Exceptional Circumstances

by Bartleman, James;

  “I don’t think many new Canadians would agree.”

  “Why don’t you ask them? Their answers might surprise you.”

  “Did you ask to see your parents after you were arrested?”

  “No I didn’t. I don’t ever want to see them.”

  “Not even if you knew you were going to be handed over to the Colombians who will torture and kill you?”

  “There you go again, trying to scare me. I know we’re not on our way to Colombia. Where do they find guys like you? But for the sake of argument, to answer your real question, even if I knew I would be captured and sent to Colombia, I still would have participated in our revolutionary action. It’s my way of sacrificing my life for oppressed people everywhere, not just in Quebec, but in Colombia and everywhere else in Latin America and Africa. And if you want to talk about values, what’s worse? Killing one man, like that Quebec minister, to free a whole society, or sending someone to a country like Colombia to be tortured to save the life of a hostage?”

  “I don’t accept your premise that killing a minister will bring about a free society,” I said. “Quebec and Canada are already free.”

  “You’re just avoiding my question. You don’t want to admit that freeing a whole society is a noble goal and sending someone off to be tortured reflects the workings of sick minds.”

  “I didn’t make the decision to send you to Colombia.”

  “You mean like the Nazi death camp guards who said they were only obeying orders?”

  “But I didn’t kill Minister Jolicoeur. You’re the one who has to accept the consequences for your actions.”

  “And so do you, if we’re really going to Bogota.”

  “Would you like something to eat?” the steward asked her, interrupting our conversation.

  “Do you have any red wine to go with the main course?”

  “There’s only one course and there’s no wine. This is a military flight.”

  After dinner, Sanchez fell asleep, waking up six hours later. “You’re not a cop are you?” she said.

  “No, I’m a Foreign Service officer.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I work for the Department of External Affairs —in other countries they’d call it the foreign ministry.”

  “Why is a Foreign Service officer doing this and not a cop?”

  “Because I wanted to give you a last chance to say where Peabody was before you’re turned over to the Colombians.”

  “Are you a priest on the side?”

  “No I told you. I’m a Foreign Service officer.”

  “What do Foreign Service officers do?”

  “We staff embassies and high commissions abroad and work at pretty much everything when we’re back in Ottawa.”

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “A few months in Colombia and a few months in Cuba.”

  “Did you learn Spanish?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “I’m trying to save your life.”

  “I don’t believe you. You’re really just a cop disguised as a Foreign Service officer — and your plan isn’t working. You can tell the pilot to turn this plane around and take me back to Montreal.”

  “But I’m a civilian. I didn’t have to come on this trip. I could have left you in the hands of the police. But I wanted to talk sense to you.”

  “’I think you’re lying.”

  “You’re probably right. Maybe just a little. But I’m glad I came anyway.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I’ve had the chance to meet you. I like you.”

  “Even if I’ve just killed someone?”

  “Even if you’d just killed someone.”

  “You think you’re funny.”

  “You think you have all the answers.”

  There was nothing more to say and I drifted off to sleep, to wake up with a start to the roar of the crowd chasing the gamine through the streets of downtown Bogota. It took a few seconds to realise it was just the noise of the plane’s engines. I looked out the window to see the sun rising over the Andes. I thought of the dirty war being fought in the jungles below the clouds. I thought of Rojas and the discussion we had in the church and missed opportunities. I thought of the time, the week before, when I walked home late at night from the ninth floor, past the Parliament Buildings lit up in the full moon. Military helicopters were flying up the Ottawa River, bringing fresh troops into the besieged city. Soldiers stepped out of the shadows, rifles at the ready, demanding that I identify myself and explain what I am doing out alone so late at night. I could have been in Bogota … or Havana. I thought of what the future held in store for Sanchez.

  The prime minister told Cabinet that once the crisis was over, the government would restore democratic rights and freedoms, and hopefully never have to treat its citizens in such an arbitrary way again. But he should have qualified his remarks by adding “until the next terrorist crisis comes along.” When that crisis occurred, we would once again chase dehumanized enemies like gamines down the streets and embrace the suspension of rights and freedoms. A population under threat couldn’t care less about torture directives. After all, people are as innately cruel as kind and loving, and history shows it doesn’t take much to cut through the veneer of civilization to reach the depths below. But maybe Canadians would care if they knew why people became torturers.

  There’s no shortage of literature on the subject. Great writers like André Malraux, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler saw torture through the eyes of torturer and victim. Some people use torture to extract information to save lives and protect property … as in Canada’s own torture directive. Some do it to defend the nation and preserve family values. Some do it because other democratic counties like the United States, France, and Israel resort to it in their wars. Some do it because they think it’s a short term expedient — a means to an end — the end being to safeguard a way of life, a way of life in which there’ll be no need for future torture directives. That’s what Garfield Whitcombe and his advisers think it’s all about, but sometimes the end never comes and the means become the end.

  The police say torture acts as a deterrent to terrorism. Psychologists say torturers are usually ordinary people who start by slapping around their victims, are rewarded by their peers for their actions, and eventually commit more acts of abuse. Torturers are also ordinary people who get a chance to play God, to dominate, to humiliate, to make suffer, to possess physically, to break spirits, to destroy identities, to look deep into souls, to search for the buried self, to rape, to make scream, to hear cries for mercy but to hit again and again until the tortured says anything, anything at all, incriminating friends, enemies, the local butcher, the priest, anyone at all to make the pain stop if only for a while as the police round up the incriminated to torture them until they give up useless information. Or maybe they just do it to have fun, to have some laughs.

  I am certain the Canadian public would care if they knew these things. That’s why the drafters of the torture directive took pains to say Canadians would not do the torturing themselves, nor would they encourage others to torture — although occasionally they might submit well considered questions to the foreign torturers to be sure they didn’t waste time flogging some poor sod with a half-inch-thick flayed electrical cord for nothing. Or perhaps, if no one noticed — or if they noticed but didn’t mind — they would watch the torturers at work from behind a one-way mirror as “interested observers,” divorcing themselves from the screams and blood and guts in the best Canadian moralistic tradition as they waited for the answers.

  Minister Hankey was right when he said adopting the torture directive would mean Canada had legitimized its practice and increased the sum total of evil in the world. I wondered if the minister of Public Safety and his advisers had given these considerations any thought. But if they had, I wonder if they really believed it was possible to separate using information from a torture victim, i
n vaguely defined exceptional circumstances, from the horror inflicted on another human being — guilty or innocent. I wonder if they knew that in making torture legitimate, they were introducing corrosive rot into the fabric of good old Canada, eroding its moral core and turning it into a country absent of honour, decency, and compassion.

  I looked at Sanchez sleeping peacefully, a small smile on her lips, convinced that when she woke up the plane would be approaching Dorval Airport, the attempt to trick her into revealing Peabody’s hidden locale abandoned. I now regretted cultivating such close relations with her. I had sullied the memory of Minister Jolicoeur. She had, after all, helped murder him. No, it was worse than murder. She had helped execute him. Murders were acts of emotion, revenge, greed, hatred, jealously, anger. But executions are carried out for cold, impersonal reasons of state or to serve ideological goals. They occupy a different and lower category of abomination.

  At dawn, Sanchez woke up, smiled, and said good morning, still under the spell of our human contact. I said good morning, but in such a way she knew something had come between us while she slept. She told the steward she was hungry, but after he brought her breakfast, she saw the Andes from her window, and set her tray aside. The plane came down and circled Bogota in preparation for landing at El Dorado Airport. The skies were clear with scattered clouds. The Tequendama River, its waters black and filthy, flowed westward to the Tequendama Falls where it dumped the raw sewage of five million people into the pristine jungles below. Vast barrios spread like giant metastatic cancers into the forested slopes stretching off into the distance. On sidewalks in downtown Bogota good people beat gamines. In prisons and military caserns throughout the city owned by the devil, good family men tortured the guilty and innocent alike. Afterwards, they went home, ate their dinners and played with their children.

  Sanchez was crying but I didn’t offer her comfort. I had never believed she knew where Peabody was hidden. She would be tortured and killed for nothing. But Jolicoeur was also killed for nothing. The plane landed and taxied to an isolated part of runway where an unmarked van and the embassy car with Alfonso at the wheel was waiting. The secret police were outside when the steward opened door. They came in without comment and dragged her out, clubbing her with their open hands as a sign of what was to come. The RCMP constable looked shaken, out of his league, but he followed them outside. I waited until everyone was gone, then took my bag and greeted Alfonso, who neither said hello nor smiled. He drove me to a hotel and departed, still silent. The next morning, before I boarded the plane, I extended my hand to Alfonso, but he didn’t take it.

  The following day, I reported for work on the ninth floor and Longshaft came to see me. He asked me no questions about the flight, but glanced at my face and told me to take a few days off. I was at home watching television when a political commentator came on the air. As the national anthem played in the background, he said the Che Guevara cell had been located and Peabody was alive. A police negotiator was talking to the kidnappers. The kidnappers insisted they be flown to Cuba as a condition for freeing their prisoner. An hour later, I saw the cell members, their faces covered with red scarves, hustling Peabody to a car that sped off down the road escorted by police cruisers to Doral Airport.

  I was elated. Sanchez had told the Colombians where Peabody was to be found! I was wrong when I thought she didn’t know where he was hidden! She would live! I watched the car with the terrorists and their prisoner drive up to a Cubana plane on the tarmac and come to a halt. I saw Peabody emerge from the car, walk to a police car, and be driven away. The terrorists went up the ramp stairs to the top, turned around, held their right arms aloft with clenched fist Black Power salutes, and tore their masks off with their left hands. I recognized the FLQ members I met at the Riviera hotel in Havana.

  I hurried to ninth floor to join the celebration in progress. Longshaft, his face ashen, came in and motioned for me to follow him to an adjoining office. Before he could speak, I said Sanchez had obviously told the Colombians where to find Peabody and would not die. Longshaft handed me a sheaf of intercepted messages from the headquarters of the Colombian secret police to its outlying stations, and walked out of the room. I read them with mounting revulsion and horror. They described the interrogation of Sanchez over a three-day period — beatings, rapes, electric shocks, and the disposal of her body over the sea. They would send a report to the RCMP and expected their Canadian friends to thank them for their fraternal collaboration. I broke down in tears because they also said Sanchez had never known where Peabody was being held. She had been telling the truth all along.

  Epilogue

  I went home to spend Christmas in Penetang and to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Although I didn’t talk about my time on the Task Force, my family guessed that something had gone badly wrong and didn’t bother me. Eventually, grandpapa got me alone to find out what had happened. I said I had done unethical things in carrying out my duties and was ashamed of myself. Grandpapa didn’t ask for the details but shook his head in disgust. “You’ve never been at ease in that diplomat job of yours in Ottawa,” he said. “Maybe you were trying too hard to prove you were just as good as a white man. Just remember, no one appointed you spokesman for the Métis people. Just be yourself. That’s all you need to be happy.”

  He didn’t say anything else, but I understood what he meant. Corinne, who was working as a nurse in Midland, came for lunch on New Year’s Day, and we were married as soon as my divorce from Heather came through. With Burump’s help, I became an aid officer, and she accompanied me on my next posting to Dhaka, Bangladesh, where I worked in the development assistance section of the high commission. Although she took time off every time a baby came along, she always found work as nurse in our subsequent assignments in the newly independent countries of sub-Sahara Africa.

  I never returned to the ninth floor, never found out if Longshaft continued sending junior diplomats to Canada’s embassies in Latin America to report back to him on international terrorism, and, thankfully, was never invited to join the Guardians. I never got another promotion, but was rewarded in other ways. Helping street kids was one cause I adopted, and there were others. If it hadn’t been for the nightmares, life would have been good.

  As for Heather, I ran into her once in the Rideau Mall, on the other side of the street from where the Daley Building used to be before they tore it down to make room for a tower of condominium apartments. It was in the summer of 2001, not long after I had retired, and I was back in Ottawa getting ready to attend the annual get-together of the officers who had joined the Department in 1966. It was the first time I’d seen her since Cuba. We sat down over coffee and talked about the matters old friends, and people who aren’t old friends and who haven’t seen each other for years, are apt to discuss. She didn’t comment on my bald head and I didn’t tell her she looked years younger than she should have for someone her age. Neither of us referred to our time together in Colombia and Cuba.

  “How’s the family?” I asked, assuming she had one. She told me her family was well. She and her husband — they were both teachers — had retired and spent their summers at the lake and their winters at their condo in Florida, just like her parents used to do. Their children had grown up and left home, and, as a special treat, she had brought her grandchildren from Winnipeg to show them the sights in Canada’s national capital.

  “And how’s your family?” she asked in return, assuming I had one since she had one. From the friendly but indifferent tone of her voice, I gathered she really didn’t care. She just wanted to be polite. I told her I had been married for years and our kids had grown up and moved away. “Grandpapa and my parents passed away a long time ago,” I added, “and my wife and I moved back to live in their house in Penetang after I retired.”

  We both got up to leave, exchanging addresses, saying we had to get together some day, we had to stay in touch, time went by so fast — all the empty formalities people say and do w
hen they don’t want to see each other again. She didn’t ask about Bella before she left … but that didn’t surprise me. I then went off to the reunion, looking forward to seeing Dan O’Shea and Gregoire Harding again, and to hang out with individuals who had meant so much to me in that first wonderful summer in the Department before everything went wrong.

  A Conversation with the Author

  Tell me about your novel.

  Exceptional Circumstances is primarily a tale of love, espionage, and intrigue. Luc Cadotte, the protagonist from Penetang, a small town on Georgian Bay, is at heart a decent person. He feels compassion for the poor and marginalized, but he is anxious to prove a Métis can do as well in the world of diplomacy as any white person and allows ambition get the better of him. He leaves his home to attend the University of Ottawa, and on graduation joins the prestigious Department of External Affairs. He serves in Colombia and Cuba from 1968 to 1970 and in Ottawa as a member of the Task Force on International Terrorism managing the FLQ crisis of October 1970. He makes friends with one of Latin America’s most charismatic guerrilla leaders, a defrocked Colombian priest, but inadvertently betrays him to the CIA. He befriends a FLQ terrorist involved in the kidnapping and murder of a Quebec government minister, but delivers her into the hands of the Colombian secret police to be tortured and questioned. In the end, he seeks and finds redemption.

  But my novel is more than a stand-alone adventure story. For those who wish to dig deeper — using this section as a guide — it also represents the post 9/11 world of diminished civil liberties. Luc becomes Everyman in a mediaeval morality play — a mixture of good and bad striving to affirm his identity, to advance his career, and to find the right wife. In his professional life, he interacts with characters that see no evil or see no good, are cold war warriors, are out to save the world, are tormented politicians, are fanatical ideologues, or are crass egoists with bloody hands. In his social life, he meets three women, the first is sweet and lovable, the second is a social-climber, and the third is a nymphomaniac. Throughout, he discusses with his fellow characters the pros and cons of some of the great ethical questions of the post-9/11 world as they affect all Canadians.