Alan Spencer looked at his watch. It was nearly six o’clock. He put down his glass of red tea and said in Libyan Arabic, “It’s been a pleasure to see you again. But now my wife will have returned home and be expecting me. Please excuse me.” He bowed to Abdul Othmani, and then to Mahmoud Tanzir, stood, and left the restaurant.
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?”
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.