When armed militiamen prowled through a Salesian convent in a suburb of Dili looking for pro-independence figures among the terrified refugees, they came across nuns slopping out a shower room, the floor of which was awash with soapy water.
They did not enter but passed along the corridor, and soon left the building. Shortly afterwards, more militiamen came with guns. The nuns began mopping out the bathroom again, though its tiled floor was perfectly clean, and once more the armed intruders passed by.
Three times the death squads missed the "special guests" concealed in the bathroom, Manuel Gusmao and his wife, Antonia Henriques Gusmao, the parents of East Timorese resistance leader, Xanana Gusmao, and prime targets for assassination.
The elderly couple were whisked secretly into the convent as the terror in Dili began on September 4th. Anxious friends thought they had been killed. This news was even conveyed to Xanana, then in the British embassy in Jakarta, who broke down and cried.
Sister Marlene Bautista, one of the couple's protectors, told me the story in a room of the convent where a sign reads: "I believe in the sun, even though it is not shining. I believe in God, even when he is silent." God appeared to be silent for two weeks in the East Timor capital, but if faith has triumphed it has been with the help, more than once, of this remarkable 38-year-old woman from the Philippines who was educated in California and has dedicated her life to the East Timorese.
Dark rings under her eyes betray a deep exhaustion after two weeks of living dangerously, during which she also rescued a nephew of Xanana's, called Elvis.
"They were looking for all the Gusmao family," she said. "He told me, `They are out to kill me'. I put him in the back of the car and drove him along a back road. I could not believe what was happening. I was saying to myself, `Don't be ridiculous'. We expected problems but we didn't expect it would be like this."
They were spotted by a militiaman on a passing motorcycle who told a pick-up truck full of militia in front. "They started shooting at the car. They're lousy shots, by the way. They missed, I couldn't believe it. Elvis Gusmao said, `Sister, now step on the gas, please don't stop'. I came very fast to UNAMET (United Nations Mission in East Timor) which was barricaded by the Indonesian military (TNI).
"The TNI would not let me pass and kept telling me to move my car back but I wouldn't. Then a UN observer came along transporting refugees. I said, `Please help me.' He let me between two of his cars and I got past."
Sister Marlene was able to witness the looting and destruction of Dili at first hand. "It was the same pattern every day. The military would take the electric stuff and carpets and TVs, and the militia would take the rest. They stole everything from us, clothes, couches, everything, even the kindergarten chairs."
She spent the two weeks with seven other nuns looking after 105 women and children and two incapable men in the convent, where they were under siege from September 7th to 20th. There was shooting by militia and soldiers every night, as the town was laid waste. Somehow they were spared. "We prayed a lot every night the shooting started," she said.
"We slept on the floor to avoid shots, though a ricocheting bullet hit beside my foot. The children were wonderful. They instinctively knew to keep quiet at night because our survival depended on our behaviour." She got them to draw "thank you" pictures when the peacekeepers arrived. Among the poignant messages pinned up in the convent yard today are "Your presence is a gift - thank you", "I thank you because nobody shot me", and "I thank you because no bullet touched me".
Also thankful that no bullet touched them are the journalists who made the same assumption last week as Sander Thoenes, Jakarta correspondent of the Financial Times, that with most of the militia gone, Dili was relatively safe.
No one really believed that Indonesian soldiers would coldbloodedly kill a Western journalist. But that is just what happened. Five hours after arriving in a chartered plane on Tuesday, Mr Thoenes ventured on to the long straight road through the pro-independence suburb of Becora, where he was killed by six TNI soldiers on motorcycles.
Several of us had made the same journey that day, including RTE reporter Aoife Kavanagh riding a motorbike with cameraman Paddy Higgins on the pillion. They saw the six soldiers wearing militia-style bandanas and fled back into town.
It wasn't the first time the Indonesian army has brutally disposed of a journalist in East Timor. Five members of two Australian television crews were murdered by infiltrating troops in 1975 and on December 7th that year, the day of the Indonesian invasion, an Australian journalist, Roger East, was captured, shot in the head and dumped into the sea after filing his last report via Marconi radio. Little has changed in 24 years. The Indonesian army sees reporters as the enemy because they shame it by exposing what it does.
Like many of his colleagues, Mr Thoenes was staying at the one-star Turismo Hotel, which is now a media centre under the command of a platoon of the Australian army led by Capt Dan Skinner. He makes sure that members of the Australian press "pool" billeted in the east wing of the fire-damaged, trashed hotel get daily rations, water and electric light.
The rest of us who liberated rooms a day before it was requisitioned, to the evident chagrin of the Australian military, have to forage for ourselves, write our stories by candlelight and endure the early-morning (5.30 a.m.) roar of an army generator next to our rooms.
Capt Skinner lectures us daily at housekeeping sessions in the lobby on security and on our behaviour: no walking in bare feet, no cooking food in the rooms, no stroking the hotel cats as "they carry diseases". That risk is reduced now as one of his patrolling soldiers kicked one of the skinny orange cats to death in the garden on Thursday night.
The bespectacled, glove-wearing officer told the pool correspondents at one of these sessions not to give official-issue drinking water to the "unaccredited" reporters. He likes to remind us that the Australian army travels on "the bones of its arse" and has nothing to spare for the unwashed.
As he said himself, he is not into PR.
By contrast, an East Timorese family in a bungalow nearby is giving free lodging and food to an overflow of reporters. Their reward was a lecture from an Indonesian officer who arrived and accused the owner of giving succour to the enemies of Indonesia and that he should remember that the TNI had not yet gone away.
The owner's courage and hospitality will long be remembered by the first reporters to arrive after "liberation", as will that of Sister Marlene, who despite everything, offers coffee, food and a shower to visitors.