He paused outside the door, put the hat on, and then he removed it and crossed the street, allowing the noon sun to blaze down on the shiny dome of his almost bald head. Was the man a marker? I wondered. But no marker would have used such an obvious signal. I would have simply walked down the sidewalk to the left or to the right. Maybe he wasn't a professional.

      Alivane Metoyer stepped to my table, and I nodded toward the striding man and asked, "Vane? Do you know him?"

      "No," she told me. "Never saw him before."

      We watched through the plate-glass window as the man entered a white Chevy across and slightly down the street. The car matched the description of dozens of cars in Natchitoches, Louisiana, but did not match the cost of his clothing or his watch.

      Coincidence, I hoped as the man drove out of sight, but having survived fifteen years as a Mossad katsa, or intelligence officer, I had no belief in coincidences. Those who did usually got a memorial service at the Israeli government's expense. There was seldom a body for a funeral. But calm down, I told myself. All that's behind you and half a world away.

      Alivane interrupted my thoughts. "You want you some more turnip greens? How 'bout a piece of pecan pie? I just pulled one out the oven."

      I looked up into her Creole eyes so green they seemed artificial, so bright they seemed illuminated from within. Wrinkles sprouted from the corners of those eyes and traced paths of hard work and worry across her tan face. Her hair, curly and black in her youth, now hung limp and gray. Pecan pies had filled out her once slim body. Resting herself, she extended an arm and clutched the back of a chair with her hand. On that clutching hand, a plain gold ring circled a finger where her long-dead husband had placed it when he pledged his undying love. She had never removed it, allowing it to become like part of her flesh, a now non-removable symbol of love beyond the grave. That love produced eight green-eyed children, and the youngest one, a daughter named Celeste, I considered the most beautiful woman alive. She stirred longings I had not felt since a letter-bomb intended for me had ended my wife's life and my career with the Mossad.

      "No thank you, Vane," I said.

      Mumbling something about me "drying up and blowing away," Alivane walked toward her kitchen, leaving me worried about a different kind of "blowing away" and with my eyes watching through the window.

      Across and down the street to the right, a group of tourists stood in front of the Catholic church and peered in wonder at the weathered tomb of a priest beside the front doors, near the sidewalk. On the corner, next to the sidewalk and the tomb, a young man stood in a phone booth, talking into the receiver. He wore new tennis shoes, faded jeans with tears in the knees, and a white T-shirt emblazoned across the front with the name of a rock group I, of course, had never heard of. He had straight brown hair hanging past his shoulders and probably attended the local university. His lips moved as he talked, but because of the distance, I could not read them. Nothing looked unusual. But I aligned the top of his head with a crack in the booth, just in case I later needed to know his height.

      Then his eyes glanced up the street, down the street, and settled on the front of Metoyer's Restaurant. His lips stopped. So did my heart. Then a horrible realization came. Celeste attended graduate school at the university and got out of class at noon. Any minute now she would bounce through the door, plop down at my table, and say, "Hey, Joe. What's happening?"

      And before I replied my usual "Nothing" or her mother ordered her standard "Git yore gimlet butt up from Joe Weiler's table and help me wait on customers," a grenade would crash through the window or a bazooka would fire, and we'd all die in an exploding inferno. But this was America. Not Lebanon. Not Palestine or even Israel. Over here, people didn't kill people by the dozens in the name of God. They did it one at a time in the name of money.

      If a hit was going down and the young man was a lookout, he would hang up the phone when it happened and casually stroll away. The bald man--if he was a marker--had signaled that the target was indeed the target. Was it me? No. When I had entered the restaurant, I walked right beside the bald man's table. He had not even glanced up. A marker would have dropped something on the floor, pausing me for a moment and getting a close look at my face. Calm down, I told myself. You're paranoid. A hit can't go down in Alivane Metoyer's little restaurant. Can it?

      Where would the shot come from? My eyes searched across the street. No open windows in the buildings. A telephone company van, orange pylons placed front and rear, sat at the curb directly across from the restaurant. Too obvious. Down the street, on the opposite corner from the church, customers walked in and out of the City Bank. Bank robbery? Maybe, but I doubted it. I returned to the obvious.

      The van's darkly tinted windows were closed except for a small one on the side facing me, pushed outward for ventilation. Above the van, up on the pole beside it, a yellow plastic tent covered the wires, shielding the linesman from the sun. There was no linesman. A black wire left the tent, trailed down the pole, and entered the closed rear door of the van. My gaze moved to the small window. No telephone company van I ever noticed had such dark windows or hinged ones on the sides. Behind that window, I then saw the muzzle of a large-caliber rifle. I stared wide-eyed, and the rifle attached to the muzzle slowly became the murky but unmistakable form of a Browning fifty-caliber machine gun. I choked on a dumpling.

      Lunch-time customers had filled the restaurant, and a single heavy bullet from the Browning would easily smash through the plate-glass window, its intended target, possibly several innocent bystanders, and shatter out the back of the building. A thirty-second burst would destroy the building and everyone in it. Alivane appeared beside me, coffee-pot in hand. "Alivane," I spoke, "sit down."

      She filled my cup, turned, and said, "Be right back soon as I fill some of these other folks' cups."

      I grabbed her arm, pulled her toward me, and ordered, "Sit down, Alivane!"

      She did, settling her bulk into a chair and flashing her green eyes at me. "What's a-matter with you, Joe Weiler. You look like you fit to bust. You been comin' in here for a year and I ain't never seen you look like that and act like this."

      I leaned forward. "Alivane, don't be frightened---"

      "Frightened? Alivane Metoyer ain't scared of nothin' long as she's got a pot of scalding coffee in her hand!"

      "Listen to me," I begged, "or someone is going to die, maybe several someones!"

      "What you mean?"

      I whispered, "Please don't look but there's a"--her head swiveled--"Alivane! Look at me!"

      She did, her eyes wide, her voice saying, "Joe Weiler, you gone crazy for shore."

      "I'm not crazy," I stated, "and I know what I'm talking about."

      "Okayokay," she muttered, "spit out your mouth what you got to say."

      "There's a telephone company van parked across the street," I told her as I looked past her worried gray head to the black muzzle and then down the street to the young man still talking on the phone. "Do you remember seeing it?"

      "It was there when I opened this morning."

      "It has a fifty-caliber machine gun inside it aimed at one of your customers."

      Her face suddenly looked like an owl with tan feathers and extremely wide green eyes. "Oh, Lordy, Lordy, Joe Weiler, you are crazy."

      "For God's sake, Alivane, I am not crazy."

      She turned pale. "You ain't?"

      "No. It's there, and any minute it's going to fire."

      "Oh, Lordy, Lordy, what we gonna do?"

      "If you can stay calm, we'll stop it before someone gets killed."

      She sat her coffee-pot-weapon on the table between us and started wringing her hands. "Lordy, Lordy, how we gonna do that?"

      I nodded my head toward the table behind her. "A bald-headed man sat there. Do you remember him? He wore an expensive gray suit."

      Her hands got still and her face turned tan again. "He had a hat? Had a little blue feather in the band?"

      "Yes. Now think. He would have talked to one of the other customers. He might simply have dropped his fork when that customer walked by and said, 'Excuse me.' That customer is the target."

      Alivane leaned toward me. "Joe Weiler," she said, "I always knowed you was more than just a white man that goo-goo-eyed my daughter. Over there," she then whispered, "against the wall. The dirty-old-man with the blond."

      I caught her inference about my age and her daughter's, but I said nothing about that subject. And I had no need to look toward the man's table. From Mossad training and actual practice, I could have filled out a report describing almost every customer in the restaurant, what they ate, how they liked it, and what I overheard them saying to each other. The dirty-old-man was over sixty, had a face-lift and a neck-tuck, dyed black hair, wore a blue shirt, matching pants, and a gold chain around his neck. He owned a bar in New Orleans. The red beans and rice he shoveled down his throat rated "as good as anything in the French Quarter."

      The blond was barely twenty-one, had breast implants, wore a slinky, too-tight pants suit that matched her escort's too-black hair, and had fake diamonds around her neck, fingers, wrists, and dangling from her ears. She was a stripper. The Natchitoches meat pie she daintily munched tasted "Awesome, totally awesome."

      "What happened?" I asked Alivane.

      "The bald-headed man got up and went over to their table. I didn't hear what he said, but the dirty-old-man said, 'No, you're mistaken; I'm from San Francisco, not Chicago.'"

      Knowing the target, I knew what kept him alive. Two tables were between him and the window. An elderly couple from Atlanta sat at one; around the other one, nearest the window, four college students did more talking about sex and teachers than eating. The moment those tables emptied or everyone leaned back at the same time or the dirty-old-man stood up to go to the restroom, he was dead.

      The Natchitoches fire station was one block down; the police station was two blocks over. "Alivane, when I stand up, go call the fire department. Tell them your kitchen's on fire. Call them direct; don't dial 911."

      "Why?"

      "There's a machine gun in that van, and there's probably a sub-machine gun in a car down the street. If the cops get here first, a bunch of Natchitoches's finest are dead." I looked into her staring green eyes and added, "Do you have a pistol?"

      "Yeah. Behind the counter."

      "What kind?"

      "A thirty-eight. Smith and Wesson."

      "When I walk by your counter, headed outside, hand it to me. Make sure it's loaded. Okay?"

      "Okay," she answered. Then she said, "Joe Weiler, do you know what you're doing?"

      "Yes," I replied and stood.

      So did Alivane, knocking over her chair.

      I walked to the target's table, said, "Hi. Mind if I sit down?" and sat down.

      "Hey, buddy," the man muttered. "Move it!"

      There was an overpowering odor of cheap cologne and perfume about the couple. Behind the blond's blue contacts, I saw brown, the same color of the roots of her hair. At the roots of the man's hair, I saw gray. But he saw red, and was about to rise. "Relax," I told him. "I mean you no harm. In fact," I added, "it's the opposite; I'm here to save you."

      He settled back in his chair, and his eyes shifted around the room. "What do you mean?" he growled.

      "I'll be truthful with you," I told him. "Someone wants you dead, and I don't want it to happen in my friend's restaurant. Personally, I think the world would probably be better off with you dead."

      He stared at me for a long angry moment while my mind churned over what I had told him. How many times had I heard those words?: "Joe, the world will be better off with this guy dead--or that guy dead--or those guys dead." Whose world? We killed them in the name of our God, and they killed us in the name of theirs. When would it end? When God was dead?

      "Go to hell," the man snapped and started to rise again.

      "If you stand," I said, "you will die."

      He sat down, shaking with fear, now, and sweat beading and then dripping down the wrinkles around his sunken eyes. "How do I know you're telling the truth?"

      "Look past my head at the van across the street. Try not to stare. Pay particular attention to what's behind the small window in the side."

      He did, and his eyes and his mouth suddenly opened wide and his chin dropped.

      "Look down!" I ordered.

      His eyes, terrified now, twitched back and forth from me to the blond. "What . . . what do you want?"

      "I've already told you. But there's one more thing: Why do they want to kill you?"

      The blond's long-nailed and sparkling fingers moved over and touched his hand. "Tell him," she said.

      He fingered the butts in the ashtray. Then he took a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of the blue shirt, barely managed to light one, and exhaled nervously. "It's . . . it was a cocaine deal. I ripped them off."

      "Them? Names?"

      "Just somebody on a payphone. Always a different somebody and always a different phone. We . . . we used a drop. Always different."

      I described the bald-headed man and the young man on the phone. "Know them?"

      The black head and the blond head both shook.

      Down the street, a siren wailed. "That's a firetruck," I said. "It will stop outside, directly out front. When it does, you're safe." I pointed to the back door. "Go through there; it leads to the alley."

      They both nodded their heads. The siren drew closer, piercing the stony silence between us. I suddenly spoke: "Don't forget to pay the check; leave it on the table."

      He pulled out a thick wallet, extracted a twenty, and dropped it beside his plate.

      "Not enough," I said.

      "How much?"

      "A thousand should cover it."

      Without a word of protest, he slid ten hundreds across the table, and I palmed them. The siren stopped behind me, shrieking, and red lights flashed over the two worried faces in front of me. The other customers rose to their feet, muttering in confusion and staring out the window. I said, "Now, go. And walk, don't run."

      They got up, flipping over their chairs, and headed for the back door. "Fire!" someone screamed, and a mass of people followed the couple out the back door, another mass exited the side door, and still others followed me to the front. I handed Alivane the hundreds and said, "The dirty-old-man was a big tipper."

      Alivane handed me her pistol. "For God's sake, be careful."

      "God doesn't have anything to do with this," I informed her. "It's in the name of money."

      Out the door I went in a stream of people flowing around a fireman tugging a hose. I stuffed the barrel of the pistol in my pocket and grasped the butt, holding it and hiding it at the same time, and followed the flow past the firetruck. Across the street, a man wearing telephone company coveralls exited the rear of the van and slammed the door. He was in his early twenties, well-built, and had a black crew-cut. U.S. Marine or Navy Seal with a side-line job, I guessed, and I etched his face into my memory. When he strolled past a wall, I marked his height against a broken brick. Down at his side, the magazine of an Uzi protruded from behind his leg. I matched his stride as he walked, seemingly without a care in the world, toward the Catholic church.

      At the church, the young man in the phone booth was now crossing the intersection, headed for my side of the street. Two buildings down from me, a car pulled slowly away from the curb, stopped in the intersection, and the young man got inside. I looked over to the man with the Uzi and caught him looking at me as we both walked away from the chaos behind us. I could have killed him then, but I didn't. I stopped. He surely recognized me as the man who had sat at his target's table, and he might could have killed me then. But he didn't try. He kept walking.

      He reached the church, stepped into the street, and got in the car. Before he closed the door, he stared at me for a long moment, etching my face into his memory, I knew.

      They drove away and passed two wailing, flashing patrol cars headed in my direction. The patrol cars stopped in the middle of the street beside me and out poured cops. I pushed Alivane's pistol all the way down in my pocket, started walking across the street toward the van, and yelled at one of the cops, "Hey! Over here!"

      "Can't stop to talk, Mister! We got a fire!"

      By then, the firemen were rolling up hoses. I pointed out that fact to the young policeman and told him, "It wasn't a fire at all; it was an attempted murder." He followed me to the van, and I jerked open the rear door and said, "With that."

      There sat the Browning on its tripod like a macabre spacecraft, its muzzle pointed out the small window and a huge belt of ammunition leading down to a black metal box on the floor. "Oh my God," groaned the policeman, and he pulled out his revolver and shouted, "Up with your hands!"

      "Wait just a minute," I complained. Then I saw the trembling muzzle of his revolver passing back and forth across my belly. Up went my hands.

      "Turn around! Grab the roof of the van!"

      He patted me down, found Alivane's pistol, and stepped back. "Make one wrong move and you're dead."

      His fellow patrolmen noticed his drawn weapon and soon had me handcuffed and surrounded. Their amazed eyes moved from me to the Browning inside the van, and I counted five nervous revolvers aimed at my belly. "He tried to murder somebody," the first officer announced. "With that!" he added, meaning the Browning.

      "No, no," I explained. "I prevented a murder! Go ask Alivane Metoyer!"

      The street around us and the still-wailing and flashing patrolcars and firetruck had now filled with gawking and gasping employees and customers of every downtown business and all of the helmet-clad firemen that had arrived on the truck. There at the edge of the crowd appeared Celeste, her hands on the hips of her jeans, her breasts quivering behind a green blouse that matched her eyes, and those eyes glaring at me.

      "Celeste! Tell them!"

      "Joe Weiler, why did you do this?"

      A cop stepped over to her. "Do you know this man, Miss Metoyer?"

      "Yes. Right before my momma fainted, she said, 'Joe Weiler did it.'"

      The cop removed a little card from his wallet and returned to me. "You have the right to remain silent. . . ."

      Oh God, I thought, suppose Alivane has had a heart attack.

      But the crowd unexpectedly parted and, pushing and shoving and wiping her face with a wet cloth, up stepped Alivane. "Hold it!" she yelled. "You've got the wrong man! He stopped a murder; maybe several murders!"

      The first officer's face fell. "You sure?"

      "Yes," Alivane answered and grabbed her pistol from his hand. "Give me my gun."

      They removed the handcuffs, and Celeste stood there, her hands still on her hips but her eyes now staring at me in curiosity. I knew she would have questions for which I would not want to provide answers.

      An hour later, Alivane and I sat at our original table, surrounded by interrogating detectives. Celeste glanced frequently at me and served us all coffee and kept the cups filled. Outside the window, the streets were cleared, the van and Alivane's front doors enclosed with yellow crime-scene tape. A finger-print crew had dusted the dirty-old-man and the blond's table for prints, found them everywhere, and had moved to the bald-headed man's table. They would find nothing, I knew. He surely used only one hand, touched only his fork and glass, and would have wiped them clean before he left.

      The chief of detectives, an all-business and efficient man in his thirties with a once-lean military body showing the effects of his wife's and Alivane's cooking, dropped his notebook on the table and leaned back in his chair. He removed his glasses, started wiping them, and looked me over. "Let me get this straight," he abruptly stated. "You've not only given us the make and model of both cars involved, you gave us their license plate numbers, and you also gave us a physical description of everyone involved down to . . . What did you say?"

      "One inch and five pounds."

      "That's what I thought you said." He put the glasses back on and continued: "Then you tell us the occupation of two of the subjects--and their home town, I might add--and the probable occupation of two others. You then followed all those revelations with the reason for the hit--'Unprofessional,' you called it--and then you followed that with a discussion of what everybody ate and how they liked it and what they smelled like and who had cosmetic surgery and who wore fake jewelry and who didn't. Is that correct?"

      "Yes," I answered and took a sip of coffee. Behind the detective, Celeste stood there listening. I wished she would leave, go in the kitchen, go somewhere. I knew what was on the detective's mind and where his questioning would lead. My past, it seemed, had traveled half-way around the world to haunt me.

      "Mister . . . Weiler? . . ."

      "Yes."

      "I've been taking statements for years and no other witness has ever provided such detailed information." He removed his glasses again. "And no other witness has ever stopped four cold-blooded killers armed with machine guns. Just who the hell are you?"

      "Joseph Weiler."

      "Yes, and I'm the Pope. You said you were from Israel? Israeli army? Retired colonel?"

      "Yes."

      "Mighty young for a colonel."

      "I'm forty."

      "Mister, I spent four years in the army criminal investigation division. Most of that four years involved the Middle East. I think I know who or rather what you are."

      I muttered, "Clear the room."

      He nodded his head, and the men around him left, followed by Alivane. Celeste filled our cups and left with a glance back at me. The detective and I sipped our coffee in silence. Mine tasted bitter. He finally put down his cup. "You're Mossad."

      I glanced down at the notebook on the table between us. "Does it go in your report?"

      "No. It won't leave this room."

      "Yes. I'm a Mossad katsa. And I am retired. No one must know."

      His expression had not changed, as if I had told him I sold insurance. "Don't worry," he said. Then his face changed into almost disbelief. "Wow. All that time over there and I never even talked to a katsa--that I know of."

      "You did."

      He stared at me through the steam rising from his cup. "Were you there when the bomb went off in---"

      "Please," I interrupted. "All that's behind me. I want it to stay there."

      "Wow," he said again. "Right here in . . . What in hell are you doing in Natchitoches, Louisiana?"

      "I was born here. My parents emigrated to Israel when I was fifteen. I live on my grandparents' farm; it's mine now."

      At that moment, I wanted out of that room, out of the restaurant, out of Natchitoches, and back on my grandparents' farm--my home. "Are you through with me?"

      "Yes," he said, and I heard him add to my back as I walked away, "I'll call if I need you."

      I left with only a nod of goodbye to Alivane and Celeste and drove out of town, following the meandering road along Cane River Lake. The town gave way to scattered oak-shaded houses perched on the bank of the lake. Fields of corn and cotton spread toward the gray horizon, flashing me glimpses down somehow secretive, dark green and perfectly parallel rows. The clouds above me rolled black as my mood, and the surface of Cane River Lake suddenly shimmered white splashes, like God had dropped a million pebbles. I turned on the wipers, slowed, and finally stopped.

      In the midst of wind-whipped trees I had climbed as a child, the old house sat solidly before me, curtains billowing out of the open window of what had once been my grandparents' bedroom, and rain peppering down on the tin roof and pouring out of gutters on both sides of the porch. I could see my mother and father in a swing at the edge of the porch, watching as my brother and I played marbles in a patch of bare dirt beside the sidewalk. But the swing had disappeared long ago, grass had covered the dirt, and my mother, my father, and my brother lay in graves beside my wife. All dead in the name of someone's God.

      Through a rain-splattered windshield and tear-filled eyes, I looked beyond the house and the memories and down my own dark green and perfectly parallel rows, stretching toward my own gray horizon. This, yes, this is the promised land, I knew. And the days of killing in the name of God were over, at least for me.

      The next day I watched through Alivane's window for Celeste to stroll by. She did, whistling a tune and with her jean-clad legs striding like she owned the sidewalk. God, I loved her, I then realized. But, sorrowfully, I also realized the impossibility of her love in return. A few seconds later, she plopped down at my table and said, "Hey, Joe. What's happening?"

      "Nothing," I answered and tried to hide my relief that our everyday-at-noon routine had not changed.

      Alivane walked by, her arms lined with plates heaped with food. She said not a word.

      "Eat slowly," Celeste ordered me. "After I've helped Momma wait on customers, I'll join you."

      I stopped eating altogether. Thirty minutes later, Celeste put a glass of tea and a plate of fried chicken and mashed potatoes on my table. Then she sat down. She pulled her chair closer to the table and said, "Are we going to have any excitement today?"

      "I certainly hope not."

      "Good," she said and started eating.

      We made small talk while we ate, and when she finished a chicken leg, she pointed the bone at me. "Joe, do you know something?"

      "What?"

      "You've been coming in here talking to me for about a year. Right?"

      "Right."

      "I've been sitting at your table talking to you for more than six months. Right?"

      "Right."

      "Well," she said and shook the bone at me, "you know damned near everything there is to know about me, and most of what I know about you, I found out yesterday."

      "I'm sorry."

      "You should be." She gnawed on the bone for a minute and then said, "There's one thing I really want to know about you."

      "What's that?" I asked and expected the worst.

      "Why have you never asked me for a date?"

      I choked on corn-bread. "What?"

      "Do you think I'm too young? I'm twenty-six. Fourteen years younger than you, but my daddy was twenty years older than my momma."

      "I'm . . . I'm . . ."

      "Gay?"

      "No."

      "Well, what?"

      "It's . . . It's . . ."

      "Is it because I'm Catholic and you're Jewish?"

      "No. I'm not even sure I believe in God."

      "Is it because I'm part black and you're white?"

      "Of course not."

      "You scared of me?"

      That was very close to the truth, but I summoned courage. "Would . . . would you go out with me?"

      She pointed the bone toward my plate. "I might, and then again, I might not. Eat."

      We finished, relaxed in our chairs, and sipped coffee. She said, "Joe?"

      "What?"

      "There's one more thing I want to know. Why did you do what you did yesterday?"

      Those green eyes seemingly looked into my soul, and I answered, "I did it in the name of love."