He felt a secret shame. He was almost afraid that if he risked opening his mouth again his voice, inflected by his time there, would betray his complicity. And that was before he saw the banner off to one side. A DMC-12 smashing through a giant capital H: DeLorean Workers Against the H Blocks.
He entered the hotel lounge more assertively than he might otherwise have done. Seated at a table to the left of the door, Dan Stevens got to his feet hurriedly and a little more shakily perhaps than the first and last time Randall had met him at the Daily News. (Well, the man had been around since the days — a couple of thousand further away now than then — of Walter Chrysler.)
‘Randall.’ He indicated a seat on the other side of the table. ‘Please, sit.’
Randall did. The waiter was on him almost instantly. ‘Vodka martini,’ he answered before he was even asked, and Stevens nodded his approval — of the drink, the unhesitating way it was ordered, the combination of the two, who knew?
His own drink was something bourbon based. He centred it on the scalloped paper coaster. ‘It was good of you to make time to see me on your trip. Tell you the truth I wasn’t even sure you would call. I know we didn’t exactly get off on the right foot last time.’
‘I was probably a little hair-trigger that day.’
‘You had every right to be. You were taking a big step. I got to tell you, there are a lot of people in the industry who are surprised — a little upset some of them — that the factory has lasted this long.’ He lifted the glass, turned the coaster over, and went through the business of centring again. ‘John as ever is taking all the credit while saying he doesn’t want to take all the credit. So far as we can see, though, looking in, a lot of it is down to you.’
Randall tried to deflect the praise. ‘For the longest time I was used to people asking what it was I actually did,’ he said, to which Dan Stevens replied that sometimes the most important jobs were the hardest to explain.
Randall went to interject again. Dan Stevens held up his hand: hear me out here. ‘There has been a pretty high turnover at executive level, which is no more than was to be expected, working with John, but it can be destabilising. It could have — should have — been even more destabilising and because it wasn’t people start looking at who or what is keeping the ship steady, who has been there throughout… And we heard about what happened at the unveiling: quick thinking.’ He drank, ran his tongue over his teeth behind closed lips. ‘If that’s what you can do there in, let’s be honest, pretty hostile conditions, think what you could do here with all our expertise and experience behind you, and on twice the salary you are on at the moment.’
‘Twice?’
Stevens shrugged. ‘Three times. We will hook you up with our real estate people in Detroit, find a property out in Bloomfield Hills.’
The martini arrived, lemon rind bobbing like a kiss curl.
Stevens addressed his glass to it, but stopped short of drinking. ‘You have to remember, John is a gambler… Oh, not with his own money… His instinct is to keep raising the stakes — scares people off: he must have something. But sooner or later someone will call him on it, and then…’
‘A whole lot of people in Belfast will lose their jobs.’
‘Well, that’s true too, although John wouldn’t be alone in thinking of workers as chips.’
‘Chips!’
Stevens tilted his head a little to one side. He seemed almost embarrassed by the reaction.
‘I’ve got to say I didn’t have you pegged as the sentimental type. It’s the product that has to be protected, the brand. That goes, it creates a void and there’s no telling what will get sucked in. I wouldn’t want to be standing too close to the edge.’
Randall nodded. For all kinds of reasons it was time for him to put as much distance as possible between him and DeLorean Motor Cars Limited. He nodded again, more firmly.
Dan Stevens smiled and went to take a drink. He didn’t like what he saw in his glass, or what he didn’t see. ‘What do you say we have another of those?’
Randall made a show of looking at his watch. ‘Sure,’ he said.
*
Stevens returned to Detroit with the promise to ‘start the ball rolling’, though discreetly for now, and Randall a couple of days later travelled down the I-495 to the Quality Assurance Centre in Wilmington. The cars in the compound on Ferry Road, right on the edge of the Delaware River, were the first DMC-12s he had seen since leaving Belfast. He told himself that pang he felt was only naturaclass="underline" he had no quarrel with the cars themselves.
The guy who met him wore shorts with socks pulled up to just below his knees, which flexed as he stood before Randall talking, like a pair of sensate potatoes (where did that come from?) struggling to escape the neck of a sack. Randall was relieved when they started walking to the workshop — ‘Lead the way,’ he said, and the knees did — and he was able to relax his face, strained from the effort of not looking.
‘I’m not going to lie, it was pretty hard going the first couple of days,’ the guy said over his shoulder. ‘I don’t know how many times I had to step in to stop a fight breaking out. Mostly your guys accusing our guys of going out of their way looking for problems, taking a wheel off just to check it had been screwed on right kind of thing… It’s settled down a bit since then.’ He turned with his hand poised to open the workshop door. ‘Don’t tell them I said this, but they are good workers.’
Good workers and, it appeared, genuinely pleased to see Randall walk in the workshop door, crowding round telling him this thing they had discovered about the alternator, this other thing about the door hydraulics. Even invited him out for a drink with them that night.
‘Probably not what you’re used to, like,’ said the one they called Washers, he of the winks of understanding at the airport. ‘You have been warned.’
‘I don’t know what you think I’m used to.’
A dive bar, a couple of blocks from Riverfront Market, beer by the pitcher, a stage at one end of the room on to which in due course a young woman in satin hot pants walked and without preamble pulled off her T-shirt to reveal shamrock nipple tassels. The law of supply and demand made barely covered flesh.
No one seemed to object to the failure to give a more rounded interpretation of northern Irishness (two of the women did pick up their purses and head for the door, but only, as they said, because there was a fella doing the same thing down the street, and no tassels) and when a tape recorder belatedly struck up ‘Danny Boy’, a group standing by the corner of the bar formed a circle and ignoring the now twirling shamrocks entirely sang along into one another’s faces, glasses raised and touching.
‘I needn’t ask if you have been enjoying yourself here,’ Randall said to the guy nearest him.
‘This? Sure it’s a bit of fun, isn’t it? But I have, aye, I’ve been enjoying it rightly. Be glad all the same to get back.’
‘Homesick?’
‘Not exactly. I’m not just saying this because you’re standing there, but I miss the work, you know, the cars constantly coming down the line at you — keeps you on your toes.’
There was a loud cheer from the front. The satin hot pants had come off now too. A pair of even smaller pants underneath, Slainte! across the behind, which was presented in a swift, toe-touching finale.
‘What about you?’ the worker said. ‘Will you not be sorry when you have to head back to Belfast again?’