Frameshift

by Robert J. Sawyer

  “Tell us a bit about yourself,” said Molly.

  “For instance?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. What TV shows do you like?”

  “The only one I watch is 60 Minutes. Everything else is garbage.”

  Pierre’s eyebrows went up. 60 Minutes had been where the story about Ivan Marchenko first broke; no wonder Klimus had known the name.

  “So,” said Klimus awkwardly. “How are your friends the Lagerkvists?”

  “They’re fine,” said Molly. “Ingrid’s talking about going into private practice.”

  “Ah,” said Klimus. “Would she stay in Berkeley?”

  “If the Lagerkvists have any plans to move,” said Molly, “they’re keeping it a secret.” She paused for a beat. “Secrets are always interesting, aren’t they?” She looked right at the old man. “I mean, we’ve all got secrets. I do, Pierre does, even little Amanda does, I’m sure. What about you, Burian? What’s your secret?”

  What’s she on about? thought Klimus.

  “You know—something down deep, something hidden…”

  She’s crazy if she thinks I’m going to talk about my private life—

  “I don’t know what you expect me to say, Molly.”

  “Oh, nothing really. I’m just rambling. Just wondering what makes a man like you tick. You know I’m a psychologist. You’ve got to forgive me for being intrigued by the mind of a genius.”

  That’s more like it, though Klimus. A little respect.

  “I mean,” said Molly, “normal people have all kinds of secrets—sexual things…”

  Christ, I can’t remember the last time I had sex…

  “Financial secrets—maybe a little cheating on the old income tax…”

  No more than anyone else…

  “Or secrets related to their jobs…”

  Best damned job in the world, university professor. Travel, respect, decent money, power…

  “Secrets related to your research…”

  Not lately…

  “To your earlier research…”

  The prize should have been mine, anyway…

  “To—to your Nobel Prize, maybe?”

  Secrets Tottenham took to the grave…

  Molly looked him directly in the eyes. “Who is Tottenham?”

  Klimus’s parchment skin showed a little color. “Tottenham—”

  “Yes, who is he?”

  She.

  “Or she?”

  Christ, what is—“I don’t know anyone named—”

  Amanda was playing with Pierre’s fingers. He spoke up. “Tottenham—not Myra Tottenham?”

  Molly looked at her husband. “You know that name?”

  Pierre frowned, thinking. Where had he heard it before? “A biochemist at Stanford during the sixties. I read an old paper of hers recently on missense mutations.”

  Molly’s eyes narrowed. She’d gone over Klimus’s bio in Who’s Who in preparation for today. “Weren’t you at Stanford in the sixties?” she said. “Whatever happened to Myra Tottenham?”

  “Oh, that Tottenham,” said Klimus. He shrugged. “She died in 1969, I think. Leukemia.” The frigid bitch.

  Molly frowned. “Myra Tottenham. Pretty name. Did you work together?”

  Tried to. “No.”

  “It’s sad when somebody dies like that.”

  Not for me. “People die all the time, Molly.” He rose to his feet. “Now, really, I must be going.”

  “But the coffee—” said Pierre.

  “No. No, I’m leaving now.” He made his way to the front door. “Good-bye.”

  Molly followed him to the door. Once he was gone she came back into the living room and clapped her hands together. Still in her father’s lap, Amanda turned to look at her, surprised by the sound. “Well?” said Pierre.

  “I know I’ll never get you off hockey,” she said, “but fishing is my favorite sport.”

  “How far is Stanford?” asked Pierre.

  Molly shrugged. “Not far. Forty miles.”

  Pierre kissed his daughter on the cheek and spoke to her in a soothing voice: “Soon you won’t have to see that mean old man anymore.”

  Pierre couldn’t do the work himself; it required much too steady a hand. But LBNL did have a comprehensive machine shop: there was a wide variety of work done at Lawrence Berkeley, and custom-designed tools and parts had to be built all the time. Pierre had Shari sketch a design for him from his verbal description, and then he took the shuttle bus down to UCB, where he visited Stanley Hall, home of the university’s virus lab. He’d guessed right: that lab had the narrowest-gauge syringes he’d ever seen. He got several of them and headed back up to the machine shop.

  The shop master, a mechanical engineer named Jesus DiMarco, looked over Pierre’s rough sketch and suggested three or four refinements, then went to write up the work order. LBNL was a government lab, and everything generated paperwork—although not nearly as much as a bureaucracy-crazy Canadian facility would have. “What do you call this gizmo?” asked DiMarco.

  Pierre frowned, thinking. Then: “A joy-buzzer.”

  DiMarco chuckled. “Pretty cute,” he said.

  “Just call me koo,” said Pierre.

  “What?”

  “You know—” He whistled the James Bond theme.

  DiMarco laughed. “You mean Q.” He looked up at the wall clock. “Come back anytime after three. It’ll be ready.”

  “Newsroom,” said the male voice.

  “Barnaby Lincoln,” said Pierre into the phone. “He’s a business reporter.”

  “He’s out right now, and—oh, wait. Here he comes.” The voice shouted into the phone; Pierre hated people who didn’t cover the mouthpiece when shouting. “Barney! Call for you!” The phone was dropped on a hard surface.

  A few moments later it was picked up.

  “Lincoln,” said the voice.

  “Barnaby, it’s Pierre Tardivel at LBNL.”

  “Pierre! Good to hear from you. Have you given some thought to what we talked about?”

  “I’m intrigued, yes. But that’s not why I’m calling. First, though, thanks for the pictures of Danielson. They were terrific.”

  “That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” said Lincoln, deadpan.

  “I need you to do one more thing for me, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to be interviewing Abraham Danielson soon?”

  “Geez, I haven’t interviewed the old man for—hell, must be six years now.”

  “Would he see you if you called?”

  “I guess, sure.”

  “Can you arrange that? Can you get in to see him? Even for five minutes?”

  “Sure, but why?”

  “Set it up. But come by my lab on the way. I’ll explain everything when you get here.”

  Lincoln thought this over for a moment. “This better be a good story,” he said at last.

  “Can you say ‘Pulitzer’?” said Pierre.

  The receptionist escorted Barnaby Lincoln into Abraham Danielson’s office.

  “Barney,” said Abraham, rising from his leather chair.

  Lincoln surged forward, hand extended. “Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.”

  Abraham looked at Lincoln’s outstretched hand. Lincoln left it extended. The old man finally took it. They shook firmly.

  Pierre had been working in the den at home—it was awkward getting into LBNL these days, since Molly had to drive him. He decided to head up to the living room to replenish his Diet Pepsi. Coffee was too dangerous a way to get his morning caffeine; he overturned his drink at least once a week now, and didn’t want to scald himself. And regular Pepsi contained all that sugar—it would ruin his keyboard or computer if he spilled it in there. But aspartame wasn’t conductive; it might make a mess, but it wouldn’t wreck electronics if spilled on them.

  Of course Pierre made a fair bit of noise going up the stairs, but the dishwasher was going, producing enough racket to drown out the
sound. As he entered the living room, he saw Molly sitting with Amanda on the couch. Molly was saying something to Amanda that Pierre couldn’t quite make out, and Amanda seemed to be concentrating very, very hard.

  He watched them for a moment—and was pleased that, to some degree, at least, his jealousy of his wife’s closeness to their daughter had passed. Yes, he still ached at not being able to communicate with her the way he’d like to, but he was coming to realize how important that special relationship between Molly and Amanda was. Amanda seemed totally comfortable with Molly’s ability to reach into her mind and hear her thoughts; it was almost a relief to the girl that she could communicate without effort with another human being. And Molly’s bond with her daughter went beyond even the normal closeness of mother and child; she could touch Amanda’s very mind.

  Pierre still thought mostly in French, and he knew, given that he virtually always spoke English, that he was doing this on some subconscious level as a defense against having his thoughts read. But Amanda had accepted her mother’s ability from the beginning, and she erected no barriers between herself and Molly; they had a closeness that was transcendental—and Pierre was, at last, glad of it. His wife was no longer tortured by her gift; rather, she was now grateful for it. And Pierre knew that after he was gone, Molly and Amanda would need that special closeness to support each other, to go on and face whatever the future might bring them together, almost as one.

  “Try again,” Molly, her back to Pierre, said to Amanda. “You can do it.”

  Pierre stepped fully into the room. “What are you two conspiring about?” he said lightly.

  Molly looked up, startled. “Nothing,” she said too quickly. “Nothing.” She looked embarrassed. Amanda’s brown eyes went wide, the way they did when she’d been caught doing something bad.

  “You look like the cat who swallowed the canary,” Pierre said to Molly, a bemused smile on his face. “What are—”

  The phone rang.

  Molly leaped to her feet. “I’ll get it,” she said, bounding into the kitchen. A moment later, she called out, “Pierre! It’s for you.”

  Pierre made his way ponderously into the kitchen. The noise from the dishwasher was irritating, but it would take him several minutes to hobble down to the den or up to the bedroom to use a different phone.

  “Hello?” said Pierre after taking the handset from his wife.

  “Pierre? It’s Avi.”

  Molly headed back to the living room; Pierre could barely hear her as she went back to talking to Amanda in conspiratorial tones.

  “We’ve dug up Abraham Danielson’s immigration records,” continued Avi. “You’re right that that’s not his real name. Nothing unusual about that, though; lots of immigrants changed their names when they came here after the war. According to his visa application, his real name is Avrom Danylchenko. Born 1911, the same year as Ivan Marchenko—but, then again, so was Klimus, so that’s hardly compelling evidence. He was living in Rijeka at the time he applied to come to the States.”

  “Okay.”

  “We can’t find anything prior to 1945 about Avrom Danylchenko. Again, that doesn’t prove spit. Lots of records were lost during the war, and there’s tons of stuff from the old Soviet Union that no one has sifted through yet. Still, it is interesting that the last record we have of Ivan Marchenko is Nikolai Shelaiev’s statement that he saw him in Fiume in 1944, and the first record of Avrom Danylchenko is his visa application the following year in Rijeka.”

  “How far is Rijeka from Fiume?”

  “I wondered that myself—couldn’t find Fiume in my atlas at first. It turns out—get this—that Fiume and Rijeka are the same place. Fiume is the old Italian name for the city.”

  “Jesus. So what happens now?”

  “I’m going to show the photo to the remaining Treblinka survivors. I’m flying out to New Mexico tomorrow to see one of them, and I’m off to Israel after that.”

  “Surely you could just fax the photo to the police there,” said Pierre.

  “No, I want to be on hand. I want to see the witnesses at the moment they first look at the photo. We were fucked over on the Demjanjuk case because the identifications weren’t handled properly. Yoram Sheftel—that’s Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer—says in all his years in the business, he’s never once seen the Israeli police conduct a proper photo-spread ID. In the Demjanjuk case, they used a photo spread that had Demjanjuk’s photo mixed in with seven others. But some of the photos were bigger or clearer than the others, and most of them didn’t bear even a passing resemblance to the man the witnesses had described. This time I’m going to supervise it all, every step of the way. There aren’t going to be any fuckups.” A pause. “Anyway, I’ve got to get going.”

  “Wait—one more thing.”

  “What are you, Columbo?”

  Pierre was taken aback. At least it was an improvement over everyone assuming he was a salesman. “When you have somebody in custody, what kind of identification records do you keep?”

  “How do you mean?” said Avi.

  “I mean you must keep records, right? The whole idea behind Nazi hunting is proving identity. Surely if you have someone in custody, you must take pains to make sure you can identify the same person again years later if need be.”

  “Sure. We take fingerprints, even some retinal scans—”

  “Do you take tissue samples? For DNA fingerprinting?”

  “That sort of routine testing is not legal.”

  “That’s not a direct answer. Do you do it? It’s easy enough, after all. All you need is a few cells. Do you do it?”

  “Off the record, yes.”

  “Were you doing that as far back as the 1980s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would you have a tissue sample from John Demjanjuk still on file?”

  “I imagine so. Why?”

  “Get it. Have it sent to my lab by FedEx.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it. If I’m right—if I’m right, I can clear up the mystery of exactly what went wrong at the Ivan the Terrible trial in Jerusalem all those years ago.”

  C h a p t e r

  39

  The phone rang again the next day. This time Pierre was down in the den, and he got it there. “Hello?”

  “Pierre, it’s Avi. I’m calling you from O’Hare. I saw Zalmon Chudzik this morning; he’s one of the Treblinka survivors who now lives in the States.”

  “And?”

  “And the poor bastard’s got Alzheimer’s disease.”

  “Merde.”

  “Exactly. But, you know—this may sound cruel—but in this one case, maybe it’s a blessing.”

  “Huh?”

  “His daughter says he’s forgotten everything about Treblinka. For the first time in over fifty years, he’s managing to sleep through the night.”

  Pierre didn’t know how to reply. After a few moments, he said, “When do you leave for Israel?”

  “About three hours.”

  “I hope you have better luck there.”

  Avi’s voice was weary. “Me, too. There were only fifty Treblinka survivors, and over thirty-five of them have passed on in the intervening years. There are only four left who hadn’t previously misidentified Demjanjuk as Ivan—and Chudzik was one of those four.”

  “What happens to our case if we don’t get a positive ID?”

  “It evaporates. Look at all the evidence they had against O. J. Simpson—made no difference to the jury. Without eyewitnesses, we’re sunk. And I do mean eyewitnesses, plural. The Israelis aren’t going to pay attention unless we get at least two independent IDs.”

  “Good Christ,” said Pierre softly.

  “At this stage,” said Avi, “I’d even take his help.”

  Avi Meyer had spent the last few days wrangling back and forth over jurisdictional issues with Izzy Tischler, a plainclothes detective with the Nazi Crimes Investigation Division of the Israeli State Police. They were now ready to attempt their first ID. T
ischler, a tall, thin, red-haired fellow of forty, wore a yarmulke; Avi was wearing a large canvas hat, trying to ward off the brutal sun. They walked down the narrow street, beside buildings of yellow brick with narrow balconies, packed one right up against the next. Two Orthodox Jewish men walked down the lane, and an Arab headed up the other way. They didn’t look at each other as they passed.

  “This is it,” said Tischler, checking the number on the house against an address he had written down on a Post-it note in his hand, folded in half so that the adhesive strip was covered over. The door was set back only a meter from the road. Weeds grew out of the cracks in the stone walk, but the beauty of the ceramic mezuzah on the doorpost caught Avi’s eye. He knocked. After about half a minute, a middle-aged woman appeared.

  “Shalom,” said Avi. “My name is Avi Meyer, and this is Detective Tischler, of the Israeli State Police. Is Casimir Landowski home?”

  “He’s upstairs. What’s this all about?”

  “May we speak to him?”

  “About what?”

  “We just need him to identify some photos.”

  The middle-aged woman looked from one man to the other. “You’ve found Ivan Grozny,” she said flatly.

  Avi cringed. “It’s important that the identification not be prejudiced. Is Casimir Landowski your father?”

  “Yes. My husband and I have looked after him since his wife died.”

  “Your father can’t know in advance who we’re asking him to identify. If he knows, the defense lawyers will be able to get the identification ruled ineligible. Please, don’t say a word to him.”

  “He won’t be able to help you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s blind, that’s why not. Complications from diabetes.”

  “Oh,” said Avi, his heart sinking. “I’m sorry.”

  “Even if he could see,” said the woman, “I’m not sure I’d let you speak to him.”

  “Why?”

  “We watched the trial of John Demjanjuk on TV. What was that, ten or more years ago? He could see then—and he knew you had the wrong guy. They’d shown him pictures of Demjanjuk, and he’d said it wasn’t Ivan.”