Exceptional Circumstances

by Bartleman, James;

  “Please, señora,” Angelita said. “I’m just a maid. I don’t have the education to answer such questions.”

  But Heather kept insisting that Angelita answer until I passed her a note saying there were microphones in the walls and to change the subject. But Heather read the note, shook her head in disagreement, and continued to press Angelita until the poor woman left the room. I went out the door, intending to escape to the embassy, but Heather ran after me and stopped me.

  “Don’t you ever tell me what to do like that again,” she said. “You may be the deputy ambassador, but I know more than you do about Cuba. You and Rolly are anti-revolutionary fascists who don’t accept that Cuba is the most democratic and socially just country in Latin America.”

  It was the first time I had heard her use boiler-plate Marxist jargon, and I didn’t like it. She’d probably picked it up during her Paris days from Jean-Paul Sartre, assuming her story that she’d slept with him was true. I also realized at that moment that she was naïve to the point of being dangerous.

  Canada’s embassy, at Calle 30, number 518, Miramar, was another former residence of a family that had fled Cuba to escape Castro. It was many times larger than our house and surrounded on all sides by a high fence of sharpened steel bars. Behind the building and visible from the street was a tennis court. On the sidewalk outside the entrance, a uniformed policeman wearing a steel helmet and with an AK-47 at the ready, stood in a hut, glowering at passersby. His job was to interrogate and take down the names of Cubans seeking to visit the embassy. He stopped me, holding up his hand and demanding I state my business. I showed him my diplomatic passport, he read it carefully, took out a pen, took copious notes, saluted, and handed it back with a polite “Bienvenido a Cuba.”

  Inside, on the ground floor, Canadian and Cuban employees were processing visa requests, arranging for the repatriation of the body of a Canadian tourist who had suffered a fatal heart attack, selling bagged flour, spare parts, and wheat and toilet paper to Cuban state enterprises, and organizing cultural visits to Cuba of Canadian musicians and artists. Off to one side, Rolly handed out work orders to the dozen Cuban electricians, carpenters, and mechanics who kept the embassy and its vehicles in working order. Upstairs, behind locked doors, were the offices of Ambassador Cook, his private secretary, Louise Bourgeault, the deputy ambassador, and the security guards, as well as the communications centre, and inside it, the safe room.

  “You’ve done well for yourself,” the ambassador said, after Louise took me to his office. “You must be among the first members of your entrance class to be promoted.”

  “There were special circumstances,” I said, not wanting to talk about my mission outside the safe room.

  “Yes of course, I understand. But before we get into all that,” he said, “let’s have a cup of coffee and tell each other a bit about each other.”

  For the next hour, we traded stories about our hometowns (he was from Petrolia, a small place near Sarnia in southwestern Ontario), about our families (he was a bachelor), and about our postings (he had served abroad in Pretoria, Tel Aviv, and Moscow, and at headquarters as the director of the Middle Eastern division). With my sketchy career, I should have felt intimidated, but he made me feel comfortable by showing interest in Heather, my family back in Penetang, and my time in Colombia. He then motioned me to follow, and led me into the communications centre where the technician on duty unlocked the door of the safe room.

  It was a five-foot by five-foot enclosure with an eight-foot ceiling, about the size of a small bathroom. But instead of a sink and toilet, it was furnished with two straight-backed chairs and a small table. Light came from a battery-powered sixty-watt bulb suspended by a wire fixed to the ceiling. Sheets of inch-thick lead lined the walls, floor, ceiling, and door to keep out electronic signals. A reinforced floor supported the structure’s weight. Travel posters — one of Niagara Falls and others of the Bay of Fundy and the Old City of Quebec — were taped to the walls, presumably to make the interior look welcoming. Affixed to the inside door was a no-smoking sign in Canada’s two official languages, with the words no-smoking underlined in red.

  “These days, we have these things at our missions in all communist countries,” the ambassador said. “They’re not comfortable, but at least we can speak without outsiders listening to our conversations.” He stepped inside, pulled the cord on the light to turn it on, and sat down on one of the chairs. I took the other one, and the technician closed the door and left us to talk.

  “The air runs out in about fifteen minutes,” he said, “so we got to be quick. Ask all the questions you want but make them short. Safe rooms don’t come with air conditioning and there’s a limit to how much heat we can take.” Getting down to business, he said, “One of the challenges you’re going to face is remaining undercover — to keep the Cubans from discovering your CIA connection.”

  “Don’t you think the Cubans have their suspicions? For years Canadian diplomats have been prowling around the countryside equipped with big cameras. They must know what’s going on.”

  “You might well be right, but I don’t think so. And that’s because you fellows come here with the rank of deputy ambassador and do the usual work of deputy ambassadors along with your espionage duties.”

  “How does that help?”

  “The Cubans wouldn’t believe anyone could do both jobs — at least that’s the assumption we’ve gone on for years. Your normal embassy workload will be heavy: supervision of staff, preparation of economic and political reports, cultivation of contacts among Cuban officials and diplomats. And your work for the CIA is almost a full-time job. Every Friday morning, a courier from Ottawa comes in on the Cubana flight to deliver diplomatic bags with personal and official mail to the embassy. All instructions from the CIA and your outgoing replies are carried in the bags. No one else at the embassy can see your correspondence.”

  “Including you?”

  “Including me. You report directly to Langley via the CIA Station Chief in Ottawa.”

  The atmosphere was glacial when I returned home for lunch. A morose Heather responded in monosyllables when I asked her how her morning had gone. Angelita scurried around anxiously as if she was afraid the mistress of the house would once again go berserk and subject her to another torrent of unanswerable questions. But Angelita’s lunch of grilled marlin and french fries cheered her up, and when I asked her if she wanted to come along on a familiarization tour of the city that afternoon, she agreed.

  Rolly pulled up in the embassy station wagon, Heather joined him in the front and I sat in the back. “Good news in this morning’s mail,” Rolly said. “Your car’s arrived from Canada. It’ll be cleared through customs today and you’ll have it tomorrow morning. After that, you can do your own exploring. Meanwhile, I’ll be your tour guide for the afternoon. Where do you want to go?”

  “Why don’t you take us to the old city and we can decide once we’re there,” I said. I had several objectives in mind for the car ride. Above all, I wanted to spend some time with Heather, whose outburst that morning had upset me. I also wanted to take a look at the port. The Soviet freighter was due to dock on the coming Saturday. When Lieberman had raised the matter, I thought the CIA must have been desperate to entrust someone like me with such an important mission. If my report turned out to be positive, what would the Americans do? Impose a maritime embargo as they did during the 1962 missile crisis? The responsibly the Americans were placing on my shoulders was enormous. I only hoped they had other ways to verify my findings.

  When Rolly turned onto Fifth Avenue and began driving west toward the city centre, Heather’s mood shifted once again. A church abandoned by its parishioners years before — doors off their hinges, grass and weeds smothering its gardens, windows broken and roof riddled with holes — was a beautiful memento of Cuba’s spiritual soul. The heavily armed troops, who fingered their weapons and eyed suspiciously each passing car at the intersections, were centurions of a new gl
orious order. A massive, shoddily built building thrown together to house Eastern Bloc technical experts — more like a power plant than a hotel — was a noble example of Socialist realism architecture.

  As we moved westward from Fifth Avenue onto the Malecón, the seaside drive into the city, Heather became ever more frantic — old men fishing from the seawall were images of a Rembrandt masterpiece; the waves, washing onto the sidewalk and roadway, were a sign of rebirth; the grimy abandoned former American embassy was a fine example of modernist architecture; a black youth facing the sea and playing a trumpet was a young Louis Armstrong; the pollution-spewing, rusted-and-held-together-with-baling-wire 1940s and 1950s model Chevrolets and Buicks were Maseratis, Lamborghinis, and Ferraris — and more of the same until we stopped for a coffee at the Plaza de San Francisco de Asis in the old city. Heather then closed her mouth and didn’t open it again for the rest of the day.

  On the return drive, Rolly drove by the port and I took note that it was unguarded. The way was open for me to sneak aboard SS Kama.

  The next morning, Heather was again the person I had known in Colombia, funny, irreverent, and cheerful. Apparently unaware she had lost control of herself, she told me how much she had enjoyed our sight-seeing excursion. “Let’s do it again, and soon,” she said, and I agreed, but was wary, wanting to help her but not knowing how. When I arrived at the office just after it opened, I asked Louise to find time for me in the ambassador’s schedule and went in to see him when he was free.

  “Heather and I have only just arrived, and we’ve already got a problem,” I said. Cook scribbled a note asking if we should move to the safe room but I shook my head to indicate it didn’t matter. In retrospect it would’ve been better if we’d kept our ensuing discussion from the microphones in the walls.

  “Heather began her day berating the maid for not being sufficiently supportive of the regime and yelling at me,” I said. “By noon she had calmed down and was her old self for a spell. Then when Rolly took us for a tour of the city she lost control and began speaking a lot of nonsense about the accomplishments of Cuba since the revolution before clamming up and remaining quiet all evening. This morning she acts as if nothing happened. I’m worried about her.”

  “Had she expressed similar views before leaving Canada?”

  “No she hadn’t. At least not to the same extent.”

  “Any psychiatric problems?”

  “She’s always had lots of friends and seemed normal to me.”

  “Then I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s probably just cultural shock. She needs to get out and meet people. Not Cubans for the obvious reasons, but members of other western embassies. If I had a wife, I’d suggest Heather call on her, but I never married.”

  “Maybe she should start by getting to know the families of the members of our embassy?”

  “Of course, but she shouldn’t fall into the rut of socializing only with members of her own mission. I should have mentioned it yesterday, but for years now, the deputy ambassadors and their wives get together to play tennis and socialize on Saturdays. Since they use our courts, the Canadian deputy ambassador is always included. They follow up tennis with a lunch hosted at one of their homes and go out for dinner and drinks in the evening in the old city. Some years ago someone christened the group, Club Hemingway, and the name stuck.”

  “I’d like that,” I said, happy to have an excuse to be in the old city to carry out my mission for the CIA on Saturday night.

  “We ambassadors have our own little group, but we don’t have as much fun as the members of Club Hemingway.”

  “Anything about them I should know?”

  “Only that they’re an eccentric group of characters, like a lot of us who accept postings no one else wants in these isolated out-of-the-way places. You’ll have to be careful they don’t involve you in any of their shenanigans. The Italian is not a career diplomat — he’s a former politician by the name of Paulo Verdi who’s lying low in Havana until a major indiscretion involving sex and an underage girl has been forgotten in Rome. The Frenchman’s name is Guillaume Monpetit. He’s an alcoholic — poor man — whose exposure to scenes of massacre during a posting in Liberia led him to drink. Or so the story goes. The Belgian’s from the old colonial service. He can’t stop talking about how good life was for the people of the Belgian Congo before independence. His name’s Damien Claes. Rens Bakker is the Dutchman, and he’s the one you have to watch. He’s been up to some foolish things since he got here and bullies his ambassador. The Englishman is the only level-headed one. His name’s Adrian Caruthers. It’s rumoured he participates in Club Hemingway to keep an eye on its members.”

  The group welcomed us when we showed up on Saturday morning and we were soon on a first- name basis. Although neither of us was a particularly good at tennis, we were a generation younger and made up in strength and endurance what we lacked in skill. It was hot and humid, the temperature rose into the mid-80s, but we played doubles, giving those not on the court a chance to cool off in the shade with glasses of lemonade — or in the case of Guillaume, with lemonade to which he added generous shots of gin from bottles in his tennis bag. As the morning went on and the matches became ever more contested — and as the temperature rose into the mid-90s — our new friends began going to Guillaume for shots of gin to add to their lemonade. The more they drank, the more they egged each other on, and there was ever louder laughing and shouting. Guillaume, with a drunken smile, waved a bottle of gin at Heather and me, inviting us to join in the fun. Heather accepted with alacrity and was soon celebrating along with the others. I declined Guillaume’s offer, and sat in silence, ignored by the others, until it was time to return home to shower and go to lunch.

  It was Paulo’s and his wife Antonietta’s turn to host Club Hemingway at lunch. I came dressed in crisply pressed and tailored green pants and shirt under the impression it looked smart if unconventional. Stupid me — I quickly discovered my outfit may have been suitable for weekend spying missions, but not for attending a lunch with a group of sophisticated Europeans.

  “I didn’t know a soldier was coming to lunch,” Antonietta said when she saw me, provoking a torrent of unfriendly laughter from the others. Heather had put on the makeup and sexy outfit that had scandalized Mrs. O’Connor in Bogota and received an altogether different sort of welcome — everybody clapped when she made her entrance.

  Otherwise, the lunch was a relaxed, elegant affair, organized by uniformed Neapolitan servants who had come with Paulo and Antonietta from Italy to take care of their household and entertaining needs. I would later learn that Antonietta was a wealthy woman who had supported the lavish lifestyle of her husband when he was a politician in Rome and now maintained him in Cuba. Although their house, like those of the other deputy ambassadors, was the former home of a Cuban family that had fled into exile in Miami, the Verdis had furnished it with rugs, drapes, tables, chairs, and the like, imported from Italy. A generator purred outside, ensuring the air conditioners never stopped working. A big tank sat on the roof providing a steady supply of water. An Italian gardener was at work outside cutting the lawn.

  The dishes were laid out on the dining table for the guests to serve themselves before taking seats around small circular tables in the wide passageway leading to the conservatory. The wine and food choices were limited, but of the highest quality — glasses of excellent light white and red Italian wines, prosciutto with imported Parma ham, pâtés of various sorts, antipastos, a selection of cold cuts, mixed salad, imported Gorgonzola and Pecorino cheeses, flan caramel, mousse au citron, and fresh fruit salad. I shuffled along diffidently at the end of the queue as befitting my position as the most junior member of the club, served myself some salad and pâté, picked up a glass of red wine, and went to join Heather, who had saved a place for me at a table for four.

  Rens Bakker — the colleague Ambassador Cook had told me was not to be trusted — was in the midst of a heated discussion with his wife whe
n I sat down. “I get so tired of these Saturday get-togethers,” his wife, Geraldine, was saying. “Every Saturday we do the same thing. We spend the mornings drinking too much and making spectacles of ourselves on the tennis court. Then we do our best to show the others we can put on a better lunch than anyone else. It’s so false, such a flattering of egos. And at night we always go to the same places to eat and tell each other the same stories and jokes.

  “Pay no attention to Geraldine,” Bakker said turning to speak to us. “She always speaks her mind, even in the company of others. If you don’t like it here,” Bakker said resuming the quarrel with his wife, “why don’t you go back to Holland and live with your mother. Nobody’s forcing you to stay. She’d be happy. I’d be happy. You’d be happy.”

  Embarrassed, I looked at Heather to gauge her reaction to this airing of dirty laundry by the Bakkers. She was keeping her head down and continued eating as the quarrel progressed. “I should have left you years ago,” Geraldine said. “But you promised it wouldn’t be long before you became an ambassador and we’d live in a big residence and mix with the best people. Instead we’re always sent to these awful places and are forced to associate with second-rate diplomats.”

  Heather smiled when Geraldine made the last remark. Then she sat up and took notice when Geraldine began accusing her husband of being unfaithful. “And every time I go away for a holiday, I come back to find another woman in my bed.”

  “So what?” Bakker said. “I told you I believed in open marriages when we met and that’s still my view. How about you,” he said, turning to Heather. “Do you think open marriages are good things? I believe in being frank about these matters. Sex is just sex after all. It’s not love.”

  “I suppose I do,” Heather said, looking at me as she provided her answer.

  “There, you see,” Bakker said, turning back to his wife. “Modern people like this young woman think like me.”