Frameshift

Agent Meyer, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.

Avi got up and stared out his window, looking out on D Street. His vision was blurry. We’d wanted justice. We’d wanted someone to pay. He placed his hand against the cold glass. What had he done? What had he done?

Now the Israeli prosecutors were saying, well, if Demjanjuk wasn’t Ivan the Terrible, maybe he’d been a guard at Sobibor or some other Nazi facility.

Avi thought of Tom Robinson, with his crippled black hand. Shiftless nigger — if he wasn’t guilty of raping Mayella Ewell, well, he was probably guilty of something else.

CNN had shown the theater that had been turned into a courthouse, the same theater Avi had sat in five years previously, watching the case unfold. Demjanjuk, even now not freed, was taken away to the jail cell where he’d spent the last two thousand nights.

Avi walked out of his living room, into the darkness.

Miss Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin‘.

But not even the ghosts stood to mark Avi Meyer’s exit.

Chapter 7

Pierre Tardivel became a driven man, committed to his studies. He decided to specialize in genetics — the field that, after all, had turned his life upside down. He distinguished himself at once, and began a brilliant research career in Canada.

In March 1993, he read about the breakthrough: the gene for Huntington’s disease had been discovered, making possible a simple, inexpensive DNA test to determine if one had the gene, and therefore would eventually get the disease. Still, Pierre didn’t take the test. He was almost afraid to now. If he didn’t have the disease, would he slack off?

Begin wasting his life again? Coast out the decades?

At the age of thirty-two, Pierre was appointed a distinguished postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, situated on a hilltop above the University of California, Berkeley. He was assigned to the Human Genome Project, the international attempt to map and sequence all the DNA that makes up a human being.

The Berkeley campus was exactly what a university campus should be: sunny and green and full of open spaces, precisely the kind of place one could imagine the free-love movement having been born at.

What was less wonderful was Pierre’s new boss, crusty Burian Klimus, who had won a Nobel Prize for his breakthrough in DNA sequencing — the so-called Klimus Technique, now widely used in labs around the world.

If Professor Kingsfield from The Paper Chase had been a wrestler, he’d have looked like Klimus, a thickset, completely bald man of eighty-one, with a neck half a meter in circumference. His eyes were brown, and his face, though wrinkled, showed only the wrinkles that went with a contracting body; there were no laugh lines — indeed, Pierre saw no signs that Klimus ever laughed.

“Don’t worry about Dr. Klimus,” Joan Dawson, the Human Genome Center’s general secretary, had said on Pierre’s first day at his new job.

Although Klimus’s full title was William M. Stanley Professor of Biochemistry — about a quarter of LBL’s eleven hundred scientists and engineers had teaching duties at either the Berkeley or San Francisco campuses of UC — Pierre had been told up front that the old man preferred to be called “Doctor,” not “Professor.” He was a thinker, not a mere teacher.

Pierre had immediately taken a liking to Joan — although it felt strange to be calling a woman twice his own age by her first name. She was kind and gentle and sweet: the gray-haired and bespectacled den mother to all the absentminded professors as well as the UCB students who did scutwork on the Human Genome Project. Joan often brought in homemade cookies or brownies and left them for everyone to enjoy by the ever-present pot of Peet’s coffee.

Indeed, shortly after he’d begun, Pierre found himself seated opposite Joan’s desk, munching on a giant butter cookie with M M’s baked into it, while he waited for an appointment with Dr. Klimus. Joan was squinting at a sheet of paper. “This is delicious,” Pierre said. He gestured at the plate, which still had five big cookies on it. “I don’t know how you can resist them. It must be quite a temptation to keep eating them.”

Joan looked up and smiled. “Oh, I don’t eat any myself. I’m a diabetic, you see. Have been for about twenty years. But I love to bake, and people seem to like the goodies I bring in so much. It gives me a lot of pleasure seeing people enjoy them.”

Pierre nodded, impressed by the self-sacrifice. He had seen earlier that Joan wore a Medic Alert bracelet; now he understood why. Joan went back to squinting at the page on her desk, but then sighed and proffered it to Pierre. “Would you be a dear, and read that bottom line for me? I can’t make it out.”