hand, he could pop off before the ink was dry on the agreement, thus providing the investor with a much faster payoff on his investment.
And there was always the investor's nightmare. 'The lure of the cure,' Carl drawled. 'Imagine betting the kids' college funds on the lifespan of some poor set designer, and then one day medical science tells you
your kids'll have their doctorates long before he's done crying over his Judy Garland records.' He rolled his eyes. 'Except it won't happen that way, even if we get that long-awaited medical miracle. You might develop a vaccine to prevent future cases, you might come up with a magic bullet to knock out or arrest the virus, but how are you going to breathe life into a completely devastated immune system? Oh, doctors keep gradually extending the survival time, and that's all factored into the equation. But those of us who are accepted as parties to viatical transactions are past the point of no return. The kids can go to college after all. The investment's safe.'
'Some investment,' I said.
'Strikes you as ghoulish, doesn't it?'
'I just can't imagine writing out a check and then sitting back and waiting for some stranger to die so I can collect.'
'I know what you mean. There have been articles written about this, you know, and not just in the gay press.'
'I must have missed them. The man I spoke with did say something about negative publicity.'
'Some writers think it's just awful,' he said. 'Reprehensible to profit from the misfortunes of others, blah blah blah. Horrible to think of anyone making money from AIDS. Well, honey, what do you think the drug companies are doing? What do you think the researchers are doing?' He held up a hand. 'Don't tell me there's a difference. I know that. I also know it's not people with AIDS who get upset about viatical transactions, because for us it's a godsend.'
'Really.'
'Absolutely. Matt, once you've been diagnosed with full-blown AIDS you damn well know you're dying, and this many years into the epidemic you've got a fairly good idea what else the future holds. If somebody in Texas makes it possible for you to live decently and comfortably in the time you've got left, how are you going to think of him? As a bloodsucker or as a benefactor?'
'I see what you mean. But—'
'But even so you can't help seeing one party as a buzzard and the other as roadkill. It's a natural reaction. One company even set up a sort of pool, like a mutual fund for viatical transactions. Instead of an individual buying a single policy, the investment funds are combined and the risk is spread out over a whole portfolio of policies.'
'The risk of longevity.'
He nodded. He toyed with a stapler on his desk, and I remembered his dead lover's pipes and wondered what he'd done with them, and when. 'But most policies are assigned to individual investors,'
he said. 'I think the paperwork must be a lot simpler that way. And there's no great need to spread the risk, because there's not really very much risk to spread. 'Viaticum, money given to a traveler.'
Everyone's a traveler, you know. And, sooner or later, everybody makes the trip.'
* * *
Back at the Chase branch, Nancy Chang went over Byron Leopold's records again, working backward from the date when he'd deposited the Viaticom check. Every three months there was a check drawn to the order of Illinois Sentinel Life. The checks had stopped two months before he got the Viaticom check.
'He transferred ownership of the policy,' I said, 'so he stopped paying the premiums, and that became the responsibility of the other party to the transaction.'
'And when he died—'
'The insurance company would have paid the money directly to the beneficiary. But who is he and how much did they pay him?'
' 'Always the beautiful answer that asks the more beautiful question,' ' she said, and laughed at my evident puzzlement, 'e.e.
Cummings. Though I suppose it would be more appropriate to quote Wallace Stevens, wouldn't it?'
'Did he have something to say about questions and answers?'
'I'm not sure what he had to say,' she said, 'because I could never tell what he was getting at. But he worked all his life as an executive with an insurance company. And at the same time he was one of the leading American poets of his time. Can you imagine?'
* * *
I knew I was going to be spending some time on the phone, and I decided I might as well make free calls from my hotel room. If I could work pro bono, so could the phone company.
I called Illinois Sentinel Life, headquartered in Springfield, and got shunted around from one person to another. I didn't get the feeling that any of the men or women I spoke to were among the leading American poets of our time, but how could I be sure?
I finally wound up talking to a man named Louis Leeds who told me, after a certain amount of fencing, that Byron Wayne Leopold had indeed been an Illinois Sentinel Life policyholder, that the face amount of the policy had been $75,000, and that ownership of the policy had been transferred on such and such a date to a Mr. William Havemeyer of Lakewood, Ohio.
'Not Texas,' I said.
No, he said, not Texas. Lakewood was in Ohio, and he wouldn't swear to it but it seemed to him that it was, a suburb of Cleveland. The lake would be Erie, he said.
'And the wood?'
