Frameshift (14 page)

“My Bryan was born right here in the good old U.S. of A. In Lincoln, Nebraska, to be exact.”

“What about his politics?”

“Republican — although sometimes he couldn’t bother getting off his duff to vote.”

“And his religion?”

“Presbyterian.”

“Did he go to university?”

“Bryan?” She laughed. “He’s an eighth-grade dropout.” She held up a hand. “Doesn’t mean he was stupid, mind you. He was a good man, and he could fix just about anything. But he didn’t have a lot of school.”

“And he was older than me, wasn’t he?”

“Depends. You as young as you look?”

“I’m thirty-three.”

“Well, my Bryan was forty-nine.” She grew a bit wistful at the mention of the age. “There’s nothing worse than dying young, is there?”

Pierre nodded. Nothing worse.

Pierre looked over the counter in the lab. Ever since he’d been a little boy, he’d hated cleaning up after himself. It just wasn’t nearly as much fun putting things away as it was taking them out. But it had to be done. He’d spread beakers and retort stands all across the countertop. And some of the labware had to be carefully washed; a molecular-biology lab was a perfect breeding ground for germs, after all.

He dismantled the retort stand and put it away in one of the cupboards.

He then picked up a beaker and took it over to the sink, rinsing it out under cold water, then placing it in a rack to dry. Next, he got his petri dishes and put them in a special bag for disposal. He returned to the table and reached out for a large flask, picked it up, and watched it fall from his trembling hand. Shards of glass went everywhere and the flask’s liquid contents made a yellowish splash across the tiled floor.

Pierre swore in French. Just tired, he told himself. Long day. Still a bit distracted from the meeting with Bryan Proctor’s widow. Need a good night’s sleep.

He went to get the broom and dustpan, and began sweeping up the broken glass.

Tired. Nothing more than that.

And yet—

God, would he have to go through this every time he dropped something? Every time he took a misstep? Every time he bumped into a wall?

Damn it — he — was — just — tired! Tired, that’s all.

Unless—

Unless it was fucking goddamn Huntington’s disease, at last rearing its monstrous head.

No. It was nothing.

Nothing.

He carried the dustpan over to the garbage pail and emptied it.

Tomorrow, everything would be fine.

Surely, it would be fine.

Pierre and Molly stood in their bathroom early in the morning and looked at the test strip together. A blue plus sign blossomed into existence on its white surface.

“
Oui?
” said Pierre.

“Wow,” said Molly. “Wow.”

Pierre kissed his wife. “Congratulations.”

“We’re going to be parents,” said Molly dreamily.

Pierre stroked her hair. “I never thought this could happen. Not for me.”

“It’s going to be wonderful.”

“You’ll make a terrific mother.”

“And you’ll make a great daddy.”

Pierre smiled at the thought. “Do you want a boy or a girl?”

“You know, we probably could have asked Burian. He could have sorted his sperm, if we’d told him. There’s a difference between male-producing sperm and female-producing, isn’t there?” Pierre nodded. Molly paused, considering his question. “I don’t know. I suppose a girl, but that’s only because of my family life, I’m sure. My mother and sister and I were alone for a long time before Paul showed up. I’m not sure how I’d be with a little boy.”

“You’d do fine.”

“Do you have a preference?”

“Me? No, I guess not. I mean, I know that every man is supposed to want a son he can play catch with, but…” He trailed off, deciding not to complete the thought. “Maybe having a girl
would
be simpler,” he said.

Molly had missed, or was choosing to ignore, the undercurrent. “I really don’t care which it is,” she said at last, her voice still dreamy. “Just as long as it’s healthy.”

After a long day at the Human Genome Center, Joan Dawson was pleased to be approaching home. She was walking from the BART station; the walk was almost a mile, but she did it every night. At her age, she wasn’t up to any more-strenuous exercise, but she did spend all day at her secretarial desk, and diabetics had to be particular about their weight.

There was hardly anyone around; she lived in a quiet neighborhood.

When she and her husband had bought here in 1959, there had been lots of young families. The neighborhood had grown up with them, but although these had qualified as starter homes all those years ago, they were out of the reach of today’s young couples. Now this area was home mostly to elderly people — the lucky ones still husband and wife, but many of the others, like Joan, having lost their spouses over the years. Her Bud had passed on in 1987.

Joan came up the walk to the front of her house, opened the lid on the mailbox, scooped up the bills, smiled when she saw her copy of
Ellery Queen’s
had arrived, fumbled for her keys, and let herself in. She turned on the porch light, made her way up to her living room, and —

“Joan Dawson?”

Her heart practically shot out of her chest, it was beating so hard. She turned around. A young white man with a shaven head and tattoos of skulls on his forearms was looking at her with pale blue eyes.

Joan was still holding her purse. She thrust it at him. “Take it! Take it!

You can have my money.”

The man was wearing a black Megadeath T-shirt with a denim vest over it, jeans with artful slashes in them, and gray Adidas. He shook his head.

“It’s not your money I’m after.”

Joan started backing away, still holding the purse in front of her, but now as if it were a shield. “No,” she said. “No — there’s jewelry upstairs.

Lots of jewelry. You can have it all.”

The punk started walking toward her. “I don’t want your jewelry, either.”

Joan had backed into the glass-topped coffee table. She tumbled backward over it, and the glass cracked with a sound like a rifle going off.

She scrambled to her feet. Pain stabbed at her from her ankle; she’d wrenched it badly going down. “Please,” she said, whimpering now.

“Please, not that.”

The skinhead stopped approaching for a moment, a look of revulsion on his face. “Fuck, woman, don’t be disgusting. You’re old enough to be my grandmother.”

Joan felt a surge of hope fighting to the surface against all the terror.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She’d backed against the rough brick of the fireplace now.

The man pulled his vest open. He had a long single-edged hunting knife with a black handle in a sheath under his arm. He pulled out the weapon and amused himself for a second by sending a glint of light playing down Joan’s horrified face.

Joan fumbled for the fireplace poker, found it, raised it in front of her.

“Stay back!” she said. “What do you want?”

The man grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth. “I want,” he said, “for you to be dead.”

Joan inhaled deeply, prelude to a scream, but before she could get it out, the man flipped the knife out of his hand, and it landed smack-dab in the middle of her chest, burying itself halfway to the hilt. She slumped to the tiled area just in front of the fireplace, her mouth still in the perfect O of the stillborn scream.

Pierre sat in front of his UNIX workstation. The monitor was on, but he wasn’t reading its display; rather, he was leafing through the
Daily Californian
, the UCB student newspaper. News about the campus football team; big debates about UCB’s elimination of racial quotas for students; a letter to the editor complaining about Felix Sousa.

Pierre’s mind wandered back to the last time he’d spoken to somebody about Sousa. He’d been talking to that strange bull-doglike fellow who had blustered into this very room over three months ago. Ari something. No, no — not Ari.
Avi
. Avi — Avi
Meyer
, that was it.

Pierre never had figured out what that had all been about. He closed the newspaper and turned to his computer, opening a window on the governmental telephone database CD-ROM, accessible through the LAN.

Avi Meyer had said he worked for the Department of Justice. The database didn’t contain individual agent listings, but Pierre did find a general-inquiry number in Washington. He highlighted the number, pressed the key for his telephone program, ticked the personal-call option in the dialogue box that popped up, and let his modem dial the call for him while he held his telephone handset to his ear.

“Justice,” said a female voice at the other end. All that was missing, thought Pierre, were Truth and the American Way.

“Hello,” he said. “Do you have someone there named Avi Meyer?”

Keyclicks. “Yes. He’s out of town right now, but I can put you through to his voice mail, or let you speak to a receptionist at OSI.”

“OSI?” said Pierre.

“The Office of Special Investigations,” said the voice.

“Oh, of course,” said Pierre. “Well, if you say he’s not in, I’ll just try again another time. Thanks.” He hung up, then clicked on his CompuServe icon and logged on to Magazine Database Plus, which had become one of Pierre’s favorite research tools since he’d discovered it a couple of months ago. It contained the full text of all the articles in over two hundred general-interest and specialty magazines — including such publications as

Science
and
Nature
 — going back as far as 1986. He typed in two search strings, “Special Investigations” and “OSI,” and selected whole-words-only, so that the latter wouldn’t result in a deluge of matches on “deposits” or “Bela Lugosi.”

The first hit was in an article from
People
magazine about Lee Majors.

In his 1970s TV series
The Six Million Dollar Man
, he’d worked for a fictitious government agency called the OSI. Pierre continued his search.

The second hit was right on target: an article in the
New Republic
from 1993. The highlighted sentence began: “Then there is the conduct of Demjanjuk’s major enemy in this country, the Office of Special Investigations, which set the wheels of injustice moving against him…”

Pierre read on, fascinated. The OSI was indeed part of the Department of Justice — a division founded in 1979, devoted to exposing Nazi war criminals and collaborators in the United States.

The case against this Demjanjuk fellow — a retired auto-worker from Cleveland, a simple man with just a fourth-grade education — had started out as the OSI’s first big success. Demjanjuk had been accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a guard at the Treblinka death camp. He’d been extradited to Israel, where he was found guilty in 1988, the second of two war-crimes trials ever held there. As in the first trial, that of Adolf Eichmann, Demjanjuk was sentenced to death.

But the OSI’s reputation was blackened when, on appeal, the Israeli supreme court overturned the conviction of John Demjanjuk. In an inquest into the whole mess, U.S. federal judge Thomas Wiseman found that the OSI had failed to meet even “the bare minimum standards of professional conduct” in its proceedings against Demjanjuk, presuming him to be guilty and ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

Pierre continued reading. The OSI had known that the real name of the man they’d wanted was Marchenko, not Demjanjuk. Now, yes, John Demjanjuk
had
listed his mother’s maiden name incorrectly as Marchenko on his application for refugee status, but he’d later claimed he’d simply forgotten her real name, and so had just filled in a common Ukrainian one.

Pierre skimmed other articles about the Demjanjuk affair, from
Time, Maclean’s
, the
Economist, National Review, People
, and elsewhere. He found part of Demjanjuk’s life story interesting because of the rocky marriage of his own parents, Elisabeth and Alain Tardivel. Demjanjuk had married a woman named Vera in a displaced-persons camp on September 1,1947. Nothing remarkable about that — except that when Vera and Demjanjuk had met, she was already married to another DP, Eugene Sakowski. Sakowski went to Belgium for three weeks, and, while he was gone, John Demjanjuk had taken up with Vera; when Sakowski returned, Vera divorced him and married John.

Pierre let his breath escape in a long sigh. Triangles were everywhere, it seemed. He wondered what his own life would have been like if his mother had ignored the church and divorced Alain Tardivel so that she could have married Pierre’s real father, Henry Spade. Things would have been so—

A sentence on the screen caught his eye: a description of Demjanjuk.

Magazine Database Plus contained text only — no photographs — but a picture nonetheless formed in Pierre’s mind: a Ukrainian, bald, sturdy, thick necked, with thin lips, almond eyes, and protruding ears.

Shit…

It couldn’t be.

It could
not
be.

The man had won a Nobel Prize, after all.

Yeah — and fucking Kurt Waldheim had ended up as United Nations secretary-general.

Bald, protruding ears. Ukrainian.

Demjanjuk had been identified based on those features. But Demjanjuk had not been Ivan the Terrible.

Meaning somebody else had been.

Someone the articles called Ivan Marchenko.

Somebody who might very well still be at large.

Burian Klimus was Ukrainian, and by his own recent statement had been bald since youth. He had large ears — not unusual for a man his age — but Pierre had never thought of them as protruding. Still, a little plastic surgery could have corrected that years ago.

And Avi Meyer was a Nazi hunter.

A Nazi hunter who had been sniffing around the Lawrence Berkeley Lab—

Meyer had asked about several geneticists, but he hadn’t really been interested in all of them. He’d consistently referred to Donna Yamashita as Donna Yamasaki, for instance — there’s no way he wouldn’t have known the correct name of someone he was actually investigating.

And, anyway, neither Yamashita nor Toby Sinclair — the other geneticist Meyer had asked about — was old enough to be a war criminal.

But Burian Klimus was.

Pierre shook his head.

God.

If he was right, if
Meyer
was right—

Then Molly was carrying within her the child of a monster.