‘The People’s Sports Car,’ Randall said and thought as he did that he caught out the corner of his eye a decisive movement in that formidable jaw.
‘It stayed with me,’ DeLorean said, measuring the words, ‘what you said in McCormick Place about wanting more from the future… Oh, don’t get me wrong’ — the thought had barely had the opportunity to form in Randall’s head — ‘I had been contemplating something like this for a while, a long, long while. The thing is, I am putting together a team here. I want you to join it.’
The model slipped in Randall’s hand. He righted it at the second attempt. ‘You know I have no experience in this business? I didn’t last six months on the auto pages.’
‘You have something better than experience: you have a nose for bullshit. That ’73 Vega? You were absolutely right, the only new thing about it was the bumper. It’s a year on year racket to part people from their money.’
‘I spent twelve months running supplies in the An Hoa Basin,’ Randall said, out of embarrassment as much as anything. He almost never spoke about that time to anyone who hadn’t been there. ‘If you didn’t have a bullshit detector before you went there you sure as hell had one by the time you left.’
DeLorean seemed to assess him differently. ‘Don’t tell me, the further up the chain of command you went the worse the smell got?’ It sounded like another potential trap of a question, but no. ‘I did a couple of years myself: ’43 to ’45,’ DeLorean said. ‘Never made it out of the US. I kept telling them ways they could improve their basic training, they kept sending me back to take it again. They hate it when they can’t make you exactly the same as them. I guess that’s why we’re both here.’
Randall looked at the model again, not knowing where else at that moment to look. Suddenly he frowned. ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying, but there is one slight problem with this.’ He gave it back: ‘No doors.’
DeLorean’s own frown lifted. He ran a finger along the model’s undercarriage, pressed something… pressed again, a little more firmly. A portion of each side of the car rose up slowly, coming to rest finally in perfect symmetry, like the wings of a bird riding a current.
‘There are your doors,’ DeLorean said.
That was it for Randall; that was the moment the flame was lit. It flickered at times; it was all he could do at others to protect it, such were the winds whipped up, not least by DeLorean himself, but it never, ever, until the very end, went out.
*
On his way back from the airport he had the cab swing by Pattie’s place, her parents’ place once upon a time. He had shaken her father’s hand on this porch: sealing the deal, the old man said. A week later he was dead. Brain haemorrhage. A week after that Pattie and Randall were married. He wasn’t the only one who had issues then, or now.
She opened the door to him, a smile on her face from whatever she had been doing in the moments before he knocked, which withered on the instant.
‘You’re supposed to give me forty-eight hours’ notice,’ she said from behind the screen door.
The TV was on. He could see over her shoulder the back of Tamsin’s head, dark against the scalding oranges and yellows and pinks of her cartoons. Pattie shifted her weight, from left foot to right, closing off the view. That’s what they had come to.
‘I’m thinking of moving to Detroit,’ Randall said. Pattie’s eye narrowed. ‘With work, I mean.’
She shrugged away any suggestion that it mattered to her what he was going for. ‘Well that ought to make things easier for everyone.’
Randall made the same left-right switch in his weight, gaining momentary advantage. Cartoons, Tamsin’s head. ‘Do you think since I’m here…?’
‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ Pattie said.
*
Word got around pretty quickly that the editor had told him not even to bother working his notice, but to collect his things and go: the last thing this paper needed was someone working there whose heart wasn’t in it.
Randall was clearing his desk when Anderson from the business pages wandered over and leaned his not inconsiderable bulk against the partition between Randall’s desk and Hal Lewis’s, though Hal had, in the time it had taken Anderson to get from one side of the room to the other, made himself scarce. There was another man with him, soberest of sober suits, hair going white at the temples. Anderson did not introduce him but instead lit himself a cigarette and stood for a moment watching, smoking.
‘So,’ he said at last, ‘you’re going to work for John Z.’
‘That is correct.’ Randall pulled open a drawer. Paperclips and thumbtacks. He pushed it shut with his thigh.
‘Going to make your fortune.’
‘All we talked about was making cars.’
‘Cars, of course.’ Anderson let that sit a moment then jerked his thumb. ‘This is Dan Stevens. Dan started in Chrysler when Walter Chrysler himself was still running the show, 1935. He knows the industry better than any man alive.’
Dan Stevens inspected his fingernails during this brief encomium. He looked up now, blinking against the smoke of Anderson’s cigarette. ‘I suppose Mr DeLorean was telling you that Bank of America has already pledged eighteen million dollars.’
‘It came up in the conversation,’ Randall said, ‘yes.’
To be precise it had come up as they walked downstairs to the lobby at the end of lunch (an apple, a banana and three lychees), Randall’s mind already made up.
‘And Johnny Carson, I’m sure… half a million?’
‘That came up too.’ And Sammy Davis Junior, Randall did not say, and Ira Levin, and Roy Clark. Hee Haw!
Anderson smiled, practically licked his lips. ‘And did it also come up that John Z was arrested back when he was at college for selling stuff that wasn’t his to sell?’
Randall couldn’t help it, he froze.
‘Advertising space for the Detroit Yellow Pages. An old scam. Lucky not to do time for it.’
Dan Stevens frowned. His entire demeanour suggested that unlike Anderson he took no pleasure in communicating any of this. ‘The way I hear it his departure from GM wasn’t quite how he has been describing it. The board had his letter of resignation ready and waiting for him to sign when he went in looking for a showdown.’
Anderson took another draw then crushed his cigarette in the ashtray Randall had just that moment emptied. ‘The man is a liability. He loves the limelight too much. Nobody in the industry will touch him any more.’
Randall stared at the last of the smoke drifting up from the butt then he tipped it into the wastebasket and shoved basket and ashtray both into Anderson’s arms.
‘Bullshit,’ he said, and with a nod to the other man as he headed for the door, ‘A pleasure meeting you, Mr Stevens.’
*
That was the summer that Liz and Robert bought the orange Morris Marina. Only four years old and less than seventy thousand miles on the clock. They took it a day here and a day there over the July fortnight: Ballywalter, Castlerock, Whitepark Bay, the Ulster American Folk Park, which was as close, Liz had thought, walking around its reconstructed settlers’ cabins, as they were ever likely to get to the real thing. They had talked about a package holiday on the continent — Torremolinos, Benidorm — had gone as far as making an appointment with Joe Walsh Tours in Castle Street the first weekend after Easter, but even at their rates, what with the new car and everything… No, it was just too much of a stretch. Maybe next year, they said, just as they had the year before. Instead, the next year Liz buried her brother, Pete, and felt guilty enough those first few months just breathing in and out, never mind lying sunning herself somewhere on the Costa Brava.