Escape to Havana Read online

  For Kate — I wish you a life full of adventure

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  December 2014

  If Charlie Hillier had known what that evening held in store, he might have done things differently. He wasn’t one for melodrama, but he could have made a hell of a speech, flown into a rage, or maybe even broken something. Even a different outfit, which wouldn’t have changed anything, would at least have allowed him to say he had done something to mark the end of his former life.

  As it was, he had barely given a thought to his usual uniform of dark suit, white shirt, and red tie when he dressed that morning. The tie was more burgundy than red, with dots small enough not to offend his conservative nature. The charcoal V-neck had been a last minute flourish, regret­table now that he was standing in the drawing room of the Swedish ambassador’s residence, simmering in the collective warmth of more than a hundred guests. They stood eating and drinking in clusters, all sheltered from a late December wind that whipped the snow against the frosted panes of the Rockcliffe mansion that had been decorated with just enough red, green, and gold to reflect the season without looking like a holiday store window. The competing scents of gingerbread and mulled wine added to the festive atmosphere, as did the spirited chatter that rose above the soft chamber music playing in the background.

  Charlie stood at the edge of a knot of guests, half listening to the bow-tied man at its centre, but more concerned with the time as he checked his watch again and loosened his tie. He and his wife had been there for hours already, despite his hope for an early exit, which Charlie had been sure to mention to her several times on the short drive over from Foreign Affairs headquarters on Sussex Drive. She had seemed agreeable enough, and even mentioned feeling fatigued herself after a long day at the office. But Charlie had been to enough of these functions with her over the years to know better. Whereas he was content to put in an uncomfortable hour or two of face time and call it a night, Sharon LeClair-Hillier was a born networker. There was always one more peer to share the latest gossip with or an interesting new acquaintance to make from the up-and-coming set, and Charlie always seemed to find himself standing in an open doorway at the end of these occasions, like a department store security guard waiting for the last straggling shopper to leave at the end of a day-long sale.

  But tonight wasn’t Sharon’s fault. They had been well on their way to the front door twice, only to be derailed by one encounter after another. First, it was the Swedish trade attaché who they had first met a week earlier at the British High Commissioner’s reception. Charlie couldn’t resist internally assigning him the moniker of “Swedish Meatball” at the time, and nothing in tonight’s encounter changed his initial impression of Lars Whatshisface. The attaché was young and freshly posted, but surely the Swedish government’s outgoing briefing should have given him a better grasp of Canada’s economic fundamentals. He could perhaps be forgiven for not knowing about Canada’s wealth of medical isotopes, but softwood lumber? As for Lars’s claim of being a former Olympic biathlete, Charlie interpreted it as a transparent plea for attention, and an attempt to compensate for some shortcoming; possibly intellectual, possibly farther south. Poor Lars’s actual experience, Charlie had thought, looking up at the young Swede as he boasted to Sharon, was probably limited to waxing skis for the real athletes.

  They had barely extricated themselves from the tiresome Lars when Charlie had found himself face to face with his former director and, as the two men paused to talk shop, Sharon had slipped off and attached herself to the Swedish ambassador’s entourage. The last time Charlie saw her, she was in conversation with the Swedish number two, which meant she had a shot at the host himself and wasn’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future. That was almost an hour ago.

  Charlie dabbed at his forehead with a paper napkin and finished the glass of wine in his hand. He had lost count after four, and the cumulative effect of the warmth, wine, and hors d’oeuvres was contributing to a fatigue that was becoming oppressive. He wasn’t sure how much alcohol Sharon had consumed, but judging by her bubbly demeanour, he knew they would be leaving her Volvo overnight. At least they had nothing on tomorrow morning, he thought, glancing out at the fat flakes of snow falling outside the living room window. They would sleep late; maybe have a little early-morning romp to work off the hangover and put some steam on their frost-rimmed bedroom window before the short ride over from New Edinburgh in his Honda. On the way back, they might stop off at that new brunch place Sharon had been talking about. It was a recipe for the perfect lazy Saturday morning, and as he stood there, he could almost taste the eggs Benedict.

  A distant crash of glassware brought Charlie out of his reverie and, as he loosened his tie another inch, he tried to focus on the nearby conversation. The distinguished-looking man at its centre was an architect, describing the various challenges he had faced in updating the structure of the heritage house in which they all now stood. Charlie was about to head off in search of his wife when he heard the man mention the secret passageways that had been uncovered when they started the refurbishment. Sensing the wave of skepticism among the huddled group, the architect gave an enthusiastic wave.

  “I’ll show you, if you don’t believe me.”

  He set off with his audience, an intrigued Charlie included, trailing behind him and led them out into the foyer and down the main hallway, following the curve of the staircase toward the rear of the house. He paused at a little alcove just to the right of the entrance to the kitchen. As his followers assembled in a pack around him, he placed his hand on a segment of wall panelling at the back of the alcove. With a theatrical flourish, he pressed on the wall and pulled his hand free, allowing a door-sized segment to pop open as he turned to his audience.

  “Through here.”

  The architect paused at the widened eyes of the gathered crowd, and sensed the vacuum created by their collective intake of breath — puzzling, since he had yet to reveal the door to the passageway that lay at the rear of the closet. He turned to follow the stares and saw two half-naked figures, frozen in horror and entwined at the waist, standing side-on in the little closet. Lars’s big paws were buried in the flesh of the woman’s buttoc
ks, his pants around his ankles. Her blouse and skirt had converged in a rumpled tangle around her midsection, and most of one breast, including a partially erect nipple, protruded over the top of a lacy bra. The minimalist, lace-trimmed triangle forming the other half of the set was dangling from her left foot, and if Charlie had any trouble recognizing her — there was an unfamiliar glow in her cheek — there was no mistaking the lingerie he had bought for her on their brief trip to Manhattan just a few weeks before.

  Spotting her husband standing at the back of the gawking crowd, Sharon LeClair-Hillier’s guilty expression faded and her eyes narrowed as she addressed him in the tone she reserved for those rare occasions when he left the toilet seat up or forgot to put out the garbage.

  “Will you close the goddamned door!”

  Chapter 1

  As the shuddering eased and the plane punched through the last of the thunderclouds, Charlie’s heart rate returned to normal and he relaxed his white-knuckled grip on the armrests. Gone were the images conjured by his anxious brain of the sudden malfunction or explosion that would send all three hundred passengers hurtling to a certain and gruesome death, as was the accompanying soundtrack of screams and pleas of mercy to various higher beings. He knew that takeoffs and landings were when most of the trouble happened, so he was technically halfway home. The window was still streaked with the rain that had hammered the tarmac at Ottawa International Airport, but the scene beyond it now was pure tranquility. The soothing, azure horizon above a landscape of cotton candy was enough to make him forget the turmoil of the last six months, if only for a moment. The ping of the seatbelt sign, followed by a muffled announcement from the flight deck, brought him back to reality. In a few hours he would be landing, and staying, in Havana. What an odd reality it was.

  He glanced over the empty seat next to him at his fellow passengers across the aisle, lost in sleep, reading, or conversation. The couple immediately adjacent seemed headed for a holiday and Charlie, envious of their apparent insouciance as his own stomach clenched, tried to imagine himself in their place. His gaze lingered on the woman, particularly the familiar way her hair was piled up on the back of her head. It wasn’t until he noticed her companion’s curious glance that he realized he was staring, and he was grateful for the interruption of the coffee cart.

  Charlie kept his eyes on the clouds for a while, as he sipped his coffee and tried to convince himself once more why it made sense for him, the same Charlie Hillier who had spent the past fifteen years pushing paper from the comfort of his climate-controlled office in Ottawa, to be embarking on a three-year posting to Havana. The fact that heat and humidity disagreed with him would have to go on the negative side of the ledger, as would his general appreciation of creature comforts, like a regular supply of hot water or electricity. His never having been on posting wasn’t really a plus either, and the rudimentary Spanish he had struggled to learn over the past six weeks wasn’t going to be much help.

  In fact, the Cuban posting’s only real asset was its distance from Ottawa. It wasn’t as far as Ulan Bator — his only other choice of posting on such short notice — but a Caribbean island, albeit embargoed and under communist dictatorship, had to be better than the frozen Mongolian steppe. Charlie would rather sweat, eat dry chicken and beans, and suffer through the occasional power outage than freeze to death on a diet of horse-kebabs. And while Havana was only a few hours away by plane, it was foreign and isolated enough that it seemed much farther removed from Ottawa; maybe even far enough for him to move on with his life. Maybe.

  In some ways, he wasn’t sure he would ever recover from the shock of that awful December night. It was bad enough finding out his wife was having an affair, but to discover — along with a dozen other aghast partygoers — her wrapped around the Swedish Meatball in a broom closet was more than he felt he deserved. What Charlie hadn’t realized at the time was that one of the people in the crowd worked in Sharon’s division, and it hadn’t taken long for vivid descriptions of the illicit holiday hump to begin floating through the halls of the Lester B. Pearson Building, where he also worked. In the weeks that followed, he had felt cloaked in humiliation from the moment he set foot in the office, an embarrassment that was heightened every time he rounded a corner or walked into a room and noticed a sharp hush, a dropping of eyes, and a not-so-subtle shift to some hastily improvised conversation.

  And things had been no better at home. Far from being repentant, Sharon seemed to think he was somehow to blame for all the fuss, disappearing in a teary huff every time he tried to discuss their situation. They spent an awkward holiday season under the same roof, barely communicating other than to engage in an occasional skirmish. Then, one evening in mid-January, they were sharing a rare moment on the sofa together, an after-dinner coffee in hand, when she told him it was over. It had been a calm discussion, and in retrospect he couldn’t remember why, or even if, he had agreed to be the one to leave, but he was gone the next day. And so, after fifteen years of what he thought was a happy marriage, he was on his own again. Well, not exactly alone. He had his older brother back East, annoyingly successful and the head of the perfect nuclear family, to remind Charlie what a failure he was. Not that he had offered anything but kind words and support on Charlie’s brief trip home in the aftermath of the breakup. His parents had said all the right things, too, of course, but it didn’t change the disappointment he had seen in their eyes. He had cut the trip short in the end, blaming an imaginary flare-up at the office, and hurried back to Ottawa. But if he was hoping for some anonymity to recover, it had never materialized.

  Taking the passport out of his shirt pocket, he fingered the blank visa pages. In almost two decades with Foreign Affairs, he had never left Canada for work, and had always felt more than a little envious of his better-travelled colleagues (that is to say, all of them) and their stories of adventure at the far reaches of the planet, whether it was their participation in some treaty negotiation or multilateral convention of global import or the subsequent night off at the Bolshoi, or weekend on safari. Charlie assured them all that he was quite happy keeping his chair warm while slurping the stale coffee at HQ. He had repeated this mantra so often in passing up one opportunity after another that he had almost come to believe it himself. Eventually, it became moot, as the opportunities dwindled and he settled into obscurity at the lower end of headquarters middle management. That Sharon’s inability to leave her aging mother, who still lived two streets away, was what really kept them both in Ottawa had never bothered him before. It seemed a small price for maintaining a happy marriage, even though the old bag had given him nothing but grief since the first day they met, having made it clear from the outset that he wasn’t worthy of her daughter, and never would be. It occurred to him recently that perhaps he should have listened to her. In fact, in light of recent events, there were a lot of choices that he was revisit­ing, wondering what he had been thinking at the time.

  Charlie put his mother-in-law’s wrinkled scowl out of his mind and flipped to the photo page of his passport, drawing a sharp intake of breath at the axe murderer staring back at him and remembering the day it was taken all too well. He had just received a courier package from his soon-to-be ex-wife’s lawyer containing their settlement agreement, his feverish first read of which revealed that it was the documentary equivalent of an unanaesthetized castration. Tucking the wretched document in his desk drawer, he had wandered the halls like an automaton, ending up at the official photo section twenty minutes late for his pre-arranged appointment. And while smiling was strictly forbidden for passport photos, he couldn’t help wondering what the photographer must have been thinking as he took the picture of a man whose misery was so obvious.

  Flipping the passport shut on the hideous photo, he felt a distinct surge of pleasure as he looked at the burgundy front cover, and the gold lettering under the coat of arms: Diplomatic Passport. He had his long-time friend and former colleague, Winston Gardiner, to tha
nk for that. He was the one who had engineered Charlie’s reincarnation, once it became clear that he could no longer stay in Ottawa.

  Unlike Charlie, Gardiner had planned his career carefully, and had joined the executive cadre some time ago. But Charlie hadn’t realized the scope of Gardiner’s new directorship when they met over lunch early in February, or the power it afforded him to navigate the quagmire that was the departmental human resources system. By the end of their lunch, Gardiner had devised a plan for his new protégé’s assignment abroad in a fraction of the time it would normally take, in part because of a cyclical shortage of personnel available for foreign postings. The only tricky part, given the fast-approaching posting deadline, was location. Two or three years in Ouagadougou might not offer the restorative experience that Charlie had in mind. Then again, Paris or London was out of the question on such short notice, especially for someone coming from outside the established pool of candidates. But there was an opening in Havana.

  As he stared at the passport, pride gave way to self-doubt, as he tried to imagine himself in his new role as Charlie Hillier, diplomat. Surely, even Gardiner’s pull couldn’t save him when the Department discovered that a middle-aged desk jockey with no relevant experience had been sent to Havana? He imagined the Canadian ambassador placing an angry call to Ottawa, demanding Charlie’s immediate recall after their first meeting. With his stomach bubbling with anxiety, he slid the passport back into his pocket and looked out the window for solace.

  “Immigration cards.” Charlie looked up as the flight attend­ant thrust a four-by-six card at him. Forcing himself to examine the Spanish side of the form, he was pleased he was able to decipher most of the instructions. He had struggled for years to upgrade his high-school French to a working level, and he had felt some of the old angst returning during those first Spanish lessons. It didn’t help that his class of six included a cocky young trade officer headed to Madrid, who had the galling habit of chuckling every time Charlie tried to spit out a sentence. His neck muscles tensed as he remembered the time — not long after his passport photo was taken, as he recalled — that he had been singled out for the third person singular of comer, and the overwhelming urge he had felt to pounce over the table and beat the smirking little bastard to death with his Spanish reader.