The Old Man(85)

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.

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.