THE TESTAMENT OF AL-HARIQA
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1
Berlin, at almost the same time that Adnan was sitting with his mother beneath the olive tree in Damascus.
Lina Karam sat in her small apartment in Kreuzberg, surrounded by piles of printed pages and two computer screens open before her, each running a different archival database. She had spent the previous three days working almost without rest, driven by the seasoned instinct of a journalist telling her that she was getting close to something far larger than she had imagined when she began this investigation only a few weeks earlier. Her little apartment had gradually turned into something resembling an investigation room: hand-drawn timelines covered one wall, linking scattered dates to historical events, while colored sticky notes spread across much of her worktable, each color representing a different thread in the sprawling puzzle.
Through Adnan, she had obtained photographs he had taken on his phone of several pages from Haj Tawfiq’s old notebook—the photographs he had taken secretly when one of Umm Sulayman’s relatives, who had kept some of Haj Tawfiq’s belongings after his disappearance, briefly showed the notebook to him, before Adnan quickly returned it to its place out of respect for a privacy he still felt was not his alone to expose. The photographs were not entirely clear, but they were sufficient to allow Lina, drawing on her long journalistic experience in analyzing coded documents, to begin deciphering some of the patterns Haj Tawfiq had used over the decades.
Lina had also turned to an old colleague, a history professor specializing in modern Middle Eastern history at a German university. She showed him some of the chronological patterns she had noticed without revealing the full details of the story, protecting her sources as the ethics of her profession required. Intrigued by the genuine excitement of an academic confronted with an unexplored trail, the man gave her a collection of references and digital archives she had not known existed: refugee relief committee archives, old European consular records, and even some memoirs by Syrian merchants that had later been published as historical documents.
2
She called Adnan the following morning, her voice carrying unmistakable scholarly excitement despite the exhaustion of several long nights without enough sleep.
“Mr. al-Rafi‘i, I think I’ve finally begun to understand what this notebook really is. It goes much deeper than we imagined at the beginning.”
“Tell me.”
“Do you remember the symbols you described to me—the recurring abbreviations and the scattered dates? I compared the patterns I was able to decipher, at least in part, with general historical archives available to researchers: immigration records, refugee committee archives, even some British and French documents from the Mandate period that have been digitized in European university libraries.” Lina paused, as though trying to catch her breath from the force of her excitement. “Mr. al-Rafi‘i, I believe Haj Tawfiq al-Nabulsi was not merely a man protecting the trust of a single family—the al-Hourani family. I believe that, for decades of his life, he was a secret custodian of the wealth of several families, most of them families who had suffered persecution, displacement, or confiscation of property during different periods of the region’s turbulent history.”
3
Adnan, still in Damascus and still trying to absorb the details of his mother’s confession from the previous night, listened with intense attention. A shiver ran through him with every word Lina spoke.
“What exactly do you mean?”
“I found, Mr. al-Rafi‘i, that some of the symbols in the notebook correspond chronologically with well-documented historical events. One wave of these symbols dates from the late 1940s, coinciding with the Nakba of 1948 and the displacement of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom fled to Damascus carrying whatever gold and jewelry they could save, searching for safe places where they could deposit them away from the chaos. Another wave dates from the late 1950s, corresponding almost exactly with what Haj Tawfiq himself told you about the nationalization laws during the period of union with Egypt. And a third, more recent wave dates from the mid-1970s, coinciding with the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War and the first waves of displacement from Beirut. That is precisely when the mysterious man arrived and handed Haj Tawfiq the box you saw yourself.”
Adnan felt increasingly stunned. “So he wasn’t hiding stolen or suspicious money, as some might have assumed. He was protecting the wealth of people who had lost everything else?”
4
“Exactly, Mr. al-Rafi‘i. And that, in my view, makes his story closer to an act of quiet heroism than anything else. Imagine one man, for more than thirty years, carrying on his shoulders the responsibility of protecting the wealth of families the public knew nothing about, with no real reward beyond his reputation as an honest man, always exposed to the risk of being discovered and accused of evading state laws—or worse, accused of theft by heirs who knew nothing of the true relationship that bound them to this strange man who guarded their secrets.”
Lina paused, then added in a more serious tone: “But this also raises a troubling question, Mr. al-Rafi‘i. If Haj Tawfiq was safeguarding the wealth of several families, not just one, that means the trust that may still be in his possession—or that was in his possession before he disappeared—could be far greater than we imagined. And the number of people interested in it, or eager to get their hands on it, may also be much larger than we initially thought.”
5
“Have you been able to identify, even approximately, how many families there were, or who they were?”
“Only partially, Mr. al-Rafi‘i. I managed to decipher two additional symbols with a reasonable degree of confidence. One most likely points to an Armenian family, perhaps descendants of survivors of the massacres that preceded their ancestors’ arrival in Syria at the beginning of the twentieth century. The other appears to be connected to a Christian family from Aleppo that was forced to sell its property quickly during a period of unrest that I have not yet been able to identify with complete precision.”
“How exactly did you arrive at those conclusions?”
“By matching the approximate dates mentioned in the notebook with immigration records preserved in the archive of an old French consulate, digitized several years ago by a Parisian university as part of a broader historical archiving project. I found the names of certain families recorded as immigrants or displaced persons during periods that correspond chronologically with the symbols in the notebook—in some cases, only a few days apart. That is a correspondence difficult to explain as mere coincidence.” Lina paused, then added with unmistakable academic excitement: “It’s like a mathematical puzzle, Mr. al-Rafi‘i. Each piece fits the next with greater precision the more I investigate.”
“But there is one symbol, Mr. al-Rafi‘i, that appears more often than any other in the entire notebook, with a frequency suggesting an exceptional importance compared with the rest.”
“Which symbol?”
“The symbol associated with the al-Hourani family trust—‘H.N.’, as you told me. It appears almost more often than all the other symbols combined, as though Haj Tawfiq was repeatedly reviewing or updating the details of this particular trust more than any other under his care. As though, for him, it carried a special significance that went beyond its simply being an ordinary financial trust.”
Adnan sat in silence, thinking about what that repetition might mean. Had Haj Tawfiq repeatedly revisited the details of the al-Hourani trust because it was the largest financially? Or because, as Adnan was beginning to suspect with increasing certainty, it was deeply and personally connected to his private life—to a woman he had once loved named Fatima, and to a son he had never dared fully acknowledge as his own?
6
At that very moment, Lina heard a heavy knock on the door of her apartment—sharp, unfamiliar, nothing like the knock of a neighbor or a postal courier.
“Mr. al-Rafi‘i, I’ll call you back in a little while. Someone is knocking at my door.”
“Lina, wait. Don’t open the door until you make sure who—”
But the call had already been cut off on her end. Lina looked through the small peephole and saw two men she did not recognize. They wore ordinary clothes, but their physical bearing suggested an unusual level of fitness and discipline for casual visitors. One carried a small tool bag that could have contained anything from genuine maintenance equipment to something considerably more troubling. Neither wore a maintenance uniform or any clearly official identification, nor did either carry the building management badge normally required by the building’s regulations.
“Who is it?” she asked, forcing her voice to sound calm and confident even as her heart began beating at an unfamiliar speed.
“We’re from the security company responsible for the building, ma’am. We received a report of a possible water leak from your apartment affecting the flat below. We need to come in and check it immediately.”
A strong instinct told Lina that something about the story was wrong. She had noticed no plumbing problem, and she had received no prior notice from the building management, as was normally required by law in Germany in such circumstances, where any emergency maintenance visit required written notice or a prior telephone call from the building management itself—not unidentified workers knocking directly on the door without any prior coordination.
7
“I’ll contact the building management to confirm first. Just a moment, please,” she said calmly through the closed door, moving quickly and silently toward her laptop. She shut it down and placed it in a small bag she had prepared in advance for emergencies—a bag she had assembled after the first digital breach, anticipating precisely such a scenario. It contained her passport, some emergency cash, and a small storage drive holding an additional copy of her most important files.
She heard another attempt at the door, harder this time, followed by the unmistakable metallic scrape of someone working at the lock. Her trained ear, sharpened by years of investigative journalism in dangerous parts of the world, had learned to distinguish ordinary sounds from suspicious ones.
Without hesitation, Lina went straight to the rear window of her apartment, which overlooked an inner courtyard connected to a neighboring building by an old metal fire escape. She had noticed it before without ever imagining that one day she would actually need to use it. She opened the window quickly and slipped outside, her bag over her shoulder, her heart pounding with a violence she had never experienced before—not even during her most dangerous investigations, whether in conflict zones she had covered or corruption investigations that had previously exposed her to veiled threats.
The old metal fire escape shook alarmingly beneath her feet, rusted at some of the joints, but she continued downward at a measured speed, careful not to stumble or make a noise that might attract the attention of whoever was inside. She felt a slight pain in her ankle when she stepped awkwardly onto one of the rungs, but ignored it, focusing all her energy on reaching the ground as quickly as possible.
8
As she climbed down the fire escape as quickly as she could, she heard the door of her apartment finally give way behind her, followed by the sound of heavy footsteps rushing inside and the voice of a man speaking in a language she could not clearly identify through fear and distance. She did not stop to look back. She continued down the shaking metal staircase until she reached the rear courtyard, then the side street, where she quickly blended into the evening foot traffic, walking fast but without attracting attention, trying to look like any ordinary passer-by despite the fact that her heart felt ready to burst from fear and exhaustion.
She took the underground metro from a station relatively far from her apartment, after making as sure as she could in that confused moment that no one was following her. She changed her route more than once, getting off at one station and boarding again at another—defensive maneuvers she had learned during earlier security training undertaken as part of her journalistic work in dangerous areas. She sat in a distant corner of the carriage, trying to slow her rapid breathing while quickly considering her next move.
She called Adnan as soon as she felt sufficiently safe.
“Mr. al-Rafi‘i, I’m all right, but two men just broke into my apartment. I escaped through the fire escape before they got inside, but I think they took everything I left there—printed papers, handwritten notes.”
9
“My God, Lina. Are you sure you’re all right? Do you need the police?”
“I already called the police from the road, Mr. al-Rafi‘i, but I honestly doubt they’ll find anything useful. Men at this level of professionalism usually don’t leave easy evidence.” Lina paused and took a deep breath to steady her trembling voice. “The German police sent a patrol to inspect the apartment and filed an official report, but the officer I spoke to seemed somewhat skeptical of my story, perhaps because I couldn’t explain the entire background without revealing sensitive details involving you, Rima, and Haj Tawfiq.”
“And did you lose much? The papers, the notes?”
“The only good news is that I kept a complete backup of all my research on an encrypted cloud-storage service, separate from my laptop itself. It’s a habit I developed after years of working in dangerous areas, where I learned never to trust a single location with any sensitive information. They didn’t really take anything irreplaceable—only some printed pages I can easily print again, and some handwritten notes which, although frustrating to lose, contain nothing I haven’t also documented digitally.”
Adnan felt a measure of relief amid the mounting anxiety. “Lina, where are you now? Are you somewhere safe?”
“I’ve moved to a trusted friend’s apartment, away from my usual neighborhood. I won’t return to my apartment until things calm down, or until we have a better understanding of who is behind all this.” She added in a firmer tone: “But, Mr. al-Rafi‘i, I’m very sorry that I dragged you into all this danger.”
“No, Lina. I’m the one who dragged you into this, and I feel genuinely guilty about it. Perhaps you should withdraw from this investigation completely now, for your own safety.”
“No, Mr. al-Rafi‘i.” Her answer was immediate and decisive, without the slightest hesitation. “Now, more than ever, I feel I have to continue. Whoever did this doesn’t merely want to know what we know; they want to stop us completely. And that, in itself, is further evidence that we are getting close to something real—and extremely dangerous. I’m not backing down now, whatever it costs.” She paused for a moment, then added in a quieter but more determined voice: “I’ve been in this profession for fifteen years, Mr. al-Rafi‘i, and I learned a long time ago that fear, when met with silence and retreat, grows and feeds on itself. But when it is met with steady, methodical work, it gradually becomes fuel for continuing the journey rather than an obstacle that stops it.”
10
After the call, Adnan sat in his room at the Damascus hotel, thinking about how wide the circle of danger surrounding this story had become. The matter was no longer confined to Damascus and Beirut; it had now reached the heart of Europe itself, to Berlin, where a woman had decided, despite the very real danger she had just faced, to continue helping him without hesitation.
He rose and walked toward the window, looking out at the scattered night lights of Damascus, trying to put into perspective the scale of what he was facing. He thought about the size of the network confronting him: who had enough resources to organize a professional break-in in Berlin, roughly simultaneous with an attempted killing in Damascus, while maintaining close surveillance of every step he himself had taken since the moment he first opened that letter in his office in Frankfurt? He could no longer convince himself that Elias al-Nabulsi alone, however sophisticated his legal expertise and however questionable his connections, possessed the capacity to coordinate all of this across several continents—from professional security men in Germany to drivers trained to stage engineered incidents in Damascus.
With growing unease that he could no longer dismiss, he began to suspect that another hand—larger and more organized—was moving all these threads from behind the curtain. It might not be Elias himself, but a person or organization using Elias as the visible front while remaining hidden from the light, much as Haj Tawfiq himself had remained hidden for decades behind the façade of a quiet cloth merchant, protecting secrets far greater than the simplicity of his little shop in al-Hariqa Market suggested.
He also thought about the cruel contrast between the two men: Haj Tawfiq, who had carried a heavy secret throughout his life in order to protect people who had lost everything else, versus the unknown network that now carried almost the same secret for the exact opposite purpose—not to protect, but to plunder and seize, exploiting Haj Tawfiq’s absence and the silence of decades to secure gains to which it had no genuine moral or legal claim.
Before going to sleep, he called Ziad Salloum and briefly told him what had happened to Lina in Berlin, without going into the other sensitive details. The lawyer listened with obvious concern and promised to be even more cautious himself, and to look for safer ways for all of them to communicate during the days ahead.
Adnan did not yet know, as he finally turned off the lamp in his room that night, immersed in renewed anxiety over Lina’s safety and his own, that the days ahead would bring him into a direct confrontation with the danger that, until that moment, had been no more than distant shadows and threats—a confrontation that would drive him, and the few allies he had left, into the very heart of al-Hariqa Market, where the whole story had begun exactly forty-five years earlier, and where it was destined to reach its most dangerous climax, among the same narrow alleys that had witnessed his first steps as a poor young man dreaming of a better future.