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SECTION 3
ECCENTRIC HABITS
In the ten days before the planned journey to New York I received some rather peculiar initiations into the customs existing in the environment of Lloyd’s, at least as far as the private life financed by business is concerned. Raymond Barley, called Ray for short, was the craziest of all of the directors at CSB. He was active in North American business and kept two families, one in London and one in Houston, Texas, and the two knew nothing of each other. Later he was to lose both of them, as so often happens when universal favor is stretched too far. Every person has only the portion assigned to him and it is sometimes hard to know when this has been exhausted. Ray was small of stature and sent out immeasurable and oddball energy. He wore rimless golden glasses and had a GI haircut. He was constantly in a good mood and had an inimitably penetrating laugh. He often came accompanying a client who lived on the Cayman Islands, where he ran a so-called „Captive“ Insurance Company - only god knew what he was really doing - perhaps money laundering was my first thought. The client was tall and of massive build and always wore a Texan hat, a Bolo necktie and a huge family crest ring on his small fleshy finger. His name was John Edward Harding III, which is meant to express in history-obsessed America that he was the grandson of an ancestor of the same name, each generation marked with a number, so that there could never be any confusion. Ray had got him access to Lloyd’s room, and even there he did not take off his hat, as though it had grown onto his head. He was an original and was tolerated with a curious mixture of mockery and esteem for his irrepressible „being different“ so on display, something deeply anchored in the personality of certain people. One midday Ray said we are going to a „fun lunch“ in the Directors‘ Club, members only, and that I would be invited to go too. In a side street of the City we went down an endless stairway and rang on the bell of a locked door. We stepped into a restaurant that did not distinguish itself very much in its furnishings from other places. The tables were covered in white cloths and there is traditional English food: pea soup, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, and bread and butter pudding. Only the service is outside the respectable framework. The servers were exclusively tall, good-looking girls who looked after their guests with bare bosoms. Ray was very well known there. He ordered a bottle of Santenay 1973. The pretty serving girl leaned over my shoulder, and I felt the firm pressure of her young breasts, and that held me back for a long time from eating.
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