Gull (4 page)

‘I’ll leave a message at the check-in desk for him to call you,’ said Randall to whom she had been redirected. He got the impression his name did not mean a single thing to her.

DeLorean arrived back in the middle of the following morning, morose.

‘So?’

‘Some people seem to think you should be getting down on your hands and knees to thank them for the privilege of bringing thousands of jobs to their country,’ was as much as he would volunteer and Randall did not press him further.

‘Did Cristina reach you?’ he asked instead.

‘She wanted to read me my horoscope. It mentioned Uranus in Capricorn: a good omen, apparently.’

Randall paused. He knew – it too having cropped up more than once – that DeLorean did set some store by these things, or by his own birth date, at any rate – 6 January: Epiphany. How better to account for those moments of revelation to which he had always been prone and on which he had never been afraid to act?

His smile on this occasion, though, was distinctly wry. ‘Luckily for Capricorn it’s too far away for me to sue, and as for the other one... Let’s not go there at all, shall we?’

‘There was another call after you left, from an Alejandro Vallecillo... The Puerto Rican Economic Development Agency, Fomento? Said he was calling at the behest of the governor...’ Randall turned towards his own desk for the piece of paper on which he had written the name.

‘Romero-Barcelo.’ DeLorean beat him to it. ‘I met him a couple of times when I was in Washington with the DBA.’

He looked at Randall, inviting him to elaborate. Randall blushed. ‘And that was all.’ All Vallecillo was prepared to divulge to
him
at least: ‘The governor had asked him to call.’

DeLorean sat for a time holding a pencil between his thumbs and forefingers. ‘The Economic Development Agency,’ he said, ‘Puerto Rico,’ then said them both again as though simple iteration could fill in the blanks. Maybe this all went with the revelations – was a precondition for them: the self-induced trance. Either way, Randall was trying to fight down the impulse to push the phone across the desk to him – ‘Ring him, why don’t you?’ – when a light in the corner of the dial pad began to flash: the Chris-Craft switchboard with an incoming call.

DeLorean took it himself. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘put him through.’ He placed a hand over the mouthpiece. ‘It’s Dick.’

Randall started to leave, but the same hand now stayed him. He wandered instead to the window. A chopper appeared out of the clouds to his left, long enough for him to notice the pilot’s bright red hair, banked, and was lost again among the buildings.

DeLorean replaced the phone on its cradle. ‘We’re going to LA,’ he said.

The dealers’ network was not expanding as fast as had been hoped – as fast as was necessary – especially in California, which it had been anticipated would account for 40 per cent of total sales. Twenty-five thousand, Dick had said, was a big buy-in for some of these guys, even with a share option on top of the guaranteed four-grand-a-car mark-up. He had had a promo film shot – very smooth, lots of sunlight through trees and flutes playing under a commentary that emphasised the durability of the design and therefore the reduced likelihood, ‘to virtually nil’, of obsolete stock – and Roy had been offering to add his weight to the negotiations. Dick, though, thought that this was a wall that needed to be got around. He thought the only person who could do it was DeLorean himself.

DeLorean, as he explained this, was on his feet in the office, the jacket he had taken off barely five minutes before back on.

It wasn’t just the stake money the network was to have generated that he had to think about – vital though that was – but the reassurance it provided to other would-be investors: one hundred and fifty dealerships taking one hundred cars a year for two years was thirty thousand sales upfront, three hundred and sixty million dollars’ worth of business.

‘The Puerto Ricans...’ Randall said.

‘Can wait for a couple of days.’

In the end they stayed in LA three days – stayed in and strayed from – eating up hundreds and hundreds of miles of Californian highway, as far north as Fresno and as far south as Imperial Beach. Wherever the car stopped dealers greeted DeLorean like an old friend. He seemed genuinely affected, humbled even, by the warmth of his reception. One dealer – this was in Thousand Oaks – told Randall, as he waited with him by the coffee vendor, how much they had always appreciated DeLorean’s solicitousness, going right back to his Pontiac days. ‘He never forgot we are on the front line. Some of the executives would come down here from Detroit and expect to be treated like goddamn royalty, wouldn’t put their hand in their pocket from the start of the trip to the end, but not John.’

Another dealer, one of the converted, over in Anaheim, did complain (‘a lot less than he did to me,’ said Dick, ‘and in longer words’) that he had had customers coming in for the past six months asking when the cars were going to appear and wanting to make a down payment – pay the whole $12000 asking price in advance, some of them. A greedier person could already have made back his $25000 investment four times over.

‘And a patient person,’ said DeLorean, ‘will be making closer to
forty
times over when the cars do appear. From the seventh car you sell it’s all profit.’

With which finally there was no arguing.

It was already gone nine o’clock when they got back to the hotel at the end of the first day. Roy was waiting for them, just blown in and blowing out again first thing tomorrow to Wichita. (That damn dealership was more trouble than it was worth.) DeLorean apologised to Randall. He and Roy had a bit of catching up to do, numbers they needed to run.

‘It’s all right,’ Randall said. In truth, although Roy had been nothing but civil to him any time they met, Randall couldn’t help feeling surplus around him. Perhaps, there being so much of him, Roy just didn’t see that company other than his was ever needed.

DeLorean laid a hand on Randall’s shoulder. ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said, and was as good as his word.

They dined just the two of them the following evening in the grillroom of the hotel. No: they sat the following evening in the grillroom of the hotel at a table with food on it, and a phone. When he was not making or taking calls, DeLorean sipped from a glass of white wine – the same glass of white wine throughout – and addressed his plate with head tilted back and jaw thrown forward, as though each new dish required a recalibration of the apparatus. A forkful or two, a sip of wine, plate pushed away. Done.

Randall found that the appetite he had worked up in the course of his day in the field was suddenly gone.

A little jazz outfit was playing off in one corner of the room, unobtrusive for the most part, but every so often becoming involved in a niggly-sounding argument between piano, drums and guitar, distracting DeLorean even more. He set down his fork at one point and turned in his seat. The maître d’ was at once on the alert, but relaxed into watching mode again as DeLorean turned back to face Randall.

‘Did you ever play?’

‘An instrument? No. There were votes taken to keep me away from them. You?’

‘A bit.’ DeLorean put the wine glass to his lips, tilted it, and took it away again. ‘A lot, actually, once upon a time. Clarinet. We had a band at Lawrence Tech, I was going to be the next Artie Shaw.’

Randall’s face was evidently a blank.

‘You don’t know Artie Shaw? You don’t know “Nightmare”?’

Randall laughed. ‘If by knowing you mean actually
know...
no.’

DeLorean’s hands, which had been poised momentarily about the ghost of an instrument, fluttered in the air between them. ‘I’ll start your education when we get back to New York.’

He picked up his fork and moved a small segment of artichoke from the rim of his plate to the centre. Left it there. He laid the fork lengthways across the plate.

‘I remember reading that his mother was Austrian.’ Artie Shaw’s, he meant, or so Randall guessed. ‘Same as mine. I kept thinking there had to be a connection, the way my own mother pushed me to take music lessons. I mean those were tough times to be trying to find five bucks a week, there weren’t too many people working on the assembly lines with her who were willing to make the sacrifices.’

Randall had spent enough time in his presence over the past couple of years to have become familiar with his parents’ assembly-line experiences, although DeLorean had never until now talked to him about them directly like this, facing him across a table, no eager journalist standing by turning the anecdote to screeds of shorthand.

‘Back then they could lay you off right across the summer while they got the lines ready for the next year’s model. You can’t imagine the strains that put on a family.’

His parents had separated, Randall had already picked that up. There were spells as a child living with relatives of his mother here in California. Or was it his father who had come west? A difficult man, he had gathered that by now too. It wasn’t Austria he was from, somewhere else beginning with A... Alsace, that was it: home of Bugatti. That was the first time he had heard DeLorean suggest a regional affinity passed down the family line: the artistry in the manufacturing, the conviction that weight was the arch-enemy of innovative design.

DeLorean was tapping lightly with all eight fingertips on the grillroom tablecloth. ‘I remember this one time a piano turning up in the house. Don’t ask me where from, some kind of shelter it looked like. There were keys missing, dampers, but we were going to fix it up. My father was good at that sort of thing, as long as he didn’t have to talk too much. Anyway, I woke up one night to a lot of crashing and thumping from downstairs – I was eight, nine, something like that – crashing and thumping at any time is unnerving, but in your own home, in the middle of the night... And what it was, Ford was having a crackdown, stolen tools, or tools suspected of being stolen. There were men in our house, to this day I couldn’t tell you how they got there, if they knocked the door, or kicked it in, but they were in there, crashing and thumping, when my brothers and I crept down the stairs to see what was going on... And, well, I guess a battered piano looked to them a likely hiding place.’

The band had stopped playing. DeLorean raised his hands to applaud over his shoulder.

‘I hope I need hardly add that there were no tools, not there, not anywhere in the house.’

‘I can’t believe they could get away with something like that,’ Randall said.

‘It was Detroit. They knew they had the people.’ He closed his fist: this tight. ‘Where else were they going to go for work?’

*

They reached the magical one hundred and fifty midway through the third morning and by the end of the day had added another eight dealers to the list. That evening they were driven out to Burbank as special guests at the recording of The Tonight Show. Randall had fielded two calls in the course of the afternoon from the Puerto Ricans, but DeLorean spent the entire journey on the car phone to Cristina, head turned to the window, and from the moment they arrived at the studios they had production assistants and hospitality staff in close attendance and then the show was starting and they were standing – such was their access – out of shot at the side of the stage, with its mess of cables and monitors, its young men and women with stopwatches and clipboards, watching Johnny Carson coax a beauty of a performance out of Peter O’Toole.

‘The last time you were on here people thought you were bombed out of your gourd...’

‘
I
thought I was bombed out of my gourd.’

‘But you were just exhausted, weren’t you?’

‘Well, it’s half your truth and half mine. I had been flying back from Japan and we left there on a Monday and arrived in the States on a Sunday, which alarmed me, and everywhere we stopped along the way it was cocktail hour and one doesn’t want to be discourteous...’

Under cover of the applause that greeted its conclusion Randall finally had an opportunity.

‘Romero-Barcelo’s people have been on the phone again. I really think you should talk to them.’

DeLorean nodded. ‘Did Roy Clark call? I’d hoped I might see him here. I know he’s been filming a guest slot with the Muppets.’

‘No,’ said Randall as the studio manager tried to wind up the applause and get Peter O’Toole to vacate his seat, ‘he didn’t.’

Afterwards, while the set was struck and Johnny was in make-up for his make-down, they went across to the Sheraton Universal Hotel, where, as Randall had observed him do many times before, DeLorean opted to stand in the lobby rather than sit, as though reluctant to commit himself too soon:
Say Johnny doesn’t come at all...?

He attracted plenty of looks of his own, even in that lobby where whichever way you turned you saw someone who looked like someone you had seen on TV. That chestnut-haired woman holding up the shoe with the broken heel? Pure Mary Tyler Moore. The four men at the table over to the right, all open-neck shirts and heavy gold bracelets and furtive glances over the shoulders as they talked? Straight off the set of
The Rockford Files
.

DeLorean had checked his watch two or three times already, had muttered two or three times more about another invitation he had had, which perhaps it would have been polite not to have declined, when the hotel doors revolved and out at quarter-turn intervals stepped Johnny Carson’s entourage, the young men and women from the wings, minus stopwatches and clipboards, with, at their centre, Johnny himself. He spotted DeLorean at once. The entourage parted as he did a little shuffle, feinting left and right before throwing his arms wide.

‘Hey!’

‘Hey!’

They hugged. Johnny and John. Brothers. Back-clapping.

Johnny was first out of the clinch.

‘So, when can I expect my car?’ He turned to the entourage as to a studio audience. ‘You know I’m going to do ads for this man? I must be the only schmuck in television history to
pay
half a million bucks to appear in an ad.’

DeLorean took it, as it was given, in good part. Every comedy act needed a stooge and he for the minute was it. ‘We just signed up our one-hundred-and-fifty-
eighth
dealer, that’s enough to take the first two years’ output and then some.’