Frameshift

Chapter 1

The screams came like popcorn popping: at first there were only one or two, then there were hundreds overlapping, then, finally, the quantity diminished, and at last there were none left and you knew it was done.

Jubas Meyer tried not to think about it. Even most of the bastards in charge tried not to think about it. Only forty meters away, a band of Jewish musicians played at gunpoint, their songs meant to drown out the cries of the dying, the rumble of the diesel engine in the Maschinehaus insufficient to fully mask the sound.

Finally, while Jubas and the others stood ready, the two Ukrainian operators heaved the massive doors aside. Blue smoke rose from the opening.

As was often the case, the naked corpses were still standing. The people had been packed in so tightly — up to five hundred in the tiny chamber — that there was no room for them to fall down. But now that the doors were open, those closest to the exit toppled over, spilling out into the hot summer sun, their faces mottled and bloated by the carbon-monoxide poisoning. The stench of human sweat and urine and vomit filled the air.

Jubas and his partner, Shlomo Malamud, moved forward, carrying their wooden stretcher. With it, they could remove a single adult or two children in each load; they didn’t have the strength to carry more. Jubas could count his own ribs easily through his thin skin, and his scalp itched constantly from the lice.

Jubas and Shlomo started with a woman of about forty. Her left breast had a long gash in it. They carried her body off to the dental station. The man there, an emaciated fellow in his early thirties named Yehiel Reichman, tipped her head back and opened her mouth. He spotted a gold filling, reached in with blood-encrusted pliers, and extracted the tooth.

Shlomo and Jubas took the body off to the pit and dumped it in on top of the other corpses, trying to ignore the buzz of flies and the reek of diseased flesh and postmortem bowel discharges. They returned to the chamber, and—

No—

No!

God, no.

Not Rachel—

But it was. Jubas’s own sister, lying there naked among the dead, her green eyes staring up at him, lifeless as emeralds.

He’d prayed that she’d gotten away, prayed that she was safe, prayed—

Jubas staggered back, tripped, fell to the ground, tears welling up and out of his eyes, the drops clearing channels in the filth that covered his face.

Shlomo moved to help his friend. “Quickly,” he whispered. “Quickly, before they come…”

But Jubas was wailing now, unable to control himself.

“It gets to us all,” said Shlomo soothingly.

Jubas shook his head. Shlomo didn’t understand. He gulped air, finally forced out the words. “It’s Rachel,” he said between shuddering sobs, gesturing at the corpse. Flies were crawling across her face now.

Shlomo placed a hand on Jubas’s shoulder. Shlomo had been separated from his own brother Saul, and the one thing that had kept him going all this time was the thought that somewhere Saul might be safe.

“Get up!” shouted a familiar voice. A tall, stocky Ukrainian wearing jackboots came closer. He was carrying a rifle with a bayonet attached — the same bayonet Jubas had often seen him honing with a whetstone to scalpel sharpness.

Jubas looked up. Even through his tears, he could make out the man’s features: a round face in its thirties, balding head, protruding ears, thin lips.

Shlomo moved over to the Ukrainian, risking everything. He could smell the cheap liquor on the man’s breath. “A moment, Ivan — for pity’s sake. It’s Jubas’s sister.”

Ivan’s wide mouth split in a terrible grin. He leaned in and used the bayonet to slice off Rachel’s right nipple. Then, with a flick of his index finger, he sent it flying off the blade into the air. It spun end over end before landing bloody side down in Jubas Meyer’s lap.

“Something to remember her by,” said Ivan.

He was a monster.

A devil.

Evil incarnate.

His first name was Ivan. His last name was unknown, and so the Jews dubbed him Ivan the Terrible. He had arrived at the camp a year before, in July 1942. There were some who said he’d been an educated man before the war; he used fancier words than the other guards did. A few even contended he must have been a doctor, since he sliced human flesh with such precision. But whatever he’d been in civilian life had been set aside.

Jubas Meyer had done the math, calculating how many corpses he and Shlomo had removed from the chambers each day, how many other pairs of Jews were being forced to do the same thing, how many trainloads had arrived to date.

The figures were staggering. Here, in this tiny camp, between ten and twelve thousand people were executed every day; on some days, the tally reached as high as fifteen thousand. So far, over half a million people had been exterminated. And there were rumors of other camps: one at Belzac, another at Sobibor, Perhaps others still.

There could be no doubt: the Nazis intended to kill every single Jew, to wipe them all off the face of the earth.

And here, at Treblinka, eighty kilometers northeast of Warsaw, Ivan the Terrible was the principal agent of that destruction. True, he had a partner named Nikolai who helped him operate the chambers, but it was Ivan who was sadistic beyond belief, raping women before gassing them, slicing their flesh — especially breasts — as they marched naked into the chambers, forcing Jews to copulate with corpses while he laughed a cold, throaty laugh and beat them with a lead pipe.

Ivan reveled in it all, his naturally nasty disposition only worsened by frequent drinking binges. As a Ukrainian, he’d likely started off a prisoner of war himself, but had volunteered for service as a Wachmann, and had demonstrated a remarkable technical facility, leading to him being put in charge of the gas chambers. He was now so trusted that the Germans often let him leave the camp. Jubas had once overheard Ivan bragging to Nikolai about the whore he frequented in the nearby town of Wolga Okralnik. “If you think the Jews scream loudly,” Ivan had said, “you should hear my Maria.”

A miracle happened.

Ivan and Nikolai pulled back the chamber doors, and—

—God, it was incredible—

—a little blond girl, perhaps twelve years old, barely pubescent, staggered naked out of the chamber, still alive.

Behind her, corpses began falling like dominoes.

But she was alive. The Jewish men and women had been packed in so tightly this time that their very bodies had formed a pocket of air for her, separated from the circulating carbon monoxide.

The girl, her eyes wide in terror, stood under the hot sun, gulping in oxygen. And when she at last had the breath to do so, she screamed, “Ma-me! Ma-me!”

But her mother was among the dead.

Jubas Meyer and Shlomo Malamud set about removing the corpses, batting their arms to dispel the flies, breathing shallowly to avoid the smell. Ivan swaggered over to the girl, a whip in his hand. Jubas shot a reproachful glance at him. The Ukrainian must have seen that. He forgot the girl for a moment and came over to Jubas, lashing him repeatedly.

Jubas bit his own tongue until he tasted salty blood; he knew that screams would just prolong the torture.

When Ivan had had his fill, he stepped back, and looked at Jubas, hunched over in pain. “Davay yebatsa!” shouted.

Even the little girl knew those obscene words. She started to back away, but Ivan moved toward her, grabbing her naked shoulder roughly and pushing her to the ground.

“Davay yebatsa!” shouted Ivan at Jubas. He dragged the girl across the ground to where he’d left his rifle, leaning against the Machinehaus wall.

He aimed the weapon at Jubas. “Davay yebatsa!”

Jubas closed his eyes.

It was horrible news, devastating news.

The pace of the executions was slacking off.

It didn’t mean the Germans were changing their minds.

It didn’t mean they were giving up their insane plot.

It meant they were running out of Jews to kill.

Soon the camp would be of no further use. When they’d started, the Germans had ordered the dead buried. But recently they’d been using earthmoving equipment to exhume the bodies and cremate them. Human ash whirled constantly through the air now; the acrid smell of burning flesh stung the nostrils. The Nazis wanted no proof to exist of what had happened here.

And they’d also want no witnesses. Soon the corpse bearers themselves would be ordered into the gas chambers.

“We’ve got to escape,” said Jubas Meyer. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

Shlomo looked at his friend. “They’ll kill us if we try.”

“They’ll kill us anyway.”

The revolt was planned in whispers, one man passing word to the next.

Monday, August 2, 1943, would be the day. Not everyone would escape; they knew that. But some would… surely some would. They would carry word of what had happened here to the world.

The sun burned down fiercely, as if God Himself were helping the Nazis incinerate bodies. But of course God would not do such a thing; the heat turned to an advantage as the deputy camp commander took a group of Ukrainian guards for a cooling swim in the river Bug.

The Jews in the lower camp — the part where prisoners were unloaded and prepared — had gathered some makeshift weapons. One had filled large cans with gasoline. Another had stolen some wire cutters. A third had managed to hide an ax among garbage he’d been ordered to remove.

Even some guns had been captured.

A few had long ago hidden gold or money in holes in trees, or buried it in secret spots. Just as the bodies had been exhumed, so now were these treasures.

Everything was set to begin at 4:30 in the afternoon. Tensions were high; everyone was on edge. And then, at just before 4:00—

“Boy!” shouted Kuttner, a fat SS man.

The child, perhaps eleven years old, stopped dead in his tracks. He was shaking from head to toe. The SS officer moved closer, a riding crop in his hand. “Boy!” he said again. “What have you got in your pockets?”

Jubas Meyer and Shlomo Malamud were five meters away, carrying an exhumed corpse to the cremation site. They stopped to watch the scene unfold. The pockets on the youngster’s filthy and tattered overalls were bulging slightly.

The boy said nothing. His eyes were wide and his lips peeled back in fear, showing decaying teeth. Despite the pounding heat, he was shaking as if it were below zero. The guard stepped up to him and slapped the boy’s thigh with the riding crop. The unmistakable jangle of coins was heard. The German narrowed his eyes. “Empty your pockets, Jew.”

The boy half turned to face the man. His teeth were chattering. He tried to reach into his pocket, but his hand was shaking so badly he couldn’t get it into the pocket’s mouth. Kuttner whipped the boy’s shoulder with his crop, the sound startling birds into flight, their calls counterpointing the child’s scream. Kuttner then reached his own fat hand into the pocket and pulled out several German coins. He reached in a second time. The pocket was apparently empty now, but Jubas could see the German fondling the boy’s genitals through the fabric. “Where did you get the money?”

The boy shook his head, but pointed past the camouflage of trees and fencing to the upper camp, where the gas chambers and ovens were hidden from view.

The guard grabbed the youngster’s shoulder roughly. “Come with me, boy. Stangl will deal with you.”

The child wasn’t the only one with something concealed on his person.

Jubas Meyer had been entrusted with one of the six stolen pistols. If the boy were taken to commander Fratiz Stangl, he’d doubtless reveal the plans for the revolt, now only thirty minutes from its planned start.

Meyer couldn’t allow that to happen. He pulled the gun from the folds of his own overalls, took a bead on the fat German, and—

—it was like ejaculation, the release, the moment, the payback—

—squeezed the trigger, and saw the German’s eyes go wide, saw his mouth go round, saw his fat, ugly, hateful form slump to the ground.

The signal for the beginning of the revolt was to have been a grenade detonation, but Meyer’s gunshot startled everyone into action. Cries of “Now!” went up across the lower camp. The canisters of gas were set ablaze. There were 850 Jews in the camp that day; they all ran for the barbed-wire fences. Some brought blankets, throwing them over the cruel knots of metal; others had wire cutters and furiously snipped through the lines. Those with guns shot as many guards as they could. Fire and smoke were everywhere. The guards who had gone swimming quickly returned and mounted horses or clambered aboard armored cars. Three hundred and fifty Jews made it over the fences and into the surrounding forest.

Most were rounded up easily and shot dead, the echoes of overlapping gun reports and the cries of birds and wildlife the last sounds they ever heard.

Still, some did make good their escape. They ran out into the woods, and kept running for their lives. Jubas Meyer was among them. Shlomo Malamud got out, too, and began a lifelong search for his brother Saul.

And others Jubas had known or heard of made it to safety as well: Eliahu Rosenberg and Pinhas Epstein; Casimir Landowski and Zalmon Chudzik.

And David Solomon, too.

But they, and perhaps forty-five others, were all that survived Treblinka.

Chapter 2

The early 1980s. Ronald Reagan had recently been sworn in as president, and, moments later, Iran had released the American hostages it had been holding prisoner for 444 days. Here in Canada, Pierre Trudeau was in the middle of his comeback term as prime minister, struggling to bring the Canadian constitution home from Great Britain.

Eighteen-year-old Pierre Tardivel stood in front of the strange house in suburban Toronto, the collar of his red McGill University jacket turned up against the cold, dry wind whipping down the salt-stained street.

Now that he was here, this didn’t seem like such a good idea. Maybe he should just turn around, head back to the bus station, back to Montreal.

His mother would be delighted if he gave up now, and, well, if what Henry Spade’s wife had told Pierre about her husband were true, Pierre wasn’t sure that he could face the man. He should just—

No. No, he had come this far. He had to see for himself.

Pierre took a deep breath, inhaling the crisp air, trying to calm the butterflies in his stomach. He walked up the driveway to the front door of the side-split suburban home, pressed the doorbell, and heard the muffled sound of the chimes from within. A few moments later, the door opened, and a handsome, middle-aged woman stood before him.

“Hello, Mrs. Spade. I’m Pierre Tardivel.” He was conscious of how out of place his Quebecois accent must have sounded here — another reminder that he was intruding.

There was a moment while Mrs. Spade looked Pierre up and down during which Pierre thought he saw a flicker of recognition on her face.

Pierre had merely told her on the phone that his parents had been friends of her husband, back when Henry Spade had lived in Montreal in the early sixties. And yet she had to have realized there must be a special reason for Pierre to want to visit. What was it Pierre’s mother had said when he’d confronted her with the evidence? “I knew you were Henry’s — you’re the spitting image of him.”

“Hello, Pierre,” said Mrs. Spade. The voice was richer than it had sounded over the phone, but there was still a trace of wariness to it. “You can call me Dorothy. Please come in.” She stepped aside, and Pierre entered the vestibule. Physically, Dorothy bore a passing resemblance to his mother — dark hair, cool blue-gray eyes, full lips. Perhaps Henry Spade had been attracted to a specific type of woman. Pierre unzipped his jacket, but made no move to take it off.

“Henry is upstairs in his room,” said Dorothy. His room. Separate bedrooms? How cold. “It’s easier for him to be lying down. Do you mind seeing him up there?”

Pierre shook his head.

“Very well,” she said. “Come with me.”

They walked into the brightly lit living room. Two full walls were covered with bookcases made of dark wood. A staircase led to the second floor. Along one side of it were tracks for a small motorized chair. The chair itself was positioned at the top. Dorothy led Pierre upstairs and into the first door on the left.

Pierre fought to keep his expression neutral.

Lying on the bed was a man who appeared to be dancing on his back.

His arms and legs moved constantly, rotating at shoulder and hip, elbow and knee, wrist and ankle. His head lolled left and right across the pillow.

His hair was steel gray and, of course, his eyes were brown.

“Bonjour,” said Pierre, so startled that he’d begun speaking in French.

He began again. “Hello. I’m Pierre Tardivel.”

The man’s voice was weak and slurred. Speaking was clearly an effort.

“Hello, P-Pierre,” he said. He paused, but whether composing his thoughts or just waiting for his body to yield a little control, Pierre couldn’t say.

“How is — is your mother?”

Pierre blinked repeatedly. He would not insult the man by crying in front of him. “She’s fine.”

Henry’s head rolled from side to side, but he kept his eyes on Pierre. He wanted more, Pierre knew, than a platitude.

“She’s in good health,” he said. “She’s a loans officer for a large branch of Banque de Montreal.”

“She’s happy?” asked Henry, with effort.

“She enjoys her work, and money is no problem. There was a lot of insurance when Dad died.”

Henry swallowed with what appeared to be considerable difficulty. “I, ah, didn’t know that Alain had passed on. Tell her… tell her I’m sorry.”

The words seemed sincere. No sarcasm, no double edge. Alain Tardivel had been his rival, but Henry seemed genuinely saddened by his death.

Pierre squeezed his jaw tightly shut for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll tell her.”

“She’s a wonderful woman,” said Henry.

“I have a picture of her,” said Pierre. He pulled out his wallet and flipped to the small portrait of his mother wearing a white silk blouse. He held the wallet where Henry could see it.

Henry stared at it for a long time, then said, “I guess I changed more than she did.”

Pierre forced a weak smile.

“Are… only child?” A few words had gotten lost in the convulsion that had passed over Henry’s body like a wave.

“Yes. There—” No, no point in mentioning his younger sister, Marie-Claire, who had died when she was two. “Yes, I’m the only one.”

“You’re a fine-looking young man,” said Henry.

Pierre smiled — genuinely this time — and Henry seemed to smile back.

Dorothy, perhaps detecting the undercurrent, or perhaps just bored with conversation about people she didn’t know, said, “Well, I can see you two have things to talk about. I’ll go downstairs. Pierre, can I bring you a drink? Coffee?”

“No, thank you,” said Pierre.

“Well, then,” she said, and left.

Pierre stood beside Henry’s bed. Having his own room made perfect sense now. How could it be any other way? No one could sleep next to him, given the constant jerking of his limbs.

The man on the bed lifted his right arm toward Pierre. It moved slowly from side to side, like the bough of a tree swaying in the wind. Pierre reached out and took the hand, holding it firmly. Henry smiled.

“You look… just like I did… when I was your age,” said Henry.

A tear did slip down Pierre’s cheek. “You know who I am?”

Henry nodded. “I — when your mother got pregnant, I’d thought there was a chance. But she ended our relationship. I’d assumed if I’d… if I’d been right, I’d have heard something before now.” His head was moving, but he managed to keep his eyes mostly on Pierre. “I— I wish I’d known.”

Pierre squeezed the hand. “Me, too.” A pause. “Do you— do you have any other children?”

“Daughters,” said Henry. “Two daughters. Adopted. Dorothy— Dorothy couldn’t…”

Pierre nodded.

“Best, in a way,” said Henry, and here, at last, he let his gaze wander away from Pierre. “Huntington’s disease is… is…”

Pierre swallowed. “Hereditary. I know.”

Henry’s head moved back and forth more rapidly than normal — a deliberate signal all but lost in the muscular noise. “If I’d known I had it, I… never would have allowed myself to father a child. I’m sorry. V-very sorry.”

Pierre nodded.

“You might have it, too.”

Pierre said nothing.

“There’s no test,” said Henry. “I’m sorry.”

Pierre watched Henry move about on the bed, knees jerking, free arm waving. And yet in the middle of it all was a face not unlike his own, round and broad, with deep brown eyes. He realized then that he didn’t know how old Henry was. Forty-five? Perhaps as old as fifty. Certainly no more than that. Henry’s right arm started jerking rapidly. Pierre, not sure what to do, let go of his hand.

“It’s… it’s good to finally meet you,” said Pierre; and then, realizing that he would never have another chance, he added a single word: “Dad.”

Henry’s eyes were wet. “You need anything?” he said. “Money?”

Pierre shook his head. “I’m fine. Really, I am. I just wanted to meet you.”

Henry’s lower lip was trembling. Pierre couldn’t tell at first if it was just part of the chorea or had deeper meaning. But when Henry next spoke, his voice was full of pain. “I — I’ve forgotten your name,” he said.

“Pierre,” he said. “Pierre Jacques Tardivel.”

“Pierre,” repeated Henry. “A good name.” He paused for several seconds, then said, “How is your mother? Did you bring a picture?”

Pierre went down to the living room. Dorothy was sitting in a chair, reading a Jackie Collins novel. She looked up and gave him a wan smile.

“Thank you,” said Pierre. “Thank you for everything.”

She nodded. “He very much wanted to see you.”

“I was very glad to see him.” He paused. “But I should be going now.”

“Wait,” said Dorothy. She took an envelope from the coffee table and rose to her feet. “I have something for you.” Pierre looked at it. “I told him I didn’t need any money.” Dorothy shook her head. “It’s not that. It’s photographs — of Henry, from a dozen years ago. From when you would have been a little boy. Photographs of what he was like then — the way I’m sure he’d like you to remember him.”

Pierre took the envelope. His eyes were stinging. “Thank you,” he said.

She nodded, her face not quite masking her pain.

Chapter 3

Pierre returned to Montreal. His family doctor referred him to a specialist in genetic disorders. Pierre went to see the specialist, whose office wasn’t far from Olympic Stadium.

“Huntington’s is carried on a dominant gene,” said Dr. Laviolette to Pierre, in French. “You have precisely a fifty-fifty chance of getting it.” He paused, and smoothed out his steel gray hair. “Your case is very unusual — discovering as an adult that you’re at risk; most at-risks have known for years. How did you find out?”

Pierre was quiet for a moment, thinking. Was there any need to go into the details? That he’d discovered in a first-year genetics class that it was impossible for two blue-eyed parents to have a brown-eyed child? That he’d confronted his mother, Elisabeth, with this fact? That she’d confessed to having had an affair with one Henry Spade during the early years of her marriage to Alain Tardivel, the man Pierre had known as his father, a man who had been dead now for two years? That Elisabem, a Catholic, had been unable to divorce Alain? That Elisabeth had successfully hidden from Alain the fact that their brown-eyed son was not his biological child?

And that Henry Spade had moved to Toronto, never knowing he’d fathered a child?

It was too much, too personal. “I only recently met my real father for the first time,” said Pierre simply.

Laviolette nodded. “How old are you, Pierre?”

“I turn nineteen next month.”

The doctor frowned. “There isn’t any predictive test for Huntington’s, I’m afraid. You might not have the disease, but the only way you’ll discover that is when you finish middle age without it showing up. On the other hand, you might develop symptoms in as few as ten or fifteen years.”

Laviolette looked at him quietly. They’d already gone over the worst of it. Huntington’s disease (also known as Huntington’s chorea) affects about half a million people worldwide. It selectively destroys two parts of the brain that help control movement. Symptoms, which normally first manifest themselves between the ages of thirty and fifty, include abnormal posture, progressive dementia, and involuntary muscular action — the name “chorea” refers to the dancing movements typical of the disease. The disease itself, or complications arising from it, eventually kills the victim; Huntington’s sufferers often choke to death on food because they’ve lost the muscular control to swallow.

“Have you ever thought about killing yourself, Pierre?” asked Laviolette.

Pierre’s eyebrows rose at the unexpected question. “No.”

“I don’t mean just now over concern about possibly having Huntington’s disease. I mean ever. Have you ever thought about killing yourself?”

“No. Not seriously.”

“Are you prone to depression?”

“No more than the next guy, I imagine.”

“Boredom? Lack of direction?”

Pierre thought about lying, but didn’t. “Umm, yes. I have to admit to some of that.” He shrugged. “People say I’m unmotivated, that I coast through life.”

Laviolette nodded. “Do you know who Woody Guthrie is?”

“Who?”

The doctor made a “kids today” face. “He wrote ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ ”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.”

“He died of Huntington’s in 1967. His son Arlo — you have heard of him, no?”

Pierre shook his head.

Laviolette sighed. “You’re making me feel old. Arlo wrote ‘Alice’s Restaurant.’ ”

Pierre looked blank.

“Folk music,” said Laviolette.

“In English, no doubt,” said Pierre dismissively.

“Even worse,” said Laviolette, with a twinkle in his eye. “American English. Anyway, Arlo is probably the most famous person in your position. He’s got a fifty-fifty chance of having inherited the gene, just like you. He talked about it once in an interview in People magazine; I’ll give you a photocopy before you go.”

Pierre, unsure what to say, simply nodded.

Laviolette reached for his pen and prescription pad. “I’m going to write out the number for the local Huntington’s support up; I want you to call them.” He copied a phone number from a small Cerlox-bound Montreal health-services directory, tore the sheet off the pad, and handed it to Pierre. He paused for a moment, as if thinking, then picked a business card from the brass holder on his desk and wrote another phone number beneath the one preprinted on the card. “And I’m also doing something I never do, Pierre. This is my personal number at home. If you can’t get me here, try me there — day or night. Sometimes… sometimes people take news like this very poorly. Please, if you’re ever thinking of doing something rash, call me. Promise you’ll do that, Pierre.” He proffered the card.

“You mean if I’m thinking about killing myself, don’t you?”

The doctor nodded.

Pierre took the card. To his astonishment, his hand was shaking.

Late at night, alone in his room. Pierre hadn’t even managed to finish undressing for bed. He just stared into space, not focusing, not thinking.

It was unfair, damn it. Totally unfair.

What had he done to deserve this?

There was a small crucifix above the door to his room; it had been there since he’d been a little boy. He stared up at the tiny Jesus — but there was no point in praying. The die was cast; what was done was done. Whether or not he had the gene had been determined almost twenty years ago, at the very moment of his conception.

Pierre had bought an Arlo Guthrie LP and listened to it. He’d been unable to find any Woody Guthrie at A A’s, but the Montreal library had an old album by a group called the Almanac Singers that Woody had once been part of. He listened to that, too.

The Almanac Singers’ music seemed full of hope; Arlo’s music seemed sad. It could go either way.

Pierre had read that most Huntington’s patients ended their lives in hospital. The average stay before death was seven years.

Outside, the wind was whistling. A branch of the tree next to the house swept back and forth across the window, like a crooked, bony hand beckoning him to follow.

He didn’t want to die. But he didn’t want to live through years of suffering.

He thought about his father — his real father, Henry Spade. Thrashing about in bed, his faculties slipping away.

His eyes lit on his desk, a white particleboard thing from Consumers Distributing. On it was his copy of Les Miserables, which he’d just finished reading for his French-literature course. Jean Valjean had stolen a loaf of bread, and no matter what he did, he could not undo that fact; until his dying day, his record was marked. Pierre’s record was marked, too, one way or the other, but there was no way to read it. If he were like Valjean — if he were a convict — then he had a Javert, too, endlessly pursuing him, eventually fated to catch up.

In the book, the tables had turned, with Inspector Javert ending up being the one incapable of escaping his birthright. Unable to alter what he was, he took the only way out, plunging from a parapet into the icy waters of the Seine below.

The only way out…

Pierre got up, shuffled over to the desk, turned on a hooded lamp on an articulated bone-white arm, and found Laviolette’s card with the doctor’s home number written on it. He stared at the card, reading it over and over again.

The only way out…

He walked back to his bed, sat on the edge of it, and listened to the wind some more. Without ever looking down to see what he was doing, he began drawing the edge of the card back and forth across the inside of his left wrist, again and again, as though it were a blade.

Chapter 4

When she was eighteen, Molly Bond had been an undergraduate psychology student at the University of Minnesota. She lived in residence even though her family was right here in Minneapolis. Even back then, she couldn’t take staying in the same house with them — not with her disapproving mother, not with her vacuous sister Jessica, and not with her mother’s new husband, Paul, whose thoughts about her were often anything but paternal.

Still, there were certain family events that forced her to return home.

Today was one of those. “Happy birthday, Paul,” she said, leaning in to give her stepfather a kiss on the cheek. “I love you.”

Should say the same thing back. “Love you, too, hon.”

Molly stepped away, trying to keep her sigh from escaping audibly. It wasn’t much of a party, but maybe they’d do better next year. This was Paul’s forty-ninth birthday; they’d try to commemorate the big five-oh in a more stylish fashion.

If Paul was still around at that point, that is. What Molly had wanted to detect when she leaned in to kiss Paul was I love you, too, spontaneous, unplanned, unrehearsed. But no. She’d heard Should say the same thing back, and then, a moment later, the spoken words, false, manufactured, flat.

Molly’s mother came out of the kitchen carrying a cake — a carrot cake, Paul’s favorite, crowned with the requisite number of candles, including one for good luck, arranged just like the stars on an American flag. Jessica helped Paul get his presents out of the way.

Molly couldn’t resist. While her mother fumbled to get her camera set up, she moved in to stand right beside her stepfather, bringing him into her zone again. Molly’s mother said, “Now make a wish and blow out the candles.”

Paul closed his eyes. I wish, he thought, that I hadn’t gotten married.

He exhaled on the tiny flames, and smoke rose toward the ceiling.

Molly wasn’t really surprised. At first she’d thought Paul was having an affair: he often worked late on weeknights, or disappeared all day on Saturdays, saying he was going to the office. But the truth, in some ways, was just as bad. He wasn’t going off to be with someone else; rather, he just didn’t want to be with them.

They sang “Happy Birthday,” and then Paul cut the cake.

The thoughts of Molly’s mother were no better. She suspected Molly might be a lesbian, so rarely was she seen with men. She hated her job, but pretended to enjoy it, and although she smiled when she handed over money to help Molly with university expenses, she resented every dollar of it. It reminded her of how hard she’d worked to put her first husband, Molly’s dad, through business school.

Molly looked again at Paul and found she couldn’t really blame him. She wanted to get away from this family, too — far, far away, so that even birthdays and Christmases could be skipped. Paul handed her a piece of cake. Molly took it and moved down to the far end of the table, sitting alone.

Wrapped up in his personal problems, Pierre failed all of his first-year courses. He went to see the dean of undergraduate studies and explained his situation. The dean gave him a second chance: McGill offered a reduced curriculum over the summer session. Pierre would only manage a couple of credits, but it would get him back on the right track for next September.

And so Pierre found himself back in an introductory genetics course. By coincidence, the same pencil-necked Anglais teaching assistant who had originally pointed out the heritability of eye color was teaching this one.

Pierre had never been one for paying attention in class; his old notebooks contained mostly doodled hockey-team crests. But today he really was trying to listen… at least with one ear.

“It was the biggest puzzle in science during the early 1950s,” said the TA. “What form did the DNA molecule take? It was a race against time, with many luminaries, including Linus Pauling, working on the problem.

They all knew that whoever discovered the answer would be remembered forever…”

Or perhaps with both ears…

“A young biologist — no older than any of you — named James Watson got involved with Francis Crick, and the two of them started looking for the answer. Building on the work of Maurice Wilkins and X-ray crystallography studies done by Rosalind Franklin…”

Pierre sat rapt.

“… Watson and Crick knew that the four bases used in DNA — adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine — were each of a different size. But by using cardboard cutouts of the bases, they were able to show that when adenine and thymine bind together, they form a combined shape that’s the same length as the one formed when guanine and cytosine bind together. And they showed that those combined shapes could form rungs on a spiral ladder…”

Rapt.

“It was an amazing breakthrough — and what was even more amazing was that James Watson was just twenty-five years old when he and Crick proved that the DNA molecule took the form of a double helix…”

Morning, after a night spent more awake than asleep. Pierre sat on the edge of his bed.

He had turned nineteen in April.

Many of those at risk for Huntington’s had full-blown symptoms by the time they were — to select a figure — thirty-eight. Just double his current age.

So little time.

And yet—

And yet, so much had happened in the last nineteen years.

Vague, early memories, of baby-sitters and tricycles and marbles and endless summers and Batman in first run on TV.

Kindergarten. God, that seemed so long ago. Mademoiselle Renault’s class. Dimly recalled celebrations of Canada’s centennial.

Being a Louveteau — a Cub Scout — but never managing to finish a merit badge.

Two years of summer camp.

His family moving from Clearpoint to Outrement, and he having to adjust to a new school.

Breaking his arm playing street hockey.

And the FLQ October Crisis in 1970, and his parents trying to explain to a very frightened boy what all the TV news stories meant, and why there were troops in the streets.

Robert Apollinaire, his best friend when he was ten, who had moved all of twenty blocks away, and had never been seen again.

And puberty, and all that that entailed.

The hubbub when the 1976 Olympics were held in Montreal.

His first kiss, at a party, playing spin the bottle.

And seeing Star Wars for the first time and thinking it was the best movie that ever was.

His first girlfriend, Marie — he wondered where she was now.

Getting his driver’s license, and smashing up Dad’s car two months later.

Discovering the magic words Je t’aime, and how effective they were at getting his hand under a sweater or skirt. Then learning what those words really meant, in the summer of his seventeenth year, with Danielle. And crying alone on a street corner after she had broken up with him.

Learning to drink beer, and then learning to like the taste. Parties.

Summer jobs. A school play for which he did lighting. Winning season’s tickets to the Canadiens home games in a CFCF radio giveaway — what a year that had been! Walking, unmotivated, through high school. Doing sports reporting for L’Informateur, the school newspaper. That big fight with Roch Laval — fifteen years of friendship, gone in one evening, never to be recovered.

Dad’s heart attack. Pierre had thought the pain of losing him would never go away, but it had. Time heals all wounds.

Almost all.

All that, in nineteen years. It was a long time, was a substantial period, was… was, perhaps, all the good time he had left.

The pencil-necked teaching assistant had been talking last class about James D. Watson. Just twenty-five when he’d co-discovered the helical nature of DNA. And by the time he was thirty-four, Watson had won the Nobel Prize.

Pierre knew that he was bright. He walked through school because he could walk through school. Whatever the subject, he had no trouble.

Study? You must be joking. Carry home a stack of books? Surely you jest.

A life that might be cut short.

A Nobel Prize by age thirty-four.

Pierre began to get dressed, putting on underwear and a shirt.

He felt an emptiness in his heart, a vast feeling of loss. But he came to realize, after a few moments, that it wasn’t the potential, future loss that he was mourning. It was the wasted past, the misspent time, the hours frittered away, the days without accomplishment, the coasting through life.

Pierre pulled up his socks.

He would make the most of it — make the most of every minute.

Pierre Jacques Tardivel would be remembered.

He looked at his watch.

No time to waste.

None.

Chapter 5

Avi Meyer’s father, Jubas Meyer, had been one of the fifty people to escape from the Treblinka death camp. Jubas had lived for three years after the escape, but had died before Avi was born. As a child growing up in Chicago, where Avi’s parents had settled after time in a displaced-persons camp, Avi had resented that his dad wasn’t around. But shortly after his bar mitzvah in 1960, Avi’s mother said to him, “You’re a man now, Avi. You should know what your father went through — what all our people went through.”

And she’d told him. All of it.

The Nazis.

Treblinka.

Yes, his father had escaped the camp, but his father’s brother and three sisters had all been killed there, as had Avi’s grandparents, and countless other people they’d been related to or known.

All dead. Ghosts.

But now, perhaps, the ghosts could rest. They had the man who had tormented them, the man who had tortured them, the man who had gassed them to death.

Ivan the Terrible. They had the bastard. And now he was going to pay.

Avi, a compact, homely man with a face like a bulldog, was an agent with the Office of Special Investigations, the division of the United States Department of Justice devoted to hunting down Nazi war criminals. He and his colleagues at the OSI had identified a Cleveland autoworker named John Demjanjuk as Ivan the Terrible.

Oh, Demjanjuk didn’t seem evil now. He was a bald, tubby Ukrainian in his late sixties, with protruding ears and almond-shaped eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. And, true, he seemed not nearly as cunning as some reports had made out Ivan the Terrible to be, but, then again, he was hardly the first man to have had his intellect dulled by the passing decades.

The OSI agents had shown photo spreads containing pictures of Demjanjuk and others to Treblinka survivors. Based on their identifications, and an SS identity card recovered from the Soviets, Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship had been revoked in 1981. He’d been extradited to Israel, and now was standing trial for the one capital crime in all of Israeli law.

The courtroom in Jerusalem’s Binyanei Ha’uma convention center was large — indeed, it was actually Hall Two, a theater rented for this trial, the most important one since Eichmann’s, so that as many spectators as possible could see history being made. Much of the audience consisted of Holocaust survivors and their families. The survivors were an ever dwindling number: since Demjanjuk’s denaturalization trial in Cleveland, three of those who had identified him as Ivan the Terrible had passed away.

The judges’ bench was on the stage — three high-back leather chairs, with the one in the center even taller than the other two. The bench was flanked on either side by a blue-and-white Israeli flag. To stage left, the prosecution’s table and the witness box; to stage right, the table for the defense attorneys and, just behind them, the dock where Demjanjuk, wearing an open-necked shirt and blue sports jacket, sat with his interpreter and guard. All the furnishings were of polished blond wood.

The stage was raised a full meter above the general audience seating.

Television crews lined the back of the theater; the trial was being broadcast live.

The trial had been under way for a week. Avi Meyer, there as an OSI observer, whiled away the time waiting for the court to be called to order by rereading a paperback of To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s tale had affected him profoundly the first time he’d read it in university. Not that the experiences of Scout — Miss Jean Louise Finch, that is — growing up in the Deep South bore any resemblance to his own upbringing in Chicago.

But the story — of the truths we hide, of the search for justice — was timeless.

In fact, maybe that book had as much to do with him joining the OSI as did the ghosts of the family he had never known. Tom Robinson, a black man, was charged with raping a white girl name of Mayella Ewell. The only physical evidence was Mayella’s badly bruised face: she’d been punched repeatedly by a man who had led with his left. Her father, a nasty impoverished drunk, was left-handed. Tom Robinson was a cripple; his left arm was twelve inches shorter than his right, and ended in a tiny shriveled hand. Tom testified that Mayella had thrown herself at him, that he’d rejected her advances, and that her father had beaten her for tempting a black man. There was not one shred of evidence to support the rape charge, and Tom Robinson was physically incapable of inflicting the beating.

But in that sleepy Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, the all-male, all-white jury had found Tom Robinson guilty as charged. A white girl’s testimony had to be taken over a black man’s and, well, even if Robinson wasn’t guilty of this particular crime, he was a shiftless nigger and doubtless guilty of something else.

That justice needed righteous guardians there could be no doubt. And there had been one in To Kill a Mockingbird: Jean Louise’s lawyer father, Atticus Finch, who represented Tom despite the calumny of the townsfolk, who gave a spirited, intelligent, dignified defense.

Back then, in the thirties, the courthouse, like everything else, had been segregated. The blacks had to sit in the balcony. Jean Louise and her brother Jem had snuck into the courthouse and found a place to watch from up there, near the kindly Reverend Sykes.

When the case was over, when Tom Robinson was taken off to jail, when all the whites had ambled out, the blacks waited in silence until Atticus Finch gathered up his law books. As he made his way out, the black men and women, knowing in their bones that Tom was innocent, that this was their lot, that Atticus had done his best, rose to their feet and stood in silent salute. The Reverend Sykes spoke to Atticus’s young daughter. “Miss Jean Louise,” he said, “stand up. Your father’s passin‘.”

Even in defeat, a righteous man is honored by those who know he did his best in an honorable cause. Your father’s passin‘…

Supreme court justice Dov Levin and Jerusalem district court judges Zvi Tal and Dalia Dorner — the tribunal that would decide John Demjanjuk’s fate — came into the theater. As soon as the three were seated, the clerk rose and announced, “Beit Hamishpat! State of Israel versus Ivan ‘John,’ son of Nikolai Demjanjuk, criminal file 373/86 at the Jerusalem District Court, sitting as the Special Court under the Law for the Punishment of Nazis and Their Collaborators. Court session of 24 Shevat 5747, 23 February 1987, morning session.”

Avi Meyer folded down a page corner to mark his place.

“My name is Epstein, Pinhas, the son of Dov and Sara. I was born in Czestochowa, Poland, on March third, 1925. I lived there with my parents until the day we were taken to Treblinka.”

Avi Meyer, who had just turned forty and so was particularly conscious of the signs of aging, thought Epstein looked ten years younger than sixty-two. He was tall, with a full head of reddish brown hair combed straight back from his forehead.

The panel of three judges listened intently: bearded Zvi Tal, a yarmulke crowning his thick gray hair; Dov Levin, dour, balding, wearing horn-rimmed glasses; and Dalia Dorner, her hair cropped short, wearing a jacket and tie just like her male colleagues.

“Your Honors,” said Epstein, turning to them, “I remember an incident — I have nightmares about it still. One day, a little girl managed to escape alive from the gas chamber. She was twelve or fourteen. Like Jubas Meyer, Shlomo Malamud, and others, I was forced to be a corpse bearer, removing the dead from the chambers.” Avi Meyer sat up straight at the mention of his father’s name. “The girl’s words still ring in my ears,” said Epstein: “ ‘Mother! Mother!’ ” He paused for a moment and wiped tears from his eyes. “Well, Ivan went after Jubas, and…”

Avi Meyer felt his heart pounding. Epstein had trailed off, and was now looking again from judge to judge, lingering longest on Dalia Dorner, as if intimidated by the female presence. “I’m sorry,” said the witness. “I’m too ashamed to repeat the words Ivan used next.”

Dov Levin frowned and removed his glasses. “If it’s important that we hear the words, then say them.”

Epstein sucked in breath, then: “He beat Jubas, then shouted, ‘ Davayy ebatsa’…”

Levin raised his shaggy black eyebrows. “Which means?”

Epstein squirmed in his chair. “ ‘Come fuck,’ in Russian. He was saying to Jubas, take off your pants and come fuck. And he pointed at the terrified girl.”

Avi Meyer tasted bile at the back of his throat. He’d thought he’d heard all the horrors twenty-seven years ago, after his bar mitzvah. His mother was dead now; he hoped she had never known.

Mickey Shaked, one of the three Israeli prosecutors, had a full head of curly hair and sad, soulful eyes. He placed the cardboard photo spread in front of Epstein. It was a sheet with eight photographs on it: two rows of three pictures and a final row of two. All were of Ukrainian men suspected of war crimes. The first five photos were passport shots; the sixth was clipped from some other document. Only the seventh and eighth were regular snapshots — almost twice as big as the others. Of the eight photos, only the seventh showed an almost totally bald man; only the seventh showed a round-faced man.

“Do you see anyone whose face you recognize among these pictures?” asked Shaked.

Epstein nodded, but at first was unable to give voice to his thoughts. He finally placed a finger on the seventh picture. “I recognize him,” he said.

“In what way?”

“The forehead, the round face, the very short neck, the broad shoulders, the ears that stick out. This is Ivan the Terrible as I remember him from Treblinka.”

“And do you see this same man anywhere in this court today?” asked Shaked, looking around the vast theater as if he himself had no idea where the monster might be.

Epstein raised his voice as he pointed at Demjanjuk. “Yes, he’s sitting right there!”

Spectators actually applauded. Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, spread his arms imploringly at the bench. Judge Levin scowled, as if reluctant to interrupt good theater, but finally called the room to order.

Another witness was on the stand now: Eliahu Rosenberg, a short, stocky man with gray hair and dark bushy eyebrows.

“I ask you to look at the accused,” said Prosecutor Mickey Shaked.

“Scrutinize him.”

Rosenberg turned to the three judges. “Will you ask the accused to take off his glasses?”

Demjanjuk immediately removed his glasses, but as Mark O’Connor, his American lawyer, rose to object, Demjanjuk put them back on.

“Mr. O’Connor,” said Judge Levin, frowning, “what is your position?”

O’Connor looked at Demjanjuk, then at Rosenberg, then back again at Judge Levin. Finally, he shrugged. “My client has nothing to hide.”

Demjanjuk stood up and took off his glasses again. He then leaned forward and spoke to O’Connor. “It’s okay,” Demjanjuk said. “Have him come closer.” He pointed to the edge of his booth. “Have him come right here.”

O’Connor at first shushed Demjanjuk, but then seemed to think that perhaps he did have a good idea. “Mar Rosenberg,” he said, “why don’t you come over for a closer look?”

Rosenberg left the witness stand and, without taking his eyes off Demjanjuk, closed the distance. Spectators whispered to themselves.

Rosenberg placed a hand on the edge of Demjanjuk’s dock to steady himself. “Posmotree!” he shouted. Look at me!

Demjanjuk met his eyes and stuck out his hand. “Shalom,” he said.

Rosenberg stumbled backward. “Murderer!” he shouted. “How dare you offer me your hand?” Avi Meyer watched as Rosenberg’s wife, Adina, who was seated in the third row, fainted. Her daughter caught her in her arms.

Rosenberg stormed back to the witness stand.

“You were asked to come closer and have a look,” said Judge Dov Levin.

“What did you see?”

Rosenberg’s voice was shaking. “He is Ivan.” He swallowed, trying to gain composure. “I say that without hesitation or the slightest doubt. He is Ivan from Treblinka — Ivan from the gas chambers. I’ll never forget those eyes — those murderous eyes.”

Demjanjuk shouted something. Avi Meyer hadn’t made it out clearly, and O’Connor, his hearing impaired by the translation headset, apparently also missed it. He took off the earphones and turned to face his client.

Avi strained to hear. “What did you say?” asked O’Connor.

Demjanjuk, red-faced, crossed his arms in front of his chest, said nothing. Demjanjuk’s Israeli lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, leaned closer to O’Connor and spoke in English. “He said to Rosenberg, ‘Atah shakran’

—“ ‘You are a liar.’ ”

“I’m telling the truth!” shouted Rosenberg. “He is Ivan the Terrible!”

Chapter 6

Molly Bond felt — well, she wasn’t sure how she felt. Cheap, but excited; full of fear, but full of hope.

She would turn twenty-six this summer, and was now well on her way to her Ph.D in behavioral psychology. But tonight she wasn’t studying.

Tonight, she sat in a bar a few blocks from the University of Minnesota campus, the smoky air stinging her eyes. She’d already had a Long Island iced tea, trying to build up her courage. She was wearing a tight-fitting red silk blouse, with no bra underneath. When she looked down at her chest, she could see the points made by her nipples pressing against the material. She’d already undone one button before entering, and now she reached down and undid a second one. She was also wearing a black leather skirt that went less than halfway down her thigh, dark stockings, and spike-heeled black shoes. Her blond hair was hanging loosely around her shoulders, and she had on green eye shadow, and lipstick as bright red as the silk top.

Molly looked up and saw a man enter the bar: a not-bad-looking guy in his mid-twenties, with brown eyes and lots of dark hair. Italian, maybe.

He was wearing a UM jacket, with “MED” on one sleeve. Perfect.

She saw him looking her over. Molly’s stomach was fluttering. She glanced at him, managed a small smile, then looked away.

It had been enough. The guy came over and took the barstool next to her, well within her zone.

“Can I buy you a drink?” he asked.

Molly nodded. “Long Island iced tea,” she said, indicating her empty glass. He motioned for the bartender.

His thoughts were pornographic. When he didn’t think she was looking, Molly could see him peering down her front. She crossed her legs on the stool, bouncing her breasts as she did so.

It wasn’t long before they were back at his place. Typical student apartment, not far from the campus: empty pizza boxes in the kitchen, textbooks spread out on the furniture. He apologized for the mess and started cleaning off the couch.

“No need for that,” said Molly. There were only two doorways off the living room, and both were open; she moved over to stand in the one that led to the bedroom.

He came over to her, his hands finding her breasts through the blouse, then under the blouse, then quickly helping her remove the blouse altogether. Molly undid his belt buckle, and they shed the rest of their clothes on the way to the bed, plenty of light still spilling in from the living room. He opened his night-table drawer, took out a three-pack of condoms, and looked at Molly. “I hate these things,” he said, testing the waters, hoping she’d agree. “Kills the sensation.”

Molly slid her palm across his hairy chest, down his muscular arm, and onto his hand, taking the condoms from him, and putting them back in the still-open drawer. “Then why bother?” she said, smiling up at him. She moved her hand to his penis and stroked it into full erection.

Avi Meyer sat in his apartment, mouth hanging open.

Demjanjuk had been found guilty, of course, and sentenced to death.

The outcome had been obvious from the beginningof the trial. Still, there had to be an appeal: it was mandatory under Israeli law. Avi hadn’t been sent to Israel for the second trial; his bosses at the OSI were confident nothing would change. Surely all the claims filtering into the press were just clever ploys by Demjanjuk’s grandstanding attorneys. Surely the interview aired on CBS’s 60 Minutes with Maria Dudek, a skinny woman now in her seventies, with white hair beneath a kerchief, ragged clothing, and only a few teeth left, a woman who had been a prostitute in the 1940s in Wolga Okralnik near Treblinka, a woman who had had a regular john — a regular ivan — who operated the gas chambers there, a woman who had screamed in bought passion for him — surely this old woman was mistaken when she said her client’s name had not been Ivan Demjanjuk but rather Ivan Marchenko.

But no. Avi Meyer was watching all the OSI’s work unravel on CNN. The Israeli Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Meir Shamgar, had just overturned the conviction of John Demjanjuk.

Demjanjuk had now been held prisoner in Israel for five and a half years. His appeal had been delayed three years due to a heart attack suffered by Judge Zvi Tal. And during those three years, the Soviet Union had fallen and formerly secret files had been made public.

Just as Maria Dudek had said, the man who had operated the gas chamber at Treblinka had been Ivan Marchenko, a Ukrainian who did bear a resemblance to Demjanjuk. But the resemblance was only passing.

Demjanjuk had been born April 3, 1920, while Marchenko had been born February 2, 1911. Demjanjuk had blue eyes while Marchenko’s were brown.

Marchenko had been married before the outbreak of World War II.

Demjanjuk’s son-in-law, Ed Nishnic, had gone to Russia and tracked down Marchenko’s family in Seryovka, a village in the district of Dnepropetrovsk. The family had not seen Marchenko since he’d enlisted in the Red Army in July 1941. Marchenko’s abandoned wife had died only a month before Nishnic’s visit, and his daughter broke down and cried upon learning of the horrors her long-missing father had perpetrated at Treblinka. “It’s good,” she was reported to have said between sobs, “that mother died not knowing.”

When those words had been relayed to him, Avi’s heart had jumped. It was the same sentiment he’d felt upon learning that Ivan had forced his own father to rape a little girl.

The KGB files contained a sworn statement from Nikolai Shelaiev, the other gas-chamber operator at Treblinka, the one who had been, quite literally, the lesser of two evils. Shelaiev had been captured by the Soviets in 1950, and tried and executed as a war criminal in 1952. His deposition contained the last recorded sighting by anyone anywhere of Ivan Marchenko, coming out of a brothel in Fiume in March 1945. He had told Nikolai he had no intention of returning home to his family.

Even before Maria Dudek had spoken to Mike Wallace, even before Demjanjuk was stripped of his U.S. citizenship, Avi had known that the last name used by Ivan the Terrible while at Treblinka might indeed have been Marchenko. But that was of no significance, Avi had assured himself: the name Marchenko was intimately linked to Demjanjuk, anyway. In a form Demjanjuk had filled out in 1948 to claim refugee status, he had given it as his mother’s maiden name.

But before the first trial, the marriage license of Demjanjuk’s parents, dated 24 January 1910, had come to light. It proved his mother’s maiden name wasn’t Marchenko at all; rather, it was Tabachuk. When Avi had questioned Demjanjuk about why he’d put “Marchenko” on the form, Demjanjuk had claimed he’d forgotten his mother’s real maiden name and, considering the matter of no consequence, had simply inserted a common Ukrainian surname to complete the paperwork.

Right, Avi had thought. Sure.

But now it seemed it had been the truth. John Demjanjuk was not Ivan…

… and Avi Meyer and the rest of the OSI had come within inches of being responsible for the execution of an innocent man.

Avi needed to relax, to get his mind off all this.

He walked across his living room to the cabinet in which he kept his videotapes. Brighton Beach Memoirs always cheered him up, and A

Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and…

Without thinking it through, he pulled out a two-tape set.

Judgment at Nuremberg.

Hardly lightweight but, at three hours, it would keep his mind occupied until it was time to go to bed.

Avi put the first tape in his VCR and, while the stirring overture played, popped some Orville Redenbacher’s in the microwave.

The movie played on. He drank three beers.

The tables had been turned at Nuremberg: Burt Lancaster played Ernst Janning, one of four German judges on trial. It seemed like a small, supporting role, until Janning took the stand in the movie’s final half hour…

The case against Janning hinged on the matter of Feldenstein, a Jew he’d ordered executed on trumped-up indecency charges. Janning demanded the right to speak, over the objections of his own lawyer. When he took the stand, Avi felt his stomach knotting. Janning told of the lies Hitler had sold German society: “ ‘There are devils among us: Communists, liberals, Jews, Gypsies. Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed.’ ”Janning shook his head slightly. “It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb.”

Lancaster spoke forcefully, bringing every bit of his craft to the soliloquy. “It is not easy to tell the truth,” he said, “but if there is to be any salvation for Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it, whatever the pain and humiliation.” He paused. “I had reached my verdict on the Feldenstein case before I ever came into the courtroom. I would have found him guilty whatever the evidence. It was not a trial at all. It was a sacrificial ritual in which Feldenstein the Jew was the helpless victim.”

Avi stopped the tape, deciding not to watch the rest even though it was almost over. He went to the bathroom and brushed his teeth.

But he’d accidentally pushed pause instead of stop. After five minutes, the tape disengaged and the TV blared at him — more of CNN. He returned to the living room, fumbled for the remote—

—and decided to continue on to the end. Something in him needed to see the finale again.

After the trial, after Janning and the other three Nazi jurists were sentenced to life imprisonment, Spencer Tracy — playing the American judge, Judge Haywood — went at Janning’s request to visit Janning in jail.

Janning had been writing up memoirs of the cases he was still proud of, the righteous ones, the ones he wanted to be remembered for. He gave the sheaf of papers to Haywood for safekeeping.

And then, his voice containing just the slightest note of pleading, Lancaster again in full control of his art, he said, “Judge Haywood — the reason I asked you to come. Those people, those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Spencer Tracy said, sadly, softly, “Herr Janning, it came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”

Avi Meyer turned off the TV and sat in the darkness, slumped on the couch.

“Devils among us.” Hitler’s phrase, according to Janning. Back in his wooden storage cabinet, next to the blank spot for Judgment at Nuremberg was Murderers among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story.

Echoes, there. Uncomfortable ones, but echoes still.

Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed.

Avi had wanted to believe that. Destroy the misery, let the ghosts rest.

And Demjanjuk — Demjanjuk—

It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb.

No. No, it had been a righteous case, a just case, a —

I had reached my verdict before I ever came into the courtroom. I would have found him guilty whatever the evidence. It was not a trial at all. It was a sacrificial ritual.

Yes, down deep, Avi Meyer had known. Doubtless the Israeli judges — Dov Levin, Zvi Tal, and Dalia Dorner — had known, too.

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

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

Mar Tal, it came to that…

Giveret Dorner, it came to that…

Avi felt his intestines shifting.

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.”

Pierre took the sheet. “It says, ‘All Q-four staffing reports are due in the director’s office no later than fifteen Sep.’ ”

“Thank you.” She sighed. “I’m starting to get cataracts, I’m afraid. I guess I’ll have to have surgery at some point.” Pierre nodded sympathetically — cataracts were common among elderly diabetics.

He looked at his watch; his appointment was supposed to have begun four minutes ago. Damn, but he hated wasting time.

Although Molly had toyed with trying to get a job at Duke University, which was famous for its research into putative psychic phenomena, she instead accepted an associate professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. She’d chosen UCB because it was far enough away from her mother and Paul (who was hanging in, much to Molly’s surprise) and her sister Jessica (who had now been through a brief marriage and divorce) that they were unlikely to ever visit.

A new life, a new town — but still, damn it all, she kept making the same stupid mistakes, kept thinking that, somehow, this time things would be different, that she could take spending an evening sitting across from a guy thinking piggish thoughts about her.

Rudy hadn’t been any worse than her previous sporadic dates, until he’d gotten a couple of drinks into him — and then his surface thoughts devolved into nothing more than a constant stream of pornography. Boy, I’d like to fuck her. Eat her pussy. Split ‘em wide, baby, split ’em wide …

She’d tried changing the topic of conversation, but no matter what they were talking about, the thoughts on the surface of Rudy’s mind were like washroom-stall graffiti. Molly observed that the Oakland A’s were doing well this season. Fucking want to hit a home run with you, babe. She asked Rudy about his work. Work on this, babe! Suck it down all the way … She mentioned that it looked like rain. Gonna shower you, babe, shower you with come. …

Finally, she could take no more of it. It was only 8:40 — awfully early to end a date that had begun at 7:30 — but she had to get out of there.

“Excuse me,” said Molly. “I’ve— I think the pesto sauce is disagreeing with me. I don’t feel very well. I think I should go home.”

Rudy looked concerned. “I’m sorry,” he said. He signaled for the waiter.

“Here, we’ll get going; I’ll take you back to your place.”

“No,” said Molly. “No, thank you. I— I’ll walk home. I’m sure a little walk will help my digestion.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No, really, I’ll be fine. You’re sweet to offer, though.” She took her wallet out of her little purse. “With tax and tip, my share should be about fifteen dollars,” she said, putting that amount on the tablecloth.

Rudy looked disappointed, but at least his concern for her health was genuine enough to have banished the Penthouse Forum commentary from his mind. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

Molly forced a smile. “Me, too,” she said.

“I’ll call you,” said Rudy.

Molly nodded and hurried out of the restaurant.

The night air was warm and pleasant. She started walking without really thinking about where she was heading. All she knew was that she didn’t want to go back to her apartment. Not on a Friday night; it was too lonely, too empty.

She was on University Avenue, which, not surprisingly, ended up taking her to the campus. She passed many couples (some straight, some gay) going the other way, and picked up clearly sexual thoughts from those who unavoidably entered her zone — but that was fine, since the thoughts weren’t about her. She came to Doe Library and decided to go in. The pesto sauce was in fact making her intestines grumble a bit, so a trip to the washroom might indeed be in order.

After she finished, she went up to the main floor. The library was mostly empty. Who wanted to be studying on a Friday night, after all, especially this early in the academic year?

“ ‘Evening, Professor Bond,” said a librarian sitting at an information desk. He was a lanky, middle-aged man.

“Hi, Pablo. Not many people here tonight.”

Pablo nodded and smiled. “True. Still, we’ve got our regulars. The night watchman is here, as usual.” He jerked a thumb at an oak table some distance away. A handsome man in his early thirties with a round face and chocolate hair sat hunched over a book.

“Night watchman?” said Molly.

“Doc Tardivel,” said Pablo, “from LBL. Been coming in here most nights lately and stays right up to closing. Keeps sending me back to the stacks for various journals.”

Molly glanced at the fellow again. She didn’t know the name and didn’t recall ever seeing him around the campus. She left Pablo and ambled into the main reading room. The copies of many current journals were stored in a wooden shelving unit that happened to be close to the table this Tardivel fellow was using. Molly made her way over to the unit and began looking for a recent issue of Developmental Psychology or Cognition to while away an hour or two with. She crouched down to go through the piles of journals on the bottommost shelf, her slacks pulling tight as she did so.

A thought impinged upon her consciousness, like the lighting of a feather on naked skin — but it was unintelligible.

The journals were out of chronological order. She worked her way through the pile, reshuffling them so that the most recent issues were on top.

Another thought fluttered against her consciousness. And suddenly she realized the cause for her difficulty in reading it. The thought was in French; Molly recognized the mental sound of the language.

She found last month’s copy of DP, straightened up, and scanned the room for a place to sit. There were plenty of empty chairs, of course, but, well…

French.

The guy thought in French.

And a foxy guy he was, too.

Molly sat down next to him and opened her journal. He looked up, a slightly surprised expression on his face. She smiled at him and then, without really thinking about it, said, “Nice night.”

He smiled back. “It sure is.”

Molly’s heart pounded. He was still thinking in French. She’d known foreigners before, but all of them had switched to thinking in English when speaking that language. “Oooh, what a lovely accent!” said Molly.

“Are you French?”

“French-Canadian,” said Pierre. “From Montreal.”

“Are you an exchange student?” asked Molly, knowing full well from what Pablo had said that he was not.

“No, no,” he said. “I’m a postdoc at LBL.”

“Oh, so you must know Burian Klimus.” Molly feigned a shudder.

“There’s a cold character.”

Pierre laughed. “That he is.”

“I’m Molly Bond,” said Molly. “I’m an associate professor in the psych department.”

“Enchante,” said Pierre. “I’m Pierre Tardivel.” He paused. “Psychology, eh? I’ve always been interested in that.”

“Wow,” said Molly softly.

“Wow?”

“You really do that. Canadians, I mean. You really say ‘eh.’ ”

Pierre seemed to blush a little. “We also say ‘You’re welcome.’ ”

“What?”

“Out here, if you say ‘Thank you’ to someone, they all seem to reply ‘Uh-huh.’ We say ‘You’re welcome.’ ”

Molly laughed. “Touche,” she said. And then she touched her hand to her mouth. “Hey — I guess I know some French after all.”

Pierre smiled. It was a very nice smile indeed.

“So,” said Molly, looking around at the musty shelves of books, “you come here often?”

Pierre nodded. There were lots of thoughts on the surface of his mind, but to Molly’s delight she could make sense out of none of them. And French — French was such a beautiful language, it was almost like soft background music rather than the irritating noise of most people’s articulated thoughts.

Before she had really considered it all the way through, the words were out. “Would you like to get a cup of coffee?” she said. And then, as if the suggestion needed some justification, added, “There’s a great cappuccino place on Bancroft.”

Pierre had an odd look on his face, a mixture of disbelief and pleasant surprise at his unexpected good fortune. “That would be nice,” he said.

Yes, thought Molly. It would indeed.

They talked for hours, the background accompaniment of Pierre’s French thoughts never intrusive. He might be as big a pig as most other men, but Molly doubted that. Pierre seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say, listening attentively. And he had a wonderful sense of humor; Molly couldn’t remember the last time she’d enjoyed anyone’s company so much.

Molly had heard it said that French men — both Canadian and European French — had a different attitude toward women than American men did.

They were more relaxed around them, less likely to be on all the time, less inclined to be constantly trying to prove themselves. Molly had only half believed it. She harbored a suspicion that their apparently blase attitude toward female nudity was some vast conspiracy: “Keep a poker face, and they’ll wave their tits right in front of you!” But Pierre really did seem to be interested in her mind and her work — and that was a bigger turn-on for Molly than any macho display.

Suddenly it was midnight and the cafe was closing.

“My God,” she said. “Where did the time go?”

“It went,” said Pierre, “into the past — and I enjoyed every moment of it.”

He shook his head. “I haven’t taken a break like this for weeks.” His eyes met hers. “Merci beaucoup.”

Molly smiled.

“At this time of night, surely you should be escorted safely to your car or home,” said Pierre. “May I walk you there?”

Molly smiled again. “That would be nice. I live just a few blocks from here.” They left the cafe. Pierre walked with his hands clasped behind his back. Molly wondered if he was going to try to hold her hand, but he didn’t.

“I really need to see more of this area,” said Pierre. “I’ve been thinking about going over to San Francisco tomorrow, do a little sight-seeing.”

“Would you like company?”

They had arrived at the entrance to her apartment building. “I’d love that,” said Pierre. “Thank you.”

There was a moment of silence. Molly was thinking, well, of course, we’d have to meet up again in the morning, unless — the thought, or maybe just the nighttime breeze, made her shiver — unless he spent the night. But what Pierre was thinking was a complete mystery. “Perhaps we could meet for brunch at eleven,” he said.

“Sure. That place right across the street is great,” Molly said, pointing.

She wondered if he was going to kiss her. It was exciting not knowing what he was thinking of doing. The moment stretched. He didn’t make his move — and that was exciting, too.

“Till tomorrow, then,” he said. “Au revoir.”

Molly went inside. She was grinning from ear to ear.

Chapter 8

Pierre and Molly’s relationship had been building nicely. He had been to Molly’s apartment three times now, but she had yet to see his place.

Tonight was the night, though: A E was showing another Cracker made-for-TV movie with Robbie Coltrane, and they both loved that series.

But Molly only had a thirteen-inch TV, and Pierre had a twenty-seven-inch set — you needed a decent size to properly follow a hockey game.

He’d cleaned up some, gathering the socks and underwear from the living-room floor, getting the newspapers off his green-and-orange couch, and doing what he considered to be a decent job of dusting — wiping the sleeve of the Montreal Canadiens jersey he was wearing across the top of the TV and stereo cabinet.

They ordered a La Val’s pizza during the final commercial break, and, after the movie was over, they chatted about it while waiting for the pizza to arrive. Molly loved the use of psychology in Cracker; Coltrane’s character, Fitz, was a forensic psychologist who worked with the Manchester police.

“He is an amazing fellow,” agreed Pierre.

“And,” said Molly, “he’s sexy.”

“Who?” asked Pierre, puzzled. “Not Fitz?”

“Yes.”

“But he’s a hundred pounds overweight, an alcoholic, a compulsive gambler, and he smokes like a chimney.”

“But that mind,” said Molly. “That intensity.”

“He’s going to end up in a hospital with a heart attack.”

“I know,” sighed Molly. “I hope he has decent health insurance.”

“Britain is like Canada — socialized medicine.”

“ ‘Socialized’ is kind of an ugly word here,” said Molly. “But I must say the idea of universal health care is appealing. It’s too bad Hillary didn’t get her way.” A pause. “I guess it was a shock for you to have to start paying for your health insurance.”

“I’m sure it will be. I haven’t got around to it yet.”

Molly’s jaw dropped. “You don’t have any health insurance?”

“Well… no.”

“Are you covered under the faculty-association group plan?”

“No. I’m not faculty, after all; I’m just a postdoc.”

“Gee, Pierre, you really should have some medical insurance. What would you do if you were in an accident?”

“I hadn’t thought about that, I guess. I’m so used to the Canadian system, which covered me automatically, that I hadn’t thought about having to actually do something to get insurance.”

“Are you still covered under the Canadian plan?”

“It’s actually a provincial plan — the Quebec plan. But I won’t meet the residency requirements this year, which means, no, I’m not really covered.”

“You better do something soon. You could be wiped out financially if you had an accident.”

“Can you recommend somebody?”

“Me? I have no idea. I’m under the faculty-association plan. That’s with Sequoia Health, I think. But for individual insurance, I haven’t a clue who’s got the best rates. I’ve seen ads for a company called Bay Area Health, and another called — oh, what is it? — Condor, I think.”

“I’ll call them up.”

“Tomorrow. Do it tomorrow. I had an uncle who broke his leg once and had to be put in traction. He didn’t have any insurance, and the total bill was thirty-five thousand dollars. He had to sell his house to pay for it.”

Pierre patted her hand. “All right already. I’ll do it first thing.”

Their pizza arrived. Pierre carried the box to the dining-room table and opened it up. Molly ate her pieces directly from the box, but Pierre liked his to be burn-the-roof-of-your-mouth hot, so he nuked each of his slices for thirty seconds before eating them. The kitchen smelled of cheese and pepperoni, plus an aroma of slightly moist cardboard coming from the box.

After she’d finished her third slice, Molly asked, out of the blue, “What do you think about kids?”

Pierre helped himself to a fourth piece. “I like them.”

“Me, too,” said Molly. “I’ve always wanted to be a mother.”

Pierre nodded, not knowing exactly what he was supposed to say.

“I mean,” continued Molly, “getting my Ph.D. took a lot of time and, well, I never met the right person.”

“That happens sometimes,” said Pierre, smiling.

Molly nibbled at her pizza. “Oh, yes. ‘Course, it’s hardly an insurmountable problem — not having a husband, I mean. I have lots of friends who are single moms. Sure, for most of them that wasn’t the way they planned it, but they’re doing fine. In fact, I…”

“What?”

She looked away. “No, nothing.”

Pierre’s curiosity was aroused. “Tell me.”

Molly considered for a time, then: “I did something pretty stupid — oh, six years ago now, I guess it was.”

Pierre raised his eyebrows.

“I was twenty-five, and, well, frankly, I’d given up any hope of finding a man I could have a long-term relationship with.” She raised a hand. “I know twenty-five sounds young, but I was already six years older than my mom was when she’d had me, and — well, I don’t want to go into the reasons right now, but I’d been having a terrible time with guys, and I didn’t see that that was likely to ever change. But I did want to have a child, and so I… well, I picked up some men — four or five different one-night stands.” She held up a hand again, as if feeling a need to make it all seem somewhat less sordid. “They were all medical students; I was trying to choose carefully. Each time I did it was at the right point in my cycle; I was hoping to get pregnant off one of them. I wasn’t looking for a husband, you understand — just for, well, just for some sperm.”

Pierre had his head tilted to one side. He clearly didn’t know how to respond.

Molly shrugged. “Anyway, it didn’t work; I didn’t get pregnant.” She looked at the ceiling for a few moments, and drew in breath. “What I got instead was gonorrhea.” She exhaled noisily. “I suppose I’m lucky I didn’t get AIDS. God, it was a stupid thing to do.”

Pierre’s face must have shown his shock; they’d slept together several times now.

“Don’t worry,” said Molly, seeing his expression. “I’m completely over it, thank God. I had all the follow-up tests after the penicillin treatment. I’m totally clean. Like I said, it was a stupid thing to do, but — well, I did want a baby.”

“Why’d you stop?”

Molly looked at the floor. Her voice was small. “The gonorrhea scarred my fallopian tubes. I can’t get pregnant the normal way anymore; if I’m ever going to do it, it’ll have to be via in vitro fertilization, and, well, that costs money. Around ten grand per attempt, last time I looked. My health insurance doesn’t cover it, since the blocked tubes weren’t a congenital condition. But I’ve been saving up.”

“Oh,” said Pierre.

“I — ah, I thought you should know…” She trailed off, and then shrugged again. “I am sorry.”

Pierre looked at his slice of pizza, now growing cold. He absently picked a green pepper off it; they were only supposed to be on half, but a stray one had ended up on one of his slices. “I would never say it’s for the best,” said Pierre, “but I guess I’m old-fashioned enough to think a child should have both a mother and a father.”

Molly did meet his eyes, and held them. “My thought exactly,” she said.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, Pierre entered the Human Genome Center office — and found to his surprise that a party was going on. Joan Dawson’s usual supply of home-baked goodies hadn’t been enough; someone had gone out and bought bags of nachos and cheesies, and several bottles of champagne.

As soon as Pierre entered, one of the other geneticists — Donna Yamashita, it was — handed him a glass. “What’s all the excitement about?” asked Pierre over the noise.

“They finally got what they wanted from Hapless Hannah,” said Yamashita, grinning.

“Who’s Hapless Hannah?” asked Pierre, but Yamashita had already moved away to greet someone else. Pierre walked over to Joan’s desk. She had a dark liquid in her champagne glass. Probably diet cola; as a diabetic, she wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol. “What’s happening?” said Pierre. “Who is Hapless Hannah?”

Joan smiled her kindly smile. “That’s the Neanderthal skeleton on loan from the Hebrew University at Givat Ram. Dr. Klimus has been trying to extract DNA from the bone for months, and today he finally finished getting a complete set.”

The old man himself had moved nearer — and for once there was a smile on his broad, liver-spotted face. “That’s right,” he said, his voice cold and dry. He glanced sideways at a chubby man Pierre recognized as a UCB paleontologist. “Now that we have Neanderthal DNA, we can do some real science about human origins, instead of just making wild guesses.”

“That’s wonderful,” replied Pierre above the din of people milling about the small office. “How old was the bone?”

“Sixty-two thousand years,” said Klimus triumphantly.

“But surely the DNA would have degraded over all that time,” said Pierre.

“That’s the beauty of the site where Hapless Hannah was found,” said Klimus. “She died in a cave-in that completely sealed her in — she was an actual, honest-to-goodness cave-woman. Aerobic bacteria in the cave used up all the oxygen, so she’d spent the last sixty thousand years in an oxygen-free environment, meaning her pyrimidines didn’t oxidize. We’ve recovered all twenty-three pairs of chromosomes.”

“What a lucky break,” said Pierre.

“It sure is,” said Donna Yamashita, who had suddenly appeared again at Pierre’s elbow. “Hannah will answer a lot of questions, including the big one about whether Neanderthal was a separate species — Homo neanderthalensis — or just a subspecies of modern humanity — Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and—”

Klimus spoke over top of her. “And we should be able to tell whether Neanderthals died out without leaving any descendants, or whether they crossbred with Cro-Magnon, and therefore mixed their genes with ours.”

“That’s terrific,” said Pierre.

“Of course,” said Klimus, “there’ll still be many questions unanswered about Neanderthals — fine details of physical appearance, culture, and so on. But, still, this is a remarkable day.” He turned his back on Pierre, and in an unexpected display of exuberance, tapped the side of his champagne glass with his Mont Blanc pen. “Everybody — everybody! Your attention, please! I’d like to propose a toast — to Hapless Hannah! Soon to become the best-known Neanderthal in history!”

Chapter 9

Pierre’s lab looked like just about every other lab he’d ever seen: a poster of the periodic table on one wall; a well-used copy of the Rubber Bible lying open on a desk; lots of glass labware set up on retort stands; a small centrifuge; a UNIX workstation with Post-it notes stuck to the bezel around the monitor; an emergency shower station, in case of chemical spills; a glass-enclosed work area under a fume hood. The walls were that sickly yellow-beige that seems so common in university environments. The lighting was fluorescent; the floor, tiled.

Pierre was working at one of the counters that lined all four walls of the room, staring at DNA autorads positioned over an illuminated panel built into the countertop. He was wearing a stained white lab coat, but it wasn’t buttoned up, so his Quebec Winter Carnival T-shirt was visible underneath. He’d never been more shocked than when an American student had mistaken the Bonhomme on the shirt for the giant Stay-Puft marshmallow man from Ghostbusters — something akin to confusing Uncle Sam with Colonel Sanders.

Burian Klimus appeared in the doorway, looking most put out.

Standing next to the old man was an attractive Asian-American woman with black hair that had been teased into a frizzy halo around her face.

“That’s him,” said Klimus.

“Mr. Tardivel,” said the woman. “I’m Tiffany Feng, from Condor Health Insurance.”

Pierre nodded at Klimus. “Thanks for bringing her up, sir,” he said. The ancient geneticist scowled, then shambled away.

Tiffany was in her late twenties. She was carrying a black attache case, and was dressed in a blue jacket and matching pants. Her white blouse was open more than one might expect at the top. Pierre was amused; he suspected Tiffany dressed differently when going to see a prospective male customer than she did when the customer was female.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” said Tiffany. “Traffic was murder coming across the bridge.” She handed him a yellow-and-black business card, then looked appreciatively around the lab. “You’re obviously a scientist.”

Pierre nodded. “I’m a molecular biologist, working on the Human Genome Project.”

“Really?” said Tiffany. “What a fascinating area!”

“You know about it?”

“Sure. We’ve had some great lectures on it at work.” She smiled.

“Anyway, I understand you’re interested in talking about insurance options.”

Pierre motioned for Tiffany to take a seat. “That’s right,” he said. “I’m from Canada, so I’ve never bought health insurance before. For a little while longer I’ll still meet the Quebec residency test, but—”

Tiffany shook her head. “I’ve helped several Canadians over the years.

Your provincial health plans cover you only to the dollar value that the same services would cost in Canada, where prices for medical services are set by the government. Here, there are no price controls. You’ll find that most procedures are more expensive, and your Quebec plan won’t cover the extra. Plus, the provincial plans provide for medical treatments, but not such things as private hospital rooms.” She paused. “Do you have any insurance under the faculty-association plan?”

Pierre shook his head. “I’m not faculty. I’m just a visiting researcher.”

She moved her attache case up onto the lab bench and opened it. “Well, then you’ll need a comprehensive package. We offer what we call our Gold Plan, which provides for one hundred percent of all your emergency hospital bills, including ambulance transfers, and anything else you might need, such as wheelchairs or crutches. Plus, it also covers all your routine medical needs, such as annual physical checkups, prescriptions, and so on.” She handed him a gold-embossed trifold brochure.

Pierre took it and browsed through it. Huntington’s patients usually ended their lives with a protracted hospital stay. If it turned out he had the disease, he’d certainly want a private room for that, and — ah, good.

This package also covered at-home nursing services and even experimental drug treatments. “Looks good,” said Pierre. “How much are the premiums?”

“They’re on a sliding scale.” She pulled a yellow-and-black binder out of her attache case. “May I ask how old you are?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Do you smoke?”

“No.”

“And you don’t currently have any medical condition, like diabetes, AIDS, or a heart murmur?”

“Right.”

“Are your parents still alive?”

“My mother is.”

“What did your father die of?”

“Umm, you mean my biological father, right?”

Tiffany blinked. “Yes.”

Henry Spade had passed away four years ago; Pierre had gone to Toronto for the funeral. “Complications from Huntington’s disease.”

Tiffany closed the binder. “Oh.” She looked at Pierre for a moment.

“That makes things rather complex. Do you have Huntington’s?”

“I have no idea.”

“You have no symptoms?”

“None.”

“Huntington’s is carried on a dominant gene, right? So you’ve got a fifty-fifty chance of having inherited the gene.”

“That’s right.”

“But you haven’t taken the genetic test for it?”

“No.”

She sighed. “This is very awkward, Pierre. I don’t make the decisions about who gets covered and who doesn’t, but I can tell you what’s going to happen if we put your application in now: you’ll be rejected on the basis of family history.”

“Really? I guess I should have kept my mouth shut.”

“That wouldn’t have done you any good in the long run; if you ever submitted a claim related to your Huntington’s, we’d investigate. If we found that you’d been aware of your family history at the time you applied for insurance, we would disallow the claim. No, you did the right thing telling me, but…”

“But what?”

“Well, as I said, this is awkward.” She opened the binder again, going to one of the tabbed sections at the back. “I don’t usually show this chart to clients, but… well, it explains it pretty clearly. As you can see, we have three basic levels of premiums in each age/sex group. Internally, we refer to them as the H, M, and L levels — for high, medium, and low. If you had a family history that showed a predisposition to, oh, say, to having a heart attack in your forties, something like that, we’d still issue you a policy, but at the H premium level — the highest level. If, on the other hand, you had a favorable family history, we’d offer you the M level. Now, M is still pretty high—”

“I’ll say!” said Pierre, looking at the figure in the column labeled “Males, 30 to 34.”

“Right, it is. But that’s because we’re not allowed to require genetic testing of applicants. Because of that, we have to assume that you might indeed have a serious genetic disorder. Now, what I’m supposed to do after showing you that premium level is say, ‘Well, you know, I can’t ask you to have a genetic test, but if you choose to, and the results are favorable, then I’d be able to offer you this premium here’ — the L premium.”

“That’s only half as much as the M premium.”

“Exactly. It’s an incentive to have the test, see? We don’t make you take a genetic test, but if you decide to do so voluntarily, you can save a lot of money.”

“That hardly seems fair.”

Tiffany shrugged. “Lots of insurance companies do it this way now.”

“But you’re saying I can’t get any health insurance because of my family history?”

“Right. Huntington’s is just too costly, and your risk level, at fifty percent, is too high, to consider covering you at all. But if you take a test that proves you don’t have the gene—”

“But I don’t want to take the test.”

“Well, this gets even more complicated.” She sighed, trying to think of how best to explain it. “Last month, Governor Wilson signed a Senate bill into law. It comes into effect on January first — ten weeks from now. The new law says California health insurers will no longer be able to use genetic testing to discriminate against people who carry the gene for a disease but have no symptoms of it. In other words, we will no longer be able to consider merely having the gene for Huntington’s or ALS or any other late-onset illnesses to be a preexisting condition in otherwise healthy people.”

“Well, it isn’t a preexisting condition.”

“Politely, Mr. Tardivel, that’s a matter of interpretation. The new California law is the first of its kind in the nation; in every other state, having bad genes does amount to a preexisting condition, even if you’re asymptomatic. Even those few states that do have anti-genetic-discrimination laws — Florida, Ohio, Iowa, a couple of others — even they make exceptions for insurance companies, allowing them to use actuarial or claims experience in deciding whom to insure and what premiums to charge.”

Pierre frowned. “But what you’re saying is, because we’re in California, if I wait until January first, you won’t be able to reject me on the basis of my family history?”

“No, we’ll still be able to do that — that’s valid information that you’re a high-risk candidate, and we’re not obligated to give policies to high-risk people.”

“Then what’s the difference?”

“The difference is that genetic information supersedes family-history information. Do you see? If we have concrete genetic info, it takes precedence over anything we might infer from the medical histories of your parents or siblings. If you take the genetic test, then, under the new state law, we have to give you a policy regardless of its results related to Huntington’s disease. Even if the test proves that you do have the Huntington’s gene, we still have to insure you as long as you apply before you have any symptoms; we can’t reject you or charge you a higher premium based on actual genetic information.”

“Wait a minute — that’s crazy. If I don’t take the test, you’ve got a fifty-fifty shot that I’ll end up making a lot of claims due to my Huntington’s, and so you reject me because of my family history. But if I do take the test, and even if it’s a hundred percent definite that I will get Huntington’s and therefore make a lot of claims, you will insure me?”

“That’s right, or at least it will be, after January first, because of the new law.”

“But I don’t want to take the Huntington’s test.”

“Really? I’d have thought you’d like to know.”

“No. No, I don’t. Hardly any Huntington’s at-risks have taken the test.

Most of us don’t want to know for sure.”

Tiffany shrugged a little. “Well, if you want to be insured, it’s your only option. Look, why don’t you fill out the forms today, but date them January — well, January second: the first business day in the new year. I’ll call you up then, and you can let me know what you want to do. If you’ve already taken the test by that point, or are prepared to take it, I’ll put the policy application in; if not, I’ll just tear it up.”

It was obvious that Tiffany simply didn’t want to risk losing a sale, but, dammit, this had already taken far too much time; Pierre certainly didn’t want to go through the same rigmarole again with somebody else. “I’d like to see some other plans before I make my decision,” he said.

“Of course.” She showed Pierre a variety of policies: the predictable Silver and Bronze Plans, with progressively fewer benefits; a hospital-only plan; a drug-only plan; and so on. But Tiffany pressed hard for the Gold Plan, and Pierre finally agreed, telling himself he would have made exactly the same decision even if her blouse had been done up all the way.

“You won’t regret your choice,” said Tiffany. “You’re not just buying health insurance — you’re buying peace of mind.” She got a form from her briefcase and handed it to Pierre. “If you could just fill this out — and don’t forget to date it January second.” She opened the left side of her jacket.

There was a pocket inside the jacket, with a row of identical retractable ballpoint pens clipped to it. She extracted one, closed her jacket, and handed the pen to Pierre.

He pressed down on the pen’s button with his thumb, extending the point, and filled out the forms. When he was done, he handed the form back to her, and absently went to put the pen in his own breast pocket.

Tiffany pointed at it. “My pen… ?” she said.

Pierre smiled sheepishly and handed it back to her. “Sorry.”

“So, I’ll call you at the beginning of the year,” she said. “But be careful between now and then — we wouldn’t want anything to happen to you before you’re insured.”

“I still don’t know if I’m going to take the test,” he said.

She nodded. “It’s up to you.”

Pierre thought, It hardly seems that way, but decided not to argue the point further.

Chapter 10

Pierre had searched long and hard for an area to specialize in. His first instinct had been to do research directly into Huntington’s disease, but ever since the Huntington’s gene had been discovered, many scientists were concentrating on that. Naturally, Pierre hoped they would find a cure — and soon enough to help him, of course, if it turned out that he himself did have the disease. But Pierre also knew of the need for objectivity in science: he couldn’t afford to piss away what time he might have left chasing slim leads that would probably amount to nothing-leads that someone without Huntington’s would know enough to abandon, but that he, out of desperation, might devote far too much time to.

Pierre decided instead to concentrate on an area most other geneticists were by and large ignoring, in hopes that such territory would be more likely to yield a breakthrough that might indeed get him a Nobel Prize. He centered his research on the so-called junk DNA, or introns: the 90 percent of the human genome that did not code for protein synthesis.

Exactly what all that DNA did do no one was quite sure. Some parts seemed to be foreign sequences from viruses that had invaded the genome in the past; others were endlessly stuttering repeats — ironically, similar in structure to the very unusual gene that caused Huntington’s; others still were deactivated leftovers from our evolutionary past. Most geneticists felt the Human Genome Project could be completed much more quickly if the junk nine-tenths were simply ignored. But Pierre harbored the suspicion that there was something significant coded in some as yet undeciphered way into that mess of nucleotides.

His new research assistant, a UCB grad student named Shari Cohen, did not agree.

Shari was tiny and always immaculately dressed, a porcelain doll with pale skin and lustrous black hair — and a giant diamond engagement ring.

“Any luck at the library?” asked Pierre.

She shook her head. “No, and I’ve got to say this seems like a long shot, Pierre.” She spoke with a Brooklyn accent. “After all, the genetic code is simple and well understood.”

And so, indeed, it seemed to be. Four bases made up the rungs of the DNA ladder: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. Each of those was a letter in the genetic alphabet. In fact, they were usually referred to simply by their initial letters: A, C, G, and T. Those letters combined together to form the three-letter words of the genetic language.

“Well,” said Pierre, “consider this: the genetic alphabet has four letters, and all its words are three letters long. So, how many possible words does the genetic language have?”

“Four to the third,” said Shari, “which is sixty-four.”

“Right,” said Pierre. “Now, what do these sixty-four words actually do?”

“They specify the amino acids to be used in protein synthesis,” replied Shari. “The word AAA specifies lysine, AAC specifies asparagine, and so on.”

Pierre nodded. “And how many different amino acids are used in making proteins?”

“Twenty.”

“But you said there are sixty-four words in the genetic vocabulary.”

“Well, three of the words are punctuation marks.”

“But even taking those into account, that still leaves sixty-one words to express only twenty concepts.” He moved across the room and pointed to a wall chart labeled “The Genetic Code.”

Shari came over to stand next to him. “Well, just as in English, the genetic language has synonyms.” She pointed at the first box on the chart.

“GCA, GCC, GCG, and GCT all specify the same amino acid, alanine.”

“Right. But why do these synonyms exist? Why not just use twenty words, one for each amino?”

Shari shrugged. “It’s probably a safety mechanism, to reduce the likelihood of transcription errors garbling the message.”

Pierre waved at the chart. “But some aminos can be specified by as many as six different words, and others by only one. If synonyms protected against transcription errors, surely you’d want some for every word.

Indeed, if you were designing a sixty-four-word code simply for redundancy, you might devote three words apiece to each of the twenty amino acids, and use the four remaining words for punctuation marks.”

Shari shrugged. “I guess. But the DNA system wasn’t designed; it evolved.”

“True, true. Still, nature tends to come up with optimized solutions through trial and error. Like the double helix itself — remember how Crick and Watson knew they’d found the answer to how DNA was put together?

It wasn’t because their version was the only possible one. Rather, it was because it was the most beautiful one. Why would some aspects of DNA be absolutely elegant, while others, including something as important as the actual genetic code, be sloppy? My bet is that God or nature, or whatever it was that put DNA together, is not sloppy.”

“Meaning?” said Shari.

“Meaning maybe the choice of which synonym is used when specifying an amino acid actually encodes additional information.”

Shari’s delicate eyebrows went up. “Like, if we’re an embryo, insert this amino, but if we’ve already been born, don’t insert it!” She clapped her hands together. The mystery of how cells differentiated throughout the development of a fetus still hadn’t been solved.

Pierre held up his hand. “It can’t be anything as direct as that, or geneticists would have noticed it long ago. But the choices of synonyms over a long stretch of DNA — be it in the active portions, or in the introns — might indeed be significant.”

“Or,” said Shari, now pouting slightly at having her idea rejected, “it might not.”

Pierre smiled. “Sure. But let’s find out, one way or the other.”

A Sunday morning.

Molly Bond loved going over to San Francisco — loved its seafood restaurants, its neighborhoods, its hills, its cable cars, its architecture.

The street Molly was on was deserted; not surprising, given how early it was. Molly had come to San Francisco to attend the Unitarian fellowship there; she wasn’t particularly religious, and had found the hypocrisy of most of the clergy she’d met in her life unbearable, but she did enjoy the Unitarian approach, and today’s guest speaker — an expert on artificial intelligence — sounded fascinating.

Molly had parked a few blocks from the fellowship hall. The meeting didn’t start until nine o’clock; she thought she might go into McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin beforehand — her one vice that she periodically but only halfheartedly tried to break was her fondness for fast food. As she headed along a steeply angled sidewalk approaching the restaurant, she noticed an old man up ahead at the side of the road in a black trench coat.

The man was bent over, poking with a walking stick at something lying at the base of a tree.

Molly continued along, enjoying the crisp early-morning air. The sky was cloudless, a pristine bowl of blue arching over the stuccoed buildings.

She was now only a dozen paces or so from the man in black. His trench coat was an expensive London Fog model, and his black shoes had recently been polished. The man was eighty if he was a day, but tall for a man that age. He was wearing a navy blue watch cap that pressed his ears against his head. He also had the collar of his trench coat turned up, but his neck was thick, with loose folds of skin hanging from it. The old guy was too absorbed in what he was doing to notice her approach. Molly heard a small whimpering sound. She looked down and her mouth dropped in horror. The black-clad man was poking at a cat with his stick.

The cat had obviously been hit by a car and left to die. Its coat, mottled white, black, orange, and cream, was smeared down the entire left side with blood. It had clearly been hit some time ago — much of the blood had dried to a brown crust — but it was still oozing thick red liquid from one long cut. One of the cat’s eyes had popped partway from its skull and was clouded over in tones of bluish gray.

“Hey!” Molly shouted at the man in black. “Are you crazy? Leave that poor thing alone!”

The man must have stumbled on the cat by accident, and had apparently been enjoying the pathetic cries it made each time he jabbed it with his stick. He turned to face Molly. She was disgusted to see that his ancient bone-white penis, erect, was protruding from his unzipped trousers, and that his other hand had been on it. “Blyat!” cried the man in an accented voice, his dark eyes narrowing to slits. “Blyat!”

“Get out of here!” Molly yelled. “I’m going to call the police!”

The man snapped “Blyat” at her once more, then hobbled away. Molly thought about going after him and detaining him until the police could arrive, but the very last thing in the world she wanted to do was touch the vile character. She loomed in to look at the cat. It was in terrible shape; she wished she knew a way to put it quickly out of its misery, but anything she might try would probably just torture the poor creature more. “There, there,” she said in soothing tones. “He’s gone. He won’t bother you anymore.” The cat moved slightly. Its breathing was ragged.

Molly looked around; there was a pay phone at the end of the block. She hurried over to it, called directory assistance, and asked for the SPCA emergency number. She then dialed that. “There’s a cat dying at the side of the road,” she said. She craned her neck to see the street signs. “It’s just off the sidewalk on Portola Drive, a half block up from the corner of Swanson. I think it was hit by a car, perhaps an hour or two ago… No, I’ll stay with the animal, thanks. Thanks ever so — and please hurry.”

She sat cross-legged on the sidewalk next to the cat, wishing she could find it in her heart to stroke the poor animal’s fur, but it was too disgusting to touch. She looked down the street, furious and distraught.

The black-clad old man was gone.

Chapter 11

Pierre sat in his lab, looking at his watch. Shari had said she might be late getting back from lunch, but it was now 14:45, and a three-hour lunch seemed excessive even by West Coast standards. Perhaps he’d been crazy hiring someone who was just about to get married. She’d have a million things to do before the wedding, after all, and…

The door to the lab opened, and Shari walked in. Her eyes were bloodshot and although she’d obviously taken a moment to attempt to fix her makeup, she’d clearly been crying a lot.

“Shari!” said Pierre, rising to his feet and moving over to her. “What’s wrong?”

She glanced at Pierre, her lower lip trembling. Pierre couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen someone look so sad. Her voice was low and quavering. “Howard and I broke up.” Tears were welling again at the corners of her eyes.

“Oh, Shari,” said Pierre. “I’m so sorry.” He hadn’t known her that long and wasn’t sure if he should pry — and yet, she probably needed somebody to talk to. Everything had been fine before she left for lunch; Pierre’s might very well be the only friendly face she’d seen since whatever had happened.

“Did you — did you have a fight?”

Tears rolled slowly down Shari’s cheeks. She shook her head.

Pierre was at a loss. He thought about drawing her close to him, trying to comfort her, but he was her employer — he couldn’t do that. Finally he settled on, “It must hurt.”

She nodded almost imperceptibly. Pierre led her over to a lab stool. She sat on it, placing her hands in her lap. Pierre noticed the engagement ring was gone. “Everything was going so well,” she said, her voice full of anguish. She was quiet for a long time. Again, Pierre thought about reaching out to her — a hand on her shoulder, say. He hated to see anyone in such pain. “But — but my parents came over from Poland after World War II, and Howard’s parents are from the Balkans.”

Pierre looked at her, not understanding.

“Don’t you see?” she said, sniffing. “We’re both Ashkenazi.”

Pierre lifted his shoulders slightly, helpless.

“Eastern European Jews,” said Shari. “We had to go for counseling.”

Pierre didn’t really know much about Judaism, although there were lots of English-speaking Jews in Montreal. “Yes?”

“For Tay-Sachs,” said Shari, sounding almost angry that it had to be spelled out.

“Oh,” said Pierre very softly, understanding at last. Tay-Sachs was a genetic disease that resulted in a failure to produce the enzyme hexosaminidase-A, which, in turn, caused a fatty substance to accumulate in the nerve cells of the brain. Unlike Huntington’s, Tay-Sachs manifested itself in infancy, causing blindness, dementia, convulsions, extensive paralysis, and death — usually by the age of four. It was almost exclusively found among Jews of Eastern European extraction. Four percent of American Jews descended from there carried the gene — but, again unlike Huntington’s, the Tay-Sachs gene was recessive, meaning a child had to receive genes from both parents to get the disease. If both the father and the mother carried the gene, any child of theirs had a 25 percent chance of having Tay-Sachs.

Still — maybe Shari had misunderstood. Yes, she was a genetics student, but… “So you both have the gene?” asked Pierre gently.

Shari nodded and wiped her cheeks. “I had no idea that I carried it. But Howard — he suspected he carried the gene, and never said a word to me.”

She sounded bitter. “His sister discovered she had it when she got married, but it was okay, because her fiance didn’t have it. But Howard knew that since his sister had it, he himself had to have a fifty-percent chance of being a carrier — and he never told me.” She looked briefly at Pierre, then dropped her gaze down to the floor. “You shouldn’t keep secrets from someone you love.”

Pierre thought about himself and Molly, but said nothing. There was quiet between them for perhaps half a minute.

“Still,” said Pierre at last, “there are options. Amniocentesis can determine if a fetus has received two Tay-Sachs genes. If you found that it had, you could have an…” Pierre couldn’t quite bring himself to say “abortion” out loud.

But Shari simply nodded. “I know.” She sniffed a few times. She was quiet for a moment, as if considering whether to go on. “But I’ve got endometriosis; my gynecologist warned me years ago that I’m going to have a very hard time conceiving. I told Howard that when we got serious.

I really, really want to have children, but it’s going to be an uphill battle, and…”

Pierre nodded. And there was no way she could afford to have pregnancies terminated.

“I’m so sorry, Shari, but…” He paused, not sure if it was his place to say anything more.

She looked at him, her face a question.

“You could adopt,” said Pierre. “It’s not so bad. I was raised by someone who wasn’t my biological father.”

Shari blew her nose, but then laughed a cold laugh. “You’re not Jewish.”

It was a statement, not a question.

Pierre shook his head.

She exhaled noisily, as if daunted by the prospect of trying to explain so much. Finally, she said, “Six million Jews were killed during World War II — including most of my parents’ relatives. Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been brought up to believe that I’ve got to have children of my own, that I have to do my part to help restore my people.” She looked away.

“You don’t understand.”

Pierre was quiet for a while. Then, at last, he said softly, “I am sorry, Shari.” He did, finally, touch her shoulder. She responded at once, collapsing against his chest, and sobbed softly for a very long time.

Chapter 12

Pierre and Molly were sitting side by side on his green-and-orange living-room couch, his arm around her. It had reached the point where they were spending almost every night together, as often at his place as at hers. Molly snuggled her back into the crook of his shoulder. Shafts of amber from the setting sun streamed in through the windows. Pierre had actually vacuumed today, the second time since he’d moved in. The low angle of the sunlight highlighted the paths his Hoover had made.

“Pierre,” Molly said, but then fell silent.

“Hmm?”

“Oh, nothing. I— no, nothing.”

“No, go ahead,” Pierre said, eyebrows raised. “What’s on your mind?”

“The question,” said Molly, slowly, “is more what’s on your mind?”

Pierre frowned. “Eh?”

Molly seemed to be wrestling with whether to go on. Then, all at once, she sat up straight on the couch, took Pierre’s arm from her shoulder, and brought it into her lap, intertwining her fingers with his. “Let’s try a little game. Think of a word — any English word — and I’ll try to guess it.”

Pierre smiled. “Anything at all?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Now concentrate on the word. Con — it’s ‘aardvark.’ ”

“C’est vrai,”said Pierre, shocked. “How’d you do that?”

“Try again,” said Molly.

“Okay — I’ve got one.”

“What’s pie — pie-rim-ih-deen? Is that French?”

“How did you do that?”

“What’s that word mean?”

“Pyrimidine. It’s a type of organic base. How did you do that?”

“Let’s try it again.”

Pierre disengaged his hand from hers. “No. Tell me how you did that.”

Molly looked at him. They were sitting so close together that her gaze kept shifting from his left eye to his right. She opened her mouth as if to say something, closed it, then tried again. “I can…” She shut her eyes.

“God, I thought telling you about my stupid bout with gonorrhea was hard. I’ve never told anyone this before.” She paused and took a deep breath. “I can read minds, Pierre.”

Pierre tipped his head to one side. His mouth hung slightly open. He clearly didn’t know what to say.

“It’s true,” said Molly. “I’ve been able to do it since I was thirteen.”

“Okay,” Pierre said, his tone betraying that he felt this was all some trick that could be exposed if enough thought were given to it. “Okay, what am I thinking now?”

“It’s in French; I don’t understand French. Voo — lay — voo… coo, something… The word ‘ moi’ — I know that one.”

“What’s my Canadian Social Insurance number?”

“You’re not thinking about the actual number. I can’t read it unless you’re actually thinking of it.” A pause. “You’re saying the numbers in French. Cinq — that’s five, right? Huit — eight. Deux — two. Um, you’re repeating it to yourself; it’s hard to keep track. Just run through it once.

Cinq huit deux… six un neuf, huit trois neuf.”

“Reading minds is…” He stopped.

“ ‘Not possible’ is what you were about to say.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know.”

Pierre was quiet for a long time, sitting absolutely still. “Do you have to be in physical contact with the person?” he said at last.

“No. But I do have to be close — the person has to be within what I call my ‘zone,’ no more than about three feet away. It’s been very difficult to do any empirical studies, being both the experimenter and the experimental subject, and without revealing to those I’m with what I’m trying to do, but I’d say the — the effect — is governed by the inverse-square law. If I move twice as far away from you, I only hear — if ‘hear’ is the correct word — your thoughts a quarter as… as ‘loudly,’ so to speak.”

“You say ‘hear.’ You don’t see my thoughts? Don’t pick up mental pictures?”

“That’s right. If all you’d done was conjure up an image of an aardvark, I couldn’t have detected it. But when you concentrated on the word ‘aardvark’ I — well, ‘heard’ is as good a word as any — I heard it as clearly as if you’d whispered it in my ear.”

“That’s — incredible.‘’

“You thought about saying ‘amazing,’ but changed your mind as the words were coming out.”

Pierre leaned back into the couch, stunned.

“I can detect what I call ‘articulated thoughts’ — words your brain is using,” said Molly. “I can’t detect images. And emotions — thank God, I can’t pick up emotions.”

Pierre was looking at her with a mixture of astonishment and fascination. “It must be overwhelming.”

Molly nodded. “It can be. But I make a conscious effort not to invade people’s privacy. I’ve been called ‘standoffish’ more than a few times in my life, but it’s quite literally true. I do tend to stand off — to not be too close to people physically, keeping them out of my zone.”

“Reading minds,” said Pierre again, as if repetition would somehow make the idea more palatable. “Incroyable,” He shook his head. “Do other members of your family have this — this ability?”

“No. I questioned my sister Jessica about it once, and she thought I was crazy. And my mom — well, there are nights my mom never would have let me go out if she could have read my mind.”

“Why keep it a secret?”

Molly looked at him for a moment, as if she couldn’t believe the question. “I want to live a normal life — as normal as possible, anyway. I don’t want to be studied, or turned into a sideshow attraction, or God forbid, asked to work for the CIA or anything like that.”

“And you say you’ve never told anyone before?”

She shook her head. “Never.”

“But you’re telling me?”

She sought out his eyes. “Yes.”

Pierre understood the significance. “Thank you,” he said. He smiled at her — but the smile soon faded, and he looked away. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I could live with the idea that my thoughts aren’t private.”

She shifted on the couch, tucking one bent leg under her body and taking his other hand. “But that’s just it,” Molly said earnestly. “I can’t read your thoughts — because you think them in French.”

“I do?” said Pierre, surprised. “I didn’t really know that I thought in any language. I mean, thoughts are, well, thoughts.”

“Most complex thought is articulated,” said Molly. “It is formulated in words. Trust me on this; this is my field. You think in French exclusively.”

“So you can hear the words of my thoughts, but not understand them?”

“Yes. I mean, I know a few French words — everyone does. Bonjour, au revoir, oui, non, stuff like that. But as long as you continue thinking in French, I won’t be able to read your mind.”

“I don’t know. It’s such an invasion of privacy.”

Molly squeezed his hands tightly. “Look, you’ll always know that your thoughts are private when you’re outside my zone — more than three or so feet away.”

Pierre was shaking his head. “It’s like — mon Dieu, I don’t know; it’s like discovering your girlfriend is really Wonder Woman.”

Molly laughed. “She has much bigger boobs than me.”

Pierre smiled, then leaned in and gave her a kiss. But after a few seconds, he pulled away. “Did you know I was going to do that?”

She shook her head. “Not really. Maybe a half second before it was obvious.”

Pierre leaned back against the couch again. “It changes things,” he said.

“It doesn’t have to, Pierre. It only changes them if you let it.”

Pierre nodded. “I—”

And Molly heard the words in his mind, the words she had been longing to hear but that had yet to be spoken aloud, the words that meant so much.

She snuggled against Pierre. “I love you, too,” she said.

Pierre held her tight.

After several moments, he said, “So what happens now?”

“We go on,” said Molly. “We try to build a future together.”

Pierre exhaled noisily.

“I’m sorry,” said Molly at once, sitting up again and looking at Pierre.

“I’m pushing again, aren’t I?”

“No,” said Pierre. “It’s not that. It’s just…” He fell silent, but then thought about what Shari Cohen had said to him that afternoon. Howard never told me. You shouldn’t keep secrets from someone you love. Pierre took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Damn,” he said at last, “this is a night for great revelations, isn’t it? You’re not pushing, Molly. I do want to build a future with you. But, well, it’s just that I may not have much of a future.”

Molly looked at him and blinked. “Pardon?”

Pierre kept his eyes on hers, watching for her reaction. “I may have Huntington’s disease.”

Molly sagged backward a bit. “Really?”

“You know it?”

“Sort of. A man who lived down the street from my mother’s house had it. My God, Pierre. I’m so sorry.”

Pierre bristled slightly. Molly, although dazed, had enough presence of mind to recognize the reaction. Pierre wanted no pity. She squeezed his hand. “I saw what happened to Mr. DeWitt — my mother’s neighbor. But I don’t really know the details. Huntington’s is inherited, right? One of your parents must have had it, too, no?”

Pierre nodded. “My father.”

“I know it causes muscular difficulties.”

“It’s more than that. It also causes mental deterioration.”

Molly looked away. “Oh.”

“Symptoms can appear anytime — in one’s thirties, or forties, or even later. I could have another twenty good years, or I might start to show signs tomorrow. Or, if I’m lucky, I don’t have the gene and won’t get the disease at all.”

Molly felt a stinging in her eyes. The polite thing to do might have been to turn away, to not let Pierre know that she was crying — but it would not have been the honest thing. It wasn’t pity, after all. She looked him full in the face, then leaned in and kissed him.

Once she’d pulled away, there was an extended silence between them.

Finally, Molly reached a hand up to wipe her own cheek, and then used the back of her hand to gently wipe Pierre’s cheek, which was also damp. “My parents,” said Molly slowly, “divorced when I was five.” She blew air out, as if ancient pain were being expelled with it. “These days, five or ten good years together is as much as most people get.”

“You deserve more,” said Pierre. “You deserve better.”

Molly shook her head. “I’ve never had better than this. I — I haven’t had much success with men. Being able to read their thoughts… You’re different.”

“You don’t know that,” said Pierre. “I could be just as bad as the rest of them.”

Molly smiled. “No, you’re not. I’ve seen the way you listen to me, the way you care about my opinions. You’re not a macho ape.”

Pierre smiled slightly. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”

Molly laughed, but then immediately sobered. “Look, I know this sounds like I’m full of myself, but I know I’m pretty—”

“In point of fact, you are drop-dead gorgeous.”

“I’m not fishing for compliments here. Let me finish. I know I’m pretty — people have told me that ever since I was a little girl. My sister Jessica has done a lot of modeling; my mother still turns heads, too. She used to say the biggest problem with her first marriage was that her husband had only been interested in her looks. Dad is an executive; he’d — wanted a trophy wife — and Mom was not content to be just that. You’re the only man I’ve ever known who has looked beyond my outer appearance to what’s inside. You like me for my mind, for… for…”

“For the content of your character,” said Pierre.

“What?”

“Martin Luther King. Nobel laureates are a hobby of mine, and I’ve always had a fondness for great oratory — even when it’s in English.” Pierre closed his eyes, remembering. ‘“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.’”

He looked at Molly, then shrugged slightly. “Maybe it’s because I might have Huntington’s, but I do try to look beyond simple genetic traits, such as beauty.” He smiled. “Not to say that your beauty doesn’t move me.”

Molly smiled back at him. “I have to ask. What does ‘ joli petit cul’ mean?”

Pierre cleared his throat. “It’s, ah, a bit crude. ‘Nice ass’ is a close approximation. Where did you hear that?”

“In Doe Library, the night we met. It was the first thought of yours I picked up.”

“Oh.”

Molly laughed. “Don’t worry.” She smiled mischievously. “I’m glad you find me physically attractive, so long as it’s not the only thing you care about.”

Pierre smiled. “It’s not.” But then his face grew sad. “But I still don’t see what kind of future we can have.”

“I have no idea, either,” said Molly. “But let’s find out together. I do love you, Pierre Tardivel.” She hugged him.

“I love you, too,” he said, at last giving the words voice.

Still embracing each other, with her head resting on his shoulder, Molly said, “I think we should get married.”

“What? Molly, we’ve only known each other a few months.”

“I know that. But I love you, and you love me. And we may not have a lot of time to waste.”

“I can’t marry you,” said Pierre.

“Why not? Is it because I’m not Catholic?”

Pierre laughed out loud. “No, sweetheart, no.” He hugged her again.

“God, I do love you. But I can’t ask you to get into a relationship with me.”

“You’re not asking me. I’m asking you.”

“But—”

“But nothing. I’m going into this with my eyes wide open.”

“But surely—”

“That argument won’t work.”

“What about—”

“I don’t care about that, either.”

“Still, I’d—”

“Oh, come on! You don’t believe that yourself.”

Pierre laughed. “Are all our arguments going to be like this?”

“Of course. We don’t have time to waste on fighting.”

He was silent for several moments, chewing on his lower lip. “There is a test,” he said at last.

“Whatever it is, I’ll try,” said Molly.

Pierre laughed. “No, no, no. I mean, there’s a test for Huntington’s disease. There’s been one for a while now; they discovered the Huntington’s gene in March 1993.”

“And you haven’t taken the test?”

“No… I— no.”

“Why not?” Her tone was one of curiosity, not confrontation.

Pierre exhaled and looked at the ceiling. “There’s no cure for Huntington’s. It’s not like anything could be done to help me if I knew. And— and—” He sighed. “I don’t know how to explain this. My assistant Shari said something to me today — she said, ‘You’re not Jewish,’ meaning there were parts of her that I could never understand because I hadn’t walked in her shoes. Most people at risk for Huntington’s haven’t had the test.”

“Why? Is it painful?”

“No. All that’s needed is a drop of blood.”

“Is it expensive?”

“No. Hell, I could do it myself, using the equipment in my lab.”

“Then why?”

“Do you know who Arlo Guthrie is?”

“Sure.”

Pierre lifted his eyebrows; he’d expected her ignorance to be the same as his had been all those years ago. “Well,” he went on, “his father Woody died of Huntington’s, but Arlo still hasn’t had the test.” A pause. “Do you know who Nancy Wexler is?”

“No.”

“Everyone with Huntington’s knows her name. She’s the president of the Hereditary Disease Foundation, which spearheaded the search for the Huntington’s gene. Like Arlo, she’s got a fifty-fifty chance of having Huntington’s — her mother died of the disease — and she’s never taken the test, either.”

“I don’t understand why people don’t take it. I’d want to know.”

Pierre sighed, thinking again of what Shari had said to him. “That’s what everyone who isn’t at risk says. But it’s not that simple. If you find out you’ve got the disease, you lose all hope. It’s inescapable. At least now, I have some hope…”

Molly nodded slightly.

“And — and, well, I sometimes have trouble getting through the night, Molly. I’ve… contemplated suicide. Lots of Huntington’s at-risks have. I’ve… come close a couple of times. What’s kept me from doing it is the chance that maybe I don’t have the disease.” He sighed, trying to decide what to say next. “One study showed that twenty-five percent of those who do take the test and are found to have the defective gene actually attempt suicide — and one in four of those succeeds. I’m… I’m not sure I could make it through all the dark nights if I knew for sure I had it.”

“But the flip side is that if you found you didn’t have it, you could relax.”

“Flip side is almost exactly right. It is a flip of the coin; the chances are exactly fifty-fifty. But I’m afraid you’re wrong when you say I could relax.

Fully ten percent of those who take the test and find they don’t have the disease still end up with severe emotional problems.”

“Why on earth would that be true?”

Pierre looked away. “Those of us who are at risk for Huntington’s live our lives based on the presumption that they might be cut short. We often give up things because of that. I — before you, I hadn’t been involved with a woman for nine years, and, to be honest, I didn’t think I ever would be again.”

Molly nodded, as if a mystery had finally been explained. “This is why you’re so driven,” she said, her blue eyes wide. “Why you work so hard.”

Pierre returned the nod. “But when you’ve made sacrifices and then discover they were unnecessary, the regret can be too much to bear. That’s why even some of those who discover they don’t have the disease end up killing themselves.” He was quiet for a long time. “But now — now, it isn’t just me. I guess I should have the test.”

Molly reached out and stroked his cheek. “No,” she said. “No. Don’t do it for me. If you ever want to take it, do it for yourself. I was serious: I want to marry you and, if you do turn out to have the disease, we’ll deal with that at the time. My proposal wasn’t contingent on your taking the test.”

Pierre blinked. He was close to tears. “I’m so lucky to have found you.”

She smiled. “I feel the same way about you.”

They held each other tightly. When their embrace ended, Pierre said, “But I don’t know — maybe I should take the test anyway. I did do what you asked, you know: I met with someone from Condor Health a couple of weeks ago. But I couldn’t get a policy.”

“You still don’t have health insurance?”

Pierre shook his head. “See, right now, they’d reject me based on my family history. But in two months, on New Year’s Day, a new California law comes into effect. It doesn’t bar the use by insurance companies of family-history information, but it does bar the use of genetic info, and the latter takes precedence over the former. If I take the test for Huntington’s, regardless of the results, then they have to insure me; they can’t even charge me a higher premium, so long as I have no symptoms.”

Molly was quiet for a moment, digesting this. “I meant what I said: I don’t want you to take the test for me, and, well — if you can’t get insurance down here, we could move to Canada, no?”

“I — I suppose. But I don’t want to leave LBL; being here is the opportunity of a lifetime.”

“Well, there are thirty million Americans without health insurance. But they mostly manage—”

“No. No, it’s one thing to let you risk being married to someone who might become very sick; it’s quite another to ask you to additionally risk financial ruin. I should have the test.”

“If you think it’s best,” said Molly. “But I’ll marry you either way.”

“Don’t say that now. Wait till we have the test results.”

“How long will that take?”

“Well, normally a lab requires you to go through months of counseling before they’ll administer the test, to make sure you really want to take it and are going to be able to deal with the results. But…”

“Yes?”

Pierre shrugged. “It’s not a hard test — no harder than any other genetic test. As I said, I could do it myself in my lab at LBL”

“I don’t want you to feel pressured into doing this.”

Pierre shrugged. “It’s not you doing the pressuring; it’s the insurance company.” He was quiet for a while. “It’s all right,” he said finally. “It’s time I found out.”

Chapter 13

“Explain what’s going on to me,” said Molly, sitting on a stool in Pierre’s lab. It was ten o’clock on a Saturday morning. “I want to understand exactly what’s happening.”

Pierre nodded. “Okay,” he said. “On Thursday, I extracted samples of my DNA from a drop of my own blood. I separated out my two copies of chromosome four, snipped off particular segments using special enzymes, and set about making radioactive images of those segments. It takes a while to develop those images, but they should be ready now, so we can actually check what my genetic code says in the specific gene associated with Huntington’s disease. That gene contains an area called IT15 — ‘interesting transcript number fifteen,’ a name given to it back when people didn’t know what it was for.”

“And if you’ve got IT15, you’ve got Huntington’s?”

“It’s not as simple as that. Everybody has IT15. Like all genes, IT15’s job is to code for the synthesis of a protein molecule. The protein IT15 makes has recently been dubbed ‘huntingtin.’ ”

“So if everyone has IT15,” said Molly, “and everybody’s body produces huntingtin, then what determines whether you have Huntington’s disease?”

“People with Huntington’s have a mutant form of IT15, which causes them to produce too much huntingtin. Huntingtin is crucial to organizing the nervous system in the first few weeks of an embryo’s development. It should cease to be produced at a certain point, but in those with Huntington’s disease it isn’t, and that causes damage to the developing brain. In both the normal and mutant versions of IT15, there’s a run of repeating nucleo-tide triplets: cytosine-adenine-guanine, or CAG, over and over again. Well, in the genetic code, each nucleotide triplet specifies the production of one specific amino acid, and amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. CAG happens to be one of the codes for making an amino acid called glutamine. In healthy individuals, IT15 contains between eleven repeats and thirty-eight repeats of this CAG triplet. But those who have Huntington’s disease have between forty-two and a hundred or so CAG repeats.”

“Okay,” said Molly, “so we look at each of your chromosome fours, find the beginning of the run of CAG triplets, then simply count the number of repeats of that triplet. Right?”

“Right.”

“You’re sure you want to go through with this?”

Pierre nodded. “I’m sure.”

“Then let’s do it.”

And they did. It was painstaking work, carefully examining the autoradiograph film. Faint lines represented each nucleotide. Pierre used a felt-tipped marker to write in the letters beneath each triplet: CAG, CAG. Molly, meanwhile, tallied the number of repeats on a sheet of paper.

Without blood samples from Elisabeth Tardivel and Henry Spade, there was no easy way to tell which of his chromosome fours had come from his father, so he had to check them both. On the first one, the string of CAG triplets ended after seventeen repeats.

Pierre breathed a sigh of relief. “One down, one to go,” he said.

He began checking the sequence on the second chromosome. No reaction when they reached the tally of eleven; that was the normal minimum. When they got to twenty-five, though, Pierre found his hand shaking.

Molly touched his arm. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You said you could have as many as thirty-eight and still be normal.”

Pierre nodded. “But what I didn’t say was that seventy percent of all normal people have twenty-four or fewer repeats.”

Molly bit her lower lip.

Pierre continued sequencing. Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight.

His eyes were blurring.

Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. Thirty-eight.

Damn. Goddamn.

Thirty-nine.

God fucking damn it.

“Still,” said Molly, trying to sound brave, “thirty-eight may be the normal limit, but you have to have at least forty-two…”

Forty.

Forty-one.

Forty-two.

“I’m sorry, honey,” said Molly. “I’m so sorry.”

Pierre put down his marker. His whole body was shaking.

“God, I am so sorry,” said Molly.

A fifty-fifty shot.

A flip of a coin.

Heads or tails.

Call it!

Pierre said nothing. His heart was pounding.

“Let’s go home,” said Molly, stroking the back of his hand.

“No,” said Pierre. “Not yet.”

“There’s nothing more to be done here.”

“Yes, there is. I want to finish the sequencing. I want to know how many repeats I have.”

“What difference does that make?”

“It makes all the difference,” said Pierre, his voice shaking. “It makes all the difference in the world.”

Molly looked perplexed.

“I didn’t tell you everything. Merde. Merde. Merde. I didn’t tell you everything.”

“What?”

“There’s an inverse correlation between the number of repeats and the age of onset of the disease.”

Molly didn’t seem to understand, or didn’t want to. “What?” she said again.

“The more repeats, the sooner symptoms are likely to appear. Some patients get Huntington’s as children; others don’t get it until their eighties. I — I have to finish the sequencing; I have to know how many repeats I’ve got.”

Molly looked at him. There was nothing to say.

Pierre rubbed his eyes, blew his nose, and bent back to the autorad film.

The tally kept growing. Forty-five.

Fifty.

Fifty-five.

Sixty.

Time continued to pass. Pierre felt faint, but he pressed on, marking letters over and over again on the film: CAG, CAG, CAG…

Molly got up and walked across the room. She found a box of Kimwipes — expensive, lab-quality tissues. She used them to dry her eyes.

She tried to hide from Pierre the fact that she was crying.

Finally, Pierre hit a codon that wasn’t CAG. The total count: seventy-nine repeats.

There was silence between them for a time. Somewhere in the distance, a fire-truck siren was wailing.

“How long?” asked Molly at last.

“Seventy-nine is a very high number,” said Pierre softly. “Very high.” He sucked in air, thinking. “I’m thirty-two now. The correlation is inexact. I can’t be sure. But… I don’t know, I guess I’d expect to see symptoms very soon. Certainly by the time I’m thirty-five or thirty-six.”

“Well, then, you—”

“At the outside.” He raised a hand. “The disease can take years or decades to run its course. First symptoms might just be a reduction in coordination, or facial tics. It might be years before things got serious.

Or…”

“Or?”

Pierre shrugged. “Well,” he said, his voice full of sadness, “I guess that’s it.”

Molly reached for his hand, but Pierre pulled it away. “Please,” he said.

“It’s over.”

“What’s over?” said Molly.

“Please. Let’s not make this difficult.”

“I love you,” said Molly softly.

“Please don’t…”

“And I know you love me.”

“Molly, I’m dying.”

Molly moved over to him, draped her arms around his neck, and rested her head against his chest. His thoughts were all in French.

“I still want to marry you,” Molly said.

“Molly, I only want what’s best for you. I don’t want to be a burden on you.”

Molly held him tighter. “I want to marry you, and I want to have a child.”

“No,” said Pierre. “No, I can’t become a father. The number of CAG repeats tends to increase from generation to generation — it’s a phenomenon called ‘anticipation.’ I have seventy-nine; any child of mine who got the gene from me might very likely have even more — meaning he or she might come down with the disease as a teenager, or even earlier.”

“But—”

“No buts. I’m sorry; this was crazy. It can never work.” He saw her face, saw the hurt, felt his own heart breaking. “Please, don’t make it harder for both of us. Just go home, would you? It’s over.”

“Pierre—”

“It’s over. I’ve wasted too much time on this already.”

He could see that the words had cut her. She headed for the laboratory door, but looked back at him once more. He didn’t meet her eyes.

She left the room. Pierre sat down on a lab stool, his hands still shaking.

Chapter 14

Pierre called Tiffany Feng and told her to go ahead and put in his health-insurance application at the first of the year. Condor might have disputed the informal testing if the result had been negative, but there was no conceivable advantage to lying about having Huntington’s. Tiffany said Pierre’s statement on Human Genome Center letterhead, notarized by the campus archivist, would be acceptable proof that the test had indeed been conducted.

Pierre went back to spending his evenings in Doe Library. Periodically he’d look up, look around, look for a familiar face.

She never appeared.

He spent each evening reading, searching the literature for information on junk DNA — now, more than ever, he knew he was in a race against time. He was already seven years older than James D. Watson had been when he’d made his great breakthrough — and only two years younger than Watson had been when he’d accepted his Nobel Prize.

A wall clock above Pierre’s chair was ticking audibly. He got up and moved to another table.

He’d started with current material and was working his way backward.

A reference in a magazine index caught his eye. “A Different Kind of Inheritance.”

Different kind of inheritance…

Could it be?

He asked Pablo to dig up the June 1989 Scientific American.

There it was — exactly what he’d been looking for. A whole different level of information potentially coded into DNA, and a plausible scheme for the reliable inheritance of that information from generation to generation.

The genetic code consisted of four letters: A, C, G, and T. The C stood for cytosine, and cytosine’s chemical formula was C H,N O — four carbons, 4 3 five hydrogens, three nitrogens, and an oxygen.

But not all cytosine was the same. It had long been known that sometimes one of those five hydrogens could be replaced by a methyl group, CH, — a carbon atom attached to three hydrogens. The process was called, logically enough, cytosine methylation.

So when one wrote out a genetic formula — say, the CAG that repeated on and on in Pierre’s own diseased genes — the C might be either regular cytosine or the methylated form, called 5-methylcytosine. Geneticists paid no attention to which one it was; both forms resulted in exactly the same proteins being synthesized.

But this article in Scientific American, by Robin Holliday, described an intriguing finding: almost always when cytosine undergoes methylation, the base next to the cytosine on the DNA strand is guanine: a CG doublet.

But C and G side by side on one side of a DNA strand meant that G and C would be found on the opposite side. After all, cytosine always bonds with guanine, and guanine with cytosine.

In the article, Holliday proposed a hypothetical enzyme he dubbed “maintenance methylase.” It would bind a methyl group to a cytosine that was adjacent to a guanine if and only if the corresponding doublet on the other side was already methylated.

It was all hypothetical. Maintenance methylase might not exist.

But if it did—

Pierre looked at his watch; it was almost closing time. He photocopied the article, returned the magazine to Pablo, and went home.

That night he dreamed of Stockholm.

“Good morning, Shari,” said Pierre, coming into the lab.

Shari was dressed in a beige blouse under a wine-colored two-piece suit. She’d cut her long, dark hair recently and was now wearing it fashionably short, parted on the left, and curving in toward her neck at the bottom. Like Pierre, Shari was burying herself in her work, trying to get over the loss of Howard.

“What’s this?” she said, holding up an autorad she’d found while tidying up. The lab would have been a pigsty if it weren’t for Shari’s periodic attempts to restore order.

Pierre glanced at the piece of X-ray film. He tried to sound nonchalant.

“Nothing. Just garbage.”

“Whoever this DNA belongs to has Huntington’s disease,” said Shari matter-of-factly.

“It’s just an old sheet.”

“It’s yours, isn’t it?” asked Shari.

Pierre thought about continuing to lie, but then shrugged. “I thought I’d thrown it out.”

“I’m sorry, Pierre. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

“No, of course not. How long have you known?”

“Few weeks.”

“How is Molly taking it?”

“We — we’ve broken up.”

Shari put the film in a Rubbermaid garbage pail. “Oh.”

Pierre shrugged a little.

They looked at each other for a moment. Pierre’s mind did what he supposed every male’s did in moments like these. He thought for an instant about him and Shari, about the possibilities there. Both of them carried diseased genes. He was thirty-two and she was twenty-six — not an outrageous difference. But — but there were other gulfs between them. And he saw on her face no indication, no suggestion, no inkling. The thought had not occurred to her.

Some gulfs are not easily crossed.

“Let’s not talk about it,” said Pierre. “I — I’ve got some research I want to share with you. Something I found in the library last night.”

Shari looked as though she wanted to pursue the subject of Pierre’s Huntington’s further, but then she nodded and took a seat on a lab stool.

Pierre told her about the article in Scientific American; about the two forms of cytosine, the regular one and the 5-methylcytosine variant; and about the hypothetical enzyme that could turn the former into the latter but would do so only if the cytosine in the CG doublet on the opposite side of the strand was already methylated.

“Hypothetically,” said Shari, stressing the word. “If this enzyme exists.”

“Right, right,” said Pierre. “But suppose it does. What happens when DNA reproduces? Well, of course, the ladder unzips down the middle, forming two strands. One strand contains all the left-hand components of the base pairs, maybe something like this…” He wrote on the blackboard that covered most of one wall:

Left side: T-C-A-C-G-T

“See that CG doublet? Okay, let’s say its cytosine is methylated.” He went over the pair again with his chalk, making it heavier:

Left side: T-C-A-C-G-T

“Now, in DNA reproduction, free-floating nucleotides are plugged into the appropriate spots on each strand, meaning the right-hand side of this one will end up looking like this…”

His chalk flew across the blackboard, writing in the complementary sequence:

Left side: T-C-A-C-G-T

Right side: A-G-T-G-C-A

“See? Directly opposite the left-hand CG pair is the right-hand GC pair.” He paused, waiting for Shari to nod acknowledgment of this. “Now the maintenance methylase comes along and sees that there isn’t parity between the two sides of the strand, so it adds a methyl group to the right-hand side.” He went over the GC pair, making it darker, too:

Left side: T-C-A-C-G-T

Right side: A-G-T-G-C-A

“At the same time, the other half of the original strand is being filled in with free-floating nucleotides. But maintenance methylase would do exactly the same thing to it, duplicating cytosine methylation on both sides, if originally present on one side.”

Pierre clapped his hands together to shake off chalk dust. “Voila! By postulating that one enzyme, you end up with a mechanism for preserving cytosine-methylation state from cell generation to cell generation.”

“And?”

“And think about our work on codon synonyms.” He waved vaguely at the wall chart labeled “The Genetic Code.”

“Yes?”

“That’s one possible additional level of coding hidden in DNA, if the choice of which synonym used is significant. Now we’ve got a second possible type of additional coding in DNA: the code made by whether cytosine is methylated or not. I’m willing to bet that one or both of those additional codes is the key to what the so-called junk DNA is really for.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Shari.

“Well, as Einstein is supposed to have said, ‘God is subtle, but malicious he is not.’” He smiled at Shari. “No matter how complex the codes are, we should be able to crack them.”

Pierre went home. His apartment seemed vast. He sat on the living-room couch, pulling idly at an orange thread coming unraveled from one of the cushions.

They were making progress, he and Shari. They were getting close to a breakthrough. Of that he felt sure.

But he wasn’t elated. He wasn’t excited.

God, what an idiot I am.

He watched Letterman, watched Conan O’Brien.

He didn’t laugh.

He started getting ready for bed, dumping his socks and underwear on the living-room floor — there wasn’t any reason not to anymore.

He’d been reading Camus again. His fat copy of the Collected Works was facedown on one of the couch’s orange-and-green cushions. Camus, who had taken the literature Nobel in ‘57; Camus, who commented on the absurdity of the human condition. “I don’t want to be a genius,” he had said. “I have enough problems just trying to be a man.”

Pierre sat down on the couch and exhaled into the darkness. The absurdity of the human condition. The absurdity of it all. The absurdity of being a man.

Bertrand Russell ran through his mind, too — a Nobel laureate in 1950.

“To fear love,” he’d said, “is to fear life — and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

Three parts dead — just about right for a Huntington’s sufferer at thirty-two.

Pierre crawled into bed, lying in a fetal position.

He slept hardly at all — but when he did, he dreamt not of Stockholm, but of Molly.

Chapter 15

“I can’t let you redo the exam,” said Molly to the male student sitting opposite her, “but if you undertake another research project, I can give you up to ten marks in extra credit for that. If you get eight or above, you’ll pass — just barely. It’s your choice.”

The student was looking at his hands, which were resting in his lap. “I’ll do the project. Thank you, Professor Bond.”

“That’s all right, Alex. Everyone deserves a second chance.”

The student got to his feet and left the cramped office. Pierre, who had been standing just outside the door waiting for Molly to be alone, stepped into the doorway, holding a dozen red roses in front of him.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

Molly looked up, eyes wide.

“I feel like a complete heel.” He actually said “eel,” but Molly assumed he meant the former, although she thought the latter was just as applicable. Still, she said nothing.

“May I come in?” he said.

She nodded, but did not speak.

Pierre stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “You are the very best thing that ever happened to me,” he said, “and I am an idiot.”

There was silence for a time. “Nice flowers,” said Molly at last.

Pierre looked at her, as if trying to read her thoughts in her eyes. “If you will still have me as your husband, I would be honored.”

Molly was quiet for a time. “I want to have a child.”

Pierre had given this much thought. “I understand that. If you wanted to adopt a child, I’d be glad to help raise it for as long as I’m able.”

“Adopt? I — no, I want to have a child of my own. I want to undergo in vitro fertilization.”

“Oh,” said Pierre.

“Don’t worry about passing on bad genes,” said Molly. “I was reading an article about this in Cosmo. They could culture the embryos outside my body, then test them for whether they’d inherited Huntington’s. Then they could implant only healthy ones.”

Pierre was a lapsed Catholic; the whole idea of such a procedure still left him uncomfortable — tossing out viable embryos because they didn’t pass genetic muster. But that wasn’t his main objection. “I was serious about what I said before. I think a child should have both a mother and a father — and I probably won’t live long enough to see a child grow up.” He paused. “I can’t in good conscience begin a new life that I know I’m not going to be around to see through its childhood,” he said. “Adoption is a special case — we’d still be improving the child’s life, even if it wouldn’t always have a father.”

“I’m going to do it anyway,” said Molly firmly. “I’m going to have a baby. I’m going to have in vitro fertilization.”

Pierre felt it all slipping away. “I can’t be the sperm donor. I — I’m sorry.

I just can’t.”

Molly sat without saying anything. Pierre felt angry with himself. This was supposed to be a reunion, dammit. How did it get so off track?

Finally, Molly spoke. “Could you come to love a child that wasn’t biologically yours?”

Pierre had already considered this when contemplating adoption. “Oui.”

“I was going to have a child without a husband anyway,” said Molly.

“Millions of children have grown up without fathers; for most of my childhood, I didn’t have one myself.”

Pierre nodded. “I know.”

Molly frowned. “And you still want to marry me, even if I go ahead and have a child using donated sperm?”

Pierre nodded again, not trusting his voice just then.

“And you could come to love such a child?”

He’d been all prepared to love an adopted child. Why did this seem so different? And yet — and yet—

“Yes,” said Pierre at last. “After all, the child would still be partly you.”

He locked onto her blue eyes. “And I love you completely.” He waited while his heart beat a few more times. “So,” he said, at last, “will you consent to be Mrs. Tardivel?”

She looked at her lap and shook her head. “No, I can’t do that.” But when she lifted her face, she was smiling. “But I do want to be Ms. Bond, who happens to be married to Mr. Tardivel.”

“Then you will marry me?”

Molly got up and walked toward him. She put her arms around his neck. “Oui,”she said.

They kissed for several seconds, but when they pulled apart, Pierre said, “There is one condition. At any time — any time — if you feel my disease is too much for you, or you see an opportunity for happiness that will last the rest of your life, rather than the rest of mine, then I want you to leave me.”

Molly was silent, her mouth hanging slightly open.

“Promise,” said Pierre.

“I promise,” she said at last.

That night, Pierre and Molly did what they had often done before they’d broken up: they went for a long walk. They’d stopped at a cafe on Telegraph Avenue for a light snack, and now were just ambling along, occasionally looking in shop windows. Like many young couples, they were still trying to get to know every facet of each other’s personalities and pasts. On one long walk, they had talked about earlier sexual experiences; on another, relations with their parents; on others still, debates about gun control and environmental issues. Nights of probing, of stimulating conversations, of each refining his or her mental image of the other.

And tonight, the biggest question of all came up as they strolled, enjoying the early evening warmth. “Do you believe in God?” asked Molly.

Pierre looked down at the sidewalk. “I don’t know.”

“Oh?” said Molly, clearly intrigued.

Pierre sounded a bit uncomfortable. “Well, I mean it’s hard continuing to believe in God when something like this happens. You know: my Huntington’s. I don’t mean I started questioning my faith last month, when we finally did the test. I started doing that back when I first met my real father.” Pierre had explained all about his discovered paternity on another long walk.

Molly nodded. “But you did believe in God before you found out you might have Huntington’s?”

Pierre nodded as they continued along. “I guess. Like most French Canadians, I was raised Roman Catholic. These days I only go to Mass on Easter and Christmas, but when I was living in Montreal, I went every Sunday. I even sang in the church choir.”

Molly winced; she had heard Pierre sing. “But it’s hard for you to believe now,” she said, “because a beneficent God couldn’t do that sort of thing to you.”

They’d come to a park bench. Molly gestured for them to sit down, and they did so, Pierre draping his arm over her shoulders. “Something like that,” he said.

Molly touched Pierre’s arm and seemed to hesitate for a moment before replying. “Forgive me for saying this — I don’t want to sound argumentative — but, well, I always find that sort of reasoning a trifle shallow.” She held up a hand. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean it to sound like a criticism. It’s just that the — the harshness of our world is apparent to anyone who looks. People starving in Africa, poverty in South America, drive-by shootings here in the States. Earthquakes, tornadoes, wars, diseases.” She shook her head. “I just — to me, I’m just saying to me — it always seems strange that one could go along without questioning one’s faith until something personally happens. You know what I’m saying? A million people starve to death in Ethiopia, and we say that’s too bad. But we — or someone we know — gets cancer or a heart attack or Huntington’s or whatever, and we say, Hey, there must be no God.” She smiled. “I’m sorry — pet peeve. Forgive me.”

Pierre nodded slowly. “No, you’re right. You’re right. It is silly when you put it that way.” He paused. “What about you? Do you believe in God?”

Molly shrugged. “Well, I was raised a Unitarian — I still sometimes go to a fellowship over in San Francisco. I don’t believe in a personal God, but perhaps in a creator. I’m what they call a theistic evolutionist.”

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

“That’s someone who believes God planned out all the broad strokes in advance — the general direction life would take, the general path for the universe — but, after setting everything in motion, he’s content to simply watch it all unfold, to let it grow and develop on its own, following the course he laid down.”

Pierre smiled at her. “Well, the course we’ve been laying down leads back to my apartment — and it is getting late.”

She smiled at him. “Not too late to know me in the biblical sense, I trust.”

Pierre stood up, offered his hand to Molly, and helped her stand up as well. “Yea, verily.”

Chapter 16

It was a small, quiet wedding. Pierre had originally thought they’d get married at UCB’s chapel, but it turned out not to have any such thing — California political correctness. Instead, they ended up being married in the living room of Molly’s coworker, Professor Ingrid Lagerkvist, with the chaplain from Molly’s Unitarian fellowship conducting the service.

Ingrid, a thirty-four-year-old redhead with the palest blue eyes Pierre had ever seen, served as Molly’s matron of honor; Ingrid was normally quite slim, but was now five months pregnant. Pierre, who had been in California for less than a year now, enlisted Ingrid’s husband, Sven — a great bear of a man with long brown hair, a huge reddish brown beard, and Ben Franklin glasses — to be his best man. Also in attendance: Pierre’s mother, Elisabeth, who had flown down from Montreal; bubbly Joan Dawson and a dour Burian Klimus from the HGC office; and Pierre’s research assistant, Shari Cohen (whom Pierre could not help notice looked sad throughout the whole affair; it had perhaps been an error asking her to attend a wedding just three months after her own engagement had broken up). Absent were any members of Molly’s family; she hadn’t even told her mother she was getting married.

Molly and Pierre had argued a bit about what vows they should exchange. Pierre refused to have Molly pledge to keep the marriage “in sickness and in health,” reiterating that she should feel free to leave anytime if he should fall ill. And so:

“Do you, Pierre Jacques,” asked the white-haired Unitarian, wearing a secular three-piece suit with a red carnation in the lapel, “take Molly Louise to be your wife, to cherish and honor her, to love and protect her, to respect her and help her fulfill all her potential for so long as you carry each other in your hearts?”

“I do,” said Pierre, and then, smiling at his mother, he added, “Oui.”

“And do you, Molly Louise, take Pierre Jacques to be your husband, to cherish and honor him, to love and protect him, to respect him and help him fulfill all his potential for so long as you carry each other in your hearts?”

“I do,” she said, staring into Pierre’s eyes.

“By the authority vested in me by the state of California, I take great pride and pleasure in pronouncing you a married couple. Pierre and Molly, you may—”

But they already were. And a long, lingering kiss it was, too.

Their honeymoon — five days in British Columbia — had been wonderful.

But soon they were back at work, Pierre keeping his standard long hours at the lab. They’d let their separate apartments go, and had bought a six-room house on Spruce Street with white stucco walls, next to a bungalow done in pink stucco. The final vestiges of Pierre’s inheritance from Alain Tardivel’s life insurance covered the down payment. Pierre had taken a beating converting the money to U.S. dollars, but was delighted to discover mortgage interest was deductible here, something it hadn’t been back in Canada. Pierre enjoyed having a backyard, and plants grew spectacularly in this climate, although the giant snails gave him the willies.

Tonight, a warm evening in June, Pierre sat at the dining-room table, its top littered with little Chinese food containers. Tiffany Feng had long ago sent him a fully executed copy of his Gold Plan policy, but what with the marriage, moving into the house, and his work at the lab, he was only just getting around to looking it over. Molly, meanwhile, had had her fill of Chinese and was now sitting on a couch in the adjacent living room, browsing through Newsweek.

“Hey, listen to this!” said Pierre, speaking loudly enough to be heard in the next room. “Under ‘Standard Benefits,’ it says: ‘In cases in which amniocentesis, genetic counseling, or other prenatal testing provides indications that a child will require extensive neonatal or later-life medical treatment, Condor Insurance, Inc., will pay all costs required to terminate the pregnancy at a hospital or government-licensed abortion clinic.’ ”

Molly looked up. “It’s a fairly standard benefit; the university’s staff policy has that, too.”

“That doesn’t seem right, somehow.”

“Why not?”

Pierre frowned. “It’s just that… I don’t know — it just seems a form of economically forced eugenics. If the baby isn’t perfect, you can have it aborted for free. But listen to this other clause — this is the one that really gets me: ‘Although our prenatal health benefits normally roll over into covering neonatal care, if amniocentesis, genetic counseling, or other prenatal testing provide indications that a child will be born manifesting symptoms of a genetic disorder, and the mother has not taken advantage of the benefit described under section twenty-two, paragraph six’ — that’s the free-abortion-of-defective-babies benefit — ‘neonatal health coverage will be withdrawn.’ You see what that means? If you don’t take the offer of a free abortion once it becomes clear that you’re going to have a less-than-perfect baby, and instead go ahead and give birth to the child, your insurance to cover the child’s needs is canceled. The insurance company is providing an enormous economic incentive to terminate all but perfect pregnancies.”

“I suppose,” said Molly slowly. She had gotten up and was now standing in the entrance to the dining room, leaning against the wall. “Still, didn’t I read about a case of the exact opposite? A couple, both of whom were genetically deaf, chose to abort their child because prenatal testing showed that it was not going to be deaf, and so they felt they wouldn’t be able to relate to it. This sort of thing goes both ways.”

“That case was different,” said Pierre. “I’m not sure I agree with the morality of it — aborting a normal child simply because he was normal — but at least it was the parents making the choice on their own, not being coerced by an outside agency. But this—” He shook his head.

“Decisions that should be private, family affairs — whether it’s to continue a pregnancy, or, as in my case, whether it’s to take a genetic test as an adult — are essentially being made for you by insurance companies. You have to terminate the pregnancy, or lose insurance; you have to take the test, or lose insurance.” He shook his head. “It stinks.”

He picked up the chop suey container, looked inside, but put it back down without taking any more. His appetite was gone.

Chapter 17

It was Molly’s turn to make dinner. Pierre used to try to help her, but had soon learned it was actually easier for her if he just stayed out of the way. She was making spaghetti tonight — about ten minutes’ work when Pierre did it, since he relied on Ragu for the sauce and a Kraft shaker for the cheese. But for Molly it was a big production, making the sauce from scratch and grating up fresh Parmesan. Pierre sat in the living room, channel surfing. When Molly called out that dinner was ready, he headed into the dining nook. They had a butcher-block style table with green wicker chairs. Pierre pulled out his chair without looking and tried to sit down, but almost immediately he hopped back onto his feet.

There was a plush toy bee sitting on his chair, with giant Mickey Mouse eyes and a fuzzy yellow-and-black coat. Pierre picked it up. “What’s this?” he said.

Molly entered from the kitchen, bearing two plates of steaming spaghetti. She set them down before she spoke. “Well,” she said, nodding at the bee, “I think it’s time we had my flowers fertilized.”

Pierre raised his eyebrows. “You want to go ahead with the IVF?”

Molly nodded. “If it’s still okay with you.” She held up a hand. “I know it’s a lot of money, but, well — frankly, I’m scared by what happened to Ingrid.” Molly’s friend Ingrid Lagerkvist had given birth to a boy with Down’s syndrome; the odds of having a Down’s child go up with age.

“We’ll find the money,” said Pierre. “Don’t worry.” His face broke into a broad grin. “We’re going to have a baby!” He sprinkled cheese on his spaghetti, then did something Molly always found amusing: he cut his spaghetti into little bits. “A baby!” he said again.

Molly laughed. “Oui, monsieur.”

Pierre’s boss, Dr. Burian Klimus, looked up and nodded curtly at each of them in turn. “Tardivel. Molly.”

“Thank you for agreeing to see us, sir,” said Pierre, sitting down on the far side of the broad desk. “I know how busy you are.” Klimus was not one to waste energy acknowledging the obvious. He sat silently behind his cluttered desk, a slightly irritated expression on his broad, ancient face, waiting for Pierre to get to the point. “We need your advice. Molly and I, we’d like to have a child.”

“Flowers and a Chianti are an excellent starting point,” said Klimus in his dry voice, brown eyes unblinking.

Pierre laughed, more out of nervousness than because of the joke. He looked around the office. There was a second door, leading to some other room. Behind Klimus’s desk was a credenza with two globes on it. One was a globe of the Earth, with no political boundaries marked; the other was — Pierre guessed, based on its reddish color — a globe of Mars. There were framed astronomical photos on the walls. Pierre returned his gaze to Klimus. “We’ve decided we want to undergo in vitro fertilization, and, well, you wrote that big article about new reproductive technologies for

Science with Professor Sousa, so…”

“Why IVF?” asked Klimus.

“I have blocked fallopian tubes,” said Molly.

Klimus nodded. “I see.” He leaned back in his chair, which creaked as he did so, and interlaced his fingers behind his bald head. “Surely you understand the rudiments of the procedure: eggs would be removed from Molly and mixed with Pierre’s sperm in a petri dish. Once embryos are created, they’re implanted, and you hope for the best.”

“Actually,” said Pierre, “we weren’t planning to use my sperm.” He shifted slightly in his seat. “I, ah, I’m not in a position to be the biological father.”

“Are you impotent?”

Pierre was surprised by the question. “No.”

“Do you have a low sperm count? There are procedures—”

“I have no idea what my sperm count is. I assume it’s normal.”

“Then why? You have an adequate mind. Why not father a child?”

Pierre swallowed. “I, ah, carry some bad genes.”

Klimus nodded. “Voluntary eugenics. I approve.” He paused. “But, you know, once the embryo is eight cells in size, we can usually remove a single cell for PCR and then genetic testing, so—”

Pierre saw no reason to debate it with the old man. “We’re going to use donated sperm,” he said firmly.

Klimus shrugged. “It’s up to you.”

“But we’re looking for recommendations for a clinic. You visited a number of them while doing that article. Is there one you’d suggest?”

“There are several good ones here in the Bay Area,” said Klimus.

“Which would be the cheapest?” said Pierre. Klimus looked at him blankly. “We, ah, understand the procedure costs around ten thousand dollars.”

“Per attempt,” said Klimus. “And IVF has only a twenty percent success rate. The average cost of actually getting a baby through this method is forty thousand dollars.”

Pierre’s jaw dropped. Forty thousand? It was a huge amount of money, and their mortgage was a killer. He doubted they could manage that much.

But Molly pressed on. “Do the clinics choose the sperm donors?”

“Occasionally,” said Klimus. “More often, the woman chooses from a catalog listing the potential fathers’ physical, mental, and ethnic characteristics. And—” He stopped in mid-sentence, completely dead, as though his mind were a million miles away.

Pierre finally leaned a bit closer. “Yes?” he said.

“What about me?” asked Klimus.

“I beg your pardon?” said Pierre.

“Me. As donor.”

Molly’s jaw dropped a little. Klimus saw that and held up a hand, palm out. “We could do it here at LBL. I can do the fertilization work, and Gwendolyn Bacon — an IVF practitioner who owes me a favor — I’m sure I could get her to do the egg extraction and embryo implantation.”

“I don’t know,” said Pierre.

Klimus looked at him. “I propose a deal: use me as the donor, and I’ll pay the costs for the procedure, no matter how many attempts it takes.

I’ve invested my Nobel money well, and have some lucrative consulting contracts.”

“But…” began Molly. She trailed off, not knowing what to say. She wished there wasn’t the wide desk between them so she could read his mind, but all she could detect was a barrage of French from Pierre.

“I am old, I know,” said Klimus, without humor. “But that makes little difference to my sperm. I’m fully capable of serving as the biological father — and I’ll provide full documentation to show myself free of HIV.”

Pierre gulped air. “Won’t it be awkward, knowing the donor?”

“Oh, it’ll be our secret,” said Klimus, raising his hand again. “You want good DNA, no? I’m a Nobel Prize winner; I have an IQ of one-six-three.

I’m a proven commodity as far as longevity is concerned, and I have excellent eyesight and reflexes. Plus, I don’t carry genes for Alzheimer’s or diabetes or any other serious disorder.” He smiled slightly. “The worst thing programmed into my DNA is baldness, and I do confess I was hit with that at an early age.”

During Klimus’s long statement, Molly had started out by shaking her head slightly back and forth, back and forth, but that had stopped by the time he reached his conclusion. She looked now at Pierre, as if to gauge his reaction.

Klimus, too, turned his eyes on Pierre. “Come on, young man,” he said, and then his face split in a dry, cold grin. “Better the devil you know.”

“But why?” asked Pierre. “Why would you be interested?”

“I’m eighty-four,” said Klimus, “and have no children. I simply wish for the Klimus genes to not disappear from the gene pool.” He looked at each of them in turn. “You’re a young couple, just getting started. I know what you make, Tardivel, and can guess what you make, Molly. Tens of thousands of dollars is a lot of money to you.”

Pierre looked at Molly and shrugged. “I… I suppose it would be okay,” he said slowly, not at all sure of himself.

Klimus brought his hands together in a loud clap that sounded like a gunshot. “Wonderful!” he said. “Molly, we’ll make an appointment for you with Dr. Bacon; she’ll prescribe hormone treatments to get you to develop multiple eggs.” Klimus rose to his feet, cutting off further discussion.

“Congratulations, Mother,” he said to Molly, and then, in an unexpected display of bonhomie, he came over and laid a bony arm on Pierre’s shoulder. “And congratulations to you, too, Father.”

“Big trouble,” said Shari, coming into Pierre’s lab and holding up a photocopy. “I found this note in a back issue of Physical Review Letters.”

She looked upset.

Pierre was spinning down his centrifuge. He left it whirling under inertia and looked up at her. “What’s it say?”

“Some researchers in Boston are contending that although the DNA that codes for protein synthesis is structured like a code — one word wrong and the message is garbled — the junk or intronic DNA is structured like a language, with enough redundancy that small mistakes don’t matter.”

“Like a language?” said Pierre excitedly. “What do they mean?”

“In the active parts of the DNA, they found that the distribution of the various three-letter codons is random. But in the junk DNA, if you look at the distribution of ‘words’ of three, four, five, six, seven, and eight base pairs in length, you find that it’s just like what we have in a human language. If the most common word appears ten thousand times, then the tenth most common appears only one thousand times, and the hundredth most common appears just a hundred times — which is very much like the relative distribution of words in English. ’The‘ is an order of magnitude more common than ’his,‘ and ’his’ is an order of magnitude more common than, say, ‘go.’ Statistically, it’s a very distinctive pattern, diagnostic of a real language.”

“Excellent!” said Pierre. “Excellent.”

Vertical frown lines were marring Shari’s otherwise porcelain-smooth forehead. “It’s terrible. It means other people have been making good progress on this problem, too. That note in Physical Review Letters was published in the December fifth, 1994, issue.”

Pierre shrugged. “Remember Watson and Crick, hunting for the structure of DNA? You recall who else was working on the same problem?”

“Linus Pauling, among others.”

“Pauling, exactly — who’d already won a Nobel for his work on chemical bonding.” He looked at Shari. “But even old Linus couldn’t see the truth; he came up with a Rube Goldberg three-stranded model.” Pierre had learned all about Goldberg since coming to Berkeley; he was a UCB alumnus and an exhibition of his cartoons was on display on campus.

“Sure, some others have been working in the same area we’re pursuing.

But I’d rather you come in here and tell me that there’s good reason to think something meaningful is coded in the non-protein-synthesizing DNA than to say everyone who ever looked at it before has concluded it really is just junk. I know we’re on the right track, Shari. I know it.” He paused. “You’ve done good work. Go home; get a good night’s sleep.”

“You should go home, too,” Shari said.

Pierre smiled. “Actually, tonight the tables are turned. I’m waiting for Molly. She’s got a late departmental meeting. I’ll stay here till she calls.”

“All right. See you tomorrow.”

“Good night, Shari. And be careful — it’s pretty late already.”

Shari left the room and started walking down the corridor. She went outside and waited for the shuttle bus to arrive. It did so, and she rode it down to the campus proper. She wanted to run a few errands on campus before heading home, one of which took her near the psychology building, where Pierre’s wife was apparently still working. Just outside it, Shari was unnerved to collide with a rough-looking young man pacing impatiently back and forth as if he were waiting for someone. He was dressed in a leather jacket and faded jeans, and had closely cropped blond hair and a strange chin that looked like two protruding fists.

Nasty customer, Shari thought as she scurried away into the darkness…