Forbidden Area

by Pat Frank

  In the early days of the revolution, when the ruble was devoid of honor in the court of currencies, and the Bolshevik regime unrecognized in the United States, Papa Gumol was approached by a personal emissary of Lenin. As a result, certain Romanoff crown jewels were converted into dollars, and several shipments of machine tools and tractors reached the port of Odessa in time to bolster the first five-year plan. From that day, the house of Gumol was a chattel of the U.S.S.R., for the jewels had entered the country without benefit of customs.

  In 1931 the Gumols built a fifteen-room Tudor home in Upper Hyannis, a suburb close enough to the Main Line to be both respectable and expansible. In 1933 Russia and the United States resumed diplomatic relations. The Gumols, thinking that their usefulness to the Soviets would now end, and their dealings in foreign exchange prove less profitable, bought and reorganized the tottering Upper Hyannis bank. They were wrong about the Soviets. A man from the re-established Russian embassy paid them a visit and informed them that their continued co-operation would be both remunerative and necessary. Dealings with the embassy would remain strictly secret, as had dealings with unofficial agents in the past. After his father died, Robert Gumol continued this relationship.

  Gumol’s function was at once that of a post office and a bank. Although he handled large sums not his own, or listed to any depositor, there was never any trouble with the bank examiners. Most of the embassy business was in cash, and for cash safe deposit boxes are adequate. Upon occasion he was called upon to convert various currencies into dollars, these occasions usually following Russian absorption of small countries, or the acquisition of a satellite. Money conversion aroused no suspicion. The Gumols had always specialized in foreign exchange.

  He was never approached by American Communists, or Amtorg, or front organizations. His only contacts were with discreet representatives of the embassy, or the consulates, and approved people who looked and acted like Americans, but who he sensed were Russian. All was done with such precision, and so infrequently, that he felt perfectly secure. He felt secure, that is, so long as he pleased his masters. There was never any doubt in his mind what would happen if they suspected the slightest carelessness or deviation.

  It was not until the late ’forties, when Stalin’s implacable hatred of America became apparent, that Gumol grew jumpy. By then, of course, it was too late. Had he attempted to excuse himself from his functions, or shown any weakness, he would certainly have been murdered.

  Had he sought the protection of the FBI or Treasury Department, and told the whole story, his life might have been saved, true. But he would be ruined and perhaps jailed. His son at Penn and his daughter at Bryn Mawr would have been disgraced, children of a traitor. Now even the alternative of confession was beyond possibility. If implicated in the loss of the bombers, and the death of the crews, he would be executed. Accessory before the fact. He might be lynched.

  And everyone in Upper Hyannis would tell you that Robert Gumol was certainly a leading citizen, a member of all the big committees and a director of the Community Chest, and quite a democratic guy, to boot, for a banker. He enjoyed a drink and a good story in the club locker room. He had even been seen at a couple of stag movies. And when he was in New York or Chicago or Havana on a convention he really did the town. Nobody would ever imagine him a second generation spy.

  The hell of it was, he thought, that he actually hated communism and socialism and had said so in dozens of speeches, one of them at the bankers’ regional convention in Atlantic City only the week before.

  The Commie bastards were crazy, starting something now, just when things seemed to be rocking along so well, and even dealings in their currency were returning to profitable normalcy. He tried to recall everything he knew about the Russians.

  Gumol had only met one big-shot Russian commissar in his life. It was in 1930, on a trip abroad with his father. In Berlin they had been introduced to Dmitri Manuilsky, chief of the Comintern, and engaged in a fight to establish Communist rule in the Reichstag. He remembered Manuilsky as a careless, cynical Bohemian, living it up in a Berlin gayly decadent and falsely gay. Manuilsky had been friendly to the Gumols, but contemptuous of Americans generally. Gumol recalled, exactly, one thing Manuilsky had said:

  “Today we aren’t strong enough to attack. Our time will come in twenty or thirty years. The bourgeoisie will have to be put to sleep, so we will begin by launching the most spectacular peace movement on record. There will be electrifying overtones and unheard-of concessions. The capitalist countries, stupid and decadent, will rejoice to co-operate in their own destruction. They will leap at another chance to be friends. As soon as their guard is down we will smash them with our clenched fist.”

  And Manuilsky had brought his fist down on the table, and the glasses and bottles had jumped and quivered. What Manuilsky had said, there in Berlin, was now part of history, for he had repeated the same thing in an address at the Lenin School of Political Warfare the next year and Gumol had read it in The Inquirer.

  Recalling Manuilsky’s statement, and knowing what he did, knowing that saboteurs had destroyed three of the best bombers the United States had and undoubtedly would get more, it looked like a big war was coming. Such extensive sabotage was surely an act of war, wasn’t it? He asked himself a question, “What’ll war do to me?” The answer was easy. It would kill him.

  It would probably kill him right there in Upper Hyannis. He had no illusions that his contacts at the embassy would give him warning. At war’s instant, his usefulness ended. He doubted, knowing their passion for secrecy, that all the Russians themselves, in Washington and the consulates, would get warning. He tried to recall what that Civil Defense man had told Rotary about the H-bomb, after the AEC had come out with the dope on fallout and radiation, but he couldn’t quite get it straight in his mind. Whatever the man had said, Upper Hyannis was much too close to Philadelphia. At best, Gumol’s survival would depend on the vagaries of the wind and whether he was in the bank, or at home, when it happened. If he was in the bank, he might live in the vault for a day or two until the fallout was over. Maybe.

  Suppose there was a war and the Americans won? He’d be just as dead. They’d get access to the Russian records, or some of the Russians in Washington would talk, and they’d find out all about him. He hated to think what Americans, after an atomic war, would do to traitors. He said, to himself, aloud, “What in hell’s going to happen to me?”

  The glimmer of an idea entered the dark dungeon of his helplessness. If he could only get out of the country! If he could get out of the country for a few weeks he might ride it out. He could see which way the cat jumped. And when war came, whatever happened, he would be rid of her.

  He hated her, and he had hated her for years and would have divorced her long ago, in spite of the children, except that he suspected she knew something. You cannot live with a woman for twenty-eight years without her learning almost everything. He had never told her a word, and yet he was quite sure she knew, and would blab if he left her. This ill wind coming might blow him some good. It was a chance—the chance of a lifetime.

  This was not the first time he had thought of skipping out and leaving her. His favorite daydream was escape from the conspirational net in which he was gilled, and from his wife. He had considered it very carefully. It was not an easy thing to do. It was very difficult for a man of his prominence to vanish. If there was a public alarm, it would be impossible. A banker, widely known and often photographed, could not change his identity and erase his spoor in a small world, laced with pervasive and efficient communications. Were it not for the Russians, he might flee his wife. There were countries in the world where leaving a wife is no crime, and from which he could not be extradited. Quitting a lifelong job of espionage was quite another matter. In countries where extradition laws are loose, murder also can be casual. Until this moment there had seemed no solution. But now he could take a perfectly logical trip, which would raise no alarm or chase, and he doubted that
he would have to come back. If the big thing didn’t happen, nothing was lost. The situation, at worst, would be as before.

  Gumol’s daydreams had not been barren. He knew, at least, how to begin.

  He picked up his largest brief case from the floor next to the file cabinet, walked out into the bank’s lobby, and chatted for a moment with Liggett, the partially crippled watchman. He went into the basement and unlocked the safe deposit cage. Five of the larger safe deposit boxes were in his own name. He opened one of these and started packing the brief case. He first put in all the thousand dollar bills, two hundred of them, and eight packages of hundreds. Then he crammed in fifties, twenties, and even tens, counting as he worked. When the case was full it contained $385,000. Whatever happened, that should be sufficient.

  He returned to his office and thought what he must do next. The thought of returning home, to Ruth, was repugnant. She’d guess something was up. She never missed. He lifted the telephone, dialled his home number, and told the maid he wanted to speak to Mrs. Gumol. When she answered he said, “Ruth, dear, I’ve got to go to Havana right away.”

  “Havana!” Her voice, as always, was like an iron file on tin.

  “They’re floating a big bond issue down there. I think I can get in on it—get the Pennsylvania distribution.”

  “You’ve never done anything like that before.”

  “Lots of things haven’t been done before.”

  “You’re not still at the bank, are you?”

  “Yes, I’ve been talking long distance most of the afternoon.”

  “I thought you had a golf date.” In her voice was triumphant suspicion.

  “Well, after golf, I mean.”

  She said, “Robert, I don’t think you’re telling me the truth. Anyway, it’s seven o’clock and we’re going out for dinner.”

  So he was a liar! He was furious, but he strained the anger from his voice, and forced himself to speak impersonally, as when turning down a ne’er-do-well’s request for a loan. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go by yourself, Ruth. I’ve got to catch the first plane I can get from Philly.”

  “You mean you’re not even coming home to pack?”

  “No. I’m not coming home to pack. Only be gone a few days. It’s possible to buy clothes in Havana, you know.”

  “But Robert!”

  “I’ll wire my address when I get there. Goodbye, Ruth.” He hung up, and leaned back in his chair. He discovered that his hands trembled, and he was breathing heavily. He assured himself that it was excitement, not his heart. Old Doc Blandy had told him to take off weight and cut out golf entirely. Blandy was nuts. Golf was his only recreation, and exercise, and how could a man lose weight by cutting out exercise? What must he do next, now? The bank. That would be simple. A bank didn’t question your motives, call you a liar, or talk back. Not when you owned it, it didn’t. In recent years he had entrusted Gifford, his cashier, with almost all the routine, while he travelled about as much as he could. A man could live elegantly, while travelling, at no cost. He lived on an expense account, and it didn’t even cost the bank anything, really, because of the tax structure. Everything came off the top. Everything, even call girls, if you knew how to squeeze them in under the column headed Entertainment. Gumol penned a note:

  “DEAR GIFF—

  “Ran into a heart specialist today who advised me to take a rest. Decided to go to Havana for a week or two. When I’m down there I’ll investigate opportunities in Latin-American exchange, so the whole trip can come off the top.” That would sound authentic to Gifford, he thought.

  “Told my wife the trip was strictly business because I didn’t want to alarm her. Please see to it that she continues to think so. I will send my address as soon as I get there. Will probably stay at the Nacional, as usual.”

  He signed his name and thought of something else. “P.S.,” he wrote. “Let’s keep this in the family. Don’t tell anyone that I’m in Havana.” More than anything else, he was afraid the Russians might suspect he had skipped. If they knew where to find him, they could compel him to return. Or kill him.

  Gumol re-read the note. The handwriting was shaky. Perhaps that was just as well. Gifford knew about his slight heart murmur and would think he was really ill. He wasn’t ill at all. He was just a little excited, perhaps a little frightened. If the Russians, or anyone, learned he was leaving the country with all this cash—he patted the brief case and forced himself to think of something else.

  There was that girl in Atlantic City. Maybe she’d go for an all-expenses-paid tour of Havana. No, that would be stupid. If he took her to Cuba, he might be hooked with her—forever. Anyway, Havana was alive with women, young and easy. From now on, he was going to live.

  Robert Gumol caught a night flight out of Philadelphia and changed in Washington for Havana. He congratulated himself on being the first to foresee what was coming, and to get out from under. Actually, he wasn’t.

  5

  Katharine Hume spent that afternoon and most of the evening at the Atomic Energy Commission, seeking the answer to “When?” Every day Air Force and Navy planes cruised the upper altitudes between Japan and Alaska, and over the northern rim of Canada and Greenland, trapping samples of air. At seismograph stations circling Russia men watched for a tremor that was not a natural grumbling of the earth. Even the smallest atomic explosion—if any could be called small—could be detected. Its location would be fixed by triangulation, its strength estimated and composition analyzed from radioactive particles carried beyond the bounds of the Soviet Union by a constant ally, the west wind.

  In the past year Britain had tested two of its new H-bombs in the frigid and unpeopled waters southwest of Australia. The United States had ignited a twenty-megaton shot at Eniwetok. In Nevada several new anti-aircraft rockets, armed with a core of fissionable material no larger than a golf ball, had been tried out. One such rocket would sponge a whole formation of bombers from the sky. In Russia there had been three nuclear explosions. They were so minor that nobody had bothered to announce them. Russia had tested no more H-bombs. So the intelligence evaluation of the AEC, at that moment, was that the world was comparatively normal. She gathered nothing new. The AEC felt no cause for alarm.

  Katharine Hume left the AEC before ten o’clock and walked home through the fog settling over the Potomac basin, head down, wishing she had worn a topcoat, thinking. The world wasn’t normal at all. Each nuclear shot raised the atmosphere’s background radiation a jot. She had access to the latest figures. To her they were frightening, yet she no longer mentioned her fears to her superiors, or checked her computations with her colleagues. Trouble was, she knew she could never produce an unchallengeable paper to offer them. You could prove the deleterious effect of excessive radiation on generations of fruit flies. You could make fairly accurate predictions of the effect on mice if you bred and studied them for years. But people were different. It would be a century or two before all was known of Hiroshima. With people, all you could do was make an informed guess, because often the mutations would not appear for generations.

  It was not fashionable or safe to tread in this forbidden area. Once she had been publicly rebuffed by a commissioner, no less, as “a beautiful young woman engrossed in her genes.” Once she had overheard a remark made to Kevin Lane, whom she was dating at the time, by another junior administrator. “I hear,” the other man had said, “that Katy wears a lead chastity belt.” Kevin had laughed at the crudity, and she had never gone out with him again. She suspected that one of the reasons she had been assigned to the Intentions Group was her insistence in pursuing a subject disagreeable to men whose principle raison d’être was the designing and testing of bigger and better bombs. While the AEC admitted her ability, still it was embarrassing to have her around, dropping barbed questions about future generations, if any, into the solemn pools of scientific deliberation. So she had learned to keep silent.

  She stopped at the corner delicatessen and bought cottage cheese and he
rring pickled in cream, and the early edition of the morning paper. She went up to her apartment, undressed, showered, and washed her hair. She put on a pair of men’s broadcloth pajamas, loose and comfortable, and settled down at the coffee table to eat and read. The paper’s double-banner headline said:

  NAVY JOINS AIR FORCE

  IN HUNT FOR LOST PLANES

  She started reading the story. “All Navy and Coast Guard ships south of Norfolk, and in the Gulf, have joined the Air Force in the search for two B-99 bombers of the 519th Wing. . . .”

  She shook the paper. It was impossible. It must be a typographical error. Then she remembered, chillingly, that SAC wings were rotated every sixty or ninety days between bases at home and abroad. Her brother was in the 519th.

  She forced herself to hunt for names. There were none. She found a paragraph that began: “Names of the fourteen missing airmen were withheld, pending notification of next of kin.”

  The paper fell to the floor and she stared at the telephone, waiting for it to ring, begging it to keep its silence. They were very close, she and her brother, Clint. With both her mother and father gone, Clint was all that was left. He was what maintained the Humes as a family. He was, in every sense, a big brother. He had made it possible for her to finish Sarah Lawrence and go on to M.I.T. He had financed her post-graduate year, urged her on to win her doctorate. He had inflated her confidence until she had courage enough to apply for a job with the Atomic Energy Commission. Then he had staked what influence he had, and enlisted the support of friends of their father, to make sure that she was not turned down because of sex or age. Outwardly, he was casual with her, but when all the rest of the world quaked and shifted, he was a rock.

  She thought of Clint, while watching the phone. She watched it for perhaps ten minutes before it rang.

  6

  It is said that the state of the world can be judged by the number of windows illuminated in the Pentagon at night. When lights burn only in the cubicles of the duty officers and in the code rooms and communications centers on the upper floors, then the world is at peace. In time of crisis, such as the beginning of the Korean War, the French agony in Indo-China, and the week when an invasion fleet massed off Formosa, the building is ablaze. On this foggy night more than half the windows, including all the Air Force corridors, signalled their yellow alert. For the first time in years, the United States was uneasy.