Glenn Patterson - Gull

‘We had to get the army in.’ (He could hardly get the sentence out.)

‘Isn’t it good to know we have support?’ DeLorean was round in front of his desk now, buttocks and feet firmly planted.

Randall was pacing, right to left, left to right. ‘And there’s still the funeral to come. There could be more trouble at that. A whole lot more.’

DeLorean spread his hands. He was a giant bird against the window of sky at his back, riding the currents.

‘Think back to the very beginning of all this, Edmund — think of the hurdles we had to overcome. And look where we are now.’

He did not, Randall knew, mean the office per se, but that inevitably was what he found himself focusing on, the apricot carpet, the bust of Lincoln, the life-size photo study of father and son, the telescope through which in rare idle moments, DeLorean liked to look down on to the street below.

‘Whatever the next few days throw up we will get through that too. I feel it in here.’ He gripped his shirt front, held it till his knuckles whitened. Then let go and pushed himself up off the desk. ‘Now, Carole, can we get some coffee for this man?’

The coffee arrived a few minutes later in a pot with an exaggeratedly belled base. DeLorean insisted that Randall take the first cup. ‘They are lovely people, the Brits, but they don’t know the first thing about making coffee.’

And Randall thought as he sipped (thought through the recognition that it was true about the coffee) how far indeed he had travelled since he last heard that particular B word used.

DeLorean toasted with this cup: ‘The Brits’ — smiling — ‘and the Irish.’

The phone rang in the outer office. Carole was already halfway there. She answered it on the third ring. A few seconds later the phone on the desk at DeLorean’s back rang too.

‘Excuse me,’ he said and leaned across to answer, one long leg rising in counterweight. ‘Hey… Yes, it was swell running into you.’ Randall was struck by the contrast between the ‘swell’ and the strain in the voice. Maybe he had reached back further than he had anticipated to pick up the phone. ‘Of course, next time I’m at the ranch… Well, that’s good of Hetrick to offer, but it’s really no bother… No, no, I will, I’ll keep it in mind.’

He replaced the phone on the cradle and swung his body round again, frowning slightly, as he searched for something on his desk… found it: a sheet of paper. ‘By the way, I want you to start proceedings for a compensation claim when you get back, for the riot damage.’

‘The Portakabin?’

‘“Additional Office Accommodation” — that is where the Hethel inventory was being relocated, isn’t that what you told me?’

‘Well there was very little actually in there yet. Most of it is still in transit.’

‘So we’ll have to pay for storage somewhere else. I’ve had finance here run the figures.’ He gave them a final check. ‘Ten million sound about right?’

Randall shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t know…’

‘I mean, I told them you were right there on the spot, but maybe, you know, in the hurly-burly of the moment’ — he had Randall’s eye now; held it — ‘you were nearly too close to form any sort of rational judgement.’

Randall took temporary refuge behind his coffee cup. Did he know? (Stylianides?) Was he guessing? Was this part of what he had seen in him the day they met in Kimmerly’s office — the man who had never shipped overseas looking into the eyes of the man who had shrunk from danger — that, never mind the bullshit detector (itself a piece of undetected bullshit), here was someone with something still to prove to himself? Or, worse, here was someone who at a crucial juncture could be relied on to capitulate again?

DeLorean selected a platinum ballpoint pen from the desk tidy, clicked the top, and made a bold blue tick on the page.

‘So, ten, then.’

*

First thing Randall did on arrival at his apartment was shower for half an hour trying to get the smell of the place out of his hair. He made a phone call, standing with the towel draped over his shoulder, then went to bed and slept until twenty after two the following afternoon. He got up and showered again, faster this time, and whistling. His appointment, subject of yesterday’s phone call, was for four o’clock. Nothing so formal as lunch or dinner, they had agreed. A civilised mid-afternoon cocktail. Crowne Plaza: Randall’s suggestion. Might as well lay more than one ghost.

With that in mind he stopped in too at the bar across the street for a shot of Polish vodka and might easily have persuaded himself of the wisdom of a second were it not for the television set in a corner of the room, across whose screen, at the precise moment he set down his empty glass, moved grim-faced people — thousands and thousands of them — following the coffin of a man who had starved himself to death to make the point that leaving a bomb in a furniture store was a political act.

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.’