Gull (7 page)

Robert shook his head. ‘If somebody was giving me thirty grand for every job I think I could see my way to rustling up two thousand of them as well,’ he said and went and sat down at the table. Liz strained the peas between the angled lid and the side of the pot and spooned them on to the plates.

‘And this,’ the industrial correspondent went on, ‘is the car that is creating all the excitement, described by its creator John DeLorean’ (so
that
was how you said it) ‘as the world’s most ethical mass-production motor car and the first car of the twenty-first century.’

Liz tilted her head trying to make sense of the image on the screen. Something odd was happening to the sides of the car – for a moment she thought it must be a trick of the vertical hold, but, no, those were the doors opening, rising up, and up, and up.

She set down the slotted spoon she had been using for the peas and covered her mouth with her hand. Honest to God, it was the only thing she could think to do to keep herself from laughing out loud.

*

The news crews were packing up. Randall rested a shoulder against one of the vans. UTV it said on the side. He was still dazed from the announcement, the flight, the whole crazy whirl of the past twenty-four hours.

For the final few minutes of the press conference his attention had snagged on a group of kids – mid-teens was his guess – watching from a slight muddy rise a couple of hundred yards away. He fancied for a time that they were trying to signal to him (he really was pretty dazed) then that they were involved in some kind of pat-a-cake or hand jive. Finally he twigged that what they were doing was passing something between them – some
things
: bottles, flashing green as heads were thrown back, tilting them towards their mouths.

He felt a hand on his back between his shoulder blades. He turned. DeLorean. His eyes were shining.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘It’s going to be something to see when it’s done.’

DeLorean nodded. ‘About that, I’ve been thinking, it might be an idea if you were to stay on here, just until we get the place up and running.’

Randall opened his mouth. DeLorean got there before him.

‘Oh, don’t worry, you’ll not be on your own, there’ll be plenty of faces you recognise, but with so many people sometimes it’s good to have someone taking care of L & L.’

Randall returned the initials as a question.

‘Call it Logistics and Liaison,’ DeLorean said. It was a new one on Randall, but then, his prerogative he supposed: his company, his job descriptions.

A cop walked by, part of the secretary of state’s team, toting the same model of machine gun as the cops at the airport. (RUC they were called here: Royal Ulster Constabulary.) DeLorean brought his voice down a notch. ‘Besides, with that
overseas
experience of yours you’re not likely to be freaked out by the presence of all these guns.’

This time, before Randall could muster a reply, Jennings stepped across their path. He dipped his head with practised deference towards DeLorean. ‘The secretary of state would like a word before he leaves.’

‘Of course.’ DeLorean took Randall’s hand in both of his. ‘I have to get on to London later: a few more papers to sign before they will start releasing the money. We’ll book you into a hotel until we can fix you up with somewhere more permanent. Ring me the day after tomorrow, let me know what you need.’

Randall and Jennings together watched him go to Roy Mason’s side.

‘I couldn’t help overhearing,’ Jennings said without turning his head, ‘and if you don’t mind me saying, it’s not the guns you have to worry about, it’s the government.’

Randall glanced at him sidelong. ‘I thought you were the government.’

‘Me? Oh, no: civil service. I simply do the bidding of whoever is in power.’ This with a small wave to the secretary of state, just getting into his car. ‘And, whisper it, Mr Mason and his party are not going to be in power for very much longer.’

Mr Mason’s party, Randall knew, was Labour, which stood in relation to its main rivals, the ‘Tories’ of the Conservative Party, rather as the Democrats did to the Republicans. The Tories had a woman in charge, Margaret Thatcher. Ronald Reagan was a fan.

‘The next incumbents, I am afraid, are not renowned for their love of public subsidy, certainly not under the new regime... And certainly not in the tens of millions that it appears Mr DeLorean has managed to extract. If I had any influence I would make sure he stuck to that timetable of his, although between you and me “eighteen months” was a bit of unnecessary bravado.’ He shook his head. ‘What I would call handing the opposition a goal start.’

The car with DeLorean in it followed the secretary of state’s away from the site. He turned a final time in his seat and saluted Randall with a forefinger off the eyebrow.

Randall raised a forefinger halfway to his own.

Jennings shook his head again.

The kids on the rise overlooking the cow fields passed their bottles round.

To begin with Randall stayed in a hotel – the Conway – a scant half a mile from the future plant, hidden away in woods on the edge of one of the housing projects that he had glimpsed that first day. Housing
estates
, I beg your pardon. The Conway, way back when, had been the home of some linen magnate, a brother of the owner of the former Seymour (the name that had escaped him) Hill, whose entire house and lands – hence ‘estate’ – the Northern Ireland government had requisitioned after World War II for public housing.

And ‘Northern Ireland’. Not ‘North’ or ‘North of’. They were very particular about that.

As DeLorean had assured him, he was not on his own. As the weeks went by and the transformation of the Dunmurry cow pasture began, the Conway started to fill up with DeLorean Motor Company Limited guests. (DeLorean himself returned to break ground at the start of October but had already checked in his souvenir spade for the flight back to London before the fourteen earth movers that entered the fields as he exited had between them turned over a single one of the seventy-two acres.) One of the first to arrive was Myron Stylianides, the perpetually upbeat director of personnel, who was responsible for finding a managing director in Chuck Bennington. Bennington was as lugubrious as Stylianides was sunny, a trait that Randall attributed in part to his beard and moustache, which looked to be modelled on an Olde English seafarer’s – a Raleigh or a Drake – and which seriously limited his scope for smiling, and in part to his Raleighan devotion to tobacco, which in its permanently lit cigarette form similarly limited his scope for speech. On Dick Brown’s recommendation Stylianides and Bennington brought in Dixon Hollinshead to oversee the construction of the factory itself and to help swell the numbers in the Conway’s residents’ dining room.

There were still nights though, particularly towards the end of the working week, when those who could get out did and when Randall had the dining room pretty much to himself.

Dunmurry was not strictly speaking in Belfast at all, but in the borough of Lisburn, whose town centre lay about three miles south along the main road that ran past the end of the Conway’s long driveway. The centre of Belfast lay maybe a mile and a half further than that in the opposite direction, although Randall did not often make that particular journey for reasons other than work and scarcely at all at night, the news that he awoke to each morning being a daily renewed disincentive.

(He was particularly alarmed by the recurrence of the term ‘coffee-jar bomb’. How could you trust anything if you could not trust a jar of coffee?)

Instead he would have a couple of beers most nights in the lounge bar – two sometimes, rarely more than three – and afterwards take a walk around the grounds or if, as was often the case, the grass was too wet, follow that long, curving driveway down to the main gates. There were a couple of whitewashed cottages opposite, vegetable gardens just visible in daylight at the rear, the whole lot dwarfed by a pair of twenty-storey apartment blocks that might have sprouted from a handful of magic stones tossed out of a cottage window one night in a fit of temper.

The gates themselves stood open throughout the day, but half a dozen yards in from the road was a security barrier operated from inside a tar-roofed wooden hut by some permutation of the same three guards: the small thin one, the tall fat one and the one with the caved-in nose. They never once introduced themselves by name, or asked Randall his, but generally, if he had gone that way, whichever pair was on duty would step out of the hut the moment they saw him and stand a while with him in an informal smoking bee.

He commented one night, early in their acquaintance, on the fact that they were not armed, as guards back home would certainly be.

‘Not allowed here,’ said the guy with the nose. ‘Only cops and soldiers. Afraid of guns getting into the wrong hands.’

‘Anyway,’ said his pal (it was the small thin one tonight), ‘there hasn’t been a bit of bother since they had this barrier put in.’

Which begged the question... Randall asked it, ‘There was before?’

‘Ach, aye.’ The guy with the nose tried to make light of it. ‘Sure there’s hardly a hotel or a bar in the country hasn’t had it at some point by now. And, like, we got off lightly: wee bit of damage to the front door, couple of windows broke, no one badly hurt.’

‘Mind you, one of the bombers was shot getting away.’ The small one had clearly not picked up on his colleague’s attempt to downplay the threat. ‘Tried to hijack a car belonging to an off-duty cop.’

The guy with the nose could only suck his teeth. ‘What are the chances of that?’

But say someone was to drive up now, Randall asked, not entirely hypothetically, someone with an actual bomb. What could they do?

The small one threw down his cigarette and ducked back into the hut (glimpse of a kettle, an electric heater), emerging a couple of moments later with a lump hammer.

‘See that? That goes through the windscreen,’ he said. ‘Then me and him’ – jerking his thumb – ‘run like hell.’

And his pal laughed, smokily. ‘Don’t listen to him.’

It was from the third guy, the fat one, that Randall heard the melancholy story of Thomas Niedermayer. He had come with his family to Belfast from Nuremberg at the start of the sixties to head up the new Grundig factory, German reel-to-reel tape recorders then being seen as the answer to the already acute problem of unemployment in the city. The security guard had used to work there – in the hangar-like building Randall had seen on the edge of the DeLorean site – which was how the subject came up. (‘How long have you been doing this then...?’) Anyway, everything was fine until five or six years ago – ‘this time of year as well’ (already it had acquired the characteristics of a folk tale). Late one weekday evening, a man had knocked on the front door of the bungalow in another part of Dunmurry (‘beautiful houses’) where Niedermayer and his family were living and told one of the teenage daughters that he had reversed into their car, which was parked on the street. The wee girl went and got her father who came out still in his slippers and followed the man down the path, chatting away, but when he bent over to inspect the damage a second man appeared out of the shadows and together with the first bundled Niedermayer into the back seat of his own car – all this in full view of his daughter – since when neither hide nor hair had been seen, nor word heard, of the poor fella.

‘They’ll have taken him over the border somewhere,’ the guard told Randall. ‘That’s where they all end up.’

‘
All?
”

‘Oh, no, here, don’t take that the wrong way. I mean touts and the like – informers.’ He clamped the cigarette in his mouth and mimed pulling a trigger two-handed, aiming at the back of a kneeling man’s head, removed the cigarette, exhaled mightily. ‘There was a whole thing going on at the time they took him about IRA guys in prison down south. Generally they leave the foreigners well alone and, like, even if they didn’t they would never in a million years lay a finger on any of your crowd. Can you imagine the stink the Irish Americans...?’ He swallowed the end of the last word. ‘Sorry, you’re not...?’ Randall shook his head. The big guy swiped a hand melodramatically across his brow:
phew!
‘Anyway, you can just imagine it, can’t you, the stink?’

Which was not quite to Randall the reassurance the big guy clearly thought it was.

He walked back up the drive to the hotel, alert to every rustle from the bushes crowding in on either side, went into the bar and had another drink, his fourth of that particular night. Well, fourth then fifth.

DeLorean returned at regular intervals throughout the autumn and winter, usually with Bill Collins in tow, sometimes with Kimmerly, now and then with a new guy, Bill Haddad, who had used to work for the Kennedys and who had been enticed away from his last job as a columnist on the
New York Post
– a slightly grander newspaper connection than Randall could boast, as Haddad occasionally reminded him – by the offer of Vice President for Planning. PR, from what Randall could see. DeLorean and his job titles.

The itinerary varied little from trip to trip: site visit, presentation from Dixon Hollinshead and Chuck, meeting with Mason and the Industrial Development Board, interview with one or other of the local TV channels (‘I couldn’t be happier with how things are going, couldn’t be happier at all’), then back to the airport for a late-afternoon flight out, because always, whatever his intentions, something would have come up in the course of the day that demanded he return that night to London or, if Kimmerly was with him, go on to Geneva, where it appeared there was some deal afoot, involving a new set of initials, GPD, General Products Development. (There ought to have been an S and an I as well – Services Inc – but they didn’t make the cut and Randall, with so much else to occupy him, didn’t give them, or the three letters that did, much in the way of thought.)

All of which meant that Randall’s opportunities for liaising with DeLorean one-to-one were usually restricted to the walks from building to car between meetings; the car itself, as he had observed in LA, having become a kind of motorised phone booth, where it was impossible – short of having a phone of your own to ring him on – to get a word in.