The Triple Goddess (5 page)

Decanted from the restaurant with a list

To starboard from the port the emboldened

Sailor throws wife and caution to the winds.

*

The Act of Parliament that had given the Corporation of Lloyd’s the power of self-regulation granted autonomy not to an insurance company, but a motley collection of individuals who did things “each for his own part and not one for another”, and who guarded their secrets as zealously as freemasons.

These days it was the non-marine underwriters who considered themselves the arbiters of how things ought to be done. They were proud to have evolved from Lloyd’s’ maritime origins into dry Darwinian sophistication. The world was their oyster, they maintained, ignoring that the briny bivalves were strangers to their element except when served in multiples of six for lunch at Wheeler’s or Sweetings restaurants, and when their pearls were hung around their wives’ necks.

The common distinction, and it was a common one, made by non-mariners as to the difference between what constituted marine and non-marine business was that if a seagull could shit on it, it belonged downstairs. They mocked their wet counterparts for spending their days poring over bills of lading issued to Turkmenistani rug merchants, and cargo lists of spices being exported from the Azores to satisfy world demand for curried goat. They maintained that sailors were men who still navigated by the stars instead of satellites, and only came onshore to careen barnacles from the wooden hulls of their vessels.

Occasionally a dry-bones would appear on the ground floor dressed in a pirate’s costume, complete with cocked hat, wig with tarred pigtails and eye-patch, wearing a cutlass and carrying a stuffed parrot on his shoulder. He would hobble about on a crutch with one leg tied behind him, and a pipe filled with ship’s corded plug tobacco clenched between his teeth that he removed to spit and swear timber-shivering oaths.

The mariners ignored the insults: they were the gentlemen of the market, and considered those upstairs to be as beneath them in character as they were in physical location, publicity hounds who were celebrated for insuring the actress, dancer, and singer Betty Grable’s legs (the issuance of which policy had prompted jokes about invoking the Inspection Clause, and claiming rights of salvage in the event of loss).

On the ground floor, traditions were upheld. Many marine underwriters still wrote their lines with quill pens; and every day a waiter would solemnly enter with a goose feather in old-fashioned script, in a tome on a lectern, the marine market’s total-losses. Non-marine underwriters were envious of the old ship-insuring Lloyd’s that had inspired a 1936 box office hit for 20th Century Fox in Tyrone Power’s first starring role. Making a film about the Vauxhall car awarded to the winner at a hole-in-one competition did not have the same filmic potential as the Napoleonic wars.

The more colourful characters in the market had nicknames. It was advisable not to be too close or down-wind of the Ginger Germ, who was a rotund little man with orange hair. And it did not do to get into a queue behind the Suitcase, a lugubrious grey-suited individual who needed a trunk, instead of the customary leather slipcase with button strap, to tote his immense portfolio of small-time business around the Room.

The Suitcase argued the merits of his business, despite the exiguous premium each contract afforded, exhaustively and took every rejection as a personal affront. His arrival was enough to shut an underwriter down to other business for the day. If a broker tipped off an underwriter that the Suitcase was headed in his direction, he would leg it to The Lamb in Leadenhall Market, and buy that broker a drink the next time he met him in a bar.

The man known as Afterbirth had a mulberry birthmark on his face; Toffee was a snob with a caramel-freckled face; Frank the Bank was rich; Sprout’s real name was Bert Russell; Pissfroth had curly hair of reddish-yellow hue; A.L.F. was an aggressive little fucker; Bonkers Barker was as per his handle; the Smart Young Man was well dressed; Super-Tramp, a titled landowner, had been wearing the same Guards tie, bespoke suit, and Lobb shoes for so many years that he looked as though he dossed with his lesser brethren under Charing Cross Bridge at night.

There were a number of animals: the Giraffe was tall with a long neck, Turkey lacked a chin, had a wattled throat and gobbled as he spoke, and the Ferret was small and furtive with a sharp nose. When the Ferret objected to his sobriquet, his quick-witted underwriting nomenclator said it was because of his reputation for tenaciousness in getting the best possible deal for his clients. Having considered this, the Ferret changed his tune: “I’m the Ferret, you know,” he would tell people; “you should treat me with more respect.”

Sticky moaned in the basement bathroom stalls, the Egg in Aspic was bald and drove a bubble car, Skid’s surname was Marx, the ever-lustful Everest was called Climb Ev’ry (from the Mother Superior’s musical exhortation to Maria in
The Sound of Music
), and the Bike, a female claims broker, was well ridden. Piers Deepleigh had been whinnied under by many a filly, the hefty Peter Thomson-Waite was called P’Tonsome because he got ever fatter, Brains was thick, the Dwarf was one, Screaming Lord Sutch made his political aspirant counterpart seem tame, and Oink—Oink was Arbella Stace’s boss—was so slovenly of manners and dress that he gave a bad name to the baconic species.

William Goldsack, Esquire, consistently made so much money for his Names that he was accorded the only respectful moniker at Lloyd’s, Bullion Bill. This extraordinary and flamboyant marine and aviation underwriter was so eccentric in his ways, that if he were to vanish in a flash and crackle of lightning, the brokers would assume that he was late for an important appointment, perhaps with the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street, the Bank of England, in order to discuss shoring up the nation’s gold reserves.

Bullion Bill Goldsack’s powers of divination were legendary: he made split-second decisions about which risks he would and would not write, and raked in profits that were unmatched by any other syndicate.

Marine and aviation and motor underwriters were precluded from writing non-marine risks unless, because of the catastrophic limits involved, they were granted the dispensation required for a market-wide placement. Supertanker mariner and space aviator and Formula One motorist though he was, Bullion Bill could not give a toss about the old saw about marine business being defined as the alimentary targets of sea-going birds. He was not interested in birds of any kind except as the prototypical species for the aeroplanes he insured, and as suppliers of the many quill pens that he wore out.

Irrespective of whether a risk was “Wet” or “Dry”, as the distinction was, even if what he was insuring was as unlikely to get guano dumped on it as an Arab’s burnous in the desert, so long as there was a fat premium involved, Bullion Bill Goldsack wanted it, all of it. He wrote more business in a day than the smallest syndicates saw in a year. He vacuumed risk from the air as if he were dedicated to making the world an Elysian Field of assurance, certitude and predictability, sucking it up greedily until it came out of his mouth as a golden river, which poured out of the building, and down Lime Street, and ran south until it became a tributary of the Thames river, where it swelled and threatened to overwhelm the flood barrier that protected the city.

At the box Goldsack wore his heavy-framed glasses perched on top of his head, to show that he had no need of them to read, learn, and inwardly digest what was put before him. It was rumoured, in a lame attempt to explain his powers of divination, that they acted like satellite panels (Bullion Bill insured satellites, lots of them; actually, all of those that were not Communist) to receive up-to-the-minute meteorological information and on-site risk intelligence. He never mugged for the crowds at the Gallery as they gazed down at him in awe: the stakes were too high for clowning.

Owing to his well-known insatiability for business, Bullion Bill’s queue of brokers wound around the floor of Lloyd’s like a Chinese dragon. It clogged the gangways and got in the way of those who were transacting business at other boxes. Underwriters frequently mistook the broker at their elbow for someone who had come to see them, when they were actually in line for Goldsack. If two brokers were in conversation and one of them edged away, it was likely that he was one step closer to getting in with Bullion Bill.

But no matter how many eager petitioners there were waiting for him, Goldsack was never “a bad wait”: his line moved faster than powder up a junkie’s nostril. One had better be ready with one’s story prepared when no fewer than three people back, for he had an uncanny ability to tell bad and underpriced risks from those that were good and paying the right rate or better. Even as he barked with dismissive disgust, without turning his head the tentacle of an arm would be shooting back to grab the first offering out of the next broker’s hand.

Woe betide that person if he was reading the newspaper or holding the wrong slip, one that he had not intended to offer. Goldsack was no respecter of a pedlar’s plans: he had been known to rip a slipcase from someone’s grasp, rifle through it until he found something to his liking, and cover it with more stamps—he had a lot of so-called “baby” syndicates, very large babies who shaved twice a day—than Romeo planted kisses on Juliet’s lips.

It was also a mistake to try and “broke” or negotiate with Bullion Bill. Instead of getting angry he would sulk and announce that he had closed one’s account for several days. Goldsack sulked a lot, and any intermediary whom he held a grudge against for long was at a serious disadvantage in generating commissions for his firm during his period of banishment. The man devoured slips, however lengthy and complicated, with his supposedly myopic eyes and picked out the salient facts without having them drawn to his attention.

If he had a question, and he never asked more than two, the broker had a brief opportunity to spit out a handful of carefully chosen words. Then, if he was lucky, there would be a series of thumps from Bullion Bill’s battery of stamps. The lines went down on the slips without regard for accuracy or tidiness. Then he would seize a blunt quill from an inkwell and scrawl his percentage or dollar participations. Goldsack got through pints of black ink in a week, and a person better have his hand out of the way when Bill went into action, for whatever happened to be underneath the pen got written, including cuffs and sleeves. Jackson Pollock-like blots sprayed in all directions, and, while the underwriter himself remained spotless, brokers often came away covered with as much ink as their slips.

When Bullion Bill especially liked a piece of business, without asking permission he might whack down a line of one hundred per cent. This was an embarrassment to the broker, because to accept such a line from any underwriter, unless it was on a very small risk or one that could be replaced elsewhere the following year without difficulty should one not be able to agree terms and the underwriter “came off”, was inadvisable. Because the underwriter had control of the placement, the last thing that one wanted Goldsack to have, he could demand as much money as he wanted on renewal.

But the size of Bullion Bill’s lines were not negotiable, and the only thing one could do, if a single underwriter swallowed the lot, was proceed to see more underwriters, because at Lloyd’s additional participations that resulted in overplacement were signed down proportionately. Thus if Goldsack took a hundred per cent and three more underwriters, alerted to the game that was being played, did the same, they would each end up with twenty-five per cent when the lines were “signed down” pro rata.

Of course, when Goldsack saw the slip the following year and discovered the trick that had been played on him, he would sulk and come off the risk altogether and ban the broker from coming to see him for some days; but that was next year’s problem, one that the broker might solve by making an advance holiday booking for the week following the anniversary date of the policy.

After completing the messy business of subscription, Bullion Bill would hurl the slip down the box over the heads of his staff to the far end, where ashen-faced entry boys eventually plucked it from the morass of others and entered a reference in the boxes on the stamp. Bill wore out these lads like cheap socks: after a month or so the most resilient of them felt the pangs of angina, and had to be replaced by trainees who would soon themselves be in the final stages of nervous collapse.

Then the broker would move on and fin feebly like a played-out fish in the dead pool out of the current that swirled around Goldsack, and linger there until he might recover his slip or slips.

Not many brokers had the energy to visit other underwriters after such a nervous ordeal, and most headed back to their offices, after stopping at the Orpheus Club or some other sympathetic institution for a drink, to add up the lines they had got that day, telex clients with their quotes and placement progress, see what was in their in-boxes, and bring their expense reports up to date.

That Goldsack’s reference numbers were so short and often identical meant they could not have been of much use to the syndicate in classifying its business, but the Lloyd’s Policy Signing Office system required that something be entered. Although he never looked up his records, brokers doubted at their peril Bullion Bill’s steel-trap memory for what he had summarily rejected, should they think to come back a few days later and submit the same risk again in the hope that Bill might not recall it and decide to write it.

The only person to have tried this was fired by his brokerage house and spent the next three years flipping hamburgers at McDonalds; where he gained sufficient knowledge of what passed for beef that he emigrated to Texas to apply for work in an abattoir, and ended up a youthful cattle baron whose meat packaging business was insured at Lloyd’s of London without the support of Bullion Bill Goldsack.