Frameshift (27 page)

“Who is he?” asked Avi. “What’s his name?”

“Ivan,” said the old man, practically spitting the word. “Ivan Grozny.”

“Are you sure?” said Avi. “Do you have any doubt?”

“Those eyes. That mouth. No — no doubt. It’s him, the very devil himself.”

Avi closed his eyes. “Thank you,” he said. “If we draw up a statement to that effect, will you sign it?”

The old man turned to face Avi. “Where is he? Have you got him?”

“He’s in the United States.”

“You’ll bring him here? To stand trial?”

“Yes.”

The old man was silent for a long time, then: “Yes, I’ll sign a statement.

You’re afraid I’ll die before the trial, aren’t you? Afraid I won’t live to identify him in court?”

Avi said nothing.

“I’ll live,” said the old man simply. “You’ve given me something to live for.” He reached out, trying to find Avi’s hand. They connected, Avi feeling the rough, loose skin. As he reached out, Malamud’s sleeve rode up his forearm, revealing his serial-number tattoo. “Thank you,” said Malamud.

“Thank you for bringing him to justice.” He paused. “What did you say your name was again?”

“Meyer, sir. Agent Avi Meyer, of the United States Department of Justice.”

“I knew someone named Meyer, at Treblinka. Jubas Meyer. He was my partner in removing bodies.”

Avi felt his eyes stinging. “That was my father.”

“A good man, Jubas.”

“He died before I was born,” said Avi. “What — what was he like?”

“Sit down,” said Malamud, “and I’ll tell you.”

Avi looked at Tischler, his eyes asking for the Israeli cop’s indulgence.

“Go ahead,” said Tischler gently. “Family is important.”

Avi took a seat, his heart pounding.

Malamud told him stories about Jubas, and Avi listened, rapt. When the old man had recounted all he could remember, Avi shook his hand again. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you so very much.”

Malamud shook his head, “No, son — thank
you
. Thank you for both of us, both me and your father. He’d be very proud of you today.”

Avi smiled, blinking away tears.

Pierre had done tests on various types of primate DNA collected from the zoo, determining not just the degree of genetic divergence but also specific ways in which key segments of their chromosome thirteens varied.

Pierre and Shari were now immersed in designing a computer simulation.

They integrated all the cytosine-methylation data they had, all the patterns they’d detected in the human and nonhuman introns, all the ideas they had about the significance of codon synonyms.

It was a massive project, with a huge database. The simulation was far too complex for them to run in any reasonable amount of time on their lab’s PC. But LBNL had a Cray supercomputer, a machine that could crunch all the numbers six ways from Sunday in the blink of an eye. Pierre had long ago put in a request for some CPU time on the Cray, and he’d slowly been moving up the queue. His time was scheduled for two weeks from now.

They’d need every minute of that time to get the simulation ready to run, but, assuming everything worked, they’d at last have the answers they’d been looking for.

“David Solomon?”

“Yes?”

“My name is Avi Meyer of the United States government. This is Detective Izzy Tischler of the Israeli police. We’d like to show you some pictures, and see if you recognize any of the people.”

Solomon had a face like a crumpled paper bag, tanned and coarsened from exposure to sun and wind. The only sharp part was his nose, a giant thing, curved and hooked like an eagle’s beak, and webbed over its entire surface by tiny exploded blood vessels. His irises were so dark brown that his pupils were all but lost against them, and the rest of his eyeballs were more yellow than white, shot through with veins.

“Why?” asked Solomon.

“I can tell you after you look at the pictures,” said Avi.

Solomon shrugged. “Okay.”

“May we come in?”

Another shrug. “Sure.” The old man shuffled into his living room and sat on the well-worn couch. There was no air-conditioning; the heat was oppressive. Tischler gingerly removed a vase from the coffee table and, finding nowhere else to set it down, simply held it in his hand. Avi placed his tape recorder on the table, then unfolded the photo spread, with its three rows of eight pictures. Solomon took off the pair of glasses he was wearing and replaced them with another pair from his breast pocket.

“These are people that—”

“Ivan Marchenko!” said the man at once.

Avi leaned forward anxiously. “Which one?”

“The middle row. The third one.”

Avi felt his stomach sink. The third picture in the middle row was indeed a bald-headed moonfaced man, but it was not Marchenko; rather, it was the caretaker at OSI headquarters in Washington. Avi knew that if he asked any leading questions — “Are you sure? Isn’t there somebody else who looks more like Ivan?” — the defense attorneys would get the evidence laughed out of court. Instead, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice, Avi simply said, “Thank you,” and reached over to close up the spread.

But Solomon was leaning forward. “I’d know that face anywhere,” he said. He reached over with a gnarled finger and tapped the sixth photo in the row of eight.

Avi felt adrenaline pounding. “But you said the third photo—”

“Sure. Third from the right.” The man looked at Avi. “That’s an American accent, isn’t it? Don’t you read Hebrew?”

Avi laughed out loud. “Not as much as I should, obviously.”

“Pierre, it’s Avi Meyer.”

“How’d it go?”

“I’ve got two positive IDs.”

“Terrific!”

“I’ll be flying back to Washington in a few days; I’ve still got some work to do with the Israeli police, helping them draft an extradition request.”

“No. Get a flight here. Fly into San Francisco. I’ve got something here you’ll want to see.”

Pierre tried to ignore the way Avi Meyer was looking at him. It had been twenty-six months since they’d last seen each other face-to-face, and although Pierre had told Avi over the phone about his condition, Avi had not until today actually seen Pierre’s chorea.

Pierre slowly, carefully, laid two autoradiographs on the light table set into his lab’s countertop, and then, with dancing hands, tried to line them up side by side. He seated himself on a lab stool, then motioned for Avi to come over and look at the autorads. “All right,” said Pierre, “what do you see?”

Avi shrugged, not knowing what Pierre wanted him to say. “A bunch of black lines?”

“Right — almost like blurry versions of the bar codes you see on food boxes. But these bar codes” — he tapped one of the pieces of film with a trembling finger — “are DNA fingerprints of two different people.”

“Who?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. You see that the bar codes are quite different, right?”

Avi nodded his bulldog head.

“There’s a thick black line here,” said Pierre, pointing with a trembling finger again, “and there’s no corresponding black line at the same point on the other one, right?”

Avi nodded again.

“But some of the lines
are
the same, aren’t they? Here’s a thin line, and — look! — the other person has a thin line at exactly the same point.”

Avi sounded impatient. “So he does.”

“Now, have a good close look at the two fingerprints, and tell me by how much you think they overlap.”

“I don’t see what this—”

“Just do it, will you?”

Avi sighed in resignation and squinted his tiny eyes at the film. “I don’t know. Twenty or thirty percent.”

“About a quarter, in other words.”

“I guess.”

“A quarter. Now, you must know something about genetics — everybody does. How much DNA do you get from your parents?”

“All of it.”

Pierre grinned. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, what proportion comes from your mother and what proportion from your father?”

“Oh — it’s half and half, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. Of all the DNA that makes up a human being, precisely half comes from each parent. Now, tell me this: do you have a brother?”

“Yes,” said Avi.

“Okay, good. Now if you’ve got half of your mother’s DNA, so does your brother, right?”

“Sure.”

“But is it the same half?”

Avi ran a hand over the stubble on his face. “How do you mean?”

“Is the DNA you got from your mother the same or different from what your brother got?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess if I got a random selection of my mother’s genes, and Barry got a random selection, they’d overlap by — what? — fifty percent?”

“That’s right,” said Pierre, not nodding deliberately, but his head bobbing in a way that looked as though he was. “An average of fifty percent overlap. So, if I put DNA fingerprints for you and your brother side by side, what would you expect to see?”

“Umm — half of my bars at the same places as half of his bars?”

“Exactly! But what have we here?” He pointed to the two pieces of film on the illuminated panel.

“A twenty-five percent overlap.”

“So these two people are highly unlikely to be brothers, right?”

Avi nodded.

“But, still, they do seem to be related, don’t they?”

“I guess,” said Avi.

“Okay. Now there’s something I read when I first looked into this case that has stuck in my mind. On his application for refugee status, John Demjanjuk put his mother’s maiden name as Marchenko.”

“Yeah, but that was wrong. Her maiden name was Tabachuk.

Demjanjuk couldn’t remember it, he said, so he just put down a common Ukrainian name.”

“And that always struck me as strange. I know my mother’s maiden name, Menard — and
her
mother’s maiden name, Bergeron. How could someone
not
remember his own mother’s maiden name? After all, Demjanjuk filled out that form in the 1940s, while he was still in his twenties. It’s not like he was an old man with a failing memory.”

Avi shrugged. “Who knows? The point is he couldn’t remember it at the time.”

“Oh, I think he remembered very well — but rather that he didn’t understand the question.”

“What?”

“He didn’t understand the question. Tell me — what does the term ‘maiden name’ mean?”

Avi frowned, irritated. “The name a woman was born with.”

“Right. But suppose Demjanjuk — who, according to the articles I read, only had a fourth-grade education — suppose he thought it meant simply the name his mother had before she’d married his father.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“Not necessarily. It’s only the same thing if his mother had never been married before.”

“But — oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit.”

“You see? What was Demjanjuk’s mother’s first name?”

“Olga. She died in 1970.”

“If Olga had been born Olga Tabachuk, but had married a man named Marchenko and then later divorced him before marrying John Demjanjuk’s father—”

“—Nikolai Demjanjuk—”

“—then when asked his mother’s maiden name, and interpreting it as meaning his mother’s
previous
name, John Demjanjuk would have answered ‘Marchenko.’ And if Olga had had one son named Ivan in 1911 by this elder Marchenko, and another son named Ivan nine years later by Nikolai Demjanjuk, then—”

“Then Ivan Marchenko and Ivan Demjanjuk would be half brothers!” said Avi.

“Exactly! Half brothers, having about twenty-five percent of their DNA in common. In fact, it even makes sense that they’re both bald. The gene for male-pattern baldness is inherited from the mother; it resides on the X chromosome. And it explains why they look so much alike — why witness after witness mistook one for the other.”

“But wait — wait. That doesn’t work. Nikolai and Olga Tabachuk were married January twenty-fourth, 1910, and Ivan Marchenko was born
after
that — on March second, 1911. That means he would have been conceived in the summer of 1910 —
after
Olga had already ended up with the legal last name of Demjanjuk.”

Pierre frowned for a moment, but then, thinking briefly of his own mother and Henry Spade, he exclaimed, “A triangle!”

Avi looked at him. “What?”

“A triangle — don’t you see? Think about John Demjanjuk’s own marriage from 1947. I remember reading that he’d been fooling around with another man’s wife while that man was away.” Pierre paused. “You know, we sometimes sum up the geneticist’s creed as ‘like father, like son’ — but ‘like mother, like son’ is just as valid for many things. My wife the behaviorist doesn’t like to admit it, but particular kinds of infidelity
do
run in families. Let’s say Olga Tabachuk married the senior Marchenko, divorced him, and then married Nikolai Demjanjuk.”

Avi nodded. “Okay.”

“But Nikolai leaves their village and heads out to — what town was Demjanjuk born in?”

“Dub Macharenzi.”

“To Dub-whatever. He goes there, looking for work or something like that, saying he’ll send for his wife once he’s got a place. Well, while the cat’s away… Olga goes back to sleeping with her ex, Marchenko. She gets pregnant and gives birth to Marchenko’s child, a child they name Ivan.

But then Nikolai sends word for her to come join him in Dub-thingie. Olga abandons baby Ivan, leaving him with the elder Marchenko. In fact — well, here’s one my wife
would
like: Ivan Marchenko grew up to have a predilection for slicing off women’s nipples. Call that his revenge for having been abandoned by his mother.”

Avi was nodding slowly. “You know, it makes sense. If Olga really did abandon the baby Ivan Marchenko, and if her second husband, Nikolai Demjanjuk, never knew about that incident, when she finally had a son of her own by Nikolai, that could explain why she decided to name
him
Ivan, too — so that she could never give herself away by accidentally referring to her legitimate son by the bastard child’s name.” Avi looked down at the autorads. “So — so one of these was made from the tissue specimen I sent you that we’d taken from John Demjanjuk, right?”

Pierre nodded, and touched the one on the left. “This one, to be precise.”

“And the other one — not Abraham Danielson?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“How’d you manage to get a tissue sample from him? I thought you’d only seen him from a distance.”

“I had a little device built.” He slowly got up from his stool and, holding on to the rounded lip of the countertop for support, made his way over to a shelf and picked up a small object from it. He returned to where Avi was sitting and extended his shaking hand so that Avi could see what he was holding. It was impossible to get a good look at it the way Pierre’s arm kept moving; Avi reached in and plucked the small device from Pierre’s palm. It looked like a tiny beige thumbtack, with a very short, very narrow spike.

“I call it a joy buzzer,” said Pierre, sitting down again. “It sticks to the palm of your hand with a minuscule drop of cyanoacrylate glue, and when you shake hands with someone, it takes a sample of a few skin cells. The pressure of the handshake is enough to distract from the minute pricking sensation.” He held up a hand. “I can’t take full credit for it — I got the idea from a special pen Condor Health uses; it seemed poetic justice to employ a similar device. A fellow I know, a newspaper reporter — same one who took the photo I originally faxed you of Abraham Danielson — wore it going into a meeting with Danielson, and shook his hand in greeting.”

Avi nodded, impressed. “Can I have copies of these… these — what do you call them?”

“Autorads.”

“These autorads?”

“Sure. Why?”

“When we’re through, I want to send them to Demjanjuk’s lawyer in Cleveland. Maybe they’ll help him get his U.S. citizenship back.” He looked at Pierre, then shrugged a little. “It’s the least I can do.”

Pierre nodded. “So where do we stand?”

“We’ve got two eyewitness identifications, both positive. But, well, the witnesses are old, and one of them is legally blind. I wish we had more.

Still, this half brother stuff to some degree rehabilitates the positive identifications made during Demjanjuk’s denaturalization and his trial in Israel.”

“So have you got enough to move against Marchenko?”

Avi sighed. “I don’t know. Danielson wasn’t even
suspected
of being a Nazi. He’s done a great job of covering his tracks.”

“He’s doubtless been able to pay off people over the last few years — make any records he wants disappear.”

“More than likely.” Avi shook his head. “The Israelis are going to be very wary about taking him on, especially after what happened last time.”

“So what else would you need to make the case?”

Avi shrugged. “In the best of all possible worlds? A confession.”

Pierre frowned. Of course, Molly could confirm Danielson’s guilt easily enough, but there was no way Pierre wanted her to have to testify in court.

“I could meet with him while wired for sound.”

“What makes you think he’ll agree to see you?” The way Avi said “you” grated a little — it was almost as if Avi were saying, “What makes you think he’ll see someone in your condition?”

Pierre gritted his teeth. “We’ll find a way.”

“Even if he is willing to see you,” said Avi, spreading his arms, “what makes you think he’ll confess to you?”

“He doesn’t have to confess then and there. He just has to say something incriminating enough to justify you arresting him. Then you can interrogate him properly.”

“I suppose. It would take some paperwork.”

“Do it. Set it up.”

“I don’t know, Pierre. You’re a civilian, and—”

“I’m a volunteer. You want to see that bastard go free?”

Avi frowned, considering. “All right,” he said at last. “Let’s give it a try.”