Gull (34 page)

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.’

Still more men had entered behind West. They were helping DeLorean up off the sofa and on to his feet, and a long, long way up that felt, turning him about, pulling his hands behind his back, cuffing them.

The door was open all the while. He wondered that Hoffman and Hetrick didn’t take the opportunity of everyone looking the other way to make a break for it. And then he saw Hoffman smiling, high-fiving a man with a shield on the hip of his white slacks, and only then did the penny drop, this whole thing – from start to finish – it had all been about him.

Or that was the way he told it in court, and that was the story that a jury of his peers went with in the end.

On 22 September 2004 a US federal trademark was filed for DeLorean Automobile Company by Ephesians 6:12, Inc in the category of Vehicles and Products for locomotion by land, air or water. The correspondent of Ephesians 6:12 (also trading as Ecclesiastes 9:10-11-12, Inc) was John Z. DeLorean of the Parsons Village Condominium Complex, Morristown, New Jersey, a twenty-minute drive from Trump National Golf Club, formerly Lamington Farm estate, Bedminster.

John Z. DeLorean died six months later on 19 March 2005 aged eighty, no automobiles, or other vehicles for locomotion by land, air or water, having been built in the interim, or indeed in the twenty-one years since his acquittal in August 1984, on grounds of probable entrapment, for conspiracy to import cocaine.

~

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Acknowledgements

About Glenn Patterson

An invitation from the publisher

This novel grew out of a play I wrote for Radio 4, broadcast in July 2011. My thanks to Gemma McMullan and especially to Clare Delargy, who first talked to me about the idea.

A great American hustler brought to vivid life in the most unlikely setting imaginable: Belfast during the Troubles.

Randall is a journalist, a disoriented Vietnam vet who’s drawn to the charismatic engineer John DeLorean, already celebrated as the man who turned around General Motors. Now DeLorean has a dream of building a beautiful sports car with gullwing doors. Cities bid against each other to get his factory; the British government of the time wins the race and wants to locate it in Belfast. Randall is the advance man, doing the groundwork and bewildered by what he finds in Northern Ireland.

Liz is a working class woman who applies for a job in the ultra-modern factory going up in the west of the city. Her husband thinks women should stay at home; besides, she’d be working with ‘the Other Sort’. She takes the job, and her life changes.

The figure around whom all the other characters in the novel revolve is the celebrity engineer with his supermodel wife, who can make anyone believe in him – including, unfortunately, himself.

Gull is an intelligent, witty and moving reconstruction of the bizarre circumstances that gave birth to one of the world’s most iconic cars.

‘One of the best contemporary Irish novelists... Glenn Patterson has become the most serious and humane chronicler of Northern Ireland over the past thirty years.’

Colm Tóibín

‘No other novelist has proved as capable of capturing the heart of modern Belfast.’

Sunday Tribune

‘This is an author whose vigour and flair keep us reading avidly as he exercises his capacity to make the everyday engrossing.’

Independent

G
LENN
P
ATTERSON
was born and lives in Belfast. He is the author of nine previous novels and three works of non-fiction. He also co-wrote the screenplay of the film
Good Vibrations
, based on the Belfast music scene of the 1970s.

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The story starts here.

First published in the UK in 2016 by Head of Zeus Ltd

Copyright © Glenn Patterson, 2016

The moral right of Glenn Patterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

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