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.
Epilogue
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
Acknowledgement
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.
About Gull
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.
Reviews
‘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
About Glenn Patterson
GLENN PATTERSON 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.
An Invitation from the Publisher
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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.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
HB ISBN 9781784971762
XTPB ISBN 9781784971847
Ebook ISBN 9781784971830
Design: Leo Nickolls
Images: car © Getty; street scene © Alamy
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