Frameshift (16 page)

“I find it hard to believe that a man who won a Nobel Prize could be that evil.”

“Well, Klimus didn’t win the Nobel
Peace
Prize, after all. Anyway, the man who operated the gas chambers — Ivan Marchenko — he’d been a prisoner of war himself before volunteering for service to the Nazis. Who knows what he did before or after the war? Who knows what level of education he had?”

“But a Nobel laureate—”

“You know who William Shockley was?” asked Pierre.

“Umm, the
inventeur
of the transistor?”

Pierre smiled. “You’re cheating.”

Molly blushed a little.

“But, anyway, yeah, Shockley invented the transistor, and he won a Nobel Prize for that in 1956. He was also a raving, out-and-out racist. He claimed that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and that the only smart blacks were smart because they had some white blood in them. He advocated sterilization of the poor, as well as anyone with a below-average IQ. Believe me, I’ve read enough biographies of Nobel laureates to know that not all of them were good people.”

“But even if Burian is this Ivan Marchenko—”

“If he’s Marchenko, then, well—” He looked down at Molly’s stomach.

“Then the baby is Marchenko’s, too.”

“Oh, shit — I hadn’t even thought about that.” She lowered her eyes. “I keep thinking of it as
your
baby…”

Pierre smiled. “Me, too. But, well, if it
is
the child of Ivan the Terrible, then… then maybe we don’t want to continue with the pregnancy.”

They’d come to the plaza just inside Sather Gate. Pierre motioned for them to rest on one of the benches placed against the low retaining wall.

Molly sat down, and Pierre sat next to her, placing an arm over her shoulders.

She looked at him. “I know we’ve only known for sure that I’m pregnant for a day, but, well, I’ve
felt
pregnant ever since the implantation was done. And I’ve wanted this so long…”

Pierre stroked her arm. “We could try again. Go to a regular clinic.”

Molly closed her eyes. “It’s
so
much money. And we were so lucky to get an implantation on the first attempt this time.”

“But if it
is
Marchenko’s child…”

Molly looked around the plaza. People were walking in all directions.

Some pigeons were waddling by a few feet away from them. She turned back to Pierre. “You know I love you, Pierre, and I admire the work you do is a geneticist. And I know geneticists believe in ‘like father, like son.’ But, well, you know
my
speciality: behavioral psychology, just like good old B.

F. Skinner taught. I honestly believe it doesn’t matter who the biological parents are, so long as the child is brought up by a caring mother and a loving father.”

Pierre thought about this. They’d argued nature-versus-nurture once or twice before on their long evening walks, but he’d never expected it to be anything more than an academic debate. But now…

“You could find out for sure,” said Pierre. “You could read Klimus’s mind.”

Molly shrugged. “I’ll try, but you know I can’t dig into his mind. He has to be thinking — in English, in articulated thoughts — directly about the topic. That’s all I can read, remember. We can try to maneuver the conversation in such a way that his thoughts might turn to his Nazi past, but unless he actually formulates a sentence on that topic, I won’t be able to read it.” She took Pierre’s hand and placed it on her flat stomach. “But, regardless, even if he is a monster, the child in here is
ours
.”

It was late afternoon on the West Coast, and therefore early evening in Washington. Pierre struggled through the DOJ voice-mail system to get to the appropriate mailbox: “This is Agent Avi Meyer. I’m in Lexington, Kentucky, until Monday, October eighth, but am checking my voice mail frequently. Please leave a message at the tone.”

Beep!

“Mr. Meyer, this is Dr. Pierre Tardivel at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — remember me? Look, one of our staff members was killed last night. I need to talk to you. Call me either here or at home. The number here is…”

Joan Dawson’s funeral was held two days later in an Episcopalian church. Pierre and Molly both attended. While waiting for the service to begin, Pierre found himself fighting back tears; Joan had been so kind, so friendly, so helpful…

Burian Klimus arrived. It seemed wrong to take advantage of such a solemn occasion, but opportunities for Molly to actually see Klimus were few and far between. When the old man sat down in a pew at the back, Molly and Pierre got up and moved over to sit next to him, Molly right beside him.

“It’s such a shame,” said Molly, in a low voice.

Klimus nodded.

“Still,” said Molly, “what a lifetime to have lived through. Somebody said Joan had been born in 1929. I can’t imagine how frightening it must have been for a ten-year-old girl to see the world go to war.”

“It was no easier for a twenty-eight-year-old man,” said Klimus dryly.

“I’m sorry,” said Molly. “Where were you during the war?”

“The Ukraine, mostly.”
And Poland
.

“Spend any time in Poland?” said Molly. Klimus looked at her. “My, ah, father’s family was there.”

“Yes, for a short time.”

“There was a camp there — Treblinka.”

“There were several camps,” said Klimus.

“Terrible places,” said Molly. She tried a different tack. ‘“Burian’ — is that the Ukrainian equivalent of ‘John? Every language seems to have its own version of John: ’Jean‘ in French, ’Ivan‘ in Russian.”

“No, it’s not. In Ukrainian, ‘John’ is also ‘Ivan.’” He looked embarrassed for a moment. “‘Burian’ actually means ‘dwells near the weeds.’”

“Oh. Still, I love Ukrainian names. They’re so musical. Klimus, Marcynuk, Toronchuk, Mymryk…
Marchenko
.”

Ivan Marchenko
, thought Klimus, the names falling together naturally in his mind. “Yes, I suppose they are,” he said.

“The war must have been terrible, and—”

“I don’t like to think of it,” Klimus said, “and — oh, excuse me. There’s Dean Cowles; I should really say hello.” Klimus rose and walked away from them.

As Pierre drove himself and Molly to the cemetery, he turned to look at his wife. “Well? Any luck?”

Molly shrugged. “It’s hard to tell. He certainly didn’t think anything along the lines of, Gee, my secret identity is Ivan the Terrible and I killed hundreds of thousands of people. Of course, that’s not surprising — most people who have done terrible things in their pasts have built up psychological defense mechanisms to keep the memories from coming to mind. Still, he
does
know the name ‘Ivan Marchenko’ — he put those two names together at once in his head.”

Pierre frowned. “Well, I’m seeing Avi Meyer this afternoon. Maybe he’ll have concrete answers about Klimus’s past.”

Avi Meyer flew directly to San Francisco from Kentucky, where he’d been investigating some octogenarian KKK members. He and Pierre had arranged to meet privately at Skates, on Berkeley’s Seawall Drive at the Marina. The restaurant jutted out over the Bay, supported by pillars that didn’t seem nearly strong enough to hold it up. Seagulls perched on the edge of its gently sloping roof, trying to hold on in a rising wind. It was midafternoon, with a leaden sky. They got a table by one of the huge windows, looking out across the water to San Francisco.

“All right, Agent Meyer,” said Pierre as soon as he sat down, “I know you’re some kind of Nazi hunter. I also know that I was attacked, and my friend Joan Dawson is dead. Tell me the connection — tell me why you are poking around LBNL.”

Avi sipped his coffee. He looked past the hanging plants and out the window. An aircraft carrier was moving along the Bay, heading for Alameda. “We routinely monitor university and corporate genetics labs.”

Pierre tilted his head. “What?”

“We also keep an eye on physics departments, political science, and several other areas.”

“What on earth for?”

“They’re natural places for Nazis to end up. I don’t need to tell you that there’s always been a whiff of controversy about genetics research.

Creating a master race, discrimination based on genetic makeup—”

“Oh, come on!”

“You yourself mentioned Felix Sousa—”

“He’s not part of HGC; he’s just a biochem prof at the university, and besides—”

“—and there’s Philippe Rushton, up in your native Canada, giving a whole new meaning to ‘Great White North’—”

“Rushton and Sousa are too young to be Nazis.”

“The universities are lousy with people hiding from one thing or another; in Canada, half your profs are Vietnam draft dodgers.”

“So’s your president, for Pete’s sake.”

Avi shrugged. “You ever see
The Stranger
? Orson Welles film? It’s about a Nazi who takes a job as an American college professor. I can name over one hundred actual cases of the same thing.”

“Which is why you think Burian Klimus is Ivan Marchenko.”

Avi’s small mouth dropped open. “You’re good,” he said at last.

“I need to know if it’s true.”

“Why should you care? I’ve gone over your files from McGill and U of T—”

“You’ve what?”

“You weren’t a campus activist. Didn’t belong to any social-justice groups. Why should you care what Klimus might have done half a century ago? A French speaker from Montreal — why should someone like you care?”

“Damn it, I told you before I’m not an anti-Semite. Maybe there is a problem with that in Quebec, but I’m not part of it.” Pierre tried to calm himself. “Look, I’ve seen pictures of Demjanjuk. I know what he looked like as a young man, know he bore a resemblance to Klimus.”

A waitress appeared. “Sprite,” said Pierre. She nodded and left.

“Klimus looks even more like Marchenko than Demjanjuk did,” said Avi.

Pierre blinked. “You’ve got photos of Marchenko?” None of the Magazine Database Plus articles mentioned the existence of such things.

Avi nodded. “The Israelis have had Marchenko’s SS file since 1991.” He opened his briefcase, pulled out a manila envelope, and took two sheets from it. The first was a photostat of an old-looking form, with a small head-and-shoulders photograph attached to its upper-left corner. The second was a blowup of that photo. It showed a man of thirty, with a broad face (twisted here in a cruel frown), incipient baldness, and protruding ears.

Pierre’s eyebrows went up. “You can certainly see the resemblance to Demjanjuk.”

Avi frowned ruefully. “Tell me about it.”

Pierre looked at the photostats.

“So,” said Avi, tapping the enlarged photo, “is that Burian Klimus?”

Pierre exhaled. “The ears are different—”

“Klimus’s don’t protrude. But that’s an easy enough thing to have fixed.”

Pierre nodded, and looked at the blowup again. “Yeah. Yeah, it could be Klimus.”

“That’s what I thought when I saw Klimus’s picture in
Time
when he was named director of the Human Genome Center. If he
is
Marchenko, you have no idea what a monster that man was. He didn’t just gas people, he tortured them, raped them. He used to love to slice nipples off women’s breasts.”

Pierre winced at that. “But do you have any proof, besides his appearance, that Klimus might be Marchenko?”

“He’s a geneticist.”

Pierre’s tone was sharp. “That’s not a crime.”

“And he was born in the same Ukrainian town as Ivan Marchenko, and in the same year — 1911.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. And then there’s what happened to you. The attack on you was the first direct connection between the Nazi movement and the genetics work going on at Lawrence Berkeley.”

“But Chuck Hanratty was a neo-Nazi.”

“Sure. But a lot of neo-Nazi groups were started by real World War II

Nazis. Do you know the name of the leader of the Millennial Reich?”

“No.”

“In documents the SFPD has captured, he’s referred to by the code name Grozny.”

Pierre’s stomach fluttered.
He’d been ordered to kill you
, Molly had said, having read Chuck Hanratty’s mind as he died,
by someone named Grozny
.

“Grozny,” repeated Pierre. “What does that mean?”

“Ivan Grozny is Russian for Ivan the Terrible. It’s what the people at Treblinka called Ivan Marchenko.”

Pierre’s head was swimming. “But this is crazy. What could Klimus have against me?” The waitress appeared and deposited Pierre’s Sprite.

“That’s a very good question.”

“And what about Joan Dawson? What could Klimus have against her?”

Avi shook his head. “I have no idea. But if I were you, I’d watch my back.”

Pierre frowned and looked out at the roiling waters of the Bay. “You’re the second person to say that to me recently.” He took a sip of his drink.

“So what do we do now?”

“There’s nothing we can do, until some proof materializes. These cases don’t break overnight, after all; if Klimus is Marchenko, he’s eluded detection for fifty years now. But keep your eyes and ears open, and report anything you find to me.”

Seven months later

“Thanks for letting me come,” said Pierre, keeping his hand steady by holding firmly on to the edge of a desk. Although he still felt as though he didn’t really belong here, Pierre could no longer deny the truth: he was clearly manifesting symptoms of Huntington’s disease. The support-group meeting was held in a high-school classroom in San Francisco’s Richmond district, halfway between the Presidio and Golden Gate Park.

Carl Berringer’s head jerked back and forth, and it was a few moments before he was able to reply. But when he did, his words were full of warmth. “We’re glad to have you. What’d you think of the speaker?”

Berringer was a white-haired man of about forty-five with pale skin and blue eyes. The guest speaker had spoken on coping with the juvenile form of Huntington’s.

“She was fine,” said Pierre, who had tuned out the talk and simply spent the meeting surreptitiously watching the others, most of whom were in much later stages of the disease. After all, besides his father, Henry Spade, Pierre had never really seen anyone else with advanced Huntington’s up close. He watched their pain, their suffering, the contorted faces, the inability to speak clearly, the torture of something as simple as trying to swallow, and the thought came to him that perhaps some of them would be better off dead. It was a horrible thing to think, he knew, but…

…
but there, because there is no grace of God, go I
. Pierre’s condition was getting steadily worse; he’d broken dozens of pieces of labware and drinking glasses by now. Still, only those who knew him well suspected anything serious was amiss. Just a tendency toward dancing hands, occasional facial tics, a slight slurring of speech…

“You work at LBL, don’t you?” asked Carl, his head still moving constantly.

Pierre nodded. “Actually, it’s
LBNL
now. They added the word ‘National’ to the lab’s name almost a year ago.”

“Well, we had a guy from your lab give a talk a couple of years ago. Big old bald guy. Can’t remember his name, but he won a Nobel Prize.”

Pierre’s eyebrows went up. “Not Burian Klimus?”

“That’s the guy. Boy, were we lucky to get him. All we can offer speakers is a Huntington’s Society coffee mug. But he had just been appointed to Lawrence Berkeley, and the university was sending him out to speaking engagements.” Carl’s hands had started moving, as if he were doing finger-flexing exercises. Pierre tried not to stare at him. “Anyway,” said Carl, “I’m glad you came. Hope you’ll become a regular. We can all use some support.”

Pierre nodded. He wasn’t sure he was any happier now that he’d finally relented and come here. It seemed an unnecessarily graphic reminder of what his future held. He looked around the room. Molly, hugely pregnant, was off in one corner sipping mineral water with a middle-aged white woman, apparently a caregiver. She was doubtless hearing what was in store for her.

The really bad cases weren’t even here; they would be bedridden at home or in a hospital. He looked around, counted eighteen people: seven obvious Huntington’s patients, seven more who were clearly their caregivers, and four whose status wasn’t easy to determine. They could have been recently diagnosed as having the Huntington’s gene, or they could have been caregivers for patients too ill to attend the meeting themselves. “Is this the normal turnout?” asked Pierre.

Berringer’s head was still jerking, and his right arm had started moving back and forth a bit, the way one’s arm does when walking. “These days, yes. We’ve lost five members in the last year.”

Pierre looked at the tiled floor. Huntington’s
was
terminal; that was the one unshakable reality. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“We’d expected some of them. Sally Banas, for instance. In fact, she’d held on longer than any of us had thought she would.” Berringer’s head movements were distracting; Pierre fought the irritation growing within him. “Another one was a suicide. Young man, only been to a couple of meetings. Recently diagnosed.” Berringer shook his head. “You know how it is.”

Pierre nodded. Only too well.

“But the other three…” Berringer had reached his left arm over to help steady his right. “World’s a crazy place, Pierre. Maybe it’s not so bad up in Canada, but down here…”

“What happened?”

“Well, they were all pretty new members — only recently manifesting the disease. They should have had years left. One of them — Peter Mansbridge — was shot. Two others were knifed to death, six months apart. Muggings, it seems.”

“God,” said Pierre. What had he done, coming to the States? He’d been assaulted, Joan Dawson had been murdered, and every time he turned around he heard about more violent crime.

Berringer tried to shake his head, but the gesture was obscured by the jerking motion. “I don’t ask for pity,” he said slowly, “but you’d think anyone who saw one of us moving the way we do would leave us in peace, instead of killing us for the few bucks we might have in our wallets.”