The occupiers were cordial and philosophical when, the next morning, they came face to face with Liz and the others in their overalls. Every calamity had its survivors, after all, and it was simply wrongheaded to blame your fate on them. They even — those without work — shared the tea they brought in with them — for they were occupying the canteen, not looting it — with those who still had work to take a break from.
The ‘two hundred’, meanwhile, were doing what those endless tours around the factory before ever production began had been preparing them for, though it had sounded like just a bit of crack then, the nuclear outcome, in which the very few had to fill in for the great many, carrying out the tasks of the departed as well as their own, hanging doors as well as fitting seats, wiring dashboards and putting on wheels, and before the wheels the brakes.
She replaced the tools in the pouches of her roll then picked up the dolly and moved round to the other side of the car where she worked her way underneath, head and shoulders first, to start work on that rotor.
*
On his return from the States Randall had made straight for the canteen — past the banners that read We Want Work and DeLorean Workers Demand Their Rights — to talk to the men and women staging the occupation. It was not what you would call a warm reception.
Where had he been when they were getting their cards? Not a manager to be seen the whole day.
He couldn’t speak for the any of the rest, he said, but for his own part — truthfully? — he had been at home with his head down the toilet bowl.
‘Oh, good,’ said a guy at the front (Randall recognised him from the dive bar in Wilmington), ‘wishes sometimes do come true.’
‘Well, you must have been wishing pretty damned fervently,’ Randall said, ‘because I never in my life felt anything to compare with it. If you were able to work the same trick wishing for new finance…’ He told them, as truthfully as the head down the toilet bowl, how he saw things, which was hopeless… if it had been up to anyone other than John DeLorean to try to pull it round. There were no lengths he would not go to (in his mind’s eye Randall saw that Romanian eagle): literally no lengths. And as he looked around their faces, saw the anger, the anxiety, lose their grip a little, he realised that DeLorean was the one person in all of this they still trusted, because in coming here in the first place he had trusted them.
He repeated this speech half an hour later in the assembly shop, only just managing to keep a rein on his confusion at seeing Liz, looking as though she had never been away, although he had checked the list after the confrontation back in February (the fury in her eyes that day…) and had seen her name plain as day among the laid-off. Some of the workers applauded when he had got to the end of his last line — ‘Keep the faith, in the management here, in John Z. DeLorean, and together we will ensure there is life in this plant after October nineteenth.’ Liz merely nodded, to herself as it might have been: all right, faith pledged.
DeLorean’s calls in the weeks that followed were, more often than not, from international airports: Dubai, Singapore, Frankfurt on a layover, Zurich, though not in the end Bucharest. There was always a deal just starting to take shape, taking the place of the last deal, which had broken down over some stupid bureaucratic detail or outrageous demand. (‘The Romanians basically wanted me to kiss Ceausescu’s ass.’) He was in the truest sense of the word indefatigable. And as June turned to July, July to August, August to September, Randall thought he detected a note of anxiety creeping in that for all the tens of thousands of miles he was covering — the lengths he was going to — he was getting nowhere.
So when the call came from LA with news of another deal in the making, Randall was relieved as much by the buoyant note he struck as by the prospect of the financing package: buoyant enough to be taken in another, less abstemious person for booze-assisted. The words were coming out faster almost than Randall could take them in. There was a consortium, though — Randall got that: entirely American — he got that too, several times, their Americanness was a big, big part of the attraction — and ready to invest tens of millions of dollars ‘within weeks’.
‘But, Edmund, none of this yet to Prior or his people, not until I have all my ducks lined up.’
A voice somewhere else in the room said, ‘Quack-quack’, which was the first that Randall knew, in all the time they had been talking, DeLorean was not alone.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t realise you had company.’
‘Oh, that was just Jim being funny. You remember Jim Hoffman?’
Randall swallowed a yelp. ‘Is he part of the consortium?’
‘He sure is,’ said DeLorean, ‘and a damn fine job he is doing too, aren’t you, Jim?’
‘If you say so, Captain,’ Hoffman said. Whatever about DeLorean, Hoffman had definitely been drinking, and not a little either. What time was it there? Three? No: two in the afternoon. Captain, he had called him. Captain.
Randall was unable to settle to anything at all for the next several hours. (Captain… No other way to say that but with a smirk.) In the end he did what he ought to have done the first night he had seen him in the lobby of the Sheraton Universal.
Hal Lewis who had sat once upon a time at the desk next to his at the Chicago Daily News was working now at another Daily News, over in LA, keeping real well, real well, thanks, he said when Randall rang him, enjoying the weather a lot more on the west coast, that was for sure… But what about Randall, had he stuck with DeLorean? Hard times there, Hal heard.
Yes, Randall had stuck with the company, and, yes, things had been kind of tough lately, but that wasn’t what he was calling about.
‘I need a favour,’ he said.
‘Shoot,’ said Hal.
‘I’m trying to find some information on a guy, James Hoffman — Jim. Has a business partner by the name of Morgan Hetrick.’
‘What’s he done to you?’
‘He hasn’t done anything. Just someone I met here in Ireland told me he was related and wondered if I had ever come across him, you know the way Irish people are, they think America is a village.’
‘That’s your official reason?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s not a very Irish name. Hoffman.’
‘He’s not a very close relation. Probably how come they lost touch.’
‘I’ll see what I can do… Not promising anything, you understand.’
‘Of course,’ Randall said.
Less than twenty-four hours later, Hal rang back.
‘That person you met in Ireland will be pleased to know that long-lost cousin Jim has been doing very well for himself indeed: him and his partners. Business contacts far and wide, though mostly far, if we take far to mean up and down as opposed to wide’s side to side.’
‘And by up and down you mean…?’
‘Mostly down: south of the border.’
‘Mexico way.’
‘And beyond, quite a bit beyond.’
‘That’s certainly interesting.’
‘And all perfectly above board, I hasten to add.’
‘Should I be detecting a hint of sarcasm?’
‘No, that one is straight… Whatever insinuations anyone might try to make.’
‘Thanks,’ said Randall. ‘I hear you better now.’
For two days after that he did little else but write and rewrite the script of the next conversation he needed to have. It rose up in his mind like a mountain that he had to surmount: it would be his triumph if he succeeded, but if he put a foot, or a word, wrong there would be no second chance, that would be him, gone.