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.