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Delaware, anybody? Second smallest in the Union, but holding the registration for half of its publicly traded companies, including General Motors and the Ford Motor Company?
    Another friend, Herb Siegel, head of Chris-Craft, the powerboat manufacturer, had given DeLorean the use of a suite in his building on Madison Avenue whenever he was in New York, which once the first prototype was ready was more often than not. Before very long Randall was there too with a third-floor walk-up giving him a view over – but alas no key to – Gramercy Park and a salary that made what he had been earning at the Daily News look like a pittance.
    (As if to further prove the wisdom of his decision the Daily News itself – struggling all the time he was there – had, since he left, suffered the greatest ignominy that a newspaper could: it had folded.)
    They had the Detroit headquarters, the New York offices, and a queue of people wanting to invest. All that was missing was a factory.
    DeLorean had told Randall all along he did not want to commit until he had found the perfect site, although from what Randall could see it was the sites that came to him, trying to convince him of their perfection. Delegations arrived from half a dozen points on the North American compass: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia (so much for no one wanting to touch him); there had been an enquiry from Spain, another from Portugal. One guy turned up at Long Lake Road from Dublin, Ireland. He had been driving from Chicago when he caught an item on the car radio – Detroit itself was preparing a bid for the factory (hear that, Anderson? Detroit) – and decided to detour out to Bloomfield Hills and offer to make representations to the Irish government, for whom he was some kind of unofficial ambassador. It sounded far-fetched – farther fetched for some reason than Portugal or Spain – but DeLorean insisted on following it up.
    Limerick was the city mentioned (Randall up to then did not even know there was an actual Limerick city), sitting at the head of the Shannon estuary, giving ready access to the North Atlantic – a three-day crossing in the right conditions – and with an airport half an hour out of town used to handling transatlantic freight.
    ‘The Irish are our kin,’ DeLorean said. ‘They sent their people here to escape hunger and want. They know what it is to struggle against oppression.’
    By a tyrannical neighbour in their case, he meant, by the Big Three in his.
    *
    Liz read a report in the Belfast Telegraph . Car plant, Limerick, though to be honest it was the photo of the man behind the whole operation that caught her eye: the square jaw, the silver hair, the open-neck shirt and leather jacket, the name that the voice in her head made Delloreen of. There was a big man called DeLorean, whose something-something-something obscene. She turned the page. Prison dispute, men in blankets. She turned again. Tonight’s television: 1, 2, and UTV. Hopeless, hopeless and worse than hopeless.
    *
    The unofficial ambassador arranged a dinner with Irish businessmen and politicians in Pittsburgh. DeLorean was irked that the invitation had not included Cristina, even though she was out of town herself, auditioning for a part in a TV movie with Larry Hagman, acting, as Randall had heard her husband say many times, having always been her first love. He had no sooner left the office for the airport than she rang to wish him luck.
    ‘I’ll leave a message at the check-in desk for him to call you,’ said Randall to whom she had been redirected. He got the impression his name did not mean a single thing to her.
    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