All the same the announcement of the stock-market flotation was put on hold for a few weeks to allow the scandal that wasn’t (because despite the retractions there were always those who were slow to pick up on the ‘wasn’t’) time to fade from the share-buying public’s consciousness.
You only got one chance with something like this. Even a dollar below the optimum could jeopardise the entire issue.
Marion, meanwhile, to no one’s great surprise, did not return to New York. Haddad too was gone, though in the opposite direction, his name removed from the door in Dunmurry as quickly as it had gone up, and letting it be known that his departure at any rate would not be quiet. He had served the goddammed Kennedys, the UN, it would take a hell of a lot more than a moral pygmy like John DeLorean to shut him up.
*
June’s fiancé had been home from the rigs on an extended leave, in the course of which he had landed an interview at Lear Fan through a friend who worked there. He had the funniest story, she said to Randall in one rather snatched conversation, which she must remember to tell him next time they had ‘a proper chance to talk’. Although speaking of that, she had also, while he was home, spent a lot of time discussing the wedding, less than six months away now. It had put manners on her — she smiled — well a wee bit anyway. Maybe when the honeymoon and all was over and her husband was back on the rigs — somehow she couldn’t see him settling to a job in a factory — she and Randall could, you know, pick things up again, assuming he was still around himself. Randall suggested she might feel differently once the ring was actually on her finger (June: ‘I can’t think why’), but, for what it was worth, yes, he thought there was a fair chance he would still be here. He had caught himself a couple of times lately actually making plans predicated on that fact. Maybe come the summer he would have Tamsin over, fly out there and bring her back with him, or at least as far as Dublin if Pattie was nervous about her coming north. He could take her to the Ring of Kerry, Connemara, Blarney Castle. Her face when she saw that: an actual castle, Tamsin… or when she went into a café and asked for a soda… Thoughts to raise the spirits as the autumn days turned darker, danker.
On one such day — the darkest and dankest yet — Thursday, towards the end of November, three transporters, each carrying twenty-four cars, left mid morning, on schedule, for the docks. Some time after two that afternoon Randall took a call from one of the drivers. All three of them were parked up in a lay-by about a mile from the harbour, pointing back towards the factory. ‘The fella at the gate said he had instructions not to let us in. Said there were dock fees outstanding. I saw the phone box here and thought maybe I would ring before we drove back through the town to the factory. I mean people are always waving when they see us and they’d be wondering, you know, was there something the matter.’
‘Thank you,’ Randall said. ‘Sit tight, we’ll get this sorted.’
Randall had no clear idea himself what the matter was, why the fees had not been paid. He knew only that spending time now trying to get to the bottom of it risked exposing more than just the driver and his colleagues to scrutiny.
Without a moment’s further thought he pulled out his contacts book and phoned the harbour master.
‘I understand we have a small problem here.’
‘There is a problem, certainly. As for the size of it, I suppose in the scheme of things it is not particularly large, no, but if you put yourself in my place…’
‘How much exactly?’ Randall asked. He listened. ‘It’ll be with you by the end of the afternoon.’
He sat for a second or two with the receiver in his hand — this was the right thing to do — then phoned the bank where he had his personal account.
‘Mr Randall!’ the manager said. He sounded as though he had food in his mouth and was trying desperately to swallow. Finally. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure?’
‘I wanted to arrange a temporary overdraft facility.’
‘Of course, of course.’ Dabbing at his mouth now, with sandpaper, as the phone made it sound. ‘And what had you mind?’ Randall named the figure. The manager stopped dabbing, collected himself. ‘I would need to ring head office for approval.’
‘It would be very temporary indeed,’ Randall said, sorry that he hadn’t just come straight out with it when he had the man at a disadvantage.
‘I am sure it will just be a formality.’
While he was pacing the floor waiting for the call back, Randall overheard two guys passing beneath his window, talking.
‘Here’s what I’m wondering,’ said one. ‘All parts are guaranteed for twenty-five years, right? And we’re going to be building eighty cars a day for, what — two hundred and fifty days a year? So what’s that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’ll tell you what it is: twenty thousand cars a year. Multiply that by twenty-five, that’s half a million cars before anyone has to buy a new one. Do you get what I’m saying?’
‘I think so.’
Randall looked out, but whoever they were they were gone.
The phone rang. The bank manager, preening himself. ‘That is all arranged,’ he said. ‘I will just need a signature from you, if you wanted to call first thing in the morning.’
‘No.’ Whether the cars shipped out today now or not they had to be got on to the portside of the harbour gates. ‘It has to be this afternoon.’
‘That might be cutting it a bit fine, getting in from Dunmurry. You know we close at half-past three.’
‘I have my coat on,’ Randall said, taking it down from the rack.
On his way out to the car he took a quick sideways step into the experimental workshop. It reminded him of that first visit to the Kimmerly offices in Detroit. The car disassembled, parts numbered and recombined. In one corner a hammock hung. The guys working there looked like they not shared a decent night’s sleep between the three of them, here or anywhere else, in weeks. They were grouped around a chassis with the steering column on the right-hand side. They barely glanced at him even when he coughed.
‘From Coventry?’ he asked. ‘How close are they with that, do you think?’
‘Could go into production spring of next year,’ said one.
‘No problem,’ said another.
Which was, Randall thought as he hurried on out, at least half a million more to keep them all going over the next two and a half decades.
The bank’s commissionaire already had the key in the lock when he arrived. He turned it behind Randall’s back. ‘We stop letting them in after about a quarter past,’ he said. There were about fifteen of ‘them’ in the line for the tellers, two-thirds clutching bags of coins for deposit. The commissionaire raised an eyebrow at Randall beneath the peak of his white-covered cap — ‘It all has to be counted,’ he said, ‘every last half pee of it’ — and led him, smartly, across to the manager’s office. The manager — rather unimpressive, rumpled even, in comparison — had the papers laid out on his desk. He uncapped his pen.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘and here…’ Randall wrote his name twice. ‘And that’s us.’ The manager smiled. ‘Can I offer you a drink, perhaps?’
‘I had better not.’
‘Of course, of course.’ The manager looked despondently at the ground before Randall’s feet. At his feet themselves, maybe, his shoes. He had made an error of judgement — an error perhaps of national judgement.
‘In other circumstances, mind you…’ said Randall.
‘Of course.’ The manager’s face brightened, but only a little. ‘Of course.’
Randall was offered a drink at the docks too, by the harbour master, ‘a small drop of something’, to show there were no hard feelings.
‘I understand entirely,’ Randall said, breaking off to blow on the cheque to make sure the ink was dry. ‘I think I would be happier if I knew the cars were safely through the gates first.’