THE TESTAMENT OF AL-HARIQA
CHAPTER FIVE
1
Adnan al-Rafii woke at six in the morning, a full half-hour before the alarm was due to ring, after a broken night of sleep filled with blurred dreams of narrow alleyways and faces whose features he could never quite recall clearly upon waking. He sat on the edge of his bed in the faint darkness before dawn and looked at the small bag he had hurriedly packed the night before, waiting by the door, ready for departure.
Before leaving his bedroom, he returned to the drawer from which he had taken the old cardboard box only the night before, and drew out the single photograph he had kept from the summer of 1976: a picture of himself as a thin young man standing beside Hajj Tawfiq in front of the shop. For a moment he wondered whether it was wise to carry it with him on a journey shadowed by dangers whose true scale he still did not know. In the end, however, he carefully slipped it into the inner pocket of his carry-on bag, wrapped in a soft tissue to protect it from any friction that might damage it. He felt he needed the photograph with him—a small talisman, a constant reminder of the real reason behind this entire journey, amid all the doubts and threats that had begun closing in around him.
He switched on his phone, which he had kept turned off throughout the night, and watched the screen slowly come alive with a backlog of notifications: messages from Sara confirming the cancellation of his appointments; a message from one of the board members wishing him ‘a safe journey’; and a message from Karim, his son, sent barely two hours earlier: ‘Dad, why are you on Do Not Disturb on WhatsApp at this hour? Call me as soon as you wake up, please.’
Adnan felt the weight of guilt pressing against his chest. He had not yet told Karim anything real, settling instead for Sara’s brief message about an ‘urgent family matter,’ sent to him through work channels, thinking it would be enough to ease his son’s anxiety for a few days. But now, from the tone of the message, he understood that Karim had not been convinced by the vague explanation.
He called him at once, despite the early hour, knowing that his son, by the nature of his medical studies, was accustomed to rising very early.
‘Dad! Finally. What’s going on? Why did you suddenly cancel all your appointments, and where are you going?’ Karim’s voice came tense, carrying a genuine anxiety he made no attempt to conceal this time.
Adnan sighed deeply. ‘Karim, I want you to listen to me calmly. There’s nothing that calls for serious alarm, but I’m travelling to Beirut this morning, for an important personal matter connected… with our family’s past.’
‘Our family’s past? Dad, you never talk like this—so cryptically. Tell me the truth.’ Karim fell silent for a moment, then added more sharply, ‘Does this have anything to do with that strange question you asked me two days ago, about that man, Hajj Tawfiq?’
2
After a brief hesitation, Adnan decided to share part of the truth with his son, though not all of it. He told him about the legal letter from Damascus, the old testament, and the name of Hajj Tawfiq al-Nabulsi, which had suddenly resurfaced after forty years of silence. Deliberately, he left out the details of the anonymous call and the veiled threat he had received; he did not want to increase his son’s anxiety more than necessary, especially since he still had no clear picture of the true scale of the danger, assuming there was any danger at all.
Karim listened in prolonged silence, then finally said, his voice edged with deep concern: ‘Dad, this sounds incredibly complicated and strange. Why not let the lawyers handle it from a distance? Why do you have to travel there yourself, at your age, to a region that isn’t entirely safe anymore?’
‘Because this concerns me personally, my son, and I cannot truly understand it from behind a desk in Frankfurt. There are questions that have remained suspended inside me for forty-five years, and I feel I owe it to myself—and to the memory of a man who taught me almost everything I know about life and work—to finally learn what happened to him.’
‘And what if there is real danger? You’re all I have left of my immediate family, Dad, since Mum died.’
The mention of his mother, gone for years, was enough to stir in Adnan’s chest a sharp, familiar pain. Still, he tried to answer as steadily as he could. ‘I promise I’ll be careful, Karim. I’ll stay in touch with you every day throughout this trip. And if I sense any real danger, I’ll come back immediately. I promise you that.’
Karim was not entirely convinced, as his long silence made clear before he finally answered: ‘All right. But call me when you get to the airport, when you get to the hotel, and every evening before you go to sleep. If you don’t, I’ll take the first flight to Beirut myself.’
Adnan smiled despite the anxiety tightening inside him, moved by his son’s sincere concern. ‘Deal.’
‘Dad, one last question.’ Karim hesitated before continuing. ‘Do you wish Mum were still here, to help you with this? I mean… you haven’t talked about her much in recent years, but I know there are things from your past you never shared with me, or even with her, I suspect.’
The words were enough to awaken in Adnan a mixture of feelings he had not expected at that particular moment: a deep longing for his late wife, Ingrid, the German woman he had loved and married a few years after settling in Frankfurt, and who had died eight years earlier from an aggressive illness that gave her little time; and guilt because, as Karim had perceptively noticed, he had never fully shared with her the details of his life before they met, as though he had kept part of himself locked away even from those closest to him.
‘Perhaps, my son. Ingrid was a wise woman, and she would have known how to advise me at a moment like this.’ He paused, then added with startling honesty, ‘But perhaps it is better that she isn’t here to witness this. She would have worried about me terribly—more than you do, even.’
3
On his way to the airport, in the car he had taken alone rather than asking his regular driver to accompany him—a deliberate decision intended to reduce the number of people who knew the details of his journey—Adnan reviewed everything he had gathered so far: the letter from the lawyer Ziad Salloum, the anonymous call the previous night, and the growing sense that a complicated web of old interests and secrets had begun moving again after decades of apparent stillness.
He took an ordinary taxi from a stand near his company’s building instead of his private car or any service booked in his name, an added precaution that felt strange even as he took it, as though he were behaving in a way he had seen only in spy films, never in his own quiet, orderly life. But the threatening call had been enough to plant in him a seed of caution he had never known before, a caution that was growing rapidly with every passing hour.
He had sent a message to the lawyer Ziad Salloum telling him his expected arrival time in Beirut and his intention to travel overland to Damascus a day or two later, asking him to arrange a face-to-face meeting as soon as possible. The lawyer replied quickly, briefly, but with a genuine note of welcome: ‘I’ll be pleased to meet you in person, Mr. al-Rafii. I’ll arrange all the necessary details and make sure the entire process is as safe and confidential as possible.’
Adnan reached the airport a full two hours before his flight, an old habit acquired through years of frequent business travel. He sat in the relatively quiet business lounge, sipping a cup of coffee whose taste he could not enjoy as he normally did, his mind occupied with every possibility that might be waiting for him at the far end of this journey.
As Adnan sat in the departure lounge at Frankfurt Airport, waiting for the boarding call, his phone rang again. Once more, the number was unfamiliar, but this time it carried a different international prefix from the number that had called him the night before.
He hesitated for a moment before answering, his heart beating faster, expecting the same voice to return. ‘Hello?’
But the voice this time was completely different: a woman’s voice, relatively young judging by its tone, speaking in a clear, quick, direct Lebanese accent.
‘Mr. Adnan al-Rafii?’
‘Yes. Who is this?’
‘My name doesn’t matter right now, sir. But I want to warn you—sincerely, not as a threat, as you may have received before. I know you’re travelling to Beirut today. Please be extremely careful about whom you trust there, especially anyone who approaches you claiming to be “helping” you with this file. Not everyone who appears to be a friend really is one.’
Adnan felt the familiar chill run through his body. ‘Who are you? And how do you know about my trip?’
‘I don’t have time to explain now, Mr. al-Rafii, but I’ll try to contact you again when the time is right. Just, please, keep the number this call came from, and don’t trust anyone who contacts you claiming to know me or know about this call until you verify for yourself who they are.’
‘Wait, please. Are you in danger? Does this have anything to do with the lawyer, Ziad Salloum?’
The voice hesitated, as though its owner were weighing her words with great care before answering. ‘I cannot confirm or deny anything about any particular person right now. All I can tell you is that this file, which you thought was merely a simple legal procedure, is far deeper and far more dangerous than you imagine, and that multiple parties—not just one—have been following every step you have taken since the moment you opened that letter.’
‘Multiple parties? Exactly how many?’
‘More than you think, and less organized than you fear, at the same time. That is all I can say for now.’ Adnan heard a low murmur in the background, something like traffic or the crush of a market, as though the woman were calling from a crowded public place. ‘I have to hang up now. Remember what I told you.’
The call ended before Adnan could ask another question, leaving him even more perplexed than the anonymous call the night before had. Who was this woman? Was she allied with the first threatening voice, or was she genuinely trying to warn him about an entirely different party? He immediately saved her number in his phone under a temporary name: ‘Caller – Beirut,’ adding a small note beside it with the date and time, an old habit acquired from years of negotiating sensitive deals, where he had learned that every tiny detail, however insignificant it might seem at the time, could later prove decisive.
4
After a relatively calm flight of less than four hours, the plane finally landed at Beirut International Airport beneath a clear, mild autumn sky. As Adnan stepped off the plane toward the arrivals hall, he felt a strange mixture of emotions: an old longing for the scent of this East he had left decades ago, mingled with a growing anxiety that had not left him since that mysterious call at the German airport.
He passed through customs with relative ease, using his German passport, which also carried a Lebanese entry visa he had obtained with striking speed thanks to old business connections in the region. He then emerged into the public arrivals hall, where a driver he had booked in advance through a trusted app was waiting with a small sign bearing his name.
On the way to the hotel, amid the familiar Beirut traffic, Adnan looked through the car window at a city that had changed enormously since the last time he had seen it, decades ago, when it had still belonged to the distant landscape of his childhood beyond Damascus’s al-Hariqa market, on a rare summer trip with his uncle. He saw a strange mixture of sleek modern skyscrapers standing beside buildings still bearing the scars of old wars that had never been fully repaired—walls pocked with bullet holes, their edges weathered and crumbling, beside enormous advertising signs for luxurious global brands. It was as though the city itself had still not decided, after all these decades, which of its many faces would become its enduring true face.
The car passed a broad square the driver pointed out with routine indifference. ‘Downtown, sir. It was completely rebuilt after the war, but people still talk about it as though it were an old scar—beautiful from the outside, but unable to hide the wound beneath.’ Adnan felt the weight of the passing remark more deeply than he expected. He thought it was an exact description of his own life, too: the confident smile he wore every morning in the meetings of his European board, while beneath it he concealed a wound that had never healed—the wound of a question left hanging for forty-five full years.
At last he reached the hotel he had booked, a tasteful mid-sized establishment in a relatively quiet part of the city, chosen precisely in search of some privacy away from the large hotels crowded with tourists and businesspeople. He checked in at the reception desk with the familiar professional smile of the young receptionist and received his room card, number 412, on the fourth floor.
5
Adnan rode the elevator alone, carrying his small bag, and as he approached his room at the end of the quiet corridor, he felt some relief at finally having arrived, even if only temporarily, somewhere he could rest for a while after a long day of mental and physical exhaustion.
He stopped in front of Room 412 and inserted the electronic key card into the lock, waiting for the familiar green light before pushing the door open and entering.
But he stopped abruptly at the threshold, frozen in place, his heart seeming to cease beating for a moment before resuming with twice the force.
The room was in complete disarray: the drawers had been pulled fully open, their contents scattered across the floor, even though he had not yet put anything in them because he had never entered the room before in his life. The bed was overturned, the pillows lay on the floor, and even a small picture that had been hanging on the wall had been removed and left askew, as though someone had searched behind it. Even the small safe, its unused digital lock still blank, stood wide open, as though whoever had searched the room had left no corner unchecked.
Adnan stood motionless in the doorway for several long moments, trying to take in what he was seeing, his heart pounding so hard he could almost hear it in his ears. He had arrived in the city barely half an hour earlier, and no one, apart from the hotel itself and the driver who had picked him up through a trusted app, knew the exact number of his room. Indeed, even he himself had known the room number only moments earlier, when the receptionist had just handed him the key card.
So how, by any conceivable logic, had this room already been searched—with such precision and thoroughness—before Adnan himself had set foot inside it even once?
6
Adnan instinctively stepped back out of the room and looked cautiously up and down the quiet, empty corridor, trying to determine whether whoever had made this mess was still nearby, hiding somewhere, or had left long ago, confident that no one would discover what had happened until it was too late.
He pulled out his phone with a slightly trembling hand and called the hotel reception desk directly.
‘Good evening. This is Adnan al-Rafii, Room 412. I need immediate assistance. There’s a serious problem in my room.’
The receptionist’s voice came back, somewhat unsettled by the unmistakable anxiety in Adnan’s voice. ‘Of course, sir. What exactly is the problem?’
‘My room. Someone has entered it and searched it completely. Everything has been turned upside down.’
There was a brief silence on the other end, followed by a clearly bewildered reply. ‘Sir, that… that’s impossible. You only arrived about half an hour ago, and we personally recorded your check-in. No one has entered the room since it was cleaned this morning. It was completely locked while waiting for your arrival, according to our records.’
‘Then how do you explain what I’m looking at right now?’ Adnan said sharply, though he had not intended to; the tension was beginning to overwhelm his usual composure.
‘I’ll send the security manager immediately, sir. Please stay where you are and don’t touch anything inside the room.’
7
Within a few minutes, the hotel’s security manager arrived, a man in his forties who looked calm but was visibly, genuinely unsettled as he inspected the room himself, photographing every detail with his phone and firing a rapid succession of questions at the receptionist through his radio.
After a quick examination, he returned to Adnan with a bewildered expression. ‘Mr. al-Rafii, to be completely honest with you, I’m utterly at a loss to explain what happened. The surveillance cameras in the corridor show that no one entered this room after the cleaning staff finished their work at eleven this morning—hours before you arrived—and up until the moment you personally entered it a short while ago. The door was not opened even once during that entire period, according to the electronic lock log itself, which records every opening with complete accuracy.’
Adnan felt a cold shiver travel through his entire body, far deeper than any ordinary fear caused by someone simply breaking into a hotel room. ‘That’s impossible. I can see the mess with my own eyes.’
‘I know, sir, and I don’t understand how to reconcile what you see with what our records show. I’ll have to notify the police, of course. We’ll open a full investigation, and we’ll move you immediately to another room in a completely different wing of the hotel, at no additional cost, naturally. We’ll also reinforce the security measures around it specifically.’
Trying to gather the scattered threads of his thoughts, Adnan asked, ‘Is there another way into this room besides the main door? A window, perhaps, or a connecting door to an adjoining room?’
The security manager thought for a moment, then gestured toward the large window overlooking a quiet side street. ‘There is a window, but we’re on the fourth floor, sir, and there’s no external staircase or connected balcony that anyone could use to reach it from outside. It’s practically impossible unless the intruder had professional climbing equipment. And even then, the building’s external surveillance cameras would have caught something. I’ve just checked them while speaking with you, and they show absolutely no unusual activity.’
Adnan shook his head, unconvinced, but equally unable to offer a better explanation. ‘Then how did this happen?’
‘I don’t know, sir, honestly. In fifteen years of working in this field, I’ve never encountered anything like this.’ He paused and looked at Adnan with curiosity mixed with unmistakable professional caution. ‘May I ask, sir, whether you have any enemies, or any legal or financial dispute that might explain why you were targeted in precisely this way? This wasn’t random. It looks extremely organized and very well funded.’
Adnan considered giving the full, honest answer, but chose to keep it as brief as possible. ‘Perhaps. I’m not entirely sure myself yet. I’m here regarding an old legal matter involving a family inheritance.’
The security manager studied him for a long moment, as though he knew that explanation contained barely half the truth, but he did not press further. He merely nodded with the professionalism of a man who had long ago learned not to involve himself in guests’ private affairs beyond what his work required.
The police arrived about half an hour later—two calm, professional officers who asked Adnan a long series of routine questions, recorded every detail carefully in small notebooks, and took additional photographs of the room from different angles. Yet their final conclusion differed little from the security manager’s own bewilderment: there was no sign of an actual break-in, no obvious unfamiliar fingerprints, no clear physical evidence on which a genuine investigation could be built. One of the officers promised, in the mildly indifferent routine tone that often characterized cases like this in a city overflowing with far larger and more urgent matters, that they would ‘open a file’ and contact him if anything new emerged. But from the tone of their voices, Adnan understood that he was unlikely to hear anything real from them after this.
‘Mr. al-Rafii,’ the first officer said before leaving, in a more serious tone than before, ‘if you have any personal or financial dispute that might be behind this, I strongly advise you to consider private security during your stay here. Beirut is relatively safe these days compared with previous years, but it’s clear that whoever is targeting you has resources and capabilities that an ordinary criminal does not.’
Adnan thanked him for the advice, though he was still unsure how he could put it into practice—or exactly whom he was supposed to protect himself from.
While the security manager was speaking, Adnan bent down carefully, without touching anything, to examine the contents of his small bag scattered across the floor, trying to make sure nothing was missing. Everything appeared to be there: his clothes, his personal papers, his passport, which he was actually carrying in the pocket of his jacket. Everything except one thing in particular, whose absence he noticed after a minute of careful inspection: the old photograph, the one he had brought with him from Frankfurt, the picture of himself with Hajj Tawfiq in front of the shop in the summer of 1976, which he had carefully placed in the inner pocket of his carry-on bag before leaving his apartment.
The photograph had vanished completely, without a trace, as though it had never been there in the first place. Adnan dropped to his knees, unconcerned with how he looked in front of the security manager, and searched with trembling hands through every piece of clothing scattered across the floor, beneath the bed, and behind the curtains, desperately hoping it had merely fallen somewhere rather than actually being stolen. But every search proved futile. There was no trace of the little photograph—not in the room, nor anywhere nearby.
8
Adnan sat on the edge of the overturned bed in that chaotic room, trying to absorb what had just happened, while the security manager spoke quietly on his phone with someone else, perhaps senior hotel management or the local police.
With a growing certainty that left no room for doubt now, Adnan understood that what he was facing was not an ordinary theft, nor merely a verbal threat over the phone that could be dismissed or questioned as to its seriousness. Someone possessed a real ability to reach places that were supposed to be completely secure, by methods that defied ordinary logic and explanation, and out of everything in that room, they had chosen specifically to take that old photograph—the one object of pure symbolic value, utterly devoid of real material worth except for the deep personal memory it represented to Adnan alone.
The message itself was far more dangerous than any direct verbal threat: it said with absolute clarity that whoever stood behind all this knew the intimate details of Adnan’s life to a frightening degree, could reach the possessions closest to him whenever they chose, and that taking that particular photograph, while leaving behind everything else of vastly greater material value, was nothing less than a direct, utterly personal message addressed to him alone: ‘We know who you are. We know what that man in the photograph means to you. And we can reach the deepest of your memories whenever we choose.’
He took out his phone, his hand still trembling slightly, and for a moment thought of calling Karim as he had promised. But he hesitated, unsure how he could explain what had just happened without provoking genuine panic in his son and perhaps sending him onto the first available flight, exactly as he had threatened that morning. In the end he decided to send a brief text message, reassuring him without frightening details: ‘I arrived safely in Beirut, Karim. The hotel is good. I’ll call you this evening as we agreed. Don’t worry.’
Another small lie, added to the chain of small lies that had begun surrounding him since the journey started, as he tried to protect the people he loved from the weight of a truth that was slowly revealing itself to him—something far larger and more dangerous than he had imagined when he decided to travel less than twenty-four hours earlier.
9
Later that night, after moving to a new, more secure room in a different wing of the hotel, with additional security stationed outside his door—arranged personally by the security manager as an apology for what had happened—Adnan sat in a chair beside the window, looking out at the lights of Beirut spread before him like a sea of earthly stars. His phone was in his hand, and he stared at the number of the mysterious woman who had called him at the German airport.
He thought for a long time about calling her, but hesitated, remembering her words that she would contact him herself when the time was right. Instead, he opened his email and wrote a short urgent message to the lawyer Ziad Salloum, briefly telling him what had happened at the hotel and asking whether it might somehow be connected to the ‘other party’ the lawyer had mentioned in their first conversation.
The reply came within only a few minutes, despite the late hour, suggesting to Adnan that the lawyer himself had not been asleep—and perhaps was worried in his own way.
‘Mr. al-Rafii, I’m deeply concerned to hear what happened. This confirms my fears that the other party is very serious and capable of more than I initially expected. Please be extremely careful in your movements from now on, and let us meet at the earliest possible opportunity—tomorrow, if we can—in a safe place we agree upon together, not in my usual office, which may itself be under surveillance.’
Adnan read the message twice and felt the weight of the situation deepen with every new word. It was no longer merely personal curiosity about an obscure past, nor simply the possibility of a financial inheritance waiting for him at the end of a long bureaucratic journey. With growing clarity, it had become a real confrontation with a hidden, organized, dangerous force—one that did not hesitate to enter hotel rooms by methods that defied logic, nor to steal the most precious of personal memories as a silent threat.
Adnan looked one last time at the lights of Beirut spread beyond his window, a city half-destroyed and half-pulsing with life at the same time, and thought of Hajj Tawfiq al-Nabulsi, the little wooden box that had disappeared forty-five years ago, and all the questions that seemed to multiply rather than resolve with every single step he took along this mysterious path.
He thought, too, with a quiet sadness he had not expected, of the stolen photograph—his only picture with Hajj Tawfiq, the sole tangible thing he had left from those distant days. He tried to summon it in his memory: Hajj Tawfiq’s serious face, the thin young man standing beside him with a shy smile, that distant morning when the photograph had been taken with a camera Hajj Tawfiq had borrowed from a photographer friend in the market, on the rare occasion when the old man, in his own quiet and private way, had marked the completion of a full year of Adnan working with him. A quiet anger rose inside him. It was not directed at the money, nor at the potential physical danger whose presence he was beginning to feel, but at the brazen audacity that had stripped him, without mercy, of the last tangible memory linking him to the man who had shaped his entire life.
He sat silently for a long while, listening to the muted sounds of the city filtering through the double-glazed window, trying to arrange in his mind all the scattered threads: the lawyer, Ziad Salloum, who had seemed sincere so far, though his growing anxiety raised questions; the unknown voice that had threatened him from Frankfurt; the mysterious woman who had apparently warned him sincerely at the airport; and finally, the hidden force that had entered a hotel room in a way that defied every known physical logic. All these threads tangled before him like a complicated weave, and he still could not tell which strand might lead him to the truth and which was merely another carefully prepared trap designed to draw him away from his real path.
For a moment he considered retreating—cancelling the entire journey and returning to Frankfurt, to his orderly, secure life, to his office on the eighteenth floor, to the quiet Main River, and to board meetings that ran with the precision of a Swiss watch. But the image of Hajj Tawfiq, though physically gone from his bag, remained alive in his memory, and the old man’s voice echoed again in the depths of him: ‘Whoever betrays himself in secret will never be faithful in public.’ He felt that retreating now, at the first real obstacle, would be a betrayal of that unwritten testament he had carried with him for forty years without ever understanding its full weight until this very moment.
He did not yet know, as he finally switched off the light in his new room and tried to find some sleep after a day of extraordinary length and tension, that his coming meeting with the lawyer Ziad Salloum would not give him the direct answers he had hoped for. Instead, it would open before him an entirely new door toward a truth far more complicated and painful than he had imagined—a truth whose roots, without his yet knowing it, began in the dark back room of a small fabric shop in Damascus’s al-Hariqa market, exactly forty-five years earlier.