The Triple Goddess (50 page)

Ego’s nomadic earthbound orb, circling fast, initiated a sympathetic but opposite motion in its lower, sublunary, stay-at-home twin, sibling, or partner. Arbella, dizzy from trying to follow one and then the other, as she was supposed not to, looked down at the design that Ego had been working on. It was intricate and well executed. Had Henri Matisse seen it, and been impressed, it might have influenced his conceptualizing of the interior of the Dominican
Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence on the French Riviera by using
gouaches découpés
, or paper cut-outs.

‘Sir, there’s another
aspect
to this. If you would care to
eyeball
...to
look
at it as a…if you could
focus
for a moment on….I mean, one doesn’t have to be the prophet
Isaiah
or gifted with
second sight
to understand that it’s possible, under certain admittedly far-fetched circumstances, for…’

The I-Man made a series of inarticulate noises, and Arbella felt a twinge of annoyance that he should be making things so difficult for her. Lloyd’s underwriters were supposed to be inured to the unusual; and Ego, as an examiner for the Chartered Insurance Institute, or C.I.I., was expected to set an example of professional behaviour.

Arbella’s exasperation coarsened further the indelicacy of her approach, like Basil Fawlty trying not to mention the War to his German guests. She wondered whether Ego’s secretary’s name was Iris.

‘In your
view
, sir, it may be a rather
cross-eyed
notion, but if ever a risk deserved your maximum commitment, this is it. If you can’t
see
your way to giving it that, then, instead of just sitting
idly
by, taking a
watching
line would enable you to
spice
up your
See-Eye-Eye
lectures by giving you something unusually interesting to tell your
pupils
about your underwriting portfolio.

‘You’ll have them asking themselves how they ever could have thought insurance was dull, when
visionaries
such as yourself are in the market. It’s your opportunity to
sock it
to them, and
lash
them into such a frenzy of enthusiasm that they’ll all pass their exams first time. And from my
perspective
, without wanting to subject you to the
glare
of publicity, I must say that support from a man held in such
high regard
by those formerly in your
orbit
of influence would add no end of kudos to the slip.

‘Are we seeing
eye to eye
on this, sir?’

Ego’s need to get to a basin as quickly as possible and bathe his reddened eye with Optrex, was sufficiently urgent to overpower the nausea that Arbella’s offering had induced in him, and he put down his stamp. Unfortunately he used his errant eye to aim with, and it landed on her arm. He did better on the second attempt, and though his signature jolted off the page at the end, thankfully both it and the five per cent it was written against were legible.

Arbella watched people swerving to avoid him as Ego legged it, the long way round the balcony (as if he were to take the M25 motorway ring road—or London Orbital—westbound or clockwise to get from Heathrow to Staines) to the Members’ cloakroom, the heavy brass and reinforced glass swing doors to which were only a dozen yards from his box.

Herman Agrippa Pardoe, dubbed Happy, or the Pardoner because he resembled the androgynous character in Chaucer’s
The Pardoner’s Tale
—“I trowe he were a gelding or a mare”—was an orchidaceous individual. He glowed as if he had just emerged from a hot bath, smelling of French hand-milled soap, and with his skin exfoliated and hydrated with fragrant essences.

Happy’s glabrous face was both cherubic and as chilling as that of the cruellest of the Caesars, his hair a sleek coating that purred as he ran his hands over it, like the white cat stroked by the arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film
You Only Live Twice.

Pardoe was immaculately tailored with red silk linings to his suit jackets, and his small feet were encased in well-creamed patent leather shoes. He wore shirts in pale shades of mauve or pink with monogrammed French cuffs, embroidered with his initials and secured with platinum links, which slid easily as he shot them over the wafer-thin Patek Philippe wrist watch. Although in cold weather he sheathed his body in a tailored brown covert coat with a velvet collar, when it was wet he had no need of an umbrella because his clothes were as impervious to water as an otter.

The Pardoner was an important underwriter who could write big lines; but the still and attentive heron-like manner, with beak ready to stab, that accompanied his easy and accommodating responses to everything the brokers told him in the course of their presentations, creeped them out.

Pardoe’s body language bespoke a character that was both sadistic and masochistic. It was said that in the office he kept his staff chained naked to their desks, filthy and unfed, and whipped them when they whimpered. Although at the box his fingers, with their half-moon cuticles and graded oval nails, handled everything with nitroglycerine caution, his reputation was that of a vulture who, after the market leaders had done all the work in bringing a risk down and killing it, and had taken their shares, descended to pick the carcass clean.

Happy was as impervious to the blandishments of senior executives, as he was to the unspoken threats of the oiks who placed internal reinsurances of underwriters’ lines, laying off their excess liabilities to guarantee a profit by “trading on the differential” between contract rates covering the same business: brokers who stuck their hands out at their sides like penguins in the approved wide-boy gesture, tugged at their lapels, eased their index fingers around the neck inside their shirts, and were constantly adjusting their neckties, and looking over their shoulders as if they were about to have their collars felt by the law.

Nonetheless, Happy used their services extensively himself, to protect himself and make still more money, perhaps rewarding the spivs with invitations to witness a flogging at his home in Chelsea.

Catching the Pardoner mid morning as he glissaded to the box after partaking solo of a leisurely cup of coffee, with a lot of sugar in it, in the Captain’s Room, Arbella moved in as Happy was lowering his bottom to be kissed by his red-upholstered foam rubber seat cushioning. He had been a little later than usual to the office that morning, after an extended nocturnal viewing of other parties coupling, and had forgone his usual plate of sausage rolls and English mustard upstairs—which he ate with a knife and fork, and a napkin tucked into his collar—so as not to dull the luncheon appetite.

‘Yes…yes…I see…I see,’ said the insightful Pardoe, as he attended to her story. You could inform Happy that his pants were on fire, Arbella thought, or that there was a knife in his ribs, and the response would be the same. Happy did always see, he saw everything.

Arbella could tell from the moistness of his pores that the Pardoner was very turned on by the masculinity—or was it the femininity?—of the riches on offer; and that he was burning with prurient desire to ask probing questions. He seemed not to care about the fabulousness of the risk. His eyeballs and neck bulged, his lips engorged with blood, his breaths shortened, and his nether regions squirmed with exquisite pleasure.

But after a struggle his self-control asserted itself. ‘Yes…yes…it shall be six per cent, I believe. Yes.’ And without waiting for Arbella to say anything, Happy picked up his stamp, the tool of his daytime trade.

The way that Pardoe wrote his line was mesmerizing. First he inked the die thoroughly until it glistened an almost obscene cherry red, a colour so inviting that one was tempted to lick it off one’s finger like icing from a cake. When he put the stamp down, the impression was straight and the corners distinct. After positioning a pad of blotting-paper under his hand to avoid smudging the slip with oily secretions, and shooting his cuff to keep it out of the way and clean, he wrote the line laboriously, pressing hard with a medium ballpoint pen—fountain-pen ink was too easy for the unscrupulous to doctor.

‘Regina,’ Pardoe portended, looking across the box to a worn-out scrap of a girl with mousy lank hair, a worried expression, and wire-framed glasses with ear springs; ‘an
X
reference, if you please.’ Happy pronounced Regina’s name so salaciously that Arbella wanted to dash outside and take lungfuls of fresh air; his voice had “something of the night” about it, in the Widdecombean phrase, which conjured images of corporally rateable offences, and messy and indulgent practices involving strange-looking instruments, rubber suits, and handcuffs.

The fearful and unqueenly Regina consulted a list, and read out a sequence of numbers and letters, wincing when she got to the triple
X
s at the end.

The entering process, which Pardoe performed himself...for when he was not observing those of other people, their comings and goings, and the insertions of A into B, and A into C, and D, and between E and E, he liked to remain stimulated...was a work of art. His lips parted as he pressed hard and evenly, and he blotted each perfect letter and digit before proceeding to the next sinister—he was left-handed—impression. Had he not filled in the squares on his stamp with such care, the reference would not show up well on the many photocopies that would be made of the slip: thus did Happy ensure that there was never any doubt as to the size and authenticity of his line, the date that it was written, its coding, and the reinsurance reference that eliminated seventy per cent of the risk for thirty per cent of the premium.

Then the job was done, and it seemed from the almost cheerful look on Happy’s face, and the even more miserable look on hers, that Regina was to be rewarded with extra stripes on her back.

Arbella went on to see many other underwriters amongst the menagerie of characters in the Room, not a few of whom were attracted by the gathering momentum of the slip, and who wrote lines of three-quarters, a half, or a quarter of a per cent. For it is as true in the placement of a risk as it is for a departing aeroplane speeding down a runway, that there comes a point when it is apparent that the slip is a “go”, V-1 critical speed is reached, the captain has no choice but to take off, and the plane is airborne.

Although the smaller the lines got the longer the time each underwriter took to summon his courage to the sticking-place—there were several of as little as nought point one-two-five per cent—but every bit counted towards the all-important seventy-five, and Arbella accepted them gladly and graciously without begrudging the many hours spent obtaining them on behalf of the Assured, who, so far as anyone knew, had all the time in the world.

Such was the exotic nature of the Ralegh slip, the aura of intrigue surrounding it, and the lure of hidden treasure working its magic, that a week later, as difficult as it was for Arbella to absorb it as fact, she reached her precise goal of seventy-five per cent point zero zero…whereupon she returned without delay to Bullion Bill Goldsack to collect his contingent twenty-five per cent line.

‘Aha,’ gloated Goldsack, without a trace of astonishment or animosity in his voice or manner. And without further ado, banging down a fusillade of stamps and spattering ink from his tenth quill of the day (he got them free from a Norfolk turkey farm), on the last panel of the slip he inscribed a series of lines on behalf of his various anonymous syndicates, for a grand total of twenty-five per cent.

‘There,’ said the Bullster, panting and triumphant, ‘is my quarter ton, and the deal is done. In ten minutes my queue’ll be all the way to the Bank of England. Bully for me.’

‘I suppose there’s a problem,’ said Carew, as Arbella approached his box towards the end of the day; ‘and I can’t say I’m surprised. It was an impossibly tall order, and I don’t know what possessed me to suggest it. I should have known better than to lay such an unfair task on you, and I can’t apologize enough for wasting your time so.’

Without a word Arbella laid the slip in front of him. Stunned, Carew stared at it and slowly traced the syndicate stamps with his finger down each panel to the end, his face flushing as he took in each of the names of the subscribers.

‘Well I’m jiggered,’ he said at length; ‘I can hardly believe my eyes. Well done, Arbella, many times well done! We must go and see my father so that you can present it to him. Are you by any chance available after work?’

‘I’ve nothing on I wouldn’t be thrilled to get out of, and certainly nothing more important.’

‘Excellent, I’ll meet you outside the Middle tower at six o’clock. Oh, by the way, here’s a funny thing: the risk I wrote for you that you chucked off the balcony…the fishing fleet?

‘What about it?’

‘I’m afraid it’s a total loss.’

‘Oh no! I’m so awfully sorry!’

‘Don’t be. Comes with the territory. That’s what I’m here for.’

Arbella was still appalled. ‘What happened?’

‘There was a minor earthquake, and the Fisherman’s Terminal in Seattle sustained severe damage. Nobody was hurt, fortunately, but all the boats were affected. Luckily it was the end of the fishing season, a successful one, so no one’s livelihood is affected. Many of the business owners will be able to get new boats and equipment.’

‘What makes me feel even worse is that I came here not knowing. The claims department doesn’t bother to tell brokers about losses until policies come up for renewal, when we have to update the experience exhibits. I’m sure you’ll be able to increase the rate, should you agree to continue next year, but that’ll hardly be enough to make you whole again any time soon. The client better turn out to be a good one, in it for the long haul, as it were.’