Timmy and the Taliban

Now that 911 is safely over, I can tell you the funny story of Timmy and the Taliban.

When we checked into our apartment on Thurs September 8, Tim was going down the elevator and met one of our neighbors, “Ben”, a Middle Eastern man, mid 30’s, who said he was from Morocco. Tim, as usual, chatted him up and found out he was in Paris on holiday for 4 weeks. Like us he had rented an apartment in the building, and that he was traveling alone. Tim said he spoke excellent English.

We didn’t see Ben again until Saturday night, September 10 when we were returning from dinner about 10 PM. As we got off the elevator, we smelled cooking smells. As we passed Ben’s door, it was open about 2 inches. We continued on to our apartment. As we were enjoying a bedtime nip of cognac, looking at the full moon through the apartment window and talking about my plan to cook Julia Child’s recipe for coq au vin on Sunday, Tim said he thought we should invite Ben to dinner to be neighborly. I reminded Tim that Europeans are not as openly friendly as Americans, and besides, I hadn’t even met Ben and was uncomfortable inviting someone to dinner whom I hadn’t met.

Then Tim hit on the idea of inviting Ben for wine and cheese one day the following week to get to know him. I agreed, and Tim went down the hall to deliver the wine-and-cheese invitation. He was back in less than 5 minutes and said, “OK. I’m officially creeped out.”

When I asked him about it, he said the door was still ajar and he knocked twice and no one came. When he rang the doorbell, the door finally opened, but it was another Middle Eastern man who answered. Tim asked for Ben. The guy reluctantly called Ben, who came to the door and seemed nervous and only opened the door part way. Tim gave the invitation and Ben seemed reluctant, but finally said, “OK. Maybe. Talk to you later.”

When Tim got back, we talked about the incident wondering what was going on, why there was another man there when Ben said he was alone, etc. etc. I said that we were in the Marais after all, and maybe Ben had brought a friend home for dinner. Who knew? None of our business. We finished our cognac and went to bed.

The next morning, about 6:30 as we were waking up, Tim wanted to talk more about the incident the night before. “There were a couple of other unusual things about last night. One was that Ben had shaved his head.”

Apparently when Tim first met him, Ben had medium length hair. I asked, “What about the other guy?” Tim said his head was shaved too.

So…two nervous Middle Eastern men in an apartment in Paris with recently shaved heads. We decided to look online.

The Internet told us that part of the ritualistic ways Muslim suicide bombers prepare to meet Allah is by shaving off body hair and shaving their heads so as to be “clean” when entering Heaven. Apparently the Koran references shaving as a means to cleanliness. OK.

Then Tim mentioned the other unusual thing:  while talking with Ben through the partially opened door, Tim could see a flag hanging from the ceiling in the main room of the apartment.

“What did it look like,” I asked.

“Well, I saw a wide green stripe and some red with a white symbol in the center. Pull up the Moroccan flag.”

The Moroccan flag is solid read with a white leaf in the center. No green.

Suddenly Tim said, “Pull up the Taliban flag.” The Taliban flag is wide stripes of black on the left, red in the middle, and green on the right, with a white symbol in the center.

“That looks like what I saw!” Tim said.

I got goose bumps.

“Put on your clothes and get your passport. We are getting out of the building,” I said.

On the sidewalk outside, we debated what to do. What if it wasn’t the Taliban flag? Surely many flags have those colors with white symbols. What if they were just having an intimate evening and were nervous because they were interrupted? What if Tim spooked them by ringing their doorbell at 10:00 o’clock at night—probably unusual in Europe?

Should we go to the police? What if we’re wrong?

In the end, we decided that given the circumstance, we were not profiling. Two nervous Middle Eastern men with recently shaved heads and a suspicious flag hanging in their apartment on September 10. If they were up to something sinister and we didn’t report it, innocent people might die. And if we reported them and were wrong, we would have made enemies out of a couple of temporary neighbors that we would never see again after September 30.

We made our decision. We went to the local police station around the corner from our apartment and found a policeman who spoke English. Tim told his story, and the policeman called someone to take our statement. Thirty minutes later after giving a statement to another English-speaking French policeman, he told us to wait. He discussed the matter with his superior. We overheard the conversation, which included a lot of head shaking and the French word for “motive”, and then they smiled, thanked us and told us we could go.

Guess the police had a good laugh after we left. Two nervous gay Americans on 911 reporting suspicious Arabs. Glad we can laugh about it now.