Identical (26 page)

He was too tired for all of this. His mind was spinning down to dark places. It was past midnight and he’d be up at 5:30.

“I’m trashed,” he said.

The young colleague of Dr. Yavem’s with whom Tim had deposited the evidence surrendered by the state police left a message on his cell saying that they had concluded the tests and wanted to talk to him or Evon at 2 this afternoon. Tim met Evon at ZP and they taxied to the hospital. They were at the U in ten minutes and then walked in circles on their way through the med school to Yavem’s lab. The hospital, famous as a cancer treatment center, had itself grown like a tumor, spreading in all directions. Sometimes you had to go half a block to find an elevator. All in all, the hike to Yavem’s lab was longer than the drive out here.

Dr. Yavem emerged to greet them and brought both back to his small white office, with its long window into his laboratory. Tim realized that he might as well be looking through the glass at something occurring fifty or one hundred years from now, because the work taking place there was that far beyond what he would ever comprehend. DNA identification had not even been invented when Dita was killed in 1982. He’d heard the term because of Watson and Crick, and a book he’d read. Tim thought for a second about his father’s father, a sour, silent man who’d been born on a farm near Aberdeen and hadn’t even seen a railroad train until one started him on his journey to America. The old man lived to the time of television but refused to watch the set, convinced it was possessed.

In the taxi, Evon had described Yavem as a merry little guy, but to Tim he seemed pretty grave behind his spare moustache. There was barely room for two of them on the other side of Yavem’s desk, which ironically made Tim like him more. It meant Yavem had given up the space to his lab and his research and not his ego.

“I have quite a bit to tell you,” Dr. Yavem said, “but it will probably make the most sense if I explain my results in the order in which I performed the tests.

“Remember, Ms. Miller, I described a very basic testing protocol. The first step, in order to do things properly, was to confirm that the blood at the Kronon home had come from one of the Gianis twins. Then, assuming that was the case, we needed to confirm that they were identical twins. If so, we’d employ two different tests to prospect throughout each man’s genome for so-called copy-number variations. If we were successful in identifying a CNV, we’d then analyze the blood from the crime scene to see if we could find the same one at the same locus.

“Step one was the well-accepted part of the testing regime. Given the age of the specimens and the likelihood of contamination, we said we would try Y-STR testing first.” Clearly a practiced teacher, Yavem, as he spoke, turned now and then to Tim, who finally pointed back at Evon.

“Tell her, Doctor. She’s going to have to explain it all to me later. Very, very slowly.” Yavem laughed just a second before reverting to a somber expression.

“We had DNA specimens from a number of sources. There was the original blood from Hal and Zeus Kronon. I had a very good specimen from the water bottle that you told me Paul Gianis had drunk from. And I had fingerprints that had been positively identified as Cass Gianis’s.

“I began by analyzing the Kronons’ blood.”

“Why Zeus and Hal?” asked Evon. “Weren’t they excluded by blood type?”

“Yes, but in this case, specimen contamination was a considerable risk. That’s one of many reasons to look first at the Y chromosome. Because females at the scene present no chance of contamination. But we knew that both Hal and his father had spent quite a bit of time in Ms. Kronon’s bedroom before the police closed the scene, so I thought it would be helpful to have their Y chromosome sequenced. When you do a DNA analysis, you don’t know precisely what cells you’re analyzing. It may look like a blood drop to the naked eye, but even a single skin cell from someone else can show up in the results. So if we have a specimen large enough to test in several regions, it’s very helpful to understand what the DNA of a possible contaminating cell looks like, so you can understand a variation in results. With a father and son, you expect the same Y sequence, but we did both, basically as a way to validate ourselves. And that proved fortuitous because Hal and Zeus are not in fact genetically linked.”

Evon had one of those moments. The veins at her temples throbbed and her vision wavered. She understood why Yavem wasn’t smiling.

“Hal is not Zeus’s son?”

“Not genetically.”

Tim grabbed her arm now that he understood. His gray eyes, clouded and marked by age, swung her way and he made an indefinite sound with his mouth in a tiny o.

“I’ll flip you,” Evon said.

“Uh-uh. I ain’t telling him,” said Tim. “There’s not enough money, not in the whole entire world.”

“God,” Evon said. She took a deep breath and said, “OK,” meaning Yavem could go on.

“I then moved on to the Gianis twins. We got very good sequencing off the water bottle on Paul. So we then tried to extract DNA from some of the fingerprint lifts that were identified as Cass’s, and we succeeded at that. We didn’t get as complete a result, but there were still identifiable short segments at a number of loci.”

“What about the copy-number variations?” asked Evon.

“We weren’t looking for them at this point. That’s a whole different array of tests. We certainly confirmed that Paul and Cass are in fact monozygotic twins-identical twins from the same embryo.”

“No surprise there,” answered Evon.

“Yes, well,” said Yavem. A brief smile escaped him and he looked downward, seemingly to suppress it. “Forgive me,” he said. “Because once the Gianis Y was sequenced, there was another unexpected result. I actually hadn’t noticed. Teresa called my attention to it.” He gestured through the window toward a figure in a white coat in the lab, the woman Tim had met with.

“I hope it’s better than the first surprise,” Evon said.

“Of the same nature. Zeus Kronon was the father of the Gianis twins.”

Evon felt her jaw hanging. “Fuck,” she said, a word she spoke aloud in conversation no more than once a year.

Tim actually laughed. A few drunken wags at St. D’s had asked how Mickey Gianis, who could barely get out of bed, had fathered more children. Tim recalled one Sunday evening when Father Nik tore the head off someone at the men’s club for speaking such a malicious slur.

Evon was looking at him.

“Did you know that?” she asked.

“Of course not.”

Evon in the meantime had taken a moment to calculate.

“So that would mean that Zeus and the Gianises all share a Y chromosome?”

“Correct.”

“So the blood at the scene might have come from Zeus, too?”

“Looking solely at the Y chromosome we’d get that result. But we know there are other genetic differences between Zeus and his twins. Because Zeus is a different blood type than those men. They’re B. He’s O. Their mother must be type B. But if the twins’ Y chromosome matched the blood, we’d know it was one of theirs. We quickly concluded, however, that was not the case. Like Zeus, the blood could not have come from the Gianises either.”

A quick fear withered Evon’s heart.

“Please tell me it’s not Hal’s.”

“By all means. It is surely not Hal’s. Or Zeus’s. Or the Gianises’. Nor Hal’s mother, Hermione, for that matter.”

“The
mother
?”

“Yes, none of the blood collected at the scene contains a Y chromosome.”

Evon stopped for a second, before asking how that could possibly be.

“You can be sure that we examined a dozen of those blood spots to be certain. But we got the same result each time. All the blood on the walls and window came from a woman,” said Yavem.

Lidia Gianis walks the contours of Zeus’s sloping lawn with care. She has not attended this picnic in more than twenty-five years, having sworn never to return. In Lidia’s life, there are few vows she does not adhere to. She believes in will-ee thelesee in Greek. Spirit. Will cannot turn snow to rain, or roll back the sea, but it can keep you from being simply steamrollered by fate.

Now and then Lidia reaches out to Teri for support because she has chosen a pair of wedged espadrilles. That is more heel than she is accustomed to, since Mickey, two inches shorter to start, does not care to feel as if he were a child being led around by the hand. But she approached this gathering intending to look her best, which has proven a vain effort in the breathy Midwestern heat that has left her flushed, and damp with sweat. Preparing this morning, she examined herself solemnly as she applied her makeup. Not an old lady yet, she decided, but further on the way than she would prefer. The sturdy and abundant body of her girlhood was surrendered in the course of three pregnancies, especially the last one with the twins, and her wide figure is better concealed beneath a floor-length shift. The coils of black hair, pushed back from the brow by a discreet band to create a leonine rush, are now overgrown by wires of gray that she regards like weeds. What she practiced in the mirror was the piercing black-eyed look, clever and determined, by which she knows herself.

Now, treading carefully, she carries her head high on her long neck, even though her upper body is weakened by a seasick feeling of high anxiety. The nausea reminds her just a little of the mornings during her first two pregnancies with Helen and Cleo. With the boys, she was healthy as a horse-except for the fact that she thought of killing herself every day.

“My brother does it right,” says Teri, “but I sometimes think, when I watch him gliding around like a swan, that his pride will kill him.” Teri adores Zeus, even while she mocks his excesses. He sports the same white suit he dons every year, preening as he greets his guests. It sometimes seems that Teri and she have been talking about Zeus their entire lives-the adolescent kisses Lidia and he shared, his marriage, his children, his feud with Mickey, his titanic success. If you asked, each woman would claim the other one raises the subject.

There are some friendships that pass into permanency due solely to an early start. Choosing today, Lidia might not welcome the company of a woman so profane and odd. But Teri is central in her life, like a stout tree you watched grow from a slender stick in the ground, a physical marker of the mystery of time. These days, Teri and she seldom meet face-to-face. The Gianises moved to Nearing a few years ago, when Mickey opened a second grocery there. And Teri refuses to visit Lidia’s home, rather than tolerate Mickey’s inevitable rages about Zeus. Instead, the two women babble to each other on the telephone at the start of every day, often for as long as an hour. A few minutes afterward, neither can recall what they discussed, except on the frequent occasions when one has slammed down the handset due to a comment too unkind to be tolerated. It falls to the offender to call back first, most often the next day, at which point the disagreement goes entirely unmentioned. In a relationship so old, rebukes are pointless. Years ago, Lidia stopped asking Teri to curb her vocabulary, instead bringing up her children to understand that no one else on earth was allowed to talk like Nouna Teri. And decades have passed since Lidia last encouraged Teri to accept one of the many men who courted her. Teri prefers to believe she is too much for any male. ‘I don’t want one,’ she will tell you to this day. ‘Cold feet in bed when you don’t need them and a cold dick when you do.’

Suddenly, there is a commotion. People surge forward and Paul’s name is on the air, accompanied by laughter. Lidia leaves Teri behind, until she sees her son struggling back to his feet, laughing with a girl who looks somewhat like Sofia Michalis. The young woman is holding Paul’s elbow as she hands him an empty paper plate. Paul’s focus on her is intense-as the song says, eyes only for her. Watching, Lidia feels a surge of hope. Georgia Lazopoulos is an empty vessel, entirely incompatible with the huge hopes she holds for both her sons. Paul probably would have proposed to Georgia long ago if Lidia had been at all encouraging. Even Father Nik, who is as dumb as his daughter, has begun to figure out that Lidia is the problem and has been increasingly cold to her. But she is unconcerned. It has been her longtime belief that these boys, conceived and carried in agony, must in some recompense from God be destined for greatness.

As she returns to Teri, Lidia feels her stomach suddenly lurch into spin cycle. Zeus is coming their way.

“Lidia, agapetae mou”-‘my dear’-he says and throws his arms wide in triumph. The vast history between them reveals itself in not so much as a flicker in his broad expression. She tolerates only a quick kiss on her cheek, but he grips her tightly for one second-he is still hale and strong-then turns to wave over Hermione, who not surprisingly has already headed this way to insert herself between Lidia and her husband. “Look who is here,” he says in English. Hermione does not bother with a welcoming word, and merely extends her hand, beset with a diamond-circled Rolex that cost more than the house Lidia lives in. “We enjoy seeing Cassian,” says Hermione, “ena kala paidee”-‘a nice boy,’ almost as if Cass were a child who’d come over to play. Hermione is beautiful but dull. She is slender-why are rich women so often thin as wafers? — with her hair expensively colored the shade of weak tea and swept up in a beehive. She has mastered an elegant smile, but they both know she has never cared for Lidia, who is far smarter than Hermione, and once enjoyed a troubling emotional proximity to her husband.

“You have stayed away too long,” Zeus tells Lidia, “and I cannot imagine why.”

That is too much. She manages no more than a stiff smile and turns heel, with Teri trailing after her. Zeus’s sister grabs Lidia’s arm again after another ten yards.

“A lease on a grocery store? Lidia, really. It’s twenty years.”