* Illustration: Patrick Leger * Before my fiancée and I headed to Syria to study Arabic, we often heard there was one advantage to living in a police state: almost no crime. So it came as a surprise when Sara and I returned to our Damascus apartment one night after a dinner party to find splintered wood in the hallway — wood that had once been part of our front door.

I made a beeline for the living room to check on our most valuable possessions: my MacBook and Sara's MacBook Pro. Both gone.

There's no 911 in Damascus, so we called our landlord, who contacted the cops. Within an hour, a dozen police were on the scene. About half of them sat around fingering unlit cigarettes. (Pushy Americans, we had asked them not to smoke inside.) The others engaged in what could generously be called an investigation. They took fingerprints from the door. They dusted the fridge. "Maybe the robber was thirsty," one said. They did not dust the coffee table where the laptops had been sitting.

The size of the police contingent was itself disconcerting. Damascus' finest had probably come out in force simply because it's not often a foreigner's home gets burglarized. But it's easy to get paranoid in Syria. We wondered whether some of the cops — like the ones wearing dark leather jackets — were "special" police, more interested in us than the crime. (Being a foreign journalist in Syria on a tourist visa can invite extra attention. Also, how to put this delicately, we were returning home from a Shabbat dinner.)

The next morning, our landlord accompanied us to the local police station to press our case. The commander was a friendly, well-fed man with an impressive mustache and the terminal stage of a comb-over. He asked a few questions about the theft and many more about the progress of our studies.

Eager to please, I told him a few Arabic jokes I had learned. ("There's this guy with a monkey, see. Along comes a hash addict ...") When I finished, he sat stone-faced — then burst into thunderous laughter. "I like this man!" he bellowed, pinching my cheeks. Sara would have taken a snapshot had our camera not also been stolen.

A few hours later, our computers were back, but it wasn't the police who found them. A friend had put us in touch with Bassel Al Hassan, apparently the one guy in Damascus who services Macs. A few days later we shared a meal with Hassan, a soft-spoken man in his mid-thirties. "Yours were the seventh and eighth stolen Macs I've recovered," he said. "Nobody knows about Macs here. A few other stores buy Macs, but eventually they all come to me, asking, Is it good? How much is it worth?' Then I check the serial numbers."

When Hassan learned our laptops had been pilfered, he called about 20 computer shops. "I didn't tell the owners I was looking for stolen computers, because then maybe they wouldn't buy them," he said.

Soon Hassan got a call about two newly arrived Macs and hustled over to the shop. He confirmed the computers were ours and told the store owner the machines were hot. The proprietor, who had paid $200 for the pair, gave them back to us without taking a penny in exchange, sheepishly delivering them to us at a street corner in our neighborhood. The only thing Hassan asked was permission to "friend" me on Facebook.

A few months later, after Sara and I returned to the US, I spoke with Hassan by phone. He said that he had corralled another stolen Mac just weeks after rescuing ours. From back here in the States, Hassan's role as the Mac Avenger of Damascus seems improbable. Except that I'm writing this article on my recovered laptop.

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