Glenn Patterson: Gull

DeLorean arrived back in the middle of the following morning, morose.

‘So?’

‘Some people seem to think you should be getting down on your hands and knees to thank them for the privilege of bringing thousands of jobs to their country,’ was as much as he would volunteer and Randall did not press him further.

‘Did Cristina reach you?’ he asked instead.

‘She wanted to read me my horoscope. It mentioned Uranus in Capricorn: a good omen, apparently.’

Randall paused. He knew — it too having cropped up more than once — that DeLorean did set some store by these things, or by his own birth date, at any rate — 6 January: Epiphany. How better to account for those moments of revelation to which he had always been prone and on which he had never been afraid to act?

His smile on this occasion, though, was distinctly wry. ‘Luckily for Capricorn it’s too far away for me to sue, and as for the other one… Let’s not go there at all, shall we?’

‘There was another call after you left, from an Alejandro Vallecillo… The Puerto Rican Economic Development Agency, Fomento? Said he was calling at the behest of the governor…’ Randall turned towards his own desk for the piece of paper on which he had written the name.

‘Romero-Barcelo.’ DeLorean beat him to it. ‘I met him a couple of times when I was in Washington with the DBA.’

He looked at Randall, inviting him to elaborate. Randall blushed. ‘And that was all.’ All Vallecillo was prepared to divulge to him at least: ‘The governor had asked him to call.’

DeLorean sat for a time holding a pencil between his thumbs and forefingers. ‘The Economic Development Agency,’ he said, ‘Puerto Rico,’ then said them both again as though simple iteration could fill in the blanks. Maybe this all went with the revelations — was a precondition for them: the self-induced trance. Either way, Randall was trying to fight down the impulse to push the phone across the desk to him — ‘Ring him, why don’t you?’ — when a light in the corner of the dial pad began to flash: the Chris-Craft switchboard with an incoming call.

DeLorean took it himself. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘put him through.’ He placed a hand over the mouthpiece. ‘It’s Dick.’

Randall started to leave, but the same hand now stayed him. He wandered instead to the window. A chopper appeared out of the clouds to his left, long enough for him to notice the pilot’s bright red hair, banked, and was lost again among the buildings.

DeLorean replaced the phone on its cradle. ‘We’re going to LA,’ he said.

The dealers’ network was not expanding as fast as had been hoped — as fast as was necessary — especially in California, which it had been anticipated would account for 40 per cent of total sales. Twenty-five thousand, Dick had said, was a big buy-in for some of these guys, even with a share option on top of the guaranteed four-grand-a-car mark-up. He had had a promo film shot — very smooth, lots of sunlight through trees and flutes playing under a commentary that emphasised the durability of the design and therefore the reduced likelihood, ‘to virtually nil’, of obsolete stock — and Roy had been offering to add his weight to the negotiations. Dick, though, thought that this was a wall that needed to be got around. He thought the only person who could do it was DeLorean himself.

DeLorean, as he explained this, was on his feet in the office, the jacket he had taken off barely five minutes before back on.

It wasn’t just the stake money the network was to have generated that he had to think about — vital though that was — but the reassurance it provided to other would-be investors: one hundred and fifty dealerships taking one hundred cars a year for two years was thirty thousand sales upfront, three hundred and sixty million dollars’ worth of business.

‘The Puerto Ricans…’ Randall said.

‘Can wait for a couple of days.’

In the end they stayed in LA three days — stayed in and strayed from — eating up hundreds and hundreds of miles of Californian highway, as far north as Fresno and as far south as Imperial Beach. Wherever the car stopped dealers greeted DeLorean like an old friend. He seemed genuinely affected, humbled even, by the warmth of his reception. One dealer — this was in Thousand Oaks — told Randall, as he waited with him by the coffee vendor, how much they had always appreciated DeLorean’s solicitousness, going right back to his Pontiac days. ‘He never forgot we are on the front line. Some of the executives would come down here from Detroit and expect to be treated like goddamn royalty, wouldn’t put their hand in their pocket from the start of the trip to the end, but not John.’

Another dealer, one of the converted, over in Anaheim, did complain (‘a lot less than he did to me,’ said Dick, ‘and in longer words’) that he had had customers coming in for the past six months asking when the cars were going to appear and wanting to make a down payment — pay the whole $12000 asking price in advance, some of them. A greedier person could already have made back his $25000 investment four times over.

‘And a patient person,’ said DeLorean, ‘will be making closer to forty times over when the cars do appear. From the seventh car you sell it’s all profit.’

With which finally there was no arguing.

It was already gone nine o’clock when they got back to the hotel at the end of the first day. Roy was waiting for them, just blown in and blowing out again first thing tomorrow to Wichita. (That damn dealership was more trouble than it was worth.) DeLorean apologised to Randall. He and Roy had a bit of catching up to do, numbers they needed to run.

‘It’s all right,’ Randall said. In truth, although Roy had been nothing but civil to him any time they met, Randall couldn’t help feeling surplus around him. Perhaps, there being so much of him, Roy just didn’t see that company other than his was ever needed.

DeLorean laid a hand on Randall’s shoulder. ‘Tomorrow night,’ he said, and was as good as his word.

They dined just the two of them the following evening in the grillroom of the hotel. No: they sat the following evening in the grillroom of the hotel at a table with food on it, and a phone. When he was not making or taking calls, DeLorean sipped from a glass of white wine — the same glass of white wine throughout — and addressed his plate with head tilted back and jaw thrown forward, as though each new dish required a recalibration of the apparatus. A forkful or two, a sip of wine, plate pushed away. Done.

Randall found that the appetite he had worked up in the course of his day in the field was suddenly gone.

A little jazz outfit was playing off in one corner of the room, unobtrusive for the most part, but every so often becoming involved in a niggly-sounding argument between piano, drums and guitar, distracting DeLorean even more. He set down his fork at one point and turned in his seat. The maître d’ was at once on the alert, but relaxed into watching mode again as DeLorean turned back to face Randall.

‘Did you ever play?’

‘An instrument? No. There were votes taken to keep me away from them. You?’

‘A bit.’ DeLorean put the wine glass to his lips, tilted it, and took it away again. ‘A lot, actually, once upon a time. Clarinet. We had a band at Lawrence Tech, I was going to be the next Artie Shaw.’

Randall’s face was evidently a blank.

‘You don’t know Artie Shaw? You don’t know “Nightmare”?’

Randall laughed. ‘If by knowing you mean actually know… no.’

DeLorean’s hands, which had been poised momentarily about the ghost of an instrument, fluttered in the air between them. ‘I’ll start your education when we get back to New York.’