‘A head of division is really only as good as the team he has around him.’
The friend of the reporter in front of Randall cupped his hands about his own mouth and earned himself a few laughs, hollering, ‘Come on, John, don’t be getting all modest on us.’
Up went DeLorean’s hands again. Up briefly went the corners of his mouth. ‘No, no, it’s true, I am blessed with a great team at Chevrolet who have all been hard at work with me the past twelve months trying to improve on the ’72 Vega. Now, some companies with a Car of the Year on their hands would be content with a tweak here and a tweak there, but at Chevrolet we don’t believe in resting on our laurels — I believe that’s the polite word for it — we keep looking to the future, and for the brand new Vega my team have come up with — wait for it — three hundred improvements, friends: three, zero, zero.’
All around Randall reporters were scribbling in notebooks, although he had not heard anything yet that could not be carried in the head.
‘But what am I talking for?’ DeLorean said, hamming it a little now. ‘Why don’t you have a look for yourselves?’ He half turned to the young women. ‘Will we show them, ladies?’
As one the two of them bent low, grasping opposite corners of the sheet covering the car, and as one they rose again and with three steps backwards laid it bare. Coupé. A blue so metallic it was practically neon, the body’s long, slow slope up from the trunk breaking like a dune at the top of the windshield, falling sharply to the hood, which curved away between raised headlights to the grille.
In style, in other words, not a whole lot different from half a dozen other cars on display elsewhere in the Convention Centre and — bar the finish and perhaps the depth of the bumper beneath the grille — to Lucas’s eyes pretty much identical to the photo on the front of the Motor Trend he had discarded on his way into the interview at the Daily News.
The reporters were writing faster, the photographers pressing closer to the dais. DeLorean was still talking.
‘Now I recognise a lot of the faces here at the front — you’ve been in this business nearly as long as I have. You boys remember what we did with the Pontiac back in the sixties. The Old Lady’s Car, isn’t that what they used to call it? Well they weren’t calling it that by the time we were through with it.’ No one ribbed him this time about that modest ‘we’, although they would have had greater cause to. Sure, there was a team there too, but he, John Z. DeLorean, more than any other person, had remade the Pontiac, and more than any other car the Pontiac had made his name. Even Lucas knew that. ‘The Vega’ — DeLorean had changed register again, this was the sales pitch — ‘is going to be for this decade what the Pontiac was for the last. Take my word for it.’
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.