard that the Virginia loan was only going to be worth half the amount the government was demanding as a condition of the other, bigger loan – the
bail out
. Whether it was Cork’s doing, or Prior’s, with Thatcher twitching his strings, or whether it was just Jeanne Farnan’s inability – for all that firmness of purpose – to sell her colleagues a deal that involved everyone but DeLorean himself risking their money, the simple fact was that they had reached if not the end of the line then the final colon: DeLorean had less than a fortnight to come up with ten million dollars.

All of a sudden Randall’s calls were stalling at Carole’s desk. She was sorry, John was in a meeting, if he could try again in an hour... She was sorry (one hour to the second later), the meeting had ended five minutes early, John had just walked out the door, she couldn’t say when he would be back. Couldn’t say or wouldn’t say. Couldn’t or wouldn’t say to Don either, from what Randall gathered.

After another five days of this he wired:
Must talk, prepared to come to you
. The reply arrived within the hour.
Suspect people working to undermine us. Beware of phones.
Randall read this far and felt something slipping away.
Have important job for you there
, the telex went on
. Await instruction.

Two days he waited. Late on the third another telex arrived, one word and a clutch of initials:
Chapman GPD
.

By lunchtime the following day he was in a car being driven up the A11 on its way from Heathrow Airport to Ketteringham Hall.

Colin Chapman had agreed, with a pretty poor grace, to take half an hour out from what was – he could not stress this too much – a very heavy schedule. He was only recently returned from an extended spell in the US built around the final race of the Formula 1 season, the Caesars Palace Grand Prix, from which he had watched both Lotuses retire with barely a third of the seventy-five laps gone. Between the early-season rows and the late-season engine problems it had been a wretched bloody year on the track. And even more bloody wretched, frankly, off it. The US market had completely collapsed (because if you thought trying to sell a $25,000 sports car there was hard you ought to try selling one that cost half as much again). American Express International had decided not to renew the loan that had been in place for the past seven years. The auditor’s report had had to be delayed, and delayed again, and then, he had been obliged to inform Companies House just the day before, delayed a third time. So, in truth, in answer to the question from Randall that had prompted this litany, no, he was afraid he had not been paying much attention to the trials and tribulations of other motor manufacturers, even ones with whom his own company had in the recent past been intimately connected.