‘Talk about being wise after the event,’ said Pattie.
‘And what was your excuse?’ he asked her.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Just don’t.’
So when a few years later the phone rang on his desk early on the second Wednesday in June — the middle day of the middle month of the middle year of the decade — Randall was a recently divorced father of a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Tamsin, who he had to go through a lawyer to see.
He picked up the receiver on the third ring. ‘Apartments and Condos?’
‘Edmund?’ said the voice. ‘So this is where they have you hidden away.’
‘Who is this?’ he asked, though he already knew the answer: no one had a voice quite like that, and no one, other than his mother, called him Edmund.
‘John DeLorean.’
‘This is a surprise.’
‘Is it? I was thinking we might have lunch.’
‘You’re in Chicago?’
‘Detroit. If you leave in the next forty-five minutes you can make the eleven-thirty flight. There’ll be a ticket in your name at the desk. Tell your editor you are comparing prices in Kenilworth and Bloomfield Hills.’
Randall pushed his chair back from the desk. The motion only added to his feeling of light-headedness. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Where will I meet you?’
He spent thirty of the forty-five minutes before he left in the microfilm library, figuring that whatever John DeLorean had been doing in the years since he had last seen him it was unlikely to have gone unreported.
He did not have far to look: 1 April 1973, resigned from General Motors, walking away from a $600,000 salary as well as that promised presidency, becoming instead president of the National Alliance of Businessmen in Washington with a pledge to increase the number of young black kids in America’s largest corporations (‘I started on the same side of the tracks as them’); same month married for the third time, to Cristina Ferrare, a model whom he had fallen for after seeing her photograph in Vogue. (The story got cuter: he had torn out the photo spread and carried it in his wallet until he met her in person at a Gucci show where she was modelling the fall range.) Both articles reported his dream of setting up his own motor company. ‘One day,’ they were quick to add. ‘One day.’
Last thing Randall did before walking to the departure gate was buy a tie, tweed-knit: he was going for lunch with John DeLorean.
There was, besides the ticket at the desk, a man waiting for him at the other side — from that day on there would always be a man waiting for him at the other side — who led him, this first man of many, to a car that drove him the thirty or so miles to Bloomfield Hills. They passed the Country Club, they passed any number of likely and inviting-looking restaurants and hotels. (Randall, for all that he was nervous, was beginning to feel very hungry too.) They stopped finally before a concrete and steel triple-decker of an office building, the name Thomas Kimmerly, Attorney at Law, prominently displayed on the lawn sloping down to the road.
‘Is this it?’
The driver, who had not spoken more than half a dozen words in the forty air-conditioned minutes he and Randall had spent confined to the car together, nodded. ‘This is where I was told: 100 West Long Lake Road.’
For a fleeting instant Randall imagined some retrospective action for his temerity at the Auto Show.
The driver turned in his seat. ‘I have somewhere else I am supposed to be.’
‘Sorry.’
He let himself out into midday, mid-year — who knows: mid-decade, maybe — Midwest heat and walked up the winding path to the door where he hesitated again, checked back… but the car was already gone.
The receptionist had been monitoring his stop-start progress. She had one hand on the phone as he entered.
‘I was hoping you could tell me where to find…’ Randall began, but got no further.
‘Hey, you made it!’ DeLorean was leaning over the first-floor stair rail, gone greyer than seemed mathematically or biologically possible, and looking somehow younger for it, dressed in a denim shirt and jeans, finished off with a pair of tooled silver-on-black cowboy boots. The receptionist took her hand from the phone. Randall put his hand to the knot of his tie. ‘Come on up!’
By the time Randall had reached the top of the stairs DeLorean was already halfway along the landing and was holding open a door — Suite 206 — for Randall, when he had caught up, to pass through. The only thing about him that did not always seem to be in a hurry was his voice.
‘Tom is letting me have the use of a couple of hundred square feet here until we have the prototype ready to show investors.’
Inside, Suite 206 was part office, part workshop, with drawing boards and flipcharts between the desks and file cabinets and a full exhaust up on one table as though for dissection.
So it was true.
‘You’re really doing it? You’re making your own cars?’
‘GM and their cronies at Chrysler and Ford will probably do everything they can to stop me, like they stopped Preston Tucker, but, yes, I am, even if I have to go somewhere else to do it.’
He strode through the room, indicating as he passed it a large platter of fruit — ‘This is lunch, by the way, help yourself’ — stopping finally before a table, just along from the exhaust, on which stood a model — balsa wood, Randall wanted to say — maybe twelve inches long. He picked it up with the fingertips of both hands.
‘And this is what they are all afraid of. This will change everything. We’re calling it the DSV — DeLorean Safety Vehicle, the world’s first ethical car. Forget the minimum requirements, this car will have, as standard, features no other company has even thought of before, or if they thought of them it was only to say they were too expensive: airbags for a start, on both sides, side impact strips, copper facings on the brake discs for fade resistance, rustproof stainless steel, and an integral monocoque structure — that means the chassis and the body are a single unit — spreads the stress in the event of a collision…’ (‘Integral monocoque structure,’ Randall repeated to himself: there could be a test after this for all he knew.) ‘It’ll be light too: two thousand pounds. We’re using a brand new process, ERM, stands for Elastic Reservoir Moulding.’ (Randall’s brain had reached the limit of its own elasticity.) ‘I’ve bought exclusive rights in it… Here.’
He held out the model to Randall whose first instinct was to fold his hands behind his back.
‘I have to warn you, I come from a long line of klutzes.’
‘Take it.’
And how could he refuse a second time? The lines were sleeker than the Safety Vehicle name suggested, sportier. He was conscious as he turned it about of DeLorean’s eyes on him.
‘It’s… It’s… Wow,’ he said, a different kind of ineptitude.
DeLorean nodded nevertheless, accepting the compliment on the model car’s behalf. ‘How much do you think a car like that ought to cost?’
There was no getting a question like that right, not that DeLorean was inclined to wait for an answer. ‘Twenty, twenty-five thousand, would you say?’
‘About that.’
DeLorean smiled. ‘Try twelve.’
‘Twelve thousand dollars?’ Randall didn’t have to feign the astonishment.
‘Within reach of two-thirds of American households. Cheap to run too.’