Frameshift

“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, Elisabeth 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.