Escape to Havana

by Nick Wilkshire

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, backing up without registering the other person’s face.

  “Charlie?”

  His surprise at hearing his name turned to horror as he looked up and saw Bruce Redden standing there.

  “Bruce…. Hi,” he stammered. “What are you doing here?”

  “My room’s on this floor.” Redden’s tone suggested that the answer should have been obvious. “You?”

  Suddenly realizing he had no plausible answer other than the truth, Charlie was hoping the doors would slam shut before he had a chance to speak, but Redden was casually leaning a hand against one side, keeping it open.

  “Just meeting a friend,” he said, unable to think of anything else. As Redden surveyed him coolly, Charlie began to fidget, which didn’t make his cover any more credible, given his generally wrinkled and bed-headed appearance. In fact, he couldn’t help thinking he looked exactly like someone who’d just had a roll in the hay, which would have been fine except that both men knew that the only person he would logically be seeing on this floor was Jillian Gray.

  “Geez, what are the odds,” Redden said, with a click of his tongue, “that your friend would be on the same floor as me, in this big old hotel?”

  “Yeah, well …” Charlie’s eyes darted away from Redden’s. He was beginning to wish the elevator cable would snap and send him plunging eight floors to his death — anything to extricate him from this conversation. He was debating telling the truth and appealing for Redden’s discretion when the latter removed his hand and the door began to slide shut.

  “Anyway, you have a good one, Charlie,” he said, giving him a sly grin.

  Chapter 29

  Charlie was in the reception area, arguing with one of the cleaners about how often the floors were supposed to be washed, when he saw the embassy van pull up to the gates. He wasn’t listening as the cleaner, a locally engaged woman who had been working at the embassy for the past ten years, rattled off a series of reasons why the floor shouldn’t be cleaned more than once a week. He was watching Gray and Redden emerge from the van, and trying to get a read from their facial expressions. After his encounter with Redden the night before, Charlie had flirted with the idea of calling Gray’s room to give her a heads up. He had decided against it, for reasons that at the time had seemed valid and convincing, but which now escaped him. He replayed the awkward elevator scene in his mind, seeing Redden’s smirk as Charlie delivered his lame excuse, his rumpled shirt hanging out. He might as well have had Gray’s lipstick smeared all over his cheek.

  As he watched Redden and Gray head toward his office in the adjacent building, Charlie settled on absolute denial as his best course of action. But as he dismissed the cleaning woman and headed for the front door, it occurred to him that Gray and Redden had probably breakfasted together at the hotel. He froze inside the door as he imagined their morning conversation over bacon and eggs and fried plantains.

  By the way Jillian, I bumped into Charlie last night, just outside your room….

  Charlie swallowed hard. Perhaps he should have called to warn her, after all. He would have to find an opportunity to talk to her this morning.

  “Good morning,” he called out, stepping out onto the front steps just as Gray and Redden were rounding the corner.

  “Oh, hi Charlie,” Gray said with her usual smile.

  Nothing amiss there.

  “Hey, Charlie,” Redden beamed. “You get home all right … after?” he added, in a lower voice, but not low enough that Gray didn’t catch it. She gave Charlie a quizzical look as they made their way up the stairs. He wanted to give her a reassuring smile, but Redden seemed to be monitoring their reactions to his comment, so he thought it best to change the subject as quickly as possible.

  “So, we’ve got twenty minutes before the driver takes us into town.”

  “Where’s their office?” Gray asked as they reached the top of the stairs and Charlie keyed in his code.

  “It’s off the Prado,” he said, remembering the email from the second of the three short-listed developers they were to meet this week.

  “Oh good, we can grab something to eat in town before we come back here for the meeting with the Cubans,” Redden said as they made their way down the hall, adding before he entered the spare office, “Unless you two have other plans, of course.”

  Gray stopped dead and looked at Charlie, who could only respond with a puzzled look. “What do you mean?” she said, taking a defiant pose in the doorway.

  “Huh?” Redden looked up from the other side of the desk. “You know, like a meeting with Sanchez, or something.”

  Gray’s spine returned to its normal curvature.

  “Why, what did you think I meant?” Redden walked casually past, on his way to the coffee pot in the room next door.

  “Whatever,” Gray muttered, as she moved off toward her temporary office and Charlie retreated to his, making a mental note that he really would have to find a way to talk to her before the day was out.

  Charlie sat at the far end of the conference room, pretending to listen to the presentation as he fiddled with his BlackBerry under the table. There was another message from the ambassador’s assistant, the third this morning, asking whether Charlie knew where Teddy’s rubber bone was. Charlie remembered the dog playing with it in the first couple of days of his stay, but he hadn’t seen it since. As he read the text of the message from Stewart’s assistant, his pulse quickened: “Mrs. Stewart is desperate to find it, as she thinks it might have something to do with Teddy’s recent incontinence.” He stared at the email and imagined Teddy undergoing a battery of tests at the vet, and himself on the wrong end of some very awkward questions when the toxicology report came back.

  “Cocaine? Really? How odd …”

  Charlie was imagining the possible consequences — from a transfer to Burkina Faso to outright termination — when it occurred to him that maybe Katherine Stewart was right. Perhaps Teddy’s soiling of the official carpets had nothing to do with his dip in Charlie’s dope-infused pool, but, rather, to the loss of a favourite chew toy.

  Charlie flashed back to his childhood, remembering a particular stuffed bear that made a little growl — it was more like a moo, actually — when he tipped it. Would Charlie have pissed the bed every night if Brownie had gone missing for a week? Quite possibly, he thought with a surge of hope. He fired off a response reminding the ambassador’s assistant, politely, that he was in a meeting with one of the prospective builders of the new embassy building right now, but he would happily attend to the missing rubber bone at his earliest possible opportunity.

  He knew he was going to have to go back to the embassy straight after the meeting, and dreaded the inevitable meeting with Stewart — official topic: work; actual topic: the official dog.

  Charlie put the addictive little devil back in its holster and looked up, realizing he had missed the last ten minutes of what so far had been a less-than-inspiring presentation.

  CubanaCan had looked respectable on paper, but it was quickly becoming apparent that they were a little light when it came to experience. Whereas Société Immobilière had furnished them with an elaborate brochure showcasing a dozen commercial projects that they had done in the past five years, to go along with the PowerPoint presentation, CubanaCan seemed a bit bush-league in comparison. Charlie had met the speaker, Doug Calvin, at a reception, and the way the ex-pat Calgarian had talked, he was responsible for building half of Havana. Now, as Charlie flipped through the poor-quality black-and-white three-pager that outlined the company’s projects, it appeared that apart from one joint venture for the construction of a small office building, most of their projects were residential, and pretty small-scale. Charlie had to admire Calvin’s ability to embellish, to the point that they almost sounded like contenders for the embassy project, but not quite.

  And if Charlie was reading Redden’s body lan
guage correctly, he was not overly impressed either. He started the same exercise with Gray, but soon found himself considering her in a rather more intimate light. She seemed to sense him looking and returned a quick smile. Sanchez was doing his best to look enthralled, but Charlie knew he was the least impressed of them all. In fact, Sanchez had warned them that CubanaCan might be in over their heads a little on a project of this size. Charlie felt his hip vibrating again and vowed not to answer the call. But when it started buzzing again a few minutes later, he couldn’t resist snapping it out quietly and glancing at the little screen.

  Again with the goddamn rubber bone?

  Charlie and Sanchez stood on the front step outside CubanaCan’s office. The sun had hidden itself behind a large, grey cloud, making the warm midday air quite comfortable.

  “They could be a while,” Sanchez said, lighting a cigarette and setting his briefcase down on a little brick wall. They had all spent fifteen minutes trapped in CubanaCan’s lobby as the affable but long-winded Doug Calvin continued his pitch. Charlie and Sanchez had led a final push to leave, but Calvin had managed to hang on to Gray and Redden for the moment.

  “So, what did you think?” Charlie asked.

  “Pretty much as expected. Doug’s a good guy, and CubanaCan’s very reputable, but they don’t really have the same track record as SI.”

  “No, that was pretty obvious. And they’ve got no previous experience building embassies.”

  “That reminds me,” Sanchez said, pausing to suck on his Marlboro. “I made an interesting discovery this morning when I made a few inquiries about the former occupant of your house.”

  Charlie didn’t remember asking Sanchez to make any such inquiries, and his surprise must have been obvious.

  “I just happened to be talking to—” Sanchez stopped and seemed to reconsider what he was going to say. “Garcia’s name came up, that’s all.”

  “And?”

  “Turns out more than his posting came to an end, if you know what I mean,” Sanchez said, his voice lowered. He took a puff of his cigarette and exhaled the smoke as he waited for Charlie’s response. When it didn’t come, Sanchez continued. “He went back to Venezuela a couple of weeks before his posting here was due to end — to make arrangements for his permanent return to Caracas, I suppose — and never returned.” He tossed the butt to the ground and crushed it under a loafer, edging closer to Charlie as he did so. “An accident. His car was incinerated, apparently. He was so close to the end of his posting that most people just assumed he had returned home a little early.”

  Charlie just stood there looking puzzled.

  “For some reason,” Sanchez continued, “the Venezuelan embassy seems quite happy to leave it at that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, my source heard about this by chance, and when he tried to confirm it with the Venezuelans, they seemed pretty reluctant to discuss it.”

  Charlie’s hip buzzed as he stood there, the colour draining out of his face. He plucked the BlackBerry distractedly from his hip and looked at the incoming message, noticing it was from Stewart’s executive assistant.

  This had better not be about that fucking rubber bone again….

  He was about to put it away when he caught the word police in the subject line and opened the message. As he scrolled through it, he began to feel ill. Stewart wanted to meet ASAP to discuss a call from the diplomatic police service. Charlie fired off a reply saying he was on his way back to the embassy and then dialed the number for the driver, who was nowhere to be found.

  “Everything okay, Charlie?” Sanchez asked, just as Gray and Redden emerged from CubanaCan’s office looking tired.

  “Yeah, but I have to head back to the embassy.”

  “Not going to join us for lunch?” Redden was patting his stomach. “I’m starving.”

  “Can’t. I’ll leave the driver for you,” he said, looking for the nearest taxi. “I’ve got some consular stuff I have to deal with,” he lied, avoiding Gray’s searching eyes and flagging an approaching taxi. “I’ll see you at the four o’clock meeting. Have a good lunch.”

  Chapter 30

  Charlie sat in the waiting area outside the ambassador’s office, fidgeting and trying to ignore the growls coming from his stomach. He had been there for almost fifteen minutes, time he could have spent doing something useful, like eating. He sighed and wondered why this always seemed to happen. First, Stewart’s assistant would summon him with a call, but instead of being shown right in after the three minute walk from his office in the other building, Charlie would end up parked on the couch by the assistant’s desk while she made a point of ignoring him. He could feel his blood pressure rising as his stomach growled again.

  The assistant’s phone buzzed, and a few seconds later she looked over to Charlie and gave him the nod.

  “He’ll see you now.”

  “Great,” he said as he headed to the door, rapping gently before entering.

  “Charlie, how are you?” Stewart was reading something on his computer and beckoned Charlie over to the sitting area. “Be right with you. Just reading this list of possible mission closures. I don’t know what they’re thinking in Ottawa.”

  “We’re not on it, are we?” Charlie said, as he took a seat and glanced at the picture of Teddy.

  “Don’t laugh. You never know. And it’s not like we’d get any warning, either. I’m not even supposed to have access to that list.” Stewart shook his head as he took a seat opposite Charlie. “Minority governments. One decides it’s going to shut down a dozen missions, and two years later the next one wants them all back up and running. It’s the same old story. Tiresome, really.” Stewart sighed.

  “How was Panama, anyway?” Charlie asked. “I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to you since you got back, what with the property visits, and … other stuff.”

  “Productive. Very productive, indeed. I was wondering whether it was going to be a waste of time, frankly. But as it turned out, I gained some valuable insights into how some of our friends are running their Americas platforms.”

  Charlie nodded, not having the faintest idea what Stewart was talking about.

  “Damn hot, though.” Stewart frowned, as if at the memory of the unpleasantness of the climate. “But enough about that. I hear you had some trouble out at your house?”

  Charlie nodded. “Yes, there was a break-in.”

  “I heard all about it from Gord … after I got a call from the Cuban police, that is.”

  Charlie wondered whether Stewart was annoyed at not being briefed by his own staff first. But that was Connors’s job, not his.

  “I wasn’t there at the time, and they didn’t really take much,” Charlie said, keen to minimize the significance of the break-in.

  “And you were pulled over by someone posing as a Cuban cop?”

  Stewart obviously knew all the details, and Charlie wondered what it was he was hoping Charlie might add.

  “Yes, apparently in league with the thieves. Did the police mention having any leads?” Charlie asked, trying to change the direction of the conversation.

  “Oh, you know the Cubans.” Stewart gave a snort and leaned back in his chair. “You never know what they’re up to. If they did have a lead, they probably wouldn’t say. They seemed puzzled by the fact that nothing was taken, though,” he added, stroking his top lip with a manicured finger.

  “I’m afraid my place doesn’t have a lot to offer your average thief. Courtesy of my ex-wife.” Charlie tried a chuckle, but it stuck in his throat just enough to sound forced.

  Stewart smiled as Charlie’s foot began to twitch.

  “Yes, you mentioned your divorce. There but for the Grace of God, Charlie. That’s what I always say.” Stewart crossed his legs and flicked a piece of lint from the cuff of his pants before continuing. “Well, I’m assured they’ll keep us
up to date on their investigation, and I asked that Gord be briefed regularly.”

  “That’s good.”

  “I suppose the whole thing must have been a bit unsettling. I hate to think what might have happened to Teddy if he’d still been there.”

  Teddy’s a fucking dog! What about me?

  “Speaking of which, I never did thank you properly for taking him while we were away.”

  “Oh, it was my pleasure,” Charlie said, relieved to be changing topics.

  “He didn’t cause you any trouble, did he?”

  “No. None,” Charlie replied, a little too quickly. Stewart seemed very interested in his response.

  “I only ask because he’s been acting a little … off since we got back.”

  Charlie’s pulse quickened.

  Fuck.

  “Really? How so?”

  “Well, he’s ruined Katherine’s favourite rug for starters. You know the one in the sun room?” Stewart paused and looked at Charlie, then carried on. “She got it at a market in Damascus and, well … it doesn’t matter now.”

  “How did he ruin it?” Charlie asked, wondering how many favourite rugs Katherine Stewart had collected over the years.

  Stewart ignored the question. “You did take him out for his regular bathroom breaks, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “And you didn’t have any problems?”

  Charlie paused for a split second. He had to be careful here. His housekeeper knew the cook at the official residence, and Stewart’s wife wasn’t beyond submitting them both to a polygraph.

  “Well,” he said, deciding on a version that was part fact and part ass-covering. “He did have a couple of accidents at first, but I made sure I took him out regularly. I’m sure it’s only temporary,” Charlie assured him, trying another tack. “He probably just missed you.”