Glenn Patterson - Gull

Carole watched apprehensively from the door. ‘I don’t think you should do that,’ she said, too late, as he made a sudden move across the floor to the photograph of DeLorean and his son in the surf and pushed the tack into it so that the envelope covered the I recall that followed life’s illusions .

‘I think thumbtacks in pictures might be the least of his worries now,’ he said.

*

DeLorean was looking down on the clouds from his airplane window, trying to get a sum right in his head. He wrote the answer down on his drinks napkin, next to the other seven- and eight-figure calculations. He had run the numbers dozens — hundreds — of times before, as indeed he had been running them all his working life, but he needed to be absolutely sure. This deal had been months in the making and bar one moment of folly, compounded by noises — to be specific quacks — off, kept from even his closest confidants. (Cristina, much to his regret, was completely in the dark.) There had been other offers on the table at various stages, more or less plausible, more or less attractive, but this was the one he kept coming back to, or rather that had kept coming back to him (for its proposers were the ones who made the running, seeming at times to anticipate events), trustworthy almost in inverse proportion to those involved in it. Morgan Hetrick and Jim Hoffman were not men who you could have brought into a room with Sir Kenneth Cork. They made Roy, frankly, look like a kid stealing apples from his neighbour’s yard.

Edmund thought he couldn’t see it, but his eyes had been wide open from the start. These men did not have scruples or much in the way of morals. They did though have money to invest and he had a scheme — the trust agreement prospectuses were in his briefcase — to enable them to invest it: a brand new company, DeLorean Motor Cars Inc. , which would only come into existence — this was the genius of the thing — at the moment of their investing and which would straight away invest in DeLorean Motor Cars Ltd, or, for the time being at any rate, Cork Gully Receivers.

And, yes, he was aware that they wanted more from him, some reciprocal investment in their own business, but he had concocted a story that he was confident would keep them at arm’s length on that. (What was business but telling — and selling — the best story?) He was in hock to the IRA in Belfast was what he had told them, he had zero room for manoeuvre, unless Hoffman and Hetrick wanted to get them involved too, which he was pretty sure — if they knew anything of that organisation’s methods — they did not.

Still.

Earlier in the week he had written a letter to Tom Kimmerly, sealed inside another envelope, Only to be opened in the event of my death , in which he laid out, step by step, the path he had tried to tread in his dealings with these people, from his first casual conversations with Hoffman — in so far as anything Jim Hoffman ever said could be classed as casual — to the legal nicety that was DMC Inc. Emphasis on the legal. He hoped Tom would not mind this once, but he had, as much for Tom’s own sake as his own, taken other advice: Hoffman and Hetrick would not be buying John DeLorean, they would be making a donation to the British government.

The trick was to make sure they did not work that out too soon.

The British government’s deadline would already have passed by the time the plane touched down, but surely faced with the prospect of all those lay-offs becoming permanent job losses, that factory standing empty, a warning to anyone else tempted to try to set up business there, they would be bound, as soon as he got this deal over the line, to suspend the liquidation proceedings.

Hoffman himself was waiting outside the terminal at the wheel of a white Cadillac, alongside another of the consortium, Benedict, who ran the Eureka Savings and Loan in San Carlos, up beyond San Jose. Vicenza the final member, was joining them at the hotel.

Hoffman shrugged his shoulders inside his jacket, DeLorean assumed for comic effect. ‘You ready to do this?’

DeLorean gave it his best drawl. ‘Ready if you are.’

It was not much more than five minutes in the car down West Century Boulevard to the Sheraton Plaza. Mainly they talked about the car. He had always had a fondness for Caddies, he told them, though they weren’t to whisper that to anyone at General Motors. (Said as though he actually imagined that was a possibility.) In the elevator they did not speak at all. The imminent outlay of double-digit millions he guessed was a sobering prospect for even the most risk-addicted.

Hoffman had forgotten to bring his room key, but explained in the act of knocking at the door of suite 501 that it was nothing to worry about, Vicenza ought to be there by now waiting for them, and, hey presto, there Vicenza was (it had crossed DeLorean’s mind in the instant before the door opened that he could not have picked the man out in a line-up), smiling, shaking hands, come on in, come on in, good to see you, good to see you. They were conscious that they were all standing so they all sat on the two sofas at the centre of the room, but that was wrong too so instantly Hoffman and Hetrick stood. DeLorean stayed put, took off his jacket, signalling he was ready to get down to business. He was going to need ten or twelve million straight away (the ‘twelve’ appeared just like that: long habit, always push for a little more); ten or twelve ought to keep everything together for now.

Hoffman though started to talk about four and a half million, which was ludicrous, and tomorrow, not today, which was even more ludicrous, but no, no, he was saying as DeLorean tried to interject, that would just be the beginning.

It was kind of hard to follow because someone else had come into the room with a small suitcase and hoisted it on the table between the sofas. Maybe he had picked Hoffman up wrong, maybe he hadn’t said tomorrow after all, maybe they had brought the four and a half million with them. Too small a case for actual banknotes: gold bars perhaps — the thud of it on the tabletop just now: there was weight in it that was for sure. Hoffman seemed excited, talking about generating three, four times more money, as the man (who was he?) undid the catches of the case and popped open the lid. DeLorean stared. His brain could not quite take in what it was his eyes were looking at: the plump packets of white powder, tight, tight-packed. He knew what they were involved in — knew it as far back as the party the night of the riot at the factory gates, when he had walked in and seen them with a bag on the table. One bag. And here were maybe forty, fifty.

The others were watching him, expecting him to say something. He kept nodding his head, nodding, nodding.

‘It’s better than gold,’ was all he could get out.

They laughed. He had one of the packets in his hand. Suddenly there was champagne — he didn’t know who had brought that. They were toasting — he was toasting — to a lot of success for everyone. Then the door opened again and another guy was coming in. He walked right up to DeLorean.

‘Hi, John,’ he said.

DeLorean riffled through his memory bank, all the meetings, the handshakes — how many hundreds, thousands of meetings and handshakes over the years? — but he couldn’t place him. He said hi anyway. His head, tell you the truth, between the champagne and the contents of the suitcase and so many new people was beginning to whirl.

‘Jerry West,’ the guy said. He was holding something out for him to look at. (DeLorean by that stage would not have been surprised by anything…) A wallet, flipped open, photograph of Jerry pokerfaced one side of the hinge, gold shield the other. (Anything… except that.) ‘I’m with the FBI. You are under arrest for narcotics smuggling violations.’