Frameshift

“My name is Avi Meyer of the United States government. This is Detective Izzy Tischler of the Israeli police. We’d like to show you some pictures, and see if you recognize any of the people.”

Solomon had a face like a crumpled paper bag, tanned and coarsened from exposure to sun and wind. The only sharp part was his nose, a giant thing, curved and hooked like an eagle’s beak, and webbed over its entire surface by tiny exploded blood vessels. His irises were so dark brown that his pupils were all but lost against them, and the rest of his eyeballs were more yellow than white, shot through with veins.

“Why?” asked Solomon.

“I can tell you after you look at the pictures,” said Avi.

Solomon shrugged. “Okay.”

“May we come in?”

Another shrug. “Sure.” The old man shuffled into his living room and sat on the well-worn couch. There was no air-conditioning; the heat was oppressive. Tischler gingerly removed a vase from the coffee table and, finding nowhere else to set it down, simply held it in his hand. Avi placed his tape recorder on the table, then unfolded the photo spread, with its three rows of eight pictures. Solomon took off the pair of glasses he was wearing and replaced them with another pair from his breast pocket.

“These are people that—”

“Ivan Marchenko!” said the man at once.

Avi leaned forward anxiously. “Which one?”

“The middle row. The third one.”

Avi felt his stomach sink. The third picture in the middle row was indeed a bald-headed moonfaced man, but it was not Marchenko; rather, it was the caretaker at OSI headquarters in Washington. Avi knew that if he asked any leading questions — “Are you sure? Isn’t there somebody else who looks more like Ivan?” — the defense attorneys would get the evidence laughed out of court. Instead, unable to keep the disappointment out of his voice, Avi simply said, “Thank you,” and reached over to close up the spread.

But Solomon was leaning forward. “I’d know that face anywhere,” he said. He reached over with a gnarled finger and tapped the sixth photo in the row of eight.

Avi felt adrenaline pounding. “But you said the third photo—”

“Sure. Third from the right.” The man looked at Avi. “That’s an American accent, isn’t it? Don’t you read Hebrew?”

Avi laughed out loud. “Not as much as I should, obviously.”

“Pierre, it’s Avi Meyer.”

“How’d it go?”

“I’ve got two positive IDs.”

“Terrific!”

“I’ll be flying back to Washington in a few days; I’ve still got some work to do with the Israeli police, helping them draft an extradition request.”

“No. Get a flight here. Fly into San Francisco. I’ve got something here you’ll want to see.”

Chapter 40

Pierre tried to ignore the way Avi Meyer was looking at him. It had been twenty-six months since they’d last seen each other face-to-face, and although Pierre had told Avi over the phone about his condition, Avi had not until today actually seen Pierre’s chorea.

Pierre slowly, carefully, laid two autoradiographs on the light table set into his lab’s countertop, and then, with dancing hands, tried to line them up side by side. He seated himself on a lab stool, then motioned for Avi to come over and look at the autorads. “All right,” said Pierre, “what do you see?”

Avi shrugged, not knowing what Pierre wanted him to say. “A bunch of black lines?”

“Right — almost like blurry versions of the bar codes you see on food boxes. But these bar codes” — he tapped one of the pieces of film with a trembling finger — “are DNA fingerprints of two different people.”

“Who?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. You see that the bar codes are quite different, right?”

Avi nodded his bulldog head.

“There’s a thick black line here,” said Pierre, pointing with a trembling finger again, “and there’s no corresponding black line at the same point on the other one, right?”

Avi nodded again.

“But some of the lines are the same, aren’t they? Here’s a thin line, and — look! — the other person has a thin line at exactly the same point.”

Avi sounded impatient. “So he does.”

“Now, have a good close look at the two fingerprints, and tell me by how much you think they overlap.”

“I don’t see what this—”

“Just do it, will you?”

Avi sighed in resignation and squinted his tiny eyes at the film. “I don’t know. Twenty or thirty percent.”

“About a quarter, in other words.”

“I guess.”

“A quarter. Now, you must know something about genetics — everybody does. How much DNA do you get from your parents?”

“All of it.”

Pierre grinned. “That’s not what I meant. I mean, what proportion comes from your mother and what proportion from your father?”

“Oh — it’s half and half, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. Of all the DNA that makes up a human being, precisely half comes from each parent. Now, tell me this: do you have a brother?”

“Yes,” said Avi.

“Okay, good. Now if you’ve got half of your mother’s DNA, so does your brother, right?”

“Sure.”

“But is it the same half?”

Avi ran a hand over the stubble on his face. “How do you mean?”

“Is the DNA you got from your mother the same or different from what your brother got?”