Frameshift

by Robert J. Sawyer

  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, Élisabeth 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.

  C h a p t e r

  23

  Pierre knew where to find any biology journal on campus, but he had no idea which of UCB’s libraries would have things like Time and National Review. He wanted to see the pictures of Demjanjuk, both as he appeared today and, more importantly, the old photos from which he’d been misidentified as Ivan. Joan Dawson seemed to know just about everything there was to know about the university; she’d doubtless know where he could find those magazines. Pierre left his lab and headed down to the HGC general office.

  He stopped short on the threshold. Burian Klimus was in there, getting his mail out of the cubbyhole with his name on it just inside the door. From the back, Pierre could see where Klimus’s ears joined his head. There were white creases there. Were they scars? Or did every old person have creases like that?

  “Good morning, sir,” said Pierre, coming into the office.

  Klimus turned and looked at Pierre. The dark brown eyes, the thin lips—was this the face of evil? Could this be the man who had killed so many people?

  “Tardivel,” Klimus said, by way of greeting.

  Pierre found himself staring at the man. He shook his head slightly. “Is Joan in?”

  “No.”

  Pierre glanced at the clock above the door and frowned. Then a thought struck him. “By the way, sir, I ran into someone you might know a couple of months ago—a Mr. Meyer.”

  “Jacob Meyer? That moneygrubbing little prick. He’s no friend of mine.”

  Pierre was taken aback—that sure sounded like an anti-Semitic comment, precisely the kind a Nazi would make without thinking…unless, of course, this Jacob Meyer fellow really did happen to be a moneygrubbing little prick. “Uh, no, this fellow’s name was Avi Meyer.”

  Klimus shook his head. “Never heard of him.”

  Pierre blinked. “Guy about this high?” He held his hand at the height of his Adam’s apple. “Shaggy eyebrows? Looks like a bulldog?”

  “No.”

  Pierre frowned, then looked again at the clock. “Joan should have been in three hours ago.”

  Klimus opened an envelope with his finger.

  “Wouldn’t she have told you if she had an appointment?”

  Klimus shrugged.

  “She’s a diabetic. She lives alone.”

  The old man was reading the letter he’d taken from the envelope. He made no reply.

  “Do we have her number?” asked Pierre.

  “Somewhere, I suppose,” said Klimus, “but I have no idea where.”

  Pierre looked around for a phone book. He found one on the bottom shelf of a low-rise bookcase behind Joan’s desk and began flipping through it. “There’s no J. Dawson listed.”

  “Maybe it is still under her late husband’s name,” said Klimus.

  “Which was…?”

  Klimus waved the letter he was holding. “Bud, I think.”

  “There’s no B. Dawson, either.”

  Klimus’s old throat made a rough noise. “No one’s first name is really Bud.”

  “A nickname, eh? What for?”

  “William, usually.”

  “There’s a W. P. Dawson on Delbert.”

  Klimus made no reply. Pierre dialed the phone. An answering machine came on. “It’s a machine,” said Pierre, “but it’s Joan’s voice, and—Hello, Joan. This is Pierre Tardivel at LBNL. I’m just calling to see if you’re all right. It’s now almost one, and we’re just a bit worried about you. If you’re in, could you pick up the phone?” He waited for about thirty seconds, then hung up. Pierre chewed his lower lip. “Delbert. That’s not too far, is it?”

  Klimus shook his head. “About five miles.” Pierre looked at the clock again. An elderly diabetic, living alone. If she was having an insulin reaction…

  “I think I’m going to take a swing by her place.”

  Klimus said nothing.

  Pierre pulled up Joan’s driveway. Something amiss about the house, though: the porch light was still on, even though it was now well into the afternoon. He walked up to the front door. A morning paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, was still on the stoop. Pierre rang the doorbell and waited for a response, tapping his foot. Nothing. He tried again. Still no answer.

  Pierre exhaled noisily, unsure what to do. He looked around. There were several large stones in the small flower bed in front of the house. He lifted each of them up, looking for a hidden key—but all he found was a large slate gray salamander, another thing about Berkeley he’d yet to get used to. He hefted the largest stone, thought about using it to break the frosted entryway window, but didn’t want to go to extremes…

  He walked down the wide stretch of lawn between this house and the one adjacent to it, feeling enormously self-conscious. There was a picket fence, mostly covered with peeling white paint, between the front yard and the back. Part of the fence was a gate, and Pierre lifted the rusting catch, swung it open, and made his way into the backyard, most of which was given over to well-tended vegetable gardens. The rear part of the house had small windows and a sliding glass door overlooking the backyard. Pierre moved up to the first window and pressed his face against the glass, boxing his eyes against the reflected sky with his hands. Nothing. Just a small wallpapered room with a TV and a corduroy-upholstered La-Z-Boy in it.

  He tried the second window. The kitchen. Joan had every conceivable gadget: food processor, juicer, blenders, bread maker, two microwaves, and more.

  He moved over to the glass door, moved his face up to it, and—

  Jesus God—

  Joan was on her side, facing him, eyes still open. A pool of dark crusted blood more than a meter in diameter had spilled out of her; its shape was irregular on the low-pile carpet, but had neatly filled the tiled area in front of the fireplace. Pierre felt his breakfast climbing his throat. He hurried back to his car, drove till he found a pay phone at a 7-Eleven, and dialed 9-1-1.

  Pierre sat on Joan’s front stoop
, arms supporting his chin, waiting. A Berkeley police car pulled up at the curb. Pierre looked up, held a hand to his brow to shield his eyes, and squinted to make out the uniformed figures approaching against the glare of the afternoon sun: a beefy black man and a slim white woman.

  “Mr. Tardivel, isn’t it?” said the black man, taking off a pair of sunglasses and putting them in the breast pocket of his jacket.

  Pierre rose to his feet. “Officer—?”

  “Munroe,” said the man. He nodded at his partner. “And Granatstein.”

  “Of course,” said Pierre, nodding at each of them. “Hello.”

  “Let’s see it,” said Munroe. Pierre led them down the path between this house and the adjacent one, through the gate, which he’d left open, and into the backyard. Munroe had his billy club out, in case he needed to use it to smash in a window, but when he got to the glass door, he saw the lock had been jimmied. “You haven’t been inside?” asked Munroe.

  “No.”

  Munroe entered and made a cursory examination of the body. Granatstein, meanwhile, started looking around the yard for anything the assailant might have dropped during his escape. Munroe came back outside and took out a small notebook, bound with a wire spiral along its top. He flipped to a blank page. “What time did you arrive?”

  “At thirteen-fifteen,” said Pierre. “I mean, at one-fifteen.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I look at my watch a lot.”

  “And she was dead when you got here?”

  “Of course—”

  “You ever been out here before?”

  “No.”

  “Then what brought you here today?”

  “She was late for work. I thought I’d check on her.”

  “Why? What business is it of yours?”

  “She’s a friend. And she’s a diabetic. I thought she might have been having an insulin reaction.”

  “What were you doing around the back of the house?”

  “Well, she didn’t answer the doorbell, so—”

  “So you went snooping around?”