The Cummings Report

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Victor spun round before he could stop himself. “What do you mean,checking up?” he rapped.

  Ian looked amazed. “I was only kidding, Dad,” he replied in a suddenly subdued voice. “What could I possibly mean? I just want to know what you did, that’s all. Don’t you ever want to know whatI’m doing?”

  Christine came in at that moment. She looked nonplussed; angry words so seldom passed between her husband and her son that it always came as a shock on the few occasions it occurred.

  “What’s the matter, you two?” she demanded, ignoring as usual the fact that some forty years separated the two male members of the family.

  But Victor was not able to give an answer that entirely satisfied his son. And it was Ian who asked Christine, when Timber was out working in the summer-house-cum-study a few minutes later, “Mama, what’s wrong with Timber? I know there’s something wrong, so there’s no use in pretending there’s not.”

  “It’s nothing, dear,” she said guardedly, poised over a rose-bed with the shears. “He’s tired, that’s all. He needs a rest.”

  She knew this wouldn’t satisfy him and it didn’t. “Look, Ma,” he said quietly. “You and me can’t kid each other.”

  “You andI, Ian.”

  “Okay. You andI. But however you put it, Timber is worried about something. Very worried. I noticed it several times. The other day he took me to the funnies and he didn’t laugh once. You know how he used to laugh at Mister Magoo? But Timber never laughs at anything now. And that night he just ...sat there. And there’s another thing: half the time he doesn’t listen to me — like I wasn’t there at all.”

  Christine turned away and tried to concentrate on cutting the flowers. “Do you think these will look all right in the sun room?” she asked brightly. “They look a bit woebegone to me.”

  “Don’t change the subject! Which is more important: the flowers in the sun room or Timber?”

  She stopped dead, holding the jaws of the garden shears wide open in a way that seemed ludicrous yet fascinating to Ian. Somehow they looked like the jaws of a human being who was suddenly too astonished to speak. He found it impossible to continue the conversation until the shears resumed their interrupted chatter, slicing off the heads of the roses with a satisfied ‘click’ each time.

  Ian’s face was strangely grim and set for a boy of his age. “All right,” he said, “if you won’t listen to me, I’ll have to talk to him myself!” He turned away abruptly and ran into the house.

  Christine knew that the moment she had dreaded for so long had come at last. Automatically, she continued with her task. But as the cutters clicked away, the sense of tragedy almost overwhelmed her. She knew that Ian wouldn’t stop until he knew the truth; for truth had been the commodity which his father had always tried to interest him in most. Now it was going to backfire on him with a vengeance ...

  Ian did not go straight out to the summer-house. Instead, he went up to his room, which contained nearly everything from a specially designed booby trap by the door (to keep out strangers — meaning Christine and Timber — when Important Things were in progress) to a library of photographs that depicted every conceivable kind of sporting event.

  But Ian ignored all these things as he shut himself in there. With methodical purpose he opened the third drawer down and took out a document that he had studied a score of times since he had first found it being blown about the garden.

  Nobody in the whole world knew that Ian possessed this small, dog-eared piece of paper; this was his own particular secret. The only person he might have shown it to was Timber; but he never had, because there was a haunting fear in his young mind that it might mean what it could not possibly mean ...

  Ian, though too young to appreciate by any means all of what had happened to his father since the Washington purge, nevertheless possessed that intuitive, clear-sighted outlook that is special to young children. He knew how bitter Timber must have felt towards an ungrateful country; he saw or sensed the gradual change that took place in his father. The friendly smile that had been so gay and full of hope had changed to one that somehow made him feel sad. And it was impossible not to notice that many people who had been house guests in the past no longer put in an appearance ...

  And in the middle of all this he had found that torn-off corner of some document of which the implications were too stunning to be true.

  The legible part read as follows:

  ... so what have you got to lose? I can’t go into details (as you no doubt can appreciate) but you will certainly benefit financially if you co operate because we pay well for everything we get. We’re not even asking you to divulge any secret information; we merely want you to work on something for us. Please contact us, therefore, in the manner already described to you, and make sure this letter is destroyed. Henceforth, if you decide to join our organization,nothing must be committed to paper.

  There was no signature, and the letter was typewritten. Whoever the recipient was (and it must surely have been Timber) he had presumably torn it up in disgust and one part of it had blown away.

  Or had he been destroying it, according to the instructions?

  “Igotto, now,” said Ian aloud. ‘I just got to ask him now!”

  He went out into the garden and knocked softly on the summer-house door.

  “Just a minute!”

  Ian bit his lip. It wasn’t too late to hide the paper. He could pretend he just came to ask for a buck for a movie. Timber would never forgive him for thinking the dreadful things that were tormenting his mind ...

  But the document was still in his hand when his father opened the door.

  “Ian!” exclaimed Timber. “You look as if you’re gunning for me! And I don’t blame you either! I really was a great big jerk this morning; must have got out of bed the wrong side. You must please ...”

  The boy interrupted him, though it was all he could do to say what he had to say. He stood rigidly still, holding out the piece of paper.

  “I want to know what this is, Timber,” he said.

  Victor Buche took the paper from him and read it slowly. It seemed such a long time ago that the letter had arrived, but now, in the present indicative, the full impact of his actions, his disregard for the consequences in his own family, the extent to which he had been made a pathetic dupe of ruthless men — all these things were there in the searching eyes of his son, whom he knew, when it came to the point, he could not deceive.

  “Sit down, Ian,” he commanded, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own.

  The boy didn’t move. “Just tell me,” he said. “Did you or didn’t you?”

  “You make it sound such a simple issue,” said Victor. “A straightforward choice between right and wrong. Life isn’t as simple as that.”

  Ian did not speak. He just knew that something was falling apart inside him, and there was nothing he could do about it. But he didn’t speak.

  “I think you’dbetter sit down,” repeated Buche. “Come and sit here, beside me, while I try and explain something to you.”

  The boy could no longer keep his emotions in check. “Explain what?” he cried, wrestling with his hands, while the unbelievable was happening before him. He would wake up in a minute and find he was having a dreadful nightmare. Then he would run to Timber’s room, and Timber would give him a hot drink and make him laugh, like he had on so many other occasions, and everything would be all right. But this nightmare would not end in that way ... “Explainwhat? Are you going to tell me what I want to know? That even if this was sent to you you just gave them the bird, like you did Senator McCarthy and that gang? Or are you going to tell me that you didn’t love anybody enough to want to hold your head up, like you always told me to? Which is it, Timber?” And now the tears, the accusing tears, began to collect in the corner of his eyes and trickle down unheeded; because pride didn’t matter any more. “But you can’t answer that, can you? I should have known at breakfast when you gave yourself away. Oh,Timber ...!”r />
  He broke down, sobbing in his father’s lap.

  For a long time Victor could say nothing, and the silence was only broken by the faint humming of some apparatus that covered the little bench across the window.

  Victor got up and picked up a soldering iron. He began to work again automatically in that lightning but methodical way that had made him one of the best practical designers in the workshop quite apart from his theoretical excellence in technology.

  Gradually, as his father worked, Ian’s mood gave way to curiosity. The two old friends, father and son, stood side by side for a while, as if in a last dying effort to keep things as they were before. The instinct in the human being is to resist change; but the effort to conceal it only underlines it. The self-conscious clutching to a bygone way of life — the middle-aged woman who pretends she is still young, the married couple who cling to their past happiness when the fatal rift has come, the bankrupt land-owner who lives in the filth of a derelict house rather than start life afresh — this is all part of the self-delusion characteristic of one type of human being. It is not altogether a contemptible trait; sometimes — but only sometimes — it actually works: the quickness of the hand deceives the eye, and the wound is mended by faith-healing alone. But with people who are principally concerned with reality — and Ian, like most children, was one of those people — it is only a temporary phase that marks the end of an era.

  “I was making this for you,” said Timber, pushing a resistor into place with his nimble fingers.

  Ian tried to sound enthusiastic. “It looks swell!” he said. Then his expression changed to one of puzzlement, for Ian Buche was by no means a budding electronic engineer. “What is it, Timber?”

  “Well, you remember that movie we saw a few weeks ago, when the big-time executive had a sort of telephone on his desk?”

  “Oh yeah, he just flicked a sort of a lever and said in a very pompous voice (he imitated him), ‘Send for Mr. Baxter! And then I’m not to be disturbed, Miss Twinkle. Not bynobody.’”

  “I doubt whether he saidquite that, but that’s the gimmick all right! Well, you seemed to think it was rather a good gadget to have around, so I thought I’d put one in your den, so that you can talk to us downstairs without having to shout.”

  “Gee, but that’s terrific! ‘Send up my orange juice,Christine!Im-mediately!Let me know when Jim gets here,Timber;we’re catching the bus uptown and I don’t want him kept waiting!See that he’s given a Coke and ...”

  Ian’s voice trailed off, and suddenly he whipped round and Hung himself on the big arm-chair, burying his face in the upholstery.

  He lay sobbing there for a while; and when he looked up, his face stained pathetically with tears, he found his mother standing there. She was quite calm; indeed, her expression was almost dead. She held out her hand to him.

  “Come on, Ian. We’ll go in the house.”

  And with a brief glance at Victor which he could not altogether interpret, she led the boy out of the summerhouse and across the lawn to the sun room.

  Victor felt an odd sensation of numbness in his limbs, and he found that his hands were shaking. But at the same time his brain had cleared; and he could see only too plainly how right Christine had been a few months back about ... well, mostly about himself. She seemed to know better than he did how his mind worked. His mind had been sick, but now it was sick no longer.

  Within five minutes he was on the telephone to someone in Washington — someone who had had a major hand in the whole slurring campaign that had ruined him. But now, ironically, this unpleasant specimen of alleged humanity was the person who could help him most.

  “Get me Major Russell,” he rapped, in a voice which was strangely alert and demanding for him.

  There was a click and he was connected.

  “Major Russell? This is Buche here. Victor Buche.” There was a longish pause at the other end of the wire. “I see,” he said at length. “And what can you want with me?”

  “I love you, too,” said Victor. “But listen to me, because this happens to be important.”

  The voice at the other end sounded resigned. “Okay, let’s have it.”

  “I’ve got to see you tonight.”

  “Tonight! Look, Buche, I’m a bit busy.” An awkward, embarrassed laugh. “I can’t just throw everything overboard for you.”

  “If you don’t,” said Victor grimly, “you’ll be endangering one of the biggest secrets the State Department ever had since the hydrogen bomb. I’m catching the next train for Pittsburgh, and that’s where I want you to meet me. I shall catch the 3.10, so you be by the track at Pittsburgh, Major.”

  “Have you gone plumb crazy? And if it’s so urgent, why can’t you come to Washington?”

  “Because it will save time if we both converge on Pittsburgh. Besides, it is too dangerous for me to be seen in Washington right now.”

  “If you’re thinking about the trial, I ...

  “I’m not thinking about any trial, Russell. Believe me, I’m up against worse things than that if I spill the works to you.”

  “But you can’t expect ...”

  “... I do expect. You be there. It’s the least you can do for me; for you’ll never know what damage you have already done. No, I shouldn’t blame you; it’s my fault that all this has happened.”

  “All right, Buche,” said Russell grimly. “I’ll be there. But I warn you, if you have been ...” he searched for the word, “if you have been indiscreet you can expect little consideration from me.”

  “I am aware of that too. And don’t think this is a stunt — I am not trying to make out I am a State witness in order to save my own skin. And Major ...” he added, “don’t come alone. Got that?Don’t come alone ...”

  Buche hung up. Once he had finished with Russell the vigour seemed to drain out of him. When he turned round to find Christine watching him from across the room, he looked exhausted and ill.

  “What shall we tell Ian?” he asked her quietly.

  “The truth. But not yet. I’ll tell him in a few days.” She tried to smile. “I’ll go and pack your things.”

  “Christine!”

  She paused at the door. “Yes?”

  His expression was very grave and serious.

  “Will you ever be able to forgive me?” he said.

  Christine opened the door abruptly. “Go and get the car out,” she said, “and look where you’re going, for once!” She almost managed to keep her voice steady ...

  *

  To Victor’s surprise, Ian came out to the garage as he was starting the car. The boy was very quiet and calm. Without saying anything for a while, he climbed in and sat next to his father.

  “It’s because of me, isn’t it?”

  Victor concentrated purposefully on turning the car. Pulling the wheel hard over and peering round through the rear window, he said: “I’m going down to Washington for a while. Just business.” He scraped the rockery with the rear fender.

  “Timber! Won’t you ever learn to turn the car without doing that? You do it practically every time!”

  “Only since we’ve had this new model. It’s two feet longer than the Ford. The trouble is, I’m not used to it.”

  “After six months?”

  Victor drove round to the front door and put on the hand-brake. “When I go forwards I’m okay,” said Timber. “I never was any good in reverse.” He looked directly at his son, and there was something of the old look there now. “You remember that, Ian!” he said. “Always go forwards, and don’t be pushed off the road by the oncoming traffic. For if you stop you stall the engine, and then you might find it darned difficult to start again.” He pressed the starter button, and the motor picked up once more. “You see? Mine’s going all right now. But it took some help from a mechanic.”

  Christine appeared at the door with his suitcase, and Ian slid over to the centre of the scat. “Can I come along to the station with you, Timber?” His eyes were imploring, but Victor was firm.
Anything could happen, once he got to the station, and his former colleagues guessed what he was planning to do.

  “No,” he said decisively. “Neither of you is coming. Don’t argue, Christine. There are reasons.”

  There was nearly civil war, but Victor finally got his own way. And by mutual (but unspoken) consent, the parting, to all outward appearances, was just the same as innumerable others that had taken place when he was simply going away on business.

  Victor put the automatic transmission control in the ‘drive’ position, and took off the brake. The car crept forward.

  “Have Bisham’s Garage pick up the car from Union Station and bring it back here,” he said. “Oh, and I’ve written a little note for Betty; see she gets it. Look after your sister, won’t you, Ian?”

  He drove off, and for as long as he was in view, he saw two figures waving from the doorway ...

  *

  Buche managed to get a drawing-room on the train. He decided it was wiser in the circumstances.

  As the train moved forward he opened his bag in order to read through some notes he had made, and found that Christine had packed a bottle of whisky. He smiled to himself at her thoughtfulness, and poured himself out a stiff one.

  At that moment someone knocked on the door.

  “Yes?” he called.

  “Porter here, sir. Do you want any papers?”

  Victor opened the door. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll have theSun and ... he broke off. “You’d better come in,” he said to Abe Shapello.

  Shapello came in and shut the door. “I didn’t think it would be that easy,” he said. “So you’re off to Washington, are you? Well, there are plenty of stops between Chicago and Washington.”

  Buche poured out another glass of Scotch. So far, everything was going exactly as he had planned it. If he could stay alive as far as Pittsburgh he could turn the tables on Shapello very satisfactorily. (No doubt Major Russell would be delighted to meet a man who was in a key position in espionage ... )

  “I take it,” said Buche, “that you don’t intend for me to reach my destination.”