Gull

by Glenn Patterson

  ‘You’ve settled then on where the plant will be?’

  ‘We’re’ – not a flicker of hesitation – ‘very nearly there with that.’

  Johnny leaned closer, but his head was angled to ensure that the entourage-cum-audience was privy to his stage whisper. ‘Did I hear Ireland?’

  ‘Well, I had talks with some people from the government there, but then the governor of Puerto Rico called...’

  ‘Several times,’ Randall said. (DeLorean cast him a quick sidelong look.)

  Johnny straightened, slapping DeLorean’s back again. ‘Begorrah, I know the Irish need the jobs even more than the Puerto Ricans do, but I thought that had to be a lot of blarney.’

  The Rockford Files guys were doing more than glancing over now, they were turned in their seats openly staring. Randall watched over DeLorean’s shoulder as one of them stood and made his way across the lobby, buttoning his sport jacket, with some difficulty, over his stomach. Randall’s instinct was to head him off, but as he took a step forward DeLorean himself seemed to sense the presence at his back.

  He turned. The man’s face broke into a smile. ‘John!’

  ‘Well in the name of...’ DeLorean’s eyebrows went up, but the eyes themselves registered only confusion. He stalled. ‘Johnny...’ but Johnny had been grabbed for a photograph by the woman with the broken shoe, ‘Edmund, this is...’

  ‘Jim Hoffman.’ The man shoved a hand into Randall’s and almost at once took it back. There was something of Roy Nesseth about him, his truculence, only concentrated, and even less palatable.

  ‘You haven’t been at the ranch in a while,’ he said to DeLorean.

  ‘The ranch, no.’ Certainty had returned to DeLorean’s eyes. ‘Jim here’s a neighbour in Pauma Valley,’ he told Randall, who nodded. He didn’t like this guy. The guy’s mouth went up at one corner. The feeling was clearly mutual. DeLorean talked on, oblivious. ‘What has you in town tonight?’

  ‘Oh, a friend here bought a hangar down in Mojave. You remember Hetrick?’ DeLorean smiled, a little uncomfortably, Randall thought: yes, he remembered Hetrick. ‘He’s thinking of going into the air haulage business.’

  ‘Hauling what?’ Randall asked.

  ‘I guess whatever needs hauling.’ Hoffman had his hand on DeLorean’s sleeve, turning him slightly, making a circle of only two. ‘But what about you? What about the car? I hear you’re still on the lookout for capital.’

  ‘Oh, we’re in pretty good shape.’ DeLorean’s turn to play the gagman. ‘About another seventy-five million, build us a factory, and we’ll be ready to go.’

  Hoffman gave a laugh (it sounded as though he had the loan of it), clapped his pockets. ‘Seventy-five million? A bit out of my league... at least for now.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ said DeLorean. ‘“For now.”’

  They shook hands.

  ‘Keep me posted,’ Hoffman said. ‘And, hey – good luck!’

  He unbuttoned his sport jacket as he walked back to his table. Randall watched him all the way. Mary Tyler Broken Shoe had got her photo and an autograph to go with it. Johnny and his entourage were moving on, in.

  ‘You coming, John?’

  ‘Be right with you,’ DeLorean said then dipped his head level with Randall’s ear. ‘Get me Romero-Barcelo on the phone first thing in the morning.’

  As Randall turned to go he saw Hoffman cock his thumb and squint down the barrel of his squat forefinger at him, taking aim.

  The men with him laughed and shook their heads. Hoffman crooked the finger: bang.

  4

  The deal tabled was for half a million square feet of factory, rent free in perpetuity, on the site of a decommissioned army base at Borinquen, not far from Aguadilla, which was itself about a two-hour drive north from the Puerto Rican capital San Juan: half a million square feet and exclusive use of the base’s former airfield. They would be as good as self-sufficient: a state within a state, or to invoke the language of Puerto Rico’s own constitutional position, an unincorporated territory within an unincorporated territory.

  Randall got to know the island’s precise legal status pretty well in the months of negotiations leading up to the letter of agreement. He got to know Washington too – the road from the airport to Governor Barcelo’s offices on 17th Street at any rate – having been dispatched there half a dozen times to work with the governor’s chosen people on amendments to the early drafts, early drafts that did not, for instance, include help in fitting out the fifty thousand feet of office space that went with the factory and the airfield. Every last word – every comma, colon and dash – had to be weighed and evaluated and weighed again.

  ‘I want what we begin here to last for generations,’ DeLorean said, over and over. ‘It is essential that we get the foundations absolutely right.’

  To that end too the company had been trying for some time to identify a suitable permanent home in New York, which it found at last on the forty-third floor of 280 Park Avenue, formerly the home of Xerox, which had copied itself across, Randall could only suppose, to somewhere pretty much identical in another part of town.

  Two-eighty Park Avenue was in effect two buildings – a mid-rise West joined by a passage to a high-rise East, which in turn was served by a choice of two elevators, the first car servicing all floors, the second, express car taking you straight to the very top and number forty-three.

  Within days of the lease being secured the entire suite had been fitted with apricot carpet on the advice of one Maur Dubin, whose floor-length mink coat was such a fixture that Randall came to think of him not so much as a man wearing fur as an overgrown mustelid that had acquired a human – and entirely bald – head.

  He busied about the forty-third floor, in and out of offices, as though it was his private domain, supervising the installation of desks one day, the hanging of a piece of art the next, and the day after insisting that the piece of art be taken down, the desks rearranged, removed altogether. Randall never once heard DeLorean gainsay his advice. And with reason. For all his oddness and his affectations Dubin was good, better than good. (The apricot carpet, when the sun shone through the forty-third-floor windows, was out of this world.) He would probably have said the best.

  There was, even among DeLorean’s closest associates, an amount of muttering: who was this guy? And where had he come from? Randall remained aloof from it. Where had he come from himself, after all? He had got on the lucky side of one of those epiphanies, the moment that John DeLorean knew for sure an expanded bumper did not a new car make.

  So, paintings went up and paintings came down, desks were tried here and tried there and replaced by other desks till at long last Dubin declared himself as satisfied as he was ever going to be. (Because, really, to get it absolutely right you would want to start from the ground floor up: what lay beneath your feet – and he wasn’t talking apricot carpet here – was as important for the harmony of a place as what lay before your eyes.)

  At long last too DeLorean pronounced himself satisfied with the commas, colons and dashes of the Puerto Rican deal.

  Randall arrived on the forty-third floor one morning to find a memo on his desk asking him to book conference rooms in the Crowne Plaza for early the following week and to make ‘all other arrangements necessary for an exchange of contracts’.

  Randall did not see DeLorean at all that week, had not, come to that, seen him for most of the previous week either. This was not unusual. On the contrary, it was a rare week when he was in New York or any other city for more than a couple of days at a time. He had, on top of everything else that was going on, a baby daughter at home, her arrival in this world a source of genuine – almost mystical – wonder to both parents. (His son, the only child from his two previous marriages, was adopted.)

  A source of wonder and, Randall didn’t doubt, the cause of more than one night’s lost sleep.

  Alejandro Vallecillo from the Puerto Rican Economic Development Agency – reconciled in the months since his i
nitial phone call to dealing with Randall as an equal – moved into the Plaza several days in advance of the signing and Randall spent the larger part of that week shuttling between there and the company’s lawyers up on E 42nd Street. He looked in on the conference rooms first thing every morning and again before he left for home at night. The Plaza’s management was installing extra telephone lines in the main room and bringing sofas and armchairs into the rooms opening off it.

  (Maur Dubin, to the best of Randall’s knowledge, was in Miami, recuperating, otherwise he might have wanted a say in it too.)

  The night before the ceremony he worked so late he did not even bother with the cab home, but took the room the hotel offered, going to bed with the curtains open as an added precaution against oversleeping.

  He need not have worried. He was up and dressed at five-thirty, standing by the window, watching the mist on the East River slowly recede to offer up, like something long buried in desert sand, the monument that was the Long Island Ferry Terminal. By seven he was down in the conference rooms for the flowers being delivered direct from the market: orchids and amaryllises and royal poincianas, deep, deep red with here and there a white and yellow throat.

  The baskets of fruit were brought up from the cold store an hour later to give them time to achieve room temperature. An icebox arrived, already stocked with juices and sodas. (The champagne, he had decided, should remain in the care of the sommelier until the moment that the pen nibs were unsheathed.) The DeLorean legal team arrived and set up base in the side room nearest the door.

  At nine o’clock to the second the Puerto Rican delegation came into the room, headed by Vallecillo. Bringing up the rear was a small, barrel-chested man with white hair swept back from a high forehead, the governor, Romero-Barcelo himself. Without being asked or directed he took a seat at the head of the conference table, the window at his back. The seat facing him – and the strengthening sun, unless the blinds were tilted to repel (Randall would make damn sure that they were) – was, for the time being, empty.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Randall said, once he had made sure that everyone had the necessary papers in front of them, ‘you would like some coffee?’

  Coffee, the governor indicated with a dip of his head, would be most welcome. It came, it went. Pages were turned, cross-referenced with earlier drafts. The room turned blue with smoke then grey. The chair at the far end of the table remained empty at ten. It remained empty at eleven. Half past.

  Romero-Barcelo beckoned to Vallecillo, seated nearest to him on the right, who listened stony-faced for several moments before coming down the room and taking Randall by the upper arm into one of the side rooms.

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’

  ‘I’m sure there is a very good explanation,’ Randall said.

  ‘There had better be.’

  They left the room together. Vallecillo returned to the governor’s right hand. A quarter of an hour passed. The governor shaped as though to push back his seat.

  ‘What about lunch?’ Randall said and before anyone could react had crossed the room and picked up a phone. ‘I’ll ring down.’

  ‘Mr Randall,’ said the woman on the other end of the line. ‘This is a coincidence. I just had a call come in for you, long distance. It is a very poor line. One moment while I try to connect you.’

  There was a sound as of the phone being immersed in a tub of suds, which cleared then to leave a voice, that voice. ‘Edmund, is that you?’

  Randall was conscious that the governor was watching him. The entire room was watching him. He faced away, endeavouring to keep his voice low and steady.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Ireland.’

  ‘Ireland?’ It came out strangulated. ‘But Ireland’s off, you told me: “Ireland’s off”.’

  ‘Not the south, the north.’ There was a warble on the line – something moving on the Atlantic seabed perhaps – swallowing what he said next. He repeated it, louder. ‘I’m in Belfast.’

  It was as though someone had tossed a grenade into the room. Randall instinctively hunched his shoulders, pulling the phone closer to his chest, trying to absorb the impact.

  ‘John,’ he managed at length, ‘I have the governor here.’

  ‘And I have the British secretary of state for North Ireland here. He has already put a proposal before the cabinet in London. We are going to make an announcement tomorrow. We’re building the factory here.’

  Randall could nearly not take it all in. ‘We’re building it in Borinquen.’ But even as he was saying it he knew it was no longer true.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before now,’ DeLorean went on, ‘but I couldn’t risk a single word of it leaking out for fear of the whole deal collapsing.’

  ‘But what do you want me to do?’

  ‘I want you to get on the first flight you can over here.’

  ‘I meant’ – Randall’s voice now was scarcely more than a whisper – ‘about the Puerto Ricans.’

  ‘Tell them they just didn’t move fast enough. This is the deal we need,’ DeLorean said and with another deep-sea warble was gone.

  Randall replaced the receiver carefully then turned back to face the room again. Everyone around the table appeared to have lit a fresh cigarette. From the looks of the smoke billowing out, possibly two or three apiece.

  The governor for the first time addressed him directly. ‘Well?’

  ‘If you could excuse me a minute,’ Randall said and let himself out into the corridor. The elevators were directly facing; the doors of the one farthest left opened the instant he pressed the call button. He rode all the way down to zero then walked quickly across the lobby and out, down the steps, on to the sidewalk. Breathe, breathe, breathe. He spotted the bar on the opposite corner of the street. He didn’t even bother with the walk sign but stepped on to the road, taking his chances with the buses and the cabs and the cars.

  Once inside (because even if he had willed it nothing that day would have hit him) he set a ten-dollar bill on the counter and pointed to the Polish vodka, that being more or less the first thing that caught his eye.

  ‘Double,’ he said, and when that was gone pointed a second time: same again.

  Then he walked back out on to the street, through the traffic, up the steps and across the hotel lobby to the elevator, reached out his finger to press up. Missed.

  *

  He got on a flight that same evening and, the following morning, having slept off in the intervening hours the effects of the previous day’s vodkas (of which there had been several more after his extended dressing down by Romero-Barcelo), picked up another flight on a plane a quarter the size from a corner of Heathrow so remote and dismal it seemed to belong not just to a different airport but a different decade entirely.

  An hour and a half later that plane came in to land on a runway bordered on one side by fields and on the other by a military base of a kind he had hoped never to see again when he flew out of Tan Son Nhat for the last time.

  DeLorean had told him that a member of the secretary of state’s team would be in the arrivals hall to meet him and sure enough when he came through from the baggage claim a large sad-looking man, in an even larger, sadder-looking suit, stood holding a piece of paper with Randall’s name written on it in blue.

  Randall stopped before him and held out his hand. ‘Jennings?’

  ‘McAuley, Mr Jennings is out in the car.’ The man bypassed Randall’s hand and reached down instead for his bag, affording Randall a glimpse of his gun, an old-fashioned pistol, holstered beneath his left arm.

  ‘I can manage that myself,’ Randall said, but McAuley had already hoisted the bag up behind his shoulder and started walking. Randall followed, a couple of steps off the bigger man’s pace, trying not to fall further behind, but trying too to take in his surroundings, which on first impressions appeared more closely aligned with that remote corner of Heathrow he had taken off from than the cosmopolitan airport he had had to walk throug
h to get there.

  A newspaper on the sole newsstand carried a photo on the front cover of a bearded man – haggard – draped in a blanket against the backdrop of a wall smeared with... well Randall had no idea what exactly, although the accompanying headline – Cardinal: Prison ‘Unfit for Humans’ – made him fear the worst. He lifted a copy and set a note on the counter, which the young woman standing on the other side heaved a sigh at.

  ‘Is that the smallest you’ve got?’

  McAuley and his bag were disappearing under the exit sign.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Randall said to the woman. ‘I don’t need the change.’

  ‘No!’ She scowled, not at the money now, he thought, but at the suggestion that she had been on the make. ‘Here...’ She dragged the coins – big ungainly things – one at a time from their compartments in her cash drawer and counted them into his hand. ‘There.’ She smiled, tightly, triumphantly: you’ve nothing on me now.

  He stuffed the coins into his pants’ pocket and ran.

  A cool breeze hit him as he reached the end of a corridor walled with yellowing Plexiglas, having made up all but a couple of yards on McAuley. Smell of new-mown grass cutting through the aircraft exhaust fumes.

  The car, a large Ford (he recognised the emblem but not the model), was easy to spot: it was the only one parked within a hundred-yard radius of the terminal. Two cops stood by, sub-machine guns clutched to their bulletproof vests, the glossy peaks of their caps pulled so low they had to tilt their heads to see past them.

  One of them said something out the corner of his mouth to McAuley as he passed, don’t ask Randall what, though McAuley smiled, a surprisingly pleasant smile, which Randall took to be a good sign.

  With his free hand McAuley pulled open the rear nearside door. A man in his late fifties, at a guess, with the most precise side parting in his hair Randall had ever seen sat over against the other door, a stack of papers resting on a buff folder on his lap. He crossed a t or dotted an i and replaced the lid of his fountain pen before turning his attention to Randall, taking him in from the newspaper up.