,And insurance has been effected outside Lloyd's. The risk was led by
London and European Insurance. Again, Duncan was self-insuring,
Nicholas noted grimly, but not all of it. And further lines were
written by - Lazarus listed the other companies which carried a part of
the risk, with whom Duncan had re-insured. But it was all too thin, too
nebulous. Again, only careful study of the figures would enable
Nicholas to analyse what Duncan was doing, how much was real insurance
and how much was bluff to convince his financiers that the risk was
truly covered, and their investment protected, Some of the names of the
re-insurers were familiar, they had been on the list of transferees who
had taken stock positions in Christy Marine.
Is Duncan buying insurance with capital? Nicholas pondered. Was he
buying at desperate prices. He must have cover, of course. Without
insurance the finance houses, the banks and st'tutons which had loaned
the money to Christy Marine to build the monstrous tanker would dig in
against Duncan. His own shareholders would raise such hell - No, Duncan
Alexander had to have cover, even if it was paper only, without
substance, a mere incestuous circle, a snake eating itself tail first.
Oh, but the trail was so cleverly confused, so carefully swept and tied
up, only Nicholas knowledge of Christy Marine made him suspicious, and
might take a team of investigators years to unravel the tortured
tapestry of deceit. In the first it had occurred to Nicholas that the
easiest way to stop Duncan Alexander was to leak his freshly gleaned
suspicions to Duncan's major creditors, to those who had financed the
building of Golden Dawn, But he realized that this was not enough.
There were no hard facts, it was all inference and innuendo.
By the time the facts could be exhumed and laid out in all their
putrefaction for autopsy, Golden Dawn would be on the high seas,
carrying a million tons of crude. Duncan might have won sufficient time
to make his profit and sell out to some completely uncontrollable Greek
or Chinaman, as he had boasted he would do. It would not be so simple
to stop Duncan Alexander, it was folly to have believed that for one
moment. Even if his creditors were made aware of the flimsy insurance
cover over Golden Dawn, were they too deeply in already? Would they not
then accept the risks, spreading them where they could, and simply twist
the financial rope a little tighter around Duncan's throat. No, it was
not the way to stop him, Duncan had to be forced to remodify the giant
tanker's hull, forced to make her an acceptable moral risk, forced to
accept the standard Nicholas had originally stipulated for the vessel.
Lazar-us had finished the insurance portion of his report and he stood
up abruptly, just as Miss Lovelace was about to attempt the impossible.
With relief, Nick followed him down the aisle and into the chill of a
Parisian evening, and they breathed the fumes that the teeming city
exhaled as Lazarus led him back eastwards through the Arrondissement
with those little dancing steps, while he recited the details of the
charters of all Christy Marine's vessels, the charterer, the rates, the
dates of expiry of contract; and Nicholas recognized most of them,
contracts that he himself had negotiated, or those that had been renewed
on expiry with minor alterations to the terms. He was relying on the
