No sooner had he called out than DeLorean’s own voice roared from inside his office. ‘Randall? Is Edmund here?’
Randall presented himself in the doorway.
DeLorean was standing in the middle of the floor where his desk had used to be, phone in hand. Shirts were strewn about the carpet, some still in their packaging, others unwrapped, arms outstretched, blues and lilacs, plain and striped, white collars and toning. ‘But this is crazy,’ he said, taking the words out of Randall’s mouth. He held the phone at arm’s length, earpiece tilted towards Randall. Far, far, away a ring tone sounded. ‘I was just this minute trying to call you in Belfast. They told me you were sick.’
‘And they told me you weren’t giving up yet.’
DeLorean drew back his head, puzzled, then looked about him. Now he got it. ‘You mean this?’ He laughed. ‘Didn’t you see the memo? We’re not giving up, we’re moving down, to the thirty-fifth floor.’ The thirty-fifth floor — the ‘basement’ in the DeLorean company parlance — had up to now been home to several of the company’s non-executive offices. ‘Doing our bit to help the economy drive.’
‘Excuse me.’ An elderly man slipped into the room through the door behind Randall, suit jacket off to reveal, beneath his vest, a lilac-striped shirt to match one of those spread out on the floor. ‘Anything?’ he asked DeLorean, and Randall at the second time of asking placed the accent, a variant on Jennings’s Scots.
DeLorean glanced apologetically at Randall. ‘I wonder if you could give us a couple of minutes. Mr Simpson here has come all the way from Edinburgh, Scotland… not just for me, you understand, but this is his only afternoon in New York.’
Randall felt his brow furrow. At a time like this he was buying shirts? Imported tailor-made shirts?
Of course he was. No matter how parlous the situation he was still the public face of the company, a face, moreover, whose appearance on the cover of a magazine could generate millions of dollars of desperately needed publicity.
What was he to do, go about in a hair shirt?
‘You don’t have to explain anything,’ Randall said.
DeLorean walked across the floor and embraced him, fists tightening between Randall’s shoulder blades. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said and Randall could not deny that to be seen by him — to be so warmly welcomed — was good too.
‘I’m not going to pretend that I thought it would ever come to this,’ DeLorean told Randall when he returned next day, rested, back to his old self, as good as, ‘and I am certainly not going to pretend that it is character-forming or any such crap, but we will take what benefit we can from the changes being forced upon us and we will come back stronger than before.’
Later that day, sitting in the new office (Randall thought he looked a little hunched as though the unaccustomed eight floors above him was an actual physical weight), DeLorean told him he had decided, some weeks ago, when it had become inevitable that operations here in Park Lane would have to shrink, to take the opportunity to clear up some of the other… clutter that had accumulated over the years. ‘I believe I may have given the wrong impression about my father in the past, not just to you, to almost anyone I spoke to about him. I may have suggested that he was from Alsace-Lorraine.’ (I believe I may… I may… Even decluttering had to be approached with circumspection.) ‘He wasn’t, he was from a place called Alba, in Romania, Transylvania, to be precise, which, you can imagine, was part of the problem when I was a kid.’ He raised his hands, making claws of the fingers. ‘Son of Dracula…’ His lips settled again over the teeth he had momentarily bared. ‘You know how other kids are. It was a problem for the old man too, or he got it into his head that it was. He had ambitions as an inventor, you see, making improvements to the tools they used then on the line — I saw them myself, carved out of wood — but he couldn’t get anyone at GM to look at them: no pedigree. I think that’s where Alsace-Lorraine came from.’
‘Bugatti,’ said Randall.
DeLorean nodded, smiled wryly. ‘Not that they wanted to know even then, but once he’d made that journey in his head there was no going back. Or maybe I’m not even remembering it correctly, maybe’ — circumspect again, testing the hypothesis — ‘it was just something he talked about doing, inventing a new back-story, and then later I just ran with it: insecurity.’ He stopped. ‘Does that seem strange to you?’
‘That you were insecure? After what you described? No.’
Another nod, another not-altogether smile. DeLorean opened a drawer and passed across the desk a sheet of heavy writing paper embossed with an eagle that Randall mistook at first for America’s own until he noticed the cross held in the beak, the downward sweep of the wings. He looked at the address: Bucures¸ti.
‘I made contact with their Industry and Economic and Financial Activity Commission, who passed me on to the Foreign Policy and International Economic Cooperation Commission, who sent me this.’
Randall read down, do not anticipate a need for your product… our own excellent Dacia Brasovia… however, on the matter of buses…
Randall looked up. ‘Buses?’
DeLorean shrugged. ‘I figured lower individual car ownership, greater need for public transport: we pilot them there then target the whole of the Eastern Bloc.’ He had his hand out to take the letter back. ‘You’ll see it doesn’t close the door entirely. I guess it does no harm that I am second-generation Romanian-American…’
Yes, thought Randall, you are now, aren’t you, and might in time be Alsatian again, or Austrian, if that was what it took to protect the brand, stop the void that Dan Stevens had talked of from opening and swallowing all of them, the factory at Dunmurry first.
*
Liz was on her back contemplating a rotor, the precision of it, as irrefutable in its composition as its own name — and the lustre… like a platinum disc, near, something valuable anyway, awarded then kept out of sight under the stairs. The things you never knew you never knew about. She unhooked the bungee rope holding the calliper clear of the rotor and began to assemble. She greased the guide pins and slid them into place, turning them just enough to hold them for now, then rubbed lubricant on to the faces of the brake pads. Copper. She tried to remember from her schooldays if there had been an actual Copper Age, tried to imagine the circumstances of its first being smelted — wasn’t that what you called it? — I mean, for someone to look at a lump of this greeny-browny rock and think, I know, I’ll heat it up and chuck in some… What was it you did chuck in? Nah, gone. She slotted the pads into their allotted calliper cradles — the pad with the wear indicator to the inside — before returning to the pins, tightening each one in turn. Wheel on, hubcap on and that would be it, locked away under the stairs until the fifteen-thousand-mile service.
She worked her way out from underneath the car, using the heels of her hands and the balls of her feet to propel the dolly. There was not a living soul within thirty yards of her. Somebody far distant was whistling ‘Tonight’ from West Side Story, jauntily, with flute-band trills and flourishes.
She had completely lost track of time. Yet if she could have captured one moment and held it out of all the hours she had spent there since her miraculous return — the many hundreds of hours since she first walked through the door — this would be it.
Every bit as miraculous as the return was the fact that she, along with Anto and TC, had survived the end of May cull. They had no way of explaining it to themselves, had been, in truth, more embarrassed than elated the day the announcement was made and had stood at the locked gates with the thirteen hundred of their workmates who would not now be going back in, or who were not expected to be going back in until a portion of them took matters into their own hands and climbed over again to set up camp in the canteen.