Is Rosario Lopez an actual historical figure?
No she isn’t. I based her character on a middle-aged, soberly dressed woman wearing small silver cross who called on me at the embassy. She was a former nun who had left the church to devote her life to running a shelter for gamines. “Did the embassy have aid funds I could give her?” she asked. Although, I couldn’t help her, I visited the shelter several times to talk to her about conditions in the barrios. It turned out she had been a friend of Torres and provided some of the information I used in the novel.
Do the Guardians exist? Are they a figment of your imagination?
The Guardians never existed as an organization. In the novel they represent the public service elite, in the small world of Ottawa, far from the major population centres elsewhere in Canada, who for generations, socialized together and met together in interdepartmental committees to prepare advice to governments, to prepare legislation, and to draft enacting regulations.
The elite of the elite were often called the Mandarins. Altogether, they provided a quality of selfless, non-partisan service to governments and to the people of Canada that was the envy of the world. But did any of the Mandarins ever say no when asked to prepare laws, orders-in-council and regulations to direct the RCMP to take by force if necessary the children of Indians and send them to residential schools, to impose a head tax on Chinese immigrants, to bar Jewish children fleeing Nazi Germany from entering Canada, to herd the entire Japanese-Canadian population of British Columbia into concentration camps after Pearl Harbour, or to draft torture directives authorizing CSIS, the RCMP and CSEC to use information derived from torture in Canada’s anti-terrorism efforts post 9/11?
With rare exceptions, that would not appear to have been the case. It could be argued that the responsibility for these actions should be borne only by the elected representatives of the people. But we should ask ourselves whether the politicians could have devised and these abhorrent policies by themselves?
Did CUSO run a program in Colombia when you were posted in Colombia?
Yes. There was no Heather, but I became friends with a number of CUSO volunteers as well as with others from Sweden and elsewhere. The farewell party for the fictional Charles Bullock in Chapter 7 is based on a party I attended as a guest of a Swedish volunteer. I’ll never forget the bitterness of a member of the Peace Corps who said his tour in Colombia was ending and he now faced the prospect of fighting in Vietnam or going into exile in Canada. He wasn’t happy with either option and I felt sorry for him.
Did Canada send a diplomat to spy for the CIA at its embassy in Havana?
Yes, as strange as that might appear. The request was made by the American government with the knowledge of President Kennedy. In the context of the missile crisis, which came perilously close to igniting a nuclear war, the Canadian government’s decision to support CIA monitoring of Soviet military equipment and movements in Cuba made a great deal of sense. John Graham, a retired Foreign Service officer, describes in his memoirs his adventures as a spy for the CIA in Cuba in the 1960s. (His book, Whose man in Havana? Adventures from the Far Side will be published soon.)
In my novel, Luc is not based on John and the incidents described never took place. By the time the Canadian government appointed me ambassador to Cuba in August 1981, Canada was no longer sending officers to Cuba with an Intelligence gathering mission.
Did MININT try to blackmail you when you were ambassador in Havana?
Yes indeed. I received three separate telephone calls in the first week in Cuba trying to suborn me. The first was from a woman who said she had seen me at some function or other and she thought I was ever-so-handsome. She wanted to meet me, she said. She would make sure no one would tell my wife. I hung up. The second was from someone who said he had a large quantity of gold left behind by a rich Cuban family that had fled the country after Castro took over. He had no way of taking the gold out of the country. Would I like to buy his gold? If so, he would give me an address where I could meet him to carry out the transaction. I hung up the telephone. The third attempt was from a man. He had seen me somewhere and thought I was ever-so-handsome as well. I hung up before he could finish his pitch and asked the maid to filter all subsequent calls. If I had responded positively to any of these propositions, MININT would have taken pictures and tried to force me to work for them.
Did MININT play dirty tricks on you — tricks similar to the ones dealt out to Luc?
They did and it was a devastating experience for my entire family. One day, my wife and I woke up to discover that someone had poisoned, Zaka, our beloved dog who had accompanied us from Canada. We rushed her to a nearby veterinarian who pumped out her stomach and gave us medicine to bring her back to health. However, to the great distress of all members of our family, she began to deteriorate and we had to ship her back to Canada to live with my parents and receive care from a local veterinarian. She never recovered and died six months later.
We returned home from the veterinarian to find telephone call after telephone call coming in, each with a message of hate and filth. My deputy came rushing in to say someone had poisoned his dog and it was now dead. The head of the commercial office came to say someone had nailed a dead rat to his door. The senior clerk came to report that all members of the Canadian staff were receiving threatening phone calls and that the Cubans working for the embassy had walked off the jobs. I went to the Foreign Ministry to protest. By the time I got home, the telephone calls had stopped, the Cuban employees had returned to work and a veterinarian sent by the Foreign Ministry was inside examining Zaka. We never found out why the Cubans targeted us. A week later, Fidel Castro came to dinner, but neither of us mentioned the incident. And in the time remaining in my posting, I could hardly wait to leave Cuba for good.
Did you personally witness the elaborate security measures MININT took to protect the life of President Castro?
President Castro often came to dinner at the official residence when I was ambassador to Cuba. His office rarely confirmed his acceptance of invitations before he appeared at our door, but several hours before his arrival, MININT troops would seal off the neighbourhood, plainclothes guards would take up positions in the garden, technicians would install new telephone lines, a doctor would set up shop in a bedroom and a MININT food taster would take up a position in the kitchen to watch the preparation of dinner and to sample all dishes destined for the president. Then exactly on time, the president would roll up to the front door in his big, black, bullet-proof Soviet Zil limousine, leave his personal Uzi pistol machine gun on the back seat, and come in to dinner wearing a bullet-proof vest under his well-pressed shirt.
In your novel you mention a Chinese Head Tax. What was that?
Responding to public pressure to control the entry of Chinese people to Canada, Parliament in 1875 imposed a tax on most Chinese immigrants that was so high it discouraged wives and children from accompanying their men to Canada. The tax remained in force until 1947. On June 22, 2006, the Canadian government apologized and offered compensation to survivors.
Did influential public servants really play a key role in the Canadian government’s decision to turn Jews fleeing the Nazis away from its borders?
In None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948, Irving Abella and Harold Tropes describe how anti-Semitic senior officials of key departments including External Affairs and Immigration, and even members of the clergy, played a role in devising and executing policies that systematically excluded Jews as immigrants and refugees to Canada.
Will your novel, other books of a similar nature, press reports, editorial comment, and parliamentary debate hinder the ability of Canada’s security agencies to safeguard the safety of Canadians in a period of ongoing international terrorism?
Anything that promotes greater public understanding of issues affecting the rights and freedoms of Canadians is in the public interest, and ultimately in the interest of Canada’s security agencies.
; Acknowledgements
I should like to thank those who provided advice and encouragement, first of all to my wife Marie-Jeanne, and son, Alain Bartleman, for their critique of the first draft. Thanks as well to Patrick Boyer of Blue Butterfly press and Kirk Howard of Dundurn who accepted the concept and manuscript. Thanks to the staff at Dundurn especially to Michael Melgaard, my editor. Thanks in particular to Alex Neve, Secretary General of Amnesty International (English branch), who read the manuscript on the long flight to Juba, South Sudan, and offered authoritative comments on the Conversation with the Author section. Thanks to Penny Collenette from the University of Ottawa law faculty and to Dr. Brian Osbourne, Professor Emeritus Queens University, for their encouragement, and to John Graham, Pierre Beemans, and Ed Gorn, who made helpful suggestions. John served in the Department in many countries, including the Dominican Republic, Cuba, London, and Venezuela. I met him when he was high commissioner to Guyana in the early 1980s and I was director for the Central American and Commonwealth division. Pierre and I became friends when he was CUSO coordinator in Bogota and I was second secretary at the Canadian embassy in the late 1960s. Ed and I met when we joined the Department in the mid-1960s and have stayed in touch over the years.
Finally, any resemblance the characters may have to individuals, living or dead is entirely coincidental as are the incidents described in the book to real events, unless otherwise identified and qualified in the Conversation with the Author section.
Also by James Bartleman
The Redemption of Oscar Wolf
In the early 1930s, Oscar Wolf, a 13-year-old Native from the Chippewas of Rama Indian Reserve, sets fire to the business section of his village north of Toronto in a fit of misguided rage against white society, inadvertently killing his grandfather and a young maid. Tortured by guilt and fearful of divine retribution, Oscar sets out on a lifetime quest for redemption.
His journey takes him to California where he works as a fruit picker and prizefighter during the Great Depression, to the Second World War where he becomes a decorated soldier, to university where he excels as a student and athlete, and to the diplomatic service in the postwar era where he causes a stir at the United Nations in New York and in Colombia and Australia.
Beset by an all-too-human knack for making doubtful choices, Oscar discovers that peace of mind is indeed hard to find in this saga of mid-20th-century aboriginal life in Canada and abroad that will appeal to readers of all backgrounds and ages.
The Fire Thief
by Stephen Guppy
Set in the 1960s, The Fire Thief is the story of Sonny Wheeler, who grew up in a time of ‘50s conformity that exploded into revolution, protest, and days of rage for many of his generation. When his mother remarries, teenaged Sonny moves with his new family to Danforth, Washington, a city that exists solely because of the nuclear power plant humming at its core.
This is the Cold War at its height: his stepfather is a nuclear engineer, his home is visited every month by FBI agents looking for Soviet spies, and the daughter of high school science teacher is named Marie Curie. Sonny’s only connection to the world outside this stifling city is his wild Aunt Alice, a lounge club singer who rejects all of the social norms of the age. Having fallen in love with the angst-ridden Karen, Sonny follows her descent into radicalism and joins the Weathermen, a revolutionary group dedicated to the overthrow of the state and the atomic utopia their parents had created. After staging the theft of plutonium from the nuclear plant, Sonny is forced to go on the run and seeks refuge in Las Vegas with his dying Aunt Alice. Having accidentally fathered a child, Sonny is torn between caring for his son and coming to terms with his own fatherless childhood. As he hides from the authorities and the effects of his drug use begin to catch up with him, Sonny Wheeler becomes a man searching for his moment of redemption.
Amidst startling imagery of a landscape littered with the effects of a nuclear age, Stephen Guppy presents us with the lonely ballad of a man trying to find his place in an increasingly confusing world. The Fire Thief is a thought-provoking novel of redemption about the bonds of family, the perils of radical politics, and the price of love.
Yaroslaw’s Treasure
by Myroslav Petriw
On a visit to Ukraine to retrieve a family heirloom secretly buried by his grandfather during the Second World War, Yaroslaw, a Ukrainian-Canadian university student, stumbles into a world full of spies and secret organizations, peril and political intrigue.
His discovery of the hidden cache yields clues to the location of a fabled lost treasure-the greatest in all Europe. Working against time, Yaroslaw and a small band of accomplices struggle to uncover and save a nation’s heritage, operating in secret to prevent the corrupt leaders of the government and the Russians-from stealing it.
Yaroslaw’s Treasure is a thrilling suspense story set against the gripping drama of the Orange Revolution, the 2004 popular uprising that saw hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets in Ukraine to overthrow a corrupt government and reinforce democracy in a land long occupied by repressive and foreign regimes.
Rich with history, romance, politics, and danger, Yaroslaw’s Treasure superbly captures the wonders and horrors of Ukraine’s past, swirls through the treacherous currents of its present politics, all the while providing entertainment as a first-rate thriller.
Available at your favourite bookseller
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Copyright © James Bartleman, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright.
All characters in this work are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copy Editor: Michael Melgaard
Design: Laura Boyle
Epub Design: Carmen Giraudy
Cover Design: Laura Boyle
Image credits: RYGER/Shutterstock.com
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Bartleman, James, 1939-, author
Exceptional circumstances / James Bartleman.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-2910-0 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-4597-2911-7 (pdf).--
ISBN 978-1-4597-2912-4 (epub)
I. Title.
PS8603.A783E94 2015 C813’.6 C2014-905054-2
C2014-905055-0
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and Livres Canada Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
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