Frameshift

“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.”