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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