Identical

  “Subpoenas enforced after a case,” Cass said. “That’s murky enough. We can appeal.”

  “Cass, there are already a ton of people who think we dismissed the suit to hide something. If we come back and start fighting Hal on a motion that he’s got every right to win, it’s going to reinforce that impression.”

  “How about saying, It’s twenty-five years, Cass did his time, this thing should be over and done with, and we’re being harassed by a rich lunatic?”

  “Do you really think the average Joe is going to side with us if we try to keep Hal from recovering the relics of his sister’s murder? It’s not my idea of family memorabilia, but people will understand if he wants to have it, rather than let the police throw it away.”

  Sofia, who in the last couple of months had tended to retreat from the brothers’ collisions, especially when there was an edge to them, had sided on this issue with Cass, rather than Paul and the lawyers. Like Cass, she was still not content with the decision not to appeal.

  “We’re making it easier for him to do the DNA,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

  “True, Sofie, but he doesn’t have a good specimen from either of us.”

  Cass said, “We’ve asked about that. They’ll extract my DNA from the fingerprints that were identified as mine.”

  “They’ll try. That’s no slam dunk, Cassian. And they still won’t have my specimen.”

  “They’ll get it. You know that. They’ll pick up some tissue when you blow your nose. Or a pencil you chew on. Or they’ll do a lift from the cheek of some woman you kiss at a fund-raiser.”

  “Well, that could screw them up then, right? At least half the time.”

  “That might not matter, man. Not if they do the test. That’s why the only alternative is to stop them.”

  Paul put his forehead against both of his palms. It was this circle. It had been for months, this tension between preventing the test and winning the election.

  “If we could stop them. But we can’t,” Paul said. “Every court will decide against us, and they’ll do it quickly with a month to the election. It’ll be a parade of bad rulings accompanied by a barrage of bad publicity, and each one will say, in effect, Gianis is hiding something. So we hunker down. If Hal comes up with a result we don’t like that he tries to publicize, we deal with it then, depending on what he’s saying. But at least there’s no nightmare scenario. No prosecutor will touch this case, because Hal’s broken the chain of evidence. He’s too much of a zealot for anybody to believe beyond a reasonable doubt he didn’t tamper with the specimens.”

  “That’s still not the best alternative,” Cass said.

  “You’re right. The better alternative,” Paul said, “is for me to drop out.” He put his head back in his hands, but he could feel both his wife and his brother staring. “There are ten times a day,” Paul said, “when I’m ready just to announce that.”

  For a minute, Cass looked like he was going to come over the table.

  “It’s not simply your decision.”

  His brother’s statement, uttered so baldly, inflamed Paul.

  “The fuck it isn’t, Cass. That’s how it is.”

  Cass struck the table with both of his palms, which jumped the opposite edge into Paul’s ribs. The moment of bright pain brought him to his feet, and Cass followed, both with closed fists at their sides. The last fistfight they’d had was at age seventeen, but Paul could still feel the primacy of those struggles, as he’d tried for a second to obliterate life’s most central, and often troubling, fact, his brother. If it was true, as some psychs said, that their connection was more intense than anything other humans experienced, then the same had to be said about their anger. In twenty-four years, he had never really raised his voice to Sofia in their occasional quarrels.

  Sofia had popped up, too, and had imposed herself in front of Cass, taking him by both of his shoulders.

  “Don’t be juvenile,” she said to them.

  They stared at each other, in animal posture, nostrils flaring and breathing hard, just one more second. Sofia pressed Cass back down to his chair.

  “Paulie,” she said, “we can’t give in to Hal Kronon. You’ve promised Ray, and everyone who works for you, that we won’t.”

  He was exhausted. A campaign was vitalizing when you were winning, but at low times, it felt like you were undergoing a form of ritual sacrifice.

  “We’re going to lose anyway.”

  “The hell,” his brother answered.

  “I told you. The Trib is going to publish a poll on Sunday where we’re running third now.”

  “I told you that,” Cass said, “and it’s thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight. We could still be first given the margin of error. Their story is going to say tie.”

  “We were twenty points ahead two months ago. And inside the campaign people understand trends. The troops were restless anyway, now that you fired Crully,” Paul said.

  Cass looked stricken. “You agreed Mark was a pain in the ass.”

  “I’m not blaming you. I said that the wrong way. I think it was the right move on balance.” They had resolved long ago that they would never second-guess one another on decisions that had to be made in the moment. And they’d talked a dozen times about what to do if Du Bois gave Hal the DNA. They had agreed that it would be best to dismiss the lawsuit, which made it inevitable Crully would quit. It was better for Mark, anyway. In another week or two, he’d have been looking for a way to jump off the sinking ship, blaming Paul for the hole in the hull. Mark was not the kind to hang around and keep bailing. He’d already been hired by Hillary to take over in Pennsylvania, where he was from. “I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying the direction is obvious. Hal’s going to keep hammering us. He may never have anything more than Georgia, but she’ll be a household name with the media buy he’s made for that ad.”

  Peering at Georgia Lazopoulos every time he turned on a TV filled Paul with clotted emotions, mostly horror and guilt. The brute fact that clobbered him was that she would have been someone else if he’d made a different choice. Sofia had added to his life as much as he’d subtracted from Georgia’s, if not more. But romance wasn’t ordinarily a zero-sum game.

  “Cass, it looks bad. That’s all I’m saying. So why hang in and worry about the test?”

  “Dropping out won’t stop Hal. It’ll motivate him, in fact. Hal would do the DNA even if you announced tomorrow that you were leaving the US and becoming a citizen of Belarus. And besides, now that Camaner has taken over, he’ll get his arms around the campaign, and we’ll win, once the focus is back on the actual issues.”

  “We’re running out of cash, Cass. The crowds are thinner at every event, especially the fund-raisers. You’re seeing the same thing. And we agreed when we started that we’re not running this campaign on debt.”

  “I don’t think we make this decision now. Camaner has to get a chance. A campaign is a rodeo ride. We both know that.”

  Paul nodded. He was ready to sleep. He stood up and hugged his brother. “Hron-yah poh-lah,” he said in Greek as he held him. ‘Many happy years.’ This was still one of the greatest feelings he knew, hugging Cass, lingering with the solid fact of his presence.

  Sofia and he went to the garage, where her Lexus was parked.

  “You’re trashed,” she said. She took the car key out of his hand.

  “No,” he answered.

  “You’re trashed,” Sofia repeated. When they came up to the street, there was a sleety rain falling and the asphalt reflected the lights, making it feel as if it were Christmas again.

  “You know the basic problem, don’t you?” Paul asked. “He likes being me more than he likes being himself.”

  “God, Paul. That’s a hell of a thing to say.”

  “I should never have agreed to this. The fact that he can pass himself off as me doesn’t mean he has the right to do it. I should have drawn a line. It was crazy.”

  “Are you forgetting the last twenty-five
years?”

  “Hardly. That’s why I said yes. It was a horrible, hard time and we hung in together, no blaming or recriminations, and I couldn’t imagine ending that period with all-out war. But truth? I was shocked that he didn’t want to go back to his own life.”

  “That’s naïve, isn’t it? You’re one of the most important men in this county. This state. Cass Gianis is an ex-con. And a convicted murderer.”

  “But you know, as adults, when the world went to hell, he’d become so determined to be himself. He was proud of all the differences between us. He was funnier and more spontaneous than I was, less disciplined. That was the whole thing with Dita. Even if it was stupid, he insisted on making the kind of decisions I never would have. I’d always taken it for granted that come January 31, 2008, he’d be in a heat to get on with his life, have kids, all of that.”

  “You liked this idea, Paul. When we first discussed it.”

  “Because I thought it meant time off. Instead, Cass has added events to the schedule and we’re both working like we’re in chains.”

  “It’s been incredibly convenient at times. You can’t deny that. He loves the fund-raisers, squeezing dollars out of every handshake. And you can’t stand them any more.”

  “I can’t stand any of it,” he said. “I can’t. If we lose, this is the end.”

  “Wanna bet?” When she sneaked a glance his way, she was smiling.

  “You haven’t heard me say this before. Hal has changed my perspective. Politics won’t be the same. I’m not the first. This is just a grander version of what they did to John Kerry with the Swift Boat thing. So now the rich nuts call you a murderer. But what I believed in, building coalitions and organizations, is out the window. It’ll all be about how fast you peddle your ass to some billionaire, so you can counteract the guy on the other side who’s done the same thing. A pox on all of it. Honestly, when I think of the future, I’m more excited about the idea of working with Cass on that charter school for ex-cons—something simple and within our control, where I can be sure I’m actually leaving the campsite a little cleaner than I found it.”

  “Paulie, we just need to get through the election. That was what we all agreed to start. You’ll be less exhausted and you two can figure it out.”

  “What is there to figure out? Something has to give, baby. You got two guys and one life. I love Cass, but I can’t put up with this a lot longer. My mother always worried about the brothers in the bible, Jacob and Esau, and Cain and Abel. Cain is always the bad guy, but I’m beginning to feel for him, with his brother moving in on him.”

  “What do you mean moving in on you?” Sofia asked. The light from the streets was on her eyes when they shifted briefly in her husband’s direction.

  “You know what I mean,” he answered quietly. There was so much he had failed to anticipate by living one day at a time until Cass’s sentence was over. He never had to weigh his relationship with his brother against his marriage. Now the geometries seemed confusing to them all. In the month before they rented the apartment, Paul had returned home frequently from late-night events to find his brother and his wife together, padding around the house in their socks, still lingering over a meal, or side-by-side watching TV or a movie. Their familiarity with each other, and especially the physical aspect of it, which he had somehow never imagined, had been disquieting. The speed with which Sofia placed her hands on Cass to restrain him tonight, and even the way his brother received it, had troubled him again. Why hadn’t he realized what would confront him?

  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.

  22.

  The Results—March 6, 2008

  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.