The Triple Goddess (10 page)

But no matter how far they went back, and though turning anything up seemed as likely as coming across a live dodo in one’s garden, or an ivory-billed woodpecker in Arkansas, they found nothing. How the man had survived for so long without any premium income was a mystery; unless he had private means, in which case it was most odd that he should choose to fritter his life away twiddling his thumbs on a little old box in an unpopulated out-of-the-way corner of Lloyd’s instead of kicking up his heels in Monte Carlo or St Moritz.

At Lloyd’s each box was identified by an acronym of three or four initials: either those of the names of the founding or active underwriter of the syndicate, or the first letters of his surname. The designation appeared on the die stamp against which underwriters wrote their lines, in the top right-hand corner above the syndicate’s registration number. Carew’s acronym was C.A.R. 001, and his Christian name was unknown. But because to everyone’s best knowledge Mr Carew had never written a risk, no one had ever seen his underwriting stamp or knew if he possessed one.

The eldest member of the Three Rooms’ Club, an old soak called Jamieson, said that he had known someone’s father whose grandfather had known someone whose great-great grandfather had nearly got a line from Carew. While that this would make Carew a very old man indeed—while he seemed to have been around for ever, there was nothing of the ancient mariner about him; in fact he looked quite youthful—confirmed that the story was apocryphal, even allowing for the extreme unreliability of the source it was more than passing strange that Jamieson should persist in maintaining the truth of the assertion.

Though Carew was as useful to the brokerage community as tits on a bull, Lloyd’s loved its legends and enjoyed sharing the lore about him. While Goldsack was famed for his ravening hunger for business and gargantuan underwriting capacity for the largest and juiciest porterhouse steaks in the house from the brokers who waited on him, with baked potato heavily buttered, side-plate of creamed spinach, and double order of onion rings, Carew lived on locusts and honey in the desert. Metaphorically speaking, because the only thing the two men had in common was that neither accepted luncheon invitations from brokers. No one knew where Goldsack ate—he just disappeared at one o’clock and reappeared at two-thirty.

Carew brought his own vittles to work with him, and either consumed them at his desk or, when the weather was fine, on a bench in Fenchurch Court. He was also often seen walking in the general direction of the Tower of London, but never appeared in any of the restaurants and coffee shops along the way.

Carew’s box was at the opposite end of the Floor from Bullion Bill’s, tucked behind a pillar in an appendix of the Room in the farthest corner away from the entrances. It was so removed from the vortex of activity around the rostrum and the balcony circle that it seemed not to be in Lloyd’s at all. Brokers only passed through the area to get to the couple of telephone booths behind a wall from which they could call their offices, and a number of empty boxes where they might get away from the hurly-burly, review their placements, or converse privately with a colleague. The air here was so still that the Caller’s voice sounded like that of an Arcadian shepherd summoning his sheep from a distant hillside.

As general as intelligence was in the Lloyd’s community about the dryness of the Caruvian underwriting well, first knowledge of it came as part of the initiation process or hazing that each trainee broker was subjected to on the occasion of his being sent up to Lloyd’s for the first time. It was a ritual like that of a new boy at public school being ordered by a prefect to go to the tuck shop to buy a tin of elbow grease.

The venerable underwriter was a soft touch for a big line, the neophyte would be assured; without doubt he was the best underwriter on whom to cut one’s teeth as an intermediary because he was an easy touch and wrote anything and everything that was put before him.

Then, inevitably and without exception, so conclusively would the inductee be apprised on this expectant visit to Mr Carew of his disinterest in commerce, that there was no point in ever going back for a second try; and no one ever did.

Fortunately Carew was a gentle and patient man, who did not object, or if he did he never showed it or said anything to that effect, to the tired old joke that was played, at his expense, on each inductee who made the pilgrimage to see the promiscuous Mr Carew, anxious only that he should not be the first broker to have his risk declined by him.

As diffident as Carew’s manner was, he liked people, and was always interested to meet and talk to newcomers to the market. It made a change from tying trout and salmon fishing flies, which is how he spent much of his time, on a vice that he clamped to the edge of his small box, which had the usual tower of drawers and shelves in the middle, and a single seat opposite him that was usually stacked with fishing paraphernalia.

With no portfolio to manage, Carew had no need of a deputy, entry boy or claims underwriter, and his only company was the occasional visiting youth. He turned out some beautiful fishing patterns, selecting hair and feathers from a variety of animal pelts and bird remiges and rectrices, including those of some protected or endangered species of mammal, and plumage that had last been seen on the hats of Edwardian women.

Those of an ornithological bent who swung by the box to get a look, swore that some of the birds were either extinct or so scarce as to induce apoplexy in any Audubon Society member who saw them.

When he was approached, Carew would look up from winding a harl from a feather round the shank of a hook, or lacquering the whipping on a head, and smile. Ranged on the shelf above him, the broker would note, were the standard reference books of the Merchant Marine by Jane’s, ordered by year; and some long out of print works of naval history, bound in cracked dull leather, and accounts of the voyages of early explorers. There were a few rectangular metal binders with snap hinges and yellow index sheets, but they were empty of underwriting information cards.

What was in the drawers and cupboards above and below was anyone’s guess. Also puzzling to the virgin pedlars was the absence of tell-tale signs of underwriting, such as ink on the blotting-paper, stamps and pens, and nubs on the leaves of scrap paper that hung from the hook on the side of the box.

Puzzling, at least, until Mr Carew, having listened attentively to the young persons’ faltering presentation of whatever it was that they had brought for his delectation, said that he was very sorry but really this was not his cup of tea…or coffee. He would thank them for coming to see him, apologize for not being able to help out, and wish each broker good fortune in the placement. Upon which the poor tyro would depart, certain that he would be fired as soon as he got back to the office, ridiculed by everyone as he cleared out his desk, and compelled to apply for a job as a shop assistant.

But that did not happen. Instead, whomever it was that he reported to—at Chandlers it was Oink—would take him into an empty room, shut the door, and cheerfully explain that all new bugs had to go through what he just had, and that they were expected to be good sports about it, bearing in mind that next time they would be ones laughing at someone else’s expense.

After being sworn to keep the thing a secret upon pain of much worse than firing, the blooded broker would be bought drinks that night and told to make the best of his career opportunity.

Which was all very well, but still no one was any the wiser about what made Carew tick. For lack of a better explanation the reluctant consensus was that he must have such a scholarly interest in risk that he preferred to confine himself to the theoretical side of it, and refrain from putting his expert knowledge to practical purpose and his reputation for an empty but unsullied record on the line.

In other words Carew was not the sort of person to write a Tonner.

Tonner policies were not for the faint of heart or poor of spirit or weak of stomach. They originated as simple bets by the armchair swashbucklers at Lloyd’s that a ship reported missing would either come home, or it would not. Even the most intellectually challenged subscribing underwriter understood this to mean that the premium was either free money, because whatever might happen had likely already happened, or that he had just assumed a share of a total loss. Win or lose, it was an opportunity to benefit mankind by slowing the growth of the black art of actuarial science, and confound those who practised it.

Over time, the search for a definition of what constituted a tonner prompted underwriters to enter into so many of them, and to come up with such increasingly liberal interpretations of what that construction might be, that ultimately they were banned as being contrary to the spirit of Lloyd’s, where men were supposed to have at least a foggy idea of what they were insuring.

But until the gavel came down, in a ruling by the Committee that every policy must have at least a smidgen of insurable interest to it or else it was nothing more than a wager, when a tonner was placed and sent to the Lloyd’s Policy Signing Office, or Bureau, for processing the clerk, having scratched his head in vain, stamped the thing “Policy Proof of Interest”—a sort of
res ipsa loquitur
that was a cop-out but it would have to do—and chucked it in his Out tray.

In the non-marine market, the nearest thing to a tonner was called a Contingency Risk, in order to make it sound more dignified and above board than the nebulous deals that were consummated downstairs. The difference, supposedly, was that whereas a tonner in its innocent infancy was an indemnification against ignorance, a contingency contract was an insurance against the possibility of financial loss as a result of something that had yet to happen, such as a golfer making a hole-in-one at next week’s golf tournament and winning a motor car.

One senior broker recalled, only too well, such a risk that he had been asked to place, guaranteeing the success of the Inuit whale blubber harvest. It was a three-year deal, or ordeal, meaning that the subscribing underwriter or underwriters could sustain a total loss on each of three consecutive harvesting seasons.

But since Lloyd’s did not permit commitments for longer than a twelvemonth at a time, there was a merciful let-out provision enabling those whose love of whale blubber did not match the obsessive level of the Inuits’, to commute their sentences at the end of each annual period, and wait for a broker to bring in something that was more to their taste, such as the ability of pigs to meet their truffle-hunting quotas.

The broker had in mind as his sole underwriter on the contract an old-school stalwart called Clotworthy Blandblind. There were very few such sportsmen as Blandblind who, in addition to not being able to resist the occasional punt, would be greedy enough to swallow the whole thing. But despite it being especially bad practice to accept a line of one hundred per cent on such a risk…because in the event of a loss in the first year no underwriter in his right mind, and many were, would agree to continue, which would require the broker to find someone who was prepared to deem the incident a “non-repeat” loss and take up the slack, and nobody was that...well, there were very few such sportsmen around as Clotworthy Blandblind. Actually, none.

In this case the broker was fortunate in that, having fagged for Clotworthy B. at Eton, he had grown sufficiently friendly with him in after-years, based on a shared love of racing, as to own a leg of one of C.B.’s thoroughbred horses. There were a couple of other things going in the broker’s favour: the sum of the beast’s quarters had just won by three times his length at Newmarket; and the day that the broker chose to do battle on behalf of the blubbering Inuits was Blandblind’s birthday.

The broker timed his appearance at the Blandblind Syndicate box for a quarter to one, when Clotworthy was pawing the ground with impatience to race for the finishing-post at the Marine Club, where he would be awarded, in place of a cup or rosette, the first of a number of large pink gins.

The reason for the broker’s timing his arrival for just before lunch was that, a) everyone in the market knew how much Blandblind looked forward to lunch time; and, b) everyone also knew, in consequence of a), never to go and see Blandblind after lunch either on his birthday or on any other day of the year when he was in training for his anniversary to roll around again.

A hint to the uninformed regarding the foregoing was seeing Blandblind passed out at the box every afternoon with head on folded arms on his desk, dreaming of winning the Derby while the other underwriters on his box ignored him and carried on with their brokers as usual. There was no broker in the Room who would risk incurring Blandblind’s wrath by waking him up, possibly while his animal was in the lead on the final furlong.

On this day, just as Blandblind had consulted his watch for the tenth time in as many minutes, and was preparing to whinny and plunge out of the starting-gate, he sighted, out of the corner of his eye through the pre-prandial scurry in the Room, an unhandicapped loose horse; which, as it got closer, proved not to be a horse at all but his one-time fag with an expression of determination on his face.

C.B. froze. He knew how few and far between were this very important executive broker’s man’s visits to the Room, laden as he was with the demands of management, and he knew that he was coming to see him. The underwriter’s grey lined features turned whiter than the ice-block lodgings of the Inuits whose livelihoods he was about to learn so little about, and he slumped in his seat and wondered how long it would take before delirium tremens and visions of pink elephants instead of pink gins set in.