The Triple Goddess (42 page)

‘Where’d they dig you up from, sonny? Oxbridge, I suppose. Did Daddy get you the job? Did he buy you a shiny red sports car, and tell you how proud you’re going to make him? At home as you are amongst your cronies on the cocktail circuit, all n
ai
ce and ref
ai
ned, in here it’s a different story, isn’t it? In here it’s “Er-er-er,” and “Sorry, sir.” What a promising start. Old Sutters won’t harm you, they said; his bark’s worse than his bite, and he’ll write a line on your cargo of Norway rats and thank you for...’

The Screamer draws a deep breath—

‘…for
insulting
me, you ugglesome boy! What made you think I would touch this vermin with a bargepole? How d’you know these gerbils are not carrying bubonic plague? Where is the disease-free warranty, the certificates of inspection, and of pedigree, and the guarantee of provenance? You don’t have them, do you? you little bastard, you don’t have them because they don’t exist!’

Sutcliffe pinches the broker’s buttock very hard and twists the flesh, in a schoolboy snake bite, as he glances again at the slip. ‘Horrors! It gets worse. A penny a tail? Is that what you’re offering me, a miserable penny a tail? Since when has the rate on gerbils ever been less than a penny and a half?’

The broker mumbles something. ‘Aha! How do I know when brokers are lying? Because their lips move.’ Sutcliffe tosses the slip onto the floor, sticks out a short leg and stamps his Gucci loafer on it. ‘I’ll tell you what. The owner of this gerbil farm, if it exists at all, is a crook; the supplier is a crook, the agent’s a crook, and the shipper’s a crook. You can tell them so from me, Herbert Sutcliffe, leader of gerbils to the gentry.

‘So off you go now, sonny, and dry your tears like a good little Old Etonian. Go and see the Shifting Sands Mutual Insurance Company; they’ll take this Pied Piper total loss in the making off your hands.’ His voice rises to a scream. ‘But it’s not for
MEEE!
Ee-EH!
It makes me
MA-AD
to see…’

‘Hwa hwa hwa,’ the staff on the box mouth mirthlessly for the tenth time that day; and There-But-For-The-Grace-of-God-Go-I expressions creep onto the faces of the other brokers in line. Furtively they check their offerings for disease warranties, and certificates of provenance, and several tiptoe away.

One broker who has a jeremiad of gerbils, or a lamentation of lemmings, to dispose of, realizes with dismay that he is offering a quarter penny per tail less than his luckless competitor. ‘Bugger,’ he says to the man behind him in line, cocking an ear to the Tannoy; ‘there’s my name again, that’s the third time I’ve been called, so it must be something important. You can have my place and welcome to it.’ And he slopes off.

Fortunately, there was no point in Arbella visiting Screaming Lord Sutcliffe; unless she were to add a section to the Ralegh risk covering the rats in the Tower of London.

Her first port of call was Geoffroy—his surname was triple-barrelled and no one bothered with it. Geoffroy, despite his youth, was the underwriter for one of the biggest and most prestigious syndicates at Lloyd’s. He was long and languid, with fair thinning hair and a peaches-and-cream complexion. He wore out-of-fashion bespoke suits, and striped or pastel-shaded Sea Island cotton shirts, which were faded and frayed at the cuffs in the careless way that bespeaks patrician-hood. At home at his country mansion in Gloucestershire this attire was exchanged for flat cap, check shirt, and tweeds.

Nobody knew where Geoffroy lived during the week, or whether he was married, and he did not care to enlighten amyone. He was never seen driving a car or taking taxis; people spotted him coming to work by tube or train from a different direction each day.

Although he was a market leader for non-marine catastrophe reinsurance contracts, with limits in the hundreds of millions of dollars, Geoffroy, who also happened to be Lord Lieutenant of his home county, did not put on airs, and treated the Waiters in the same way as he did senior brokers. He lounged and enjoyed himself, ribbing those who came to see him with easy humour, comfortable in the knowledge that no one could best him in negotiation, because he did not negotiate.

Geoffroy made business seem like a hobby, and had no interest in joining the market committees that other leaders went on to reinforce their prestige. He did not take appointments or go on long pissy lunches with his friends in the market, but was always as accessible at the box to trainees as he was to executives; with whom he would share an anecdote, joke or piece of gossip before getting down to brass tacks.

While other leaders sweated over complicated sums, Geoffroy had the facility of plucking from his mercurial mind a Goldilocks rate that was neither so high as to give the client apoplexy, or so low as to fail to generate support from the following markets. However major the risk, nothing fazed him, and he never agonized over a decision, had second thoughts, or lost a moment’s sleep over the massive liabilities that he exposed his syndicate to.

Geoffroy was a good sport about coming to brokers’ lunches, where he would drink a single Tuborg lager, and charm their most obnoxious clients. He would ask about their families and golf handicaps and where they went on vacation; in the evenings he would chat up their fat and overdressed wives, and laugh at stories of how they had spent the day melting their husbands’ credit cards on West End shopping sprees.

If he accepted an invitation to join a business luncheon with a broker and representatives from a client company, at a round table in the River Room at the Savoy, and the Queen Mother entered with an entourage, as everyone respectfully stopped talking and stood, she would nod at Geoffroy and say, “Oh hello, Geoffr’y. See you at Asc’t.” To which Geoffroy, bowing from the neck not the waist, would reply, “Mam,”—not a long “Marm,” or “Ma’am”, per protocol. There was not a client in the world who could fail to be awed by such connections.

This took a burden of entertainment off the tired brokers, for which they were grateful, and they repaid him by doing everything they could to sell his terms. Because he lent such kudos to a slip, the client usually decided in the end, after much bellyaching, that yes, he could live with Geoffroy’s terms. For in truth the risk manager in Boston or Boise had no idea himself as to what his company should be paying, except that his boss, who had no idea either, wanted it to be less.

Since Geoffroy was an expert in everything, Arbella could not afford not to see him. Fortunately when she approached his box, his customary queue had not yet formed, and he was doing the
Times
crossword without filling in the squares.

‘Oh hi, Arbella,’ he said, smiling and pushing the folded newspaper to one side. ‘How’s tricks?’

‘Fine, Geoffroy, thanks. Yourself?’

Geoffroy stifled a yawn, took the slip which Arbella was hesitating to place before him, and sat up fractionally straighter. ‘H’m. Carew again, I see. You’re quite the pair, aren’t you?’ Of course he knew of her triumph.

Arbella explained everything. As aware as she was that underneath Geoffroy’s shell of congeniality lay a great intellect, there was something about him that encouraged straightforwardness and greater than usual frankness; and she needed to become comfortable with telling her story.

‘Well, well,’ he said when she got to the end; it was so like him not to be surprised, or interrupt, but this was an ominous response. ‘Jolly interesting,’ he added, giving the slip back to her. ‘Thanks for the show, but Lloyd’s isn’t supposed to write financial guarantee. Good luck, though. I’ll be very interested to learn how you get on.’

Arbella felt depression sink like cold porridge in her stomach. Yesterday’s market heroine was about to become a laughing-stock. She longed for a prestigious piece of business, something big but uncontroversial that would ensure her a welcome from respected figures like Geoffroy. Who even when they declined her contracts would do so for reasonable reasons, such as that the commission was too high, or the loss to premium ratio; with excuses such as “Sorry, it’s too cheap,” or “I’m full on this already through another broker,” or “Don’t write the class,” or “Not without a such-and-such clause on it.”

With ego-salving comments like “I’ll take a pass, but tell Hiram Ledbetter [the client] and his wife Dottie, Hello, and say I’m looking forward to seeing them at The Greenbrier later in the year and pairing Hiram at golf.”

Even, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this one,” or “I don’t trust the client, his eyes are too close together” would be acceptable.

But Oink, who was as mean as he was greedy, and guarded his accounts jealously, would never entrust her with one of the jewels in the Chandler crown.

In an attempt to distance herself from failure, she withdrew and headed for the diagonally opposite corner of the Room, to see Brillo.

Brillo, so called because his hair was wiry like the steel-wool kitchen scouring pad of that proprietary name, was a Geoffroy wannabe. He led many of the horizontal or “excess layers”, which catastrophe programs were sectioned into, that Geoffroy did not, on the sound principle that an underwriter was ill advised to take across-the-board participations on a placement in case it “totalled”.

The two underwriters could not have been more different in appearance and character. Brillo was a short aggressive man, who jiggled up and down in his seat, and cast threatening glances at those who approached the box, to warn them against the folly of wasting his time. While Geoffroy seemed to pluck the right rate out of the air, Brillo sweated over the business of underwriting, and expended as much energy on contracts as if he were running a marathon.

For Brillo there was no such thing as too much information, and he had a passion for actuarial models and mathematical formulae. On the worldwide property business that made up the bulk of his portfolio, he would track weather patterns with the assiduity of a detective hunting down a master criminal.

Brillo had an inexhaustible appetite for exhibits, and would throw a wobbly if the broker showed up without every detail to hand that he deemed necessary to include in his calculations. He required biographies of the client company’s key personnel, statements of underwriting philosophy, geographical spreads, policy forms, and analyses of the legal “climate” in the subject state or states or country.

He wanted classes of risk broken down by amount of premium and number of policies for each band of limit; details of rate increases and decreases from the previous year; aggregate accumulations of exposure for earthquake and windstorm; PML or probable maximum loss amounts for fire at each key industrial location; and historical losses trended for inflation from the year of occurrence to the present.

Having read all of the foregoing, Brillo would pout and say that there was not enough information, and that the broker would have to go away and get more.

When at last he was supplied a sufficient prodigality of material, like a fractious child who could be pacified by bringing him his toys, Brillo would play with it happily. Humming like a top, he consulted manuals and charts and databases, and created as-if models of hurricane paths and damage estimates at different wind strengths. While so engaged he would not tolerate any “faffling around”, as he called it, by any broker who tried to speed the process up by making a point or explaining something; or attempted to steer him in the direction of any other rate than the one that he would eventually come up with; or tell a joke to distract him; or, God forbid, suggest that, in this instance, science might consider yielding to pragmatism.

After double-checking his sums for errors or inconsistencies, Brillo would begin to bubble with excitement until, like a kettle coming to the boil, steam was almost visible coming out of his ears. Inking the terms on the slip as if there could be no doubt as to their being the correct, and therefore saleable, ones, he would present it triumphantly to the broker; and woe betide the intermediary who protested that he did not have a prayer of getting his client to agree to them…and might he be able to live with half for one year only?

It was with trepidation that Arbella approached Brillo and, after a much shorter than usual wait, presented her document. As he read his mouth began opening and shutting, and he shifted uncomfortably on his seat.

Soon his haywire hair, which he attempted in a schoolboyish way to tame with a brush, began to crackle with static electricity and stood on end. His frame started shaking like an unevenly loaded washing machine in the thirteen hundred revolutions per minute spin cycle. His breath came stertorously through flared nostrils, and he held out a desperate hand for some explanatory exhibit that would avert a seizure.

Before Brillo came apart at the seams, Arbella muttered an apology about not feeling well, grabbed her slip and hastened to the exit.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Breaking for a cup of coffee in the Captain’s Room to collect her thoughts, Arbella decided to visit Sir Walter in search of inspiration. She would not tell Carew; not because she wanted to exclude him, but because a broker did not go bleating to the lead when in trouble on a placement.

Instead of the moody individual she was expecting, Arbella was surprised to find the great man in a welcoming mood. He inquired whether she would like some coffee, and asked Grammaticus if he would be so kind as to bring a fresh pot and another cup. He offered her a cigar, and was disappointed when she declined it; but his interest was roused when Arbella produced a box of cigarettes from her shoulder-bag, put one between her lips and produced an instant noiseless flame from a palm-sized tinder-box.