The Old Man

by Thomas Perry

  He had never mentioned to his Libyan friends that Marie was a pianist, and that she spent most afternoons in a practice room at the music academy near their apartment. He was always aware that the people hunting for him would be using everything they knew about Zoe McDonald to find him. They would know she could never give up the piano for long.

  She had cut and dyed her hair, changed the way she dressed, her name, and her nationality, but people in intelligence knew that as soon as a fugitive stopped feeling that every second of life was a desperate pursuit, her own tastes and preferences would begin to reassert themselves.

  He had told her that having a piano in the apartment was out of the question. Any intelligence man would periodically check the records of the high-end piano manufacturers and pay visits to a few recent purchasers. But in a big city there were alternatives. She had visited a number of places around Toronto where it was possible to rent a space with a good piano. She had settled on a music studio where few children took lessons, but adults practiced for Royal Conservatory–level examinations or prepared for regional competitions. The academy kept her surrounded by people who were talented, and that prevented her from standing out. The studio was comfortable and had a couple of break rooms where she and the others could chat or rest. The building was a reasonable walk from their apartment, and in the rain or cold it was a one-stop subway ride.

  He would probably not have agreed to this arrangement, but the place had the advantage of keeping her out and busy every afternoon. Alan used his time each day on activities that he didn’t let Marie know much about.

  Alan spent a portion of every day reviving his fluency in Arabic. He began the reawakening of his linguistic memory by completing online commercial language courses. They included some modernisms and slang he had not heard before. The people who had designed the courses seemed to be heavily interested in Middle Eastern business language, customs, and modes of address. Alan found a few Libyan films. During the Gaddafi era it became dangerous to make movies, which all had to be approved by Gaddafi himself, so few films were made. He found one made in 1972 called The Destiny Is Very Hard, and another called The Road, both made by Libyan directors using Libyan actors, so he watched them over and over again, trying to recover his accent.

  After a few months of intensive study, he was ready to search Toronto for Libyan exiles. Toronto had always been one of the places where people who fled dictatorships, wars, and chaos stopped running. And in his experience, as soon as exiles came to rest they began to seek each other out.

  He knew that most Libyan exiles would attend a Sunni mosque of the Maliki school. He put together a list of Sunni mosques and began to visit them, listening for Libyan-accented Arabic. There was a concentration of mosques and Islamic schools around North York, so he walked the neighborhoods in the district. Muslims tried to live within walking distance of a mosque, so he spent many hours simply walking, looking, and listening to people speak.

  He found a small halal restaurant that served good kefta and Moroccan merguez and fattoush. The restaurant attracted people accustomed to sitting at tables in the afternoon talking and drinking tea. He spent his first few visits drinking tea alone and eavesdropping on conversations while he held a book in his hands. After a few visits sitting at a table near a group of men about his own age, he noticed that one of the men brought a friend, and there were not enough chairs for all of them. Another man who seemed to be the host asked Alan in English if he minded if they took a chair from his table.

  Alan replied easily in Arabic, “I would be happy to give up as many chairs as you like. I’m alone.”

  The man switched back to Libyan Arabic. “If you would like to join us, we’ll move the two tables together and we can all stretch out a little.” This man introduced himself as Abdul Othmani. He took charge and asked Alan his name, which he said was Roger Thorne, then introduced him to each of the others, one at a time.

  They behaved as though Alan were an honored guest. The conversation was about the persistent cold this winter. When the conversation turned to local politics, a few of the men became reticent. Abdul Othmani’s friend Mahmoud Tanzir whispered to Othmani, who laughed. Othmani said to Spencer: “Roger, you aren’t a government informant, are you?”

  “Me?” said Roger Thorne. “I’m too old to be a government informer. I’m here because I’m particular about my food.”

  They seemed to be willing to take a chance on him after that, as though they realized how ridiculous it would be to plant an agent to spy on a group of elderly men drinking tea. He learned that they were all exiles from the Gaddafi government crackdowns of the 1970s, and most of them had completed their working lives as skilled tailors in Toronto men’s stores and retired. Mahmoud Tanzir and Abdul Othmani had emigrated at the same time from the same street in Tripoli, and were old friends.

  Roger Thorne’s fluency in Arabic had to be explained. He said his parents had been Canadian archaeologists who had been based in the eastern part of Libya near Benghazi. When he was a young child they had left him in the homes of Libyan friends while they were away in the field. They had spent months at a time studying the twelve-thousand-year-old rock paintings in the Acacus Mountains.

  Roger Thorne began showing up at the Salaam Restaurant nearly every day to join the conversations at the table. Othmani and Tanzir were always there, joined by a constantly changing group of friends and acquaintances.

  During the same period Alan Spencer began to devote time to relief organizations. He visited a number of Toronto groups, talked to administrators and volunteers, and read everything he could find on the subject of Canadian relief efforts in the Middle East. Finally he selected the Canadian People’s Relief Corps and became a member. He began by giving the group a five-thousand-dollar donation. It was large enough to bring him a personal thank-you note from the director, but not enough to cause much curiosity.

  The Canadian People’s Relief Corps’ mission was to organize, fund, and equip teams of relief workers and send them where humanitarian aid was most urgently needed. They provided water purification systems, generators, food, clothing, and materials for temporary shelters. If the country was infested with mosquitos they brought mosquito netting. If the region was hungry but stable they brought well-digging equipment, seeds, tools, and even imported livestock. And no matter where they went, they brought medical supplies, doctors, nurses, technicians, and trained volunteers.

  The organization had been operating for over twenty years, and Spencer saw references in the literature to teams that had been to Bosnia, India, Timor, Bangladesh, Mozambique, Mali, Rwanda, Nigeria, Liberia, Ukraine, Syria, Eritrea, Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.

  During his second month Spencer donated another five thousand dollars. After the third month he made the monthly donation permanent and began attending meetings. He never spoke during the business portions of the proceedings, which were usually reports on current missions in various countries or deliberations about future missions, but he sometimes stayed after with a few others to discuss the issues without speaking publicly.

  On one occasion he happened to be talking to some of the board members about missions to the Middle East when the president brought out a letter from an official in Iraq. Spencer said, “I can probably tell you what it says.”

  When the president handed the letter to him he read it aloud in English and handed it back. The director asked him why he spoke Arabic. He repeated the story he had concocted for Abdul Othmani and his friends about his parents bringing him to Libya as a child.

  A month later, after a regular meeting of the Toronto group, the director introduced Spencer to a pair of doctors who were planning to take a large group on a mission to North Africa in a few months. One of them was a woman named Labiba Zidane. While they were speaking about the difficulty of operating in Libya, Dr. Zidane unexpectedly switched to Arabic.

  “The director says you’re fluent in Arabic,” she said in Libyan Arabic. “Are you?”

&nb
sp; He replied in Arabic. “I am only a poor student of the language, but I can get by in most situations. And you are a physician. May I ask what your specialty is?”

  She smiled. “My practice is in pediatrics but I have some experience in infectious diseases.”

  The other doctor, Andre Leclerc, was French Canadian. He looked at them in amused puzzlement. But the pair kept talking in rapid Arabic.

  Dr. Zidane said, “How old are you?”

  “I’m sixty,” Alan said.

  “Healthy? No trouble with your heart or lungs?”

  “No trouble.”

  “Would you consider coming with us to Libya in the fall? We desperately need volunteers.”

  “I’m not sure. What sort of work would I do?”

  “Triage, most of the time. Often people in the remote areas or the poor in the cities don’t see a doctor from one year to the next, so they come in large numbers. You would greet the patients and ask them if they have any specific problems, ask them their names, then make them understand where to sit to wait, and take their temperature and blood pressure. Obviously, if someone is terribly ill you would take them to the front of the line.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “You’ll need a few weeks of training, and you can think while we train you. It’s several months away.”

  Dr. Leclerc said, “You two sound as though you’ve known each other for some time.”

  “No, but we have a common acquaintance—with Arabic. This is someone we want,” she said. She turned back to Alan. “Do you have a passport?”

  “I do,” Alan said. “But I’ll have to see if it’s even current.”

  “Our staff will take care of that for you,” said the director. “Bring it with you this week, and we’ll include you in the request for all of the entry visas.”

  “But I haven’t decided,” said Spencer.

  “Having a visa is a precaution,” said Dr. Zidane. “And we’d better see which shots you need. I promise they won’t hurt a bit.”

  As Alan Spencer walked to the subway station he thought about what had happened tonight. He had gotten the invitation that any clandestine operator would have wanted at this stage. Later, if Dr. Zidane doubted him, she would not fail to remind herself that Spencer had not come to her and Dr. Leclerc. They had approached him and tried to talk him into going. He would make sure they asked him again in English in front of more witnesses before he assented.

  31

  It was summer. To Marie Spencer the Toronto winter had seemed harder than the ones in Chicago. The snow had lasted into April, and then there was a period of cold rain and dark skies that seemed to last a long time before the sunny days arrived.

  She had always loved summer—not just the gentle weather, but the celebration of renewal. Now she lived with a man who never had to concern himself with whether he could afford something—a play, a concert, a train trip across a continent. He let her spend summer days working at things she loved to do, and the long, mild summer evenings with him enjoying the city.

  During the summer she had made good progress at the academy learning the piano pieces she had wanted to master, and Alan always seemed to be reading and studying, or going out to work with Canadian charities. He never said much about the charities, but she knew enough about him now to understand what he must be doing. He was very premeditated, and he was probably burnishing his legend. She’d read somewhere that was what they called a false identity in his old line of work—a legend. If he were ever under suspicion by the Canadian authorities, he couldn’t just be a reclusive businessman. He had to be a person with acquaintances and contacts, and a record of virtue. During that summer he seemed to be thriving, as he had not been since Chicago. Physically and mentally, he was at a peak.

  She appreciated the care that he took to remain healthy and strong. She also appreciated the fact that he didn’t bore her with the details. She knew he lifted weights and worked out in a gym somewhere on King Street. There was also a martial arts dojo where he trained, but she didn’t know precisely where that was either, other than the fact that it was near a restaurant that he liked. He had been going to the dojo, taking lessons or classes or whatever martial arts people did, for at least four months before she knew it. She had noticed a few bruises on him, and some scrapes, and asked him how they’d happened.

  They talked about everything—or, she did, really. He spent most of their conversations listening. He would comment or ask questions, say he understood, and let her move to another topic. He almost never offered the details of his own day. His talk tended to be about things he had observed or learned while out in the city, or interesting articles he had read. She liked these anecdotes because they widened her view of the city without forcing her to do much work. At that time she was learning the Rach 3, the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto no. 3 in D Minor, and that was enough to think about.

  On September 30, Marie came home at six and discovered that Alan was not sitting on the couch waiting for her, as she had expected. She closed the door and walked through the apartment calling him. Then she looked at her cell phone, but found no messages or missed calls from him. So she put away her music and went to the kitchen to see about preparing to cook dinner.

  Then she noticed that Alan’s laptop was open on the dining room table and plugged into a wall socket. She was curious, so she walked to the table and looked. There was a disc in the laptop, its jewel case sitting beside it, but the computer was asleep. She refreshed it, and played the disc.

  Alan had recorded a videodisc of himself sitting there at the table. When she first saw his face, there was a half second of pleasure, but then she saw that his expression was not happy.

  “Hi, Marie. I’m aware that leaving a recording is a terrible way to tell you this. I can only promise you that there was no way that wasn’t terrible. I am on a plane right now, about ten hours into a fourteen-hour flight. I’m part of a mission to deliver aid and medical care to some people who need it and deserve to receive it. The work is real. There are forty-six of us, and I’m certain that none of the others have ulterior motives.

  “As for my motives, I’m sure you know what they are. The morning when we had to get out of the cabin and try to escape through the snow, I realized we were about to move to our last option. We both knew by then that my giving the money to the government had not changed anybody’s mind. And we knew that they would never stop looking for us. But that morning, I realized that I couldn’t let things go on much longer. Beginning that day, I changed what I was doing.

  “I apologize for the secrecy. I had to hide my plans from you. I knew that you would never agree. And I knew that if I told you in person even ten minutes before I was on the plane and in the air, you would try to stop me.

  “I’ve now reached the point where if you called anyone or made any attempt to get the plane stopped, I would certainly be caught and killed. I don’t know how long this will take. This trip is supposed to last for six months, but where we’re going, plans have to be made day to day.

  “I’ve left you the things you’ll need if you have to leave the apartment while I’m gone, even if it means leaving Canada too. You’ll find a pocketbook in a drawer in the bedroom with Canadian and American cash in it. There’s also a Vermont driver’s license and a bank card in the name Julia Larsen with your picture on it. There’s a balance in that bank account of a little over two million dollars. There’s also a safe-deposit box key in the purse for the box at that bank. The American passport is the last one I got with your picture in it, so don’t lose it.

  “I hate to sound corny, but destroy this DVD. It could get us both killed. The only good way to do it is to burn it. Thank you for everything, and good luck. Good-bye.”

  While the image dissolved into static emptiness, Marie cried. It wasn’t the sort of crying that made a small drop or two well up in a woman’s eyes that she blotted with a piece of Kleenex. She wept with deep, shuddering spasms, rocking back and forth.

&n
bsp; She knew exactly where he was going, without having to look up the possible destinations of a fourteen-hour flight or the excursions of Toronto relief organizations. He was going back to that horrible place because he liked the odds. If he killed Faris Hamzah, then Faris Hamzah would stop demanding his death and sending killers, and she and his family would be safe. If Faris Hamzah killed him, then Hamzah would stop sending killers, and she and his family would be safe.

  She loved him, but she hated him. He didn’t have to do this. They had been in a new country, safe and happy, for six months. He had manipulated her, fooled her again. He had never stopped manipulating her. And now he had left her totally alone in a foreign country, and she was scared and angry.

  She ejected the DVD from the computer, broke it in her hands, and broke it again. She carried it to the kitchen, put the pieces in a small iron frying pan, slid the pan into the oven, and turned on the broiler to melt them. She turned on the stove-top fan to get rid of the smell. Then she began to search the apartment for guns.

  She found herself annoyed at Alan for not having guns in the apartment. If he had any left, he must have taken them with him. He undoubtedly thought she would decide to kill herself, and so he would try to make it less likely that she could carry it off.

  Her frustration and irritation grew as she searched. She looked in every drawer, every cabinet, and everyplace she had ever seen him hide a gun. She was at it for hours, and then realized it was nearly midnight. She was tired, and she was hungry. She went into the kitchen and ran water in the frying pan. She tried to scrape the charred mess out of the pan. She pried most of what was left of the plastic into the garbage, then conceded that the pan was now unusable, and threw that in the trash too.

  She sat and thought about the relationship, from the moment he had called to ask about the room she’d advertised in Chicago until now. The big moment, the time when everything had changed, was when he had kidnapped her from the apartment and driven away. That was when her secret had begun to matter again.