Chapter 12: The Gala

On Saturday night, the Nine sat on a turntable in the middle of the Fisher ballroom under a black silk sheet.

Two hundred people in evening clothes stood around it holding champagne.

Bankers, dealers, reporters, two city councilmen, and a woman from the mayor's office who kept asking if the car was electric.

The full run on Monday had gone clean: forty-one minutes at redline, not one drop of coolant lost.

Nobody on the crew had said a word about it, because saying it might break it.

Marty wore a borrowed tuxedo with the pants hemmed by his wife on the kitchen table, and he kept tugging the bow tie.

"I look like a penguin who lost a bet," he told me.

"You look great."

"I look like a waiter."

"A waiter would have a tray."

"Someone give me a tray," he said, "I'll act more natural."

Cleo came down the staircase in a black gown with her back bare to the waist.

The room did not go quiet exactly, but a lot of heads turned.

I forgot what I was going to say to Marty.

She crossed the floor to me and fixed my bow tie, which Marty had tied wrong, with quick sure fingers.

"You're staring," she said.

"I'm allowed."

"Yes," she said, and she did not smile. "You are."

I thought she was nervous about her father's speech.

Clifford sat at the edge of the dais in a wheelchair with a blanket over his knees.

He had insisted on coming, and he had insisted on the wheelchair being hidden behind a potted palm.

At nine o'clock he took the microphone from the emcee.

"I have been in the car business for fifty years," he said.

His voice came out stronger than I expected.

"I have never been prouder of anyone than the twelve men and one woman who built what's under that sheet."

The crew in the back cheered, and Marty raised both fists.

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