The Cummings Report

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  I was shouting, and my voice only betrayed anger, but I began to feel the icy chill of fear creeping towards my heart. I had always known that it would be she who would eventually decide about us, just as I had always dreaded it more than anything else on earth. More than once she had threatened to leave me, and though I had succeeded in persuading her, against her better judgment — and, in truth, against mine, had I been able to face up to it — to change her mind, I had felt that next time I could not stand it. I always knew there would be a next time, with that same terrifying feeling of suspense in the pit of my stomach.

  Now, as I sat there staring at her, I realized that this was the last. This time she would succeed, because I had no longer the strength of will, the conviction in my heart, to fight hard enough. My troops were divided; and although I did not realize it, my subconscious did. It had had enough. If I had not the power of decision, it would be forced upon me.

  I do not know exactly what I said. But I know I said more than I could ever take back. In the past, I had never, even at the height of my fury, given away the fact that there was a part of me which did not love her. This time the barrier broke down; even if she had wanted an excuse to change her mind, she could have found none. When the tirade was over, I felt the sickening fear of the inevitable; and when she picked up her wrap to go, she meant it with no possible reservation. I began to plead, but knowing it was futile. Even while I was stacking humiliation on top of the rest, a part of my mind was triumphing, knowing that this was the right answer even if it had been arrived at the wrong way. The pleading was a seal on the end of the affair.

  I found myself unbelievably alone. Her unfinished drink was on the table. A cigarette with lipstick on it still smouldered in the ash-tray on the piano. The only thought in my mind was the old familiar paradox. I didn’t want her back; but if she didn’t come back, I would die.

  The day’s events paraded themselves mercilessly through my mind: the journey up from the country where I had been resting, on Dr. Jefferson’s strict orders; how I had hoped to sneak into the theatre unnoticed to watch my opening night, and how instead I had been recognized all over the town and heralded in time to take the full credit for my second greatest flop. Alice had told me she was going, but she had not told me that she was going with Richard. The fact that everybody else seemed to be aware of the situation did not help. To be forewarned is not to be forearmed. In my heart, I knew the show was a mistake — I was not writing good music, and I knew it. I also knew it was a mistake to make Alice promise to come home and have a drink with me afterwards — yet I had gone through with it.

  Now that she was gone, I felt a strange, cold panic. Not a panic of desperate, hasty actions; on the contrary, everything was slowed down. With a shock I realized I couldn’t feel my hands. I could control them, but I could not feel them. I bit hard into the palm of my left hand until the skin went white and then began to bleed. I felt nothing. Slowly and deliberately I went to the telephone and tried to dial Jeff’s number. But by the time I had got half-way through I had forgotten it. I started again, but still I could not remember it, and my legs felt as though they were giving away beneath me ...

  Alice did come back that night. That was true to pattern. It was what she found that was new, and changed everything between us.

  Twenty minutes later, the ambulance she had called when she discovered me lying helpless, with the receiver in my hand, collected me and took me to St. George’s Hospital. Two days after that I was in Murtha House.

  I do not know how many more times that 7th Avenue traffic light changed colour again before I finally got to sleep. But it didn’t really matter. For the next few days I had to play a waiting game. I would get all the sleep I needed.

  CHAPTER 13

  IN former times, before the word ‘ideology’ became so prominent upon the pages of current events, traitors were, traditionally, men and women who were out to make money. Thus they were prepared to work for either side (or both at once) according to the prices offered. They were professionals, and therefore their methods were fairly set. If you knew their methods you could detect them.

  Then a great change came. Thinking men, instead of feeling a close bond with the country that nurtured them, began to wonder what was theoretically the best way to run the human race. Ways of life that were new to them and which sounded magnificent when discussed in the abstract, fired their imaginations.

  Mostly, these thinking men were not politicians or sociologists. They had little or no practical knowledge of what would happen to the State, or for that matter, the human mind, when such ideas were put into actual practice. But being men of high intellect, and many of them of a very high personal integrity, they pictured these social systems as they would have practised them themselves. They saw the light. And rather than contribute to the improvement of their own native social systems, they took the short cut and assisted the favoured regime at the expense of their own. The end justified the means. Even though the democracies to which they belonged might be temporarily — even mortally — wounded, the world would benefit in the end tenfold as a direct result of their own political foresight. Thus they were not, in their own eyes, traitors, but rather prophets of the better world to come.

  Unfortunately, they were also in ideal positions, many of them, to do their countries injury, for they possessed secrets; and secrets are the master-keys to power. Power to destroy, and power through which men of ability suddenly became merely cranks and amateurs, fumbling about in the murky depths of ideological hogwash. Thus they destroyed themselves also.

  Naturally, the older type of traitor, the cynic who was in the racket for the cash, did not entirely die out. Rather he thrived; and his meat and drink were the political dupes whose aims were as noble as their actions were ignominious. Thus the two varieties worked in grim harmony, each despising the other.

  They had their meeting points, these two tribes who both ate the missionaries for different reasons.

  One such place was a room over an all-night café, situated in the heart of Brooklyn. In that dirty little bolt-hole, with its stained wallpaper and creaking floorboards, was the unprepossessing headquarters of an astoundingly efficient organization.

  Let’s take an imaginary walk up that crumby little street, not far from the subway station. We will call it Noll Street, but that is not its real name. Its real name has made banner headlines since all this took place, and it is time it was allowed to drop back into obscurity so that its honest inhabitants may be allowed to resume their unobtrusive life once again.

  *

  A hundred yards or so along the road we can see a bright patch of light flooding the entire road. Its source is the window of the café, which is calledPete’s Diner, and that is our destination.

  It is not a particularly noisy place; the juke box, an old-fashioned-looking thing, is out of order — it often is. The customers look, and are, innocent enough — a few dock-hands on their way to night shift, a few others who have finished work and haven’t got wives to cook them a meal, a taxi driver or two, some subway employees. There are few girls, if any.

  If you are there ‘on business’, the system is simple but effective enough. There are two perfectly legitimate entrances to the café: one in Noll Street and one leading into an alley at the back which eventually joins the next road. Thus, if you sit down and drink your coffee, pay ‘Pete’ and leave through the back way, you are assumed to have left the premises. Actually you ascend a metal staircase immediately beyond the door. The foot of this staircase is well in the shadow, so once your foot is on the first rung you are very unlikely to be seen by anyone chancing to use the back way out.

  In this way, everyone who is seen to enter the café is always observed to partake of its dubious food and then to leave the premises. Only in great emergencies are agents allowed to use the back entrance as a means of arrival and exit (without eating in the diner), since an over-enthusiastic cop on seeing someone disappear down the alley could easily
check that he had not been toPete’s Diner at all. (The time lapse between leaving the café and final emergence from the end of the alley is not considered to be a major risk.)

  Having paid our bill and exchanged a few casual remarks with Pete about football or the Ball Game (according to season) let us leave through the back way and go up those iron stairs — the stairs that Hugh Palate knew, and many others whose names have now become even more discredited.

  There are seventeen of these stairs, ascending in a single flight back over the roof of the café. At the top is a door that we find locked. On giving the correct signal it will be opened for us. That signal is changed daily.

  We find ourselves in a small lobby-In here there is no light. But after we have entered, and the outside door has been shut and bolted, the inner door is opened and we have finally arrived in that infamous little room.

  The walls are papered, though the green material, with its faded, embossed design, must surely have been there for a generation. There are various wooden cupboards placed round the walls, painted in conflicting shades of brown. One of them contains a filing system with a wealth of quite remarkable information, hardly any of which is known (I am writing of some months back) to the F.B.I. Another contains short-wave radio equipment and voicescrambling apparatus; yet another conceals a special photographic developing plant for fine-grain microfilm. The furniture consists merely of a few kitchen-type chairs, and a deal table. Only the lighting has received any real attention, due to the necessity of studying papers, photographs and technical drawings. But the fluorescent lighting is concealed, and to complete the picture of general decay, two bare bulbs hang disconsolately from the ceiling.

  Thus, at least on casual inspection, the room is much the sort of place you might expect to find over a third-class café. But when the F.B.I. tore it apart a few months ago they found enough material and evidence to send two men to the gas chamber, and to stop up a bigger hole in top-secret security than anyone thought could possibly have existed.

  *

  Piecing the story together from the files, reports and confessions that later became available to the police, we find that about the time that I was dining with Lord Robdale in a comfortable Fifth Avenue apartment, three men, arriving separately and at intervals, ordered coffee and hamburgers inPete’s Diner, and afterwards left by the back entrance, only to climb silently up those seventeen iron steps to the room above.

  The first to arrive was the man I knew as Peter Ghent, whose real name was Peter Loring. He had with him a set of keys (already received in advance) with which he opened the outer and inner doors. Having closed them, he went to the cupboard nearest the window, which was shuttered (and soundproofed from the outside) and tuned in the radio to a certain frequency. He had not long to wait before the next member of the group arrived.

  Victor Buche was a tall, quietly-spoken man of fifty. He had greying hair and wore old-fashioned-looking wire-rimmed glasses. His single-breasted herringbone suit looked as if it might have started life in an English tailor’s shop — and in fact it had, for Buche had studied physics at Cambridge, where he was also a lecturer for a time. But Buche now had a slight stoop, and this, added to the hard wear the material had had to put up with, over the years, accounted for its bedraggled appearance.

  Victor was happily married with two children, and now lived in a pleasant brownstone house in Chicago. Formerly he had held a post in Washington where he had been carrying out important research on electronic triggering of nuclear weapons. He resigned because he disapproved of the hydrogen bomb. His colleagues respected him despite his decision, and there was no question of any disloyalty.

  But his resignation occurred at the time of Senator McCarthy’s scurrilous purge, when honourable men who dared to utter the word ‘peace’ were immediately accused of Communistic tendencies. And Victor Buche, staunch believer in free democracy, refused to answer impertinent questions about his private life and social connections. McCarthy tried to have him indicted for Contempt of Congress, having failed with all his other charges, but the Senate Committee who tried him decided this was totally uncalled for in view of Buche’s faultless record.

  Nevertheless, Victor was ruined by the ensuing whispering campaign, and he began to believe that if this sort of thing could happen to an innocent man in a so-called free democracy there must be something seriously wrong with it. Thus the over-enthusiastic Senator did all the necessary groundwork for the Soviet Union in gaining them another highly trained technician. This bitter and shabbily treated man was therefore approached, in due course of time, by those who felt they could make use of him, when his own country decided he was untouchable.

  He had therefore been invited, some months back, to visitPete’s Diner, to meet the notorious Hugh Palate, who handed over every available secret of PERISCOPE, upon which he had done a great deal of research. Buche carried on where Palate left off, and when Palate had told everything he knew, Buche was provided with a laboratory and told to get on with it. Soon after this, Palate took his alleged holiday on the Alaska Highway — he was by this time suspected by the authorities and had therefore become too dangerous to have around. Buche, knowing nothing of his real fate, mourned his ‘comrade’ and carried on his researches ...

  On this particular night, however, Victor Buche came toPete’s for a special conference, some of which was to be by radio direct with Moscow. Plans were to be made to get the completed PERISCOPE project out of the country by the method already described. But there were a number of points to be settled: in particular the time needed to test the British equipment on the spot, in conjunction with the apparatus that had now been completed in the clandestine laboratory of which Buche was in charge.

  The third and last individual to arrive was none other than Abe Shapello, deputy manager of theHotel Ajax, who had so thoughtfully allowed me to leave the establishment by the back entrance earlier that same evening.

  It was obvious from his appearance that Victor Buche, family man, one-time stroke of the Harvard Eight and later a ‘back-room boy’ during the Second World War, was a troubled man. He hated what he was doing, but had gone too far to back out.

  But now he paced the room, nervously chain smoking, already thinking, perhaps, of what he was to write in the diary that was found, only a few days later, in the summerhouse of his Chicago home. “I thought,” he was to say then, “that by levelling out the strength of the two major powers I was doing something for the cause of peace. I knew the Russians had not got any equivalent of PERISCOPE, therefore to equalize the two countries I thought they should have it. Similarly, if I had known of some revolutionary Russian development, I would have tried to procure it for the Americans.” He had not attempted to do so, however, when he was in the best possible position to gain such information. But perhaps he would have loathed himself even more if he had been working for both sides at once ...

  Abe Shapello was less complicated altogether. He was just a bum who wanted to make some extra dough. This way he made plenty. He was thus far less vulnerable to self doubts, and consequently less potentially dangerous to the espionage organization of which he was a member.

  *

  “Cummings has swallowed the bait like a be-autiful eighteen-pound Nova Scotia salmon!” said Abe. “As soon as he knew he was wanted by the police he went to a phone-booth and made a call. When he’d hung up he asked me to let him out the back way. It was easy as that; I had him tailed of course; and who do you think he went and had a drink with? None other than Lord Robdale himself! Only thing is, if Robdale checks up on the story aboutYankee’s Rest they’ll both know it’s phoney.”

  Peter Loring,alias Peter Ghent, filled three glasses from a bottle of Scotch he took from the filing cabinet. He downed his in one. “That doesn’t matter too much,” he said. “That story was mostly figured out in case he decided to risk everything and go to the F.B.I.”

  “Mr. Loring,” interposed Buche in his quiet, softly modulated voice, “I am not happy ab
out the abduction of this innocent Englishman. We ourselves all went into this with our eyes open. This man is innocent. Besides, I understand he is suffering from some sort of mental illness.” The sulky mouth of Peter Loring tried to simulate a smile. But the pale blue eyes did not smile.

  “He is in no danger, Victor, I can assure you. And his innocence can easily be established when we have completed our plans.”

  Buche’s expression did not change. “But, as I understand it, you are using him for political motives, and not just to cover our own — er — activities.”

  “That may be true. But don’t let it bother you, Professor.”

  “But itdoes bother me, Mr. Loring. It bothers me very much indeed. It is no desire of mine to whip up trouble between England and America. You know my reason for assisting you in your plans, don’t you?”

  Loring tried hard to conceal his boredom. “Yeah. You want to maintain a balance between the two great powers.”

  Buche cast his eyes downward. “Yes. I am under no illusion, however, of what you think about my motives. You think I’m just another crank, like all the rest.” Loring looked shocked. “Victor, you know that isn’t true. We’re all working for the same cause.”

  “I used to think so; I suppose even poor Hugh thought so — once. Unfortunately, one only finds out the truth when it is too late. Then there is no turning back.”

  Loring fixed him with his cold, lily-pond eyes. “I hope you remember that, Professor Buche.”

  “Have no fear,” said Victor. “I know I’m in your power; you don’t have to issue veiled threats. I made a decision and I must stick to it ...”

  *

  There had been the evening when Victor Buche had returned home rather late, and had found Christine waiting up for him.

  She was sitting there, quite quietly, on the settee, and didn’t move when he wearily came down the two little steps that led from the hall direct to the living-room. He knew at that moment, beyond any shadow of doubt, that she knew. Her expression wasn’t even accusing; it was resigned and sad.