The Triple Goddess (47 page)

‘On the fast track, I’d say. I’m still up and coming myself, and you’d find me right up your alley.’

When Arbella did not respond Black Jack shifted his gaze to the slip. ‘You could get banned from the Room for pulling a scam like this, and I know about scams. There are ways to scam and ways not to scam. And what’s this—no brokerage? I smell a rat. The only broker ever to suggest forgoing brokerage got the almighty piss taken out of him by that Bateman fellow, the artist; unfairly, because I had his nuts in my drawer at the time. The original cartoon is hanging in my office, and the nuts I dried and cracked for Christmas.’

Shere Khan’s voice turned as silky as that of George Sanders in the film of Kipling’s book. ‘Tell you what. How about you take brokerage, bribe your accounts guy, and kick back half to me? If there’s any trouble with the Bureau, I’m Chairman of the Oversight Committee. Out of sight, out of mind. Most of the committee members are Names on my syndicate.’

Arbella consulted her manicure. ‘I didn’t hear that, Mr Newbold.’

The sliding shutter on the dark lantern in Black Jack’s brain opened. ‘Got it! I’ll have my men arrange for a maritime mishap; your Caribbean-bound buccaneer and crew can sleep with the fishes and Mrs Newbold, and we’ll park the swag in my Bahamian bank. You can have a fifteen per cent instead of brokerage.’

‘Still deaf, Mr Newbold.’

‘Okay, another option: this says underwriters get to share the profits as well as the premium, right? We’ll give the guy an escort home, drop him off a few leagues short of Plymouth, and fence the goods. I’m an expert fencer.’

“Nothing doing, Mr Newbold.’

‘For chrissakes, girl, you’ve no imagination. All right, I’ll write ten per cent. No, fifteen...I can’t let the other tits in the Room have too much, I’d be a right tit myself if I did. I’d hate to look like a tit.’ Newbold again inspected Arbella’s
poitrine
. ‘So…in a twat for tit, excuse me while I reach between your legs. My stamp’s in the cupboard but not for long. Look, here it comes...’

He did not move quickly enough, as Arbella stood up and stepped back. Grunting his disappointment, Black Jack took out his stamp. He put it down at a rakish angle and wrote the line untidily, so as to make it look like he did not care. It would never do to show that Black Jack cared. He thrust the slip at the entry boy on his right, who set aside the overseas bank statement that he was checking for his boss, to make sure that the twenty per cent interest had been calculated correctly, and flicked a last glance at Arbella.

‘My other offer still stands, as do I. Let me know if you change your mind, or wish to reconsider a fallback position.’ And with that Black Jack Newbold resumed his stony gaze into the building across the street.

Her prospects considerably brightened, Arbella headed for the far end of the floor, to cleanse herself of Black Jack and search for easier prey. Bill B was always good for two and a half per cent, because Bill B was the nicest man in the Room. He was a chubby and rubicund desperately shy middle-aged bachelor, who lived with his mother in East Croydon.

Any broker could tell, as Bill stared at a slip, that he had not the faintest idea what was before him; in self-acknowledgement of which he theorized that, if he wrote two and a half per cent on everything he was offered, the syndicate would survive. Later he was proved sadly wrong.

Whenever Arbella went to see Bill B he had to fight his inclination to double his standard line to five per cent. It was painful for her to see him struggle with his one and only rule of underwriting; but in the end, with profuse apologies for not being able to do more, he would abide by his principle.

To compensate, after much agonizing and heavy breathing and perspiration, Bill would always—he was ever mindful of the adjurations regarding his bachelor status that he received every morning from his mother when she served him his breakfast and watched him eat it, as to when was he going to do something about it, for there must be some nice Church of England lady he knew whose hand he could ask for—invite her to his home for Sunday lunch.

Arbella accepted her two and a half per cent from Bill B gratefully, and said she would let him know if she ever had a weekend free.

Next on her list was Wally. Wally was a wally, and a fusspot, and a great advocate of the many greater and lesser restrictive clauses and exclusions that underwriters liked to append to contracts in order to emasculate them of their risk content. To emphasize his syndicate’s conservative image, Wally wore three-piece subfusc suits and sported a monocle.

In arriving at a determination of whether or not to participate on a risk, Wally rode piggyback on such market leaders as Geoffroy and Brillo, and never subscribed to a contract that men of such calibre had not either quoted or were not on.

But first Wally feigned underwriting the thing for himself, wasting brokers’ time by asking a series of fatuous questions, such as whether there was any flood exposure on a placement for a factory in Arizona; or single dwelling values exceeding a million dollars in a mobile home park in Florida.

For his deputy underwriter, Wally had an aggressive stupid short-legged and long-backed pipe-smoking, huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ Old Etonian buffoon called Cunliffe. Cunliffe, who sat across from Wally, listened in to every broker’s pitch when nobody was in on his side, so that he could make cautionary interjections to Wally about details that he may have missed, or information that the broker seemed to have convinced Wally was to the syndicate’s advantage when really it was the opposite.

Cunliffe had a brow that was permanently furrowed, to show how hard and seriously he was thinking, when really he was straining hard to think, a voice like a twelve-bore to scatter his pronouncements to the four winds, and a brain the size of a pellet of birdshot.

Noting that both men were open, Arbella chose to see Wally rather than Cunliffe as her underwriter
du jour
at the box, because although he was the senior underwriter she preferred his less threatening manner.

She was not surprised when the absence of a line from Geoffroy and Brillo set the alarm bells ringing on both sides of the box, and she was lectured in stereo on the folly of approaching the syndicate with any risk that had been spurned by recognized leads.

When Arbella protested that Carew was hardly anonymous, Wally brushed her objection aside, saying that was irrelevant because he had “no form”, and that it was impossible to respect the judgement let alone trust the sanity of an underwriter who to the best of his understanding had never written a non-marine risk.

As to the apparent absurdity of the contract, Wally had no comment to make; which gave Arbella the idea of getting Geoffroy to lead a spoof contract next year with an April Fool’s Day inception date, covering the Swiss spaghetti harvest, per the 1/4/1957 BBC
Panorama
programme, and seeing how much she could get Wally to write on it.

So, still cheered by her line from Newbold, Arbella moved on unabashed.

Mad Max was an ingratiating man, highly risk-averse, who manifested rather than suffered from (because he was not aware of it) a bad speech impediment. Brokers had no choice but to stand in the path of an impossible to predict trifecta of droplets, spray, and mucus from the loquacious Max’s endlessly productive salivary glands and throat.

Because Mad Max also had an annoying habit of answering his own questions, brokers got a replay drenching from each sentence.
Caveat vendor
, those who were Max-bound reminded themselves before leaving the office, as on cloudless days they donned their raincoats. They remained as far away from him as possible while remaining in earshot, and held their slipcases before them like umbrellas against a head-on squall.

Senior brokers were accompanied by polyester-suited trainees, who had been instructed to interpose themselves as boulders in front of their bosses as their superiors addressed Max over the youths’ shoulders, to shield them from the effluvial response that ran in rapids over and around the logjam and rocks of Max’s enlarged tongue and irregular teeth, downriver from his glottis, epiglottis, and uvula.

The startling nature of Arbella’s risk put Mad Max in even more sibilant state than usual, as he seeded the clouds that hung over the box and talked himself into a declination. ‘Sscchho you schh-schee,’ he concluded, invisibly through the brume, ‘I’m sch-chorry to ss-ss-ss-tschay we can’t asch-tshischt. It’tch ssch-shimply too exxschotic a propojjijjitshion for thischhh scchindicate, jushht too eesho...
eeeschoa!
...eeeeschoteric.

‘Yeththsch, I’m afraid we’ll have to take a parrsschhhth on thicchh one. Our tasht-
tteh
is for th-th-thimple rithkths. Perhapssche you have sh-sh-shumeththing elssshhh to sthchow us? No? Then you’ll have to excuththth uththth, I’m afraid. Shoshoscho
scthorry
. Tsschee you again tsschoo-oo-oon.
Tschheeecchhh
.’

Something more solid than spit landed on Arbella’s sleeve. To attempt to change Mad Max’s mind would necessitate her changing into a rubber diving suit or swimwear, or a Mrs Emma Peel as played by Miss Diana Rigg in
The Avengers
television series-style catsuit; and although that might have boosted her chance of a line, it was not going to happen.

So she politely withdrew and betook herself, in order to clean up, to the small ladies’ toilet that (either in recognition that Lloyd’s was a bastion of femina-phobia, or out of belief that women were naturally perfect and not subject to involuntary bodily functions, and that only men were in need of a long line of urinals and stalls as occupied the basement mausoleum of the Gents’ WC, and—situated behind Screaming Lord Sutcliffe’s box on the non-marine floor—the male Members Only discharge and evacuation facility complete with uniformed waiter to dust the dandruff off one’s shoulders) was located at the far end of a passageway on the fourth floor.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The slip so far was a mess. One per cent from Carew, fifteen from Newbold, and two and a half from Bill B, equalled eighteen and a half; plus Arbella had a promise of twenty-five per cent from Goldsack contingent upon her reaching seventy-five. There was long way to go, and the key members of the non-marine market had turned her down.

Since the risk was more “wet” than “dry”, Arbella decided to return to the marine floor. She would start with someone who was in love with the sound of his own voice, she thought, in order to give her time to find her sea legs again; that made the choice easy: she would go and see Shipshape Sharples.

Shipshape Sharples was known as the Severn Bore because, in addition to being very boring, he hailed from the city of Bristol near the River Severn, which is famous among other things for the tidal surge wave that runs up the estuary as
the tide enters the Bristol Channel from the Atlantic and continues into the Severn Estuary, filtering the volume of water into a narrow channel that increases the height of the water by anything up to fifteen metres, and causes
the second highest tide in the world of up to two metres travelling at an average speed of sixteen kilometres per hour.

Allegedly descended from a five-hundred-year-old family from Bristol, all the men of which went to sea at an early age, Sharples had attended a polytechnic, where he studied landscape design. But he was very proud of his marine heritage, and never lost an opportunity to inform or remind people of it. For them the Severn Bore performed much more frequently than the freak tide that had earned him his monicker, without moving a muscle.

At the box Sharples lay supine, rather than sat—dry-docked rather than anchored and moored—so that brokers had to hold their slips over his nose for him to read. From that position he delivered a series of monologues, which may or may not have anything to do with whatever it was that one had come to see him about.

For non-marine brokers and those who were new to Lloyd’s, locating the boxes of some of the marine syndicates was as difficult as searching for Robin Hood in Sherwood Forest on a day when he was particularly anxious not to be disturbed; or trying to negotiate one’s way through a foggy Doone valley.

Even veterans of the marine market often swore that the routes around and through the boxes changed overnight, and that the straight path had been made crooked. The gangways were a one-way system, so that even getting from one end of a box to the other to have a slip entered, or reach a different underwriter seated at another corner, involved a circuitous journey filled with obstacles.

However carefully the brokers memorized landmarks and blazes along the way—a notice posted, the notch on a desk, the face of an underwriter or clerk, or the shape of the box—next time the trail was lost. There was a code that only those who worked on the syndicates were privy to, which signalled an incursion into their territory: a language of nods and winks, whistles and coughs, jerked thumbs, and racetrack bookie tick-tack semaphore.

In addition to discouraging brokers whom underwriters did not like, or those who peddled types of business that they did not commonly favour, it was thus that the mariners protected themselves against policemen, detectives, customs and excise men, members of the fraud squad, bailiffs, tax inspectors, and servers of either subpoenas to appear in Court or writs on behalf of ex-wives bent on collecting overdue alimony payments.

The complex pedestrian channels they created made navigating around the marine floor like driving around and through a Park and Ride-less Oxford City searching for the single, premium-rate, NCP parking garage while trying to stay out of the bus, and the wrong, one-way lanes and off the screens of the town’s traffic cameras, the pride and joy of the City Council’s fine-revenue officers and its relentless team of legal infringement enforcers.