The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

by Helgason, Hallgrimur

  The mature blonde recommends I go into town and hands me a hotel address. “It’s only forty minutes with the bus,” she says and smiles. Ah, well, I guess three days in Vikingland won’t hurt. Three days without a gun will be hard on Toxic, though.

  An escalator carries me down one flight and I walk through the busy luggage hall. The exit gate is divided in two, for those with something to declare and not. My latest identity asks whether I shouldn’t use this opportunity to declare myself guilty of sixty-seven homicides, but I wave all the angels away, like the cloud of mosquitos.

  Surprise awaits me outside the exit gate. Out in the small welcoming area, a man with thinning hair and a thick-haired woman are standing, holding a sign that reads: FATHER FRIENDLY. I seem to be out of sync with myself (too many selves, I guess) for I make the huge mistake of stopping short in front of the fucking sign. And me, wearing the fucking collar! They make the obvious connection.

  “Mr. Friendly?” the woman smiles out in the more and more familiar sounding accent.

  I’m about to say no, when suddenly I spot two policemen standing further out in the hall, close to the exit. So, before leaving my lips, my no turns into a yes. And I’m done for. I’m grounded for the next few hours. I’m forced to be fucking Friendly.

  The killer becomes his victim.

  “Very nice to see you, Mr. Friendly. Did you have good trip?” the man asks me with a very strong Icelandic accent. I notice his bad teeth when he smiles.

  “Yeah, yeah, it was OK.” Suddenly I hate my own accent. Not very Virginian, I guess.

  “I hardly recognized you! You look even younger than on your Web site,” the woman says. Always a big smile.

  I have a Web site?

  “Oh? You…you saw me there?” I mumble.

  Fuck it. I’m a hitman, not a spy.

  “Yes, of course!” the woman continues. “But we have not seen your TV show.”

  My God. I have a TV show? I would like to see that.

  “You wouldn’t like to see that,” I say.

  “Oh? Of course! We would love to see that!” they both cry out loud like kids high on candy. They’re a happy bunch. God’s doing, I guess. They introduce themselves and their names are incredible. His is Goodmoondoor (must be his stage name) and her name is something like Sickreader. I wonder what their American nicknames would be. Goo & Si? Even “Tomo” was too long for the Yanks. The more people, the shorter the names. The less people, the longer the names.

  Suddenly Sickreader looks me down and asks:

  “Don’t you have any luggage, Father Friendly?”

  I pause for a moment.

  “No. The Word is my only luggage.”

  They laugh like happy cartoon hamsters. I feel like an actor who has just made an important step in the development of a new character. Hallelujah!

  They bring Father Friendly past the two cops (I give them a blessing look) and out on the parking lot where it’s as cold as the inside of a fridge. And me who was looking forward to the Adriatic Spring, chilling on the Riva, sipping pivo and watching the tightly jeaned asses sway by, with the sound of sandal-heels clicking against the white limestone tiles. Ah, the girls of Split…

  But, no. Instead I’m standing out in some polar parking lot collecting goosebumps and watching the reflection of my bald new self (I could, actually, pass for a priest) in the window of a silver Land Cruiser two strangers are indicating I should enter. The vehicle has already been blessed by the presence of the great Benny Hinn, they tell me. It seems Goodmoondoor and Sickreader are professional televangelists. They run a small, local Christian TV channel called Amen. Minutes later we’re rolling through the lunar park with the Goodmoondoor at the steering wheel.

  “We have many Christian TV show from America. Benny Hinn of course. And also Joyce Meyers, Jimmy Swaggart, and David Cho. And we also have our show, in Icelandic and also in English. We are on TV every night, me and my wife. Sometimes we are together and sometimes we are alone. You will see.”

  This is the Goodmoondoor speaking in his primitive English. His nice looking wife sits by his side and smiles to me in the backseat. Her husband continues:

  “So, what are you going to talk about tonight? What text are you going to talk from?”

  “Eh…Tonight?” I ask.

  “Yes. You will be special guest of my show tonight.”

  “On TV?”

  “Yes!” he laughs with all his crooked teeth, almost like a half-wit.

  “Uh…I see. I thought I…”

  I’m saved by my mobile. The screen reads “Niko” and without thinking I greet him in Croatian: “Bok.” Niko is Dikan’s personal assistant. The Number Two Man. He asks me where I am, and I tell him the inconceivable truth, stopping short of the fact that I’m sitting in a Christian All-Star vehicle on my way to my first TV mass. He tells me that me landing up here is not so bad after all (does he even know that Iceland is a country?) since things are getting serious after the big fuck-up. “You fucked up real bad, Toxic,” he says. The Fed-ups, as he calls them, have already been to the restaurant, and they’ve also broken into my place. They even visited my mother this morning, in her small hardware shop in the heart of Split, and broke her arm. Dikan’s balls are boiling, Niko says. “If you are in this fucking Iceland then stay there!” he screams. “Don’t go to Zagreb or Split and don’t come here! Just stay where you are and do the LPP!”

  As mentioned, that’s short for Lowest Possible Profile. I wonder if Goodmoondoor’s TV show fits into that category.

  As I hang up my mobile, Sickreader turns towards me again and asks what language I just used.

  “It’s Croatian,” I say.

  “Oh? So you speak Croatian?”

  “Yes, we have some Croatian people in our church.”

  “Where are you from, in the beginning?” the Good Moon driver asks.

  “In the beginning we were all God’s children.” I’m too damn good. “But if you are asking about my accent, it’s an acquired one, if you can say so. I was a missionary for many years in the former republic of Yugoslavia.”

  “Oh, really?” they both say.

  “Yes. Spreading the good word of God in a communist state. That was some tough shit, man. I mean, tough holy shit. And being American over there, man, that was plain suicide. I had to take on another name and get rid of my American accent completely. They called me Tomislav. Tomislav Bokšić. Nowadays everyone thinks I’m from over there. But no. I’m one hundred percent American. I even have Clay Aiken CDs at home. In fact, the Friendly family has been in Virginia since the twelfth century.” I guessed this would be called overacting. “Excuse me, since the eighteenth century.”

  They take it all in with a smile. There is a beat—along with my heartbeat, straight out of some suspense film score—before the woman asks:

  “How old are you, Father Friendly?”

  “I’m…I was born in sixty-five. That makes me…uh…forty.”

  “So you have been very young when you were in….”

  “In Yugoslavia? Oh, yes. I’m deeply marked by it. I had some really tough times over there.”

  It’s a bright and early May morning. I mean, an early morning in early May, and the sun is about to rise from behind the mountains ahead. Their sky has no clouds at all, and on the left-hand side the ocean keeps the waves below its gray-green surface. Still the scene looks just as cold as it is. The arctic May looks like a Midwest March. There are some vacant houses scattered along the coastline. “Summerhouses,” my hosts inform me. OK. So they do have summer up here.

  The flight lasted five hours, and the time difference is about the same: a whole night has passed from the restroom scene at JFK. Killing Friendly was my first manual murder since the mustached kid in Knin. I used my hands, a trick I learned from Comrade Prizmić, the oldest one in our platoon, the WWII veteran with the big nostrils and absent cheeks. “It’s just like blowing out a candle,” he used to say. “It all depends on position and speed. Man is wax. L
ife is flame. Blow out his light and he’s dead.” Good old Prizmić. They cut the breasts off his wife and made him eat them.

  There is a sticker on the back of the driver’s seat. It’s in English. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)”

  Woe, man. Finally the six o’clock sun breaks out from the sharp mountain edge. Like a bright chicken from a blue egg. The road lights up.

  “We drive the road of light!” Goodmoondoor says and turns towards me with a big, happy smile. “The road of light!”

  CHAPTER 5

  GUNHOLDER

  05.16.2006

  They want me to stay in their house. “We never let our guest stay at hotel. Our home is your home,” Goodmoondoor assures me. I thank him. It’s a small suburban villa on two shiny floors, in a neighborhood called Guard the Beer, or something like that, situated between the city center and the airport. Therefore I still haven’t seen the famous Reykjavik that I read about on the plane: “the hottest city in Europe, the capital of cool.” Apparently this is where Tarantino goes if he wants to play up his celebrity status. Bad luck it wasn’t him next to me in the men’s room. Then I’d be entering town in a white limo, with a gold chain around my neck and his VIP passport in my pocket, waving out the window to the young girls lining up at the side of the road holding up their old Pulp Fiction posters. Instead, I’m offered a seat in a silent suburban kitchen with no chicks in sight.

  Sickreader prepares a wonderful breakfast table with coffee, toast, and two boiled eggs that instantly make me think of Dikan’s balls. What the hell do they mean it was my fault? My fuck-up? I killed the right guy. Then it turns out he was FBI. That’s not my fault. I should be mad at them.

  “If you will be so kind, Father Friendly? We always ask the guest to say the table prayer,” Goodmoondoor says when we are seated.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  Again I have to regret not having killed Tarantino instead of this priest guy. But then again, it wouldn’t have been easy to mess with the writer of Kill Bill. Yeah, I guess I was lucky. At least the clergyman looked a bit like me. At least they believe I am him. That’s pretty low profile, I guess.

  OK. Here we go. Table prayer. I bow my head and close my eyes.

  “Dear God, dear beloved God. Thank you for this…for those eggs. Thank you for…thank you for having Friendly…friendly people around here. Thanks for sending me up here to this beautiful island and meeting those beautiful…those good and kind people. Thank you for giving me safe harbor in the sea of trouble. And breakfast as well. Amen.”

  Not too bad. They murmur their “amen,” and then it’s smiling time again.

  “Do you have many people in your organization, Father Friendly?”

  I lose my grip on the situation here. Accidentally it’s Toxic who answers. “About forty.”

  “Forty thousand?”

  “Forty thousand? Oh, yes, about forty thousand. Forty thousand registered members. But we have millions of people tuning in each week.”

  I remind myself to ask for the latest ratings report the next time I meet my program producer.

  After breakfast they show me to my room on the upper floor. I’m back to Catholic school. A crucifix hangs over the bed and two studio photos of Jesus Christ are on the opposite wall. White linen, white curtains, white rug.

  They tell me I must be tired from the long flight. I say you bet and then use the opportunity to tell Goodmoondoor that I cannot possibly go on TV tonight.

  “I’m sorry, but I just have to be totally relaxed when I go on TV. If God is to speak through me, I have to be totally empty inside.”

  I pause briefly, regretting using the wrong words. He looks at me like a freshly cuckolded llama. Big eyes, long teeth, hairy neck. His wife whispers something about my jet lag before I continue:

  “I mean, I’m just saying that nothing can be in the way, so that his word can travel through me. No tiredness, no nothing…I always have to be in super shape for TV.”

  “But,” he finally says, “I said on my show that you will come tonight and talk to the people.”

  “Oh? You did?”

  “Yes. I cannot cheat my promise to them. They are very faithful people.”

  Poor guy. He looks heartbroken. But I have to think of my LPP.

  “How many people watch the show?”

  I guess, for the small time TV-man, this question is a no-no. He gets all tangled up in his face, like a politician faced with a difficult question, and comes out with an excusing laugh.

  “We have many people watching.”

  I see. He only has ten viewers.

  “OK. We’ll see. You just call me, in the afternoon.”

  I don’t know what in the hell I’m doing. I give him my NYC number. The priest gives his colleague a hitman’s number.

  “OK, that’s good,” the Good Man says. His smile is back but a bit dented from the shock I just gave him. “You can stay here today and get a rest. Just be like in your home. We have to go to work now. In the TV station.”

  From my window I watch them board the fancy SUV. The believers always seem to have the best cars. God knows how to reward his people. Of course he knows you do need an SUV to reach heaven. The preacher’s wife wears a skirt and has lovely legs. If she were the only woman in our platoon and we were stuck in the mountains for a month, I’d start dreaming about her on Day 12.

  I’m left alone in the house. Despite the glacial spring outside, the rooms are warm like a July midnight in Memphis. That’s where I carried out a rather clumsy operation under an ugly bridge. When it comes to killing, I’m no racist, but shooting black people has never been my favorite. There’s nothing fresh about that.

  I strip to my true self, happy to get away from God’s collar, Friendly’s shirt, and Igor’s jeans, and crawl into bed. How soft, how cozy. And how incredibly quiet. It’s almost too much. It’s the loudest silence I’ve heard. I realize that I’ve been living in a disco for a decade or so and now, finally, I have stepped outside. I’m not kidding. There is absolutely no sound to be heard. It’s as silent as the Serbian skull my mother keeps on the shelf above her bed.

  Then suddenly the room is flooded by sunlight. White room, bright sun. If I were to wake up here, in this sunny silence, lying in this soft eiderdown bed with crispy, clean sheets, and the signed picture of the Lord on the opposite wall, I would think I was dead and gone to heaven. But of course I’ll never go there. I’m stuck in traffic on the highway to hell.

  Damn. It’s so fucking silent I can’t sleep. For a man who’s lived in the noise all his life, being sung to sleep by Chetnik bombs and SoHo manholes, this is hard to take.

  I give up and go downstairs, roaming around the house with my piggy belly sticking out over my Calvin Klein black boxers. The beautiful mountain morning fills every window, the light harsh and cold and very strong. Ice-sun. And I get this touristy feeling: the stupid surprise you experience when you realize that the same sun has also been rising here for the past million years. Also here, in this north-of-all-nuts city, people have been waking up and going to sleep for centuries. I remember when I first came back to Split after four years in NYC and was shocked to see that my mother had aged. I was almost angry at her, as if she had betrayed me, and started talking to her about moisturizing and masturbation techniques. I guess I was just not made to travel. I’m a One Place Man.

  I never should have left Split. But when you’ve fought so hard for something, you can’t really enjoy it. I guess I’d still be in Croatia if it wasn’t called Croatia.

  The house is full of fancy stuff and this kind of furniture-store-furniture. A big black sofa full of pillows fills the TV-corner, the dining set shines like a piece of porcelain, and every windowsill is crowded with vases and statues. A small St. Bernard looks me in the eye, a wine barrel hanging around its neck, to be broken in case of emergency if God deserts you. The walls spo
rt real paintings (some lunar landscapes in golden frames) and all kinds of stuff made for hanging on nails—a small Jesus, some dried roses, and this colorful Japanese thing that I don’t know the word for but is used for creating wind where there is no breeze. Still, the living room looks as if no one lives here. It could well be an installation at The Icelandic Museum of Modern Living. Plus, I find it all a bit too luxurious for devout followers of Christ. I doubt that any of the apostles possessed such a big flat screen. But at least it’s all as clean as the Savior’s conscience.

  I turn on the bathtub, for my jet lag, and the TV, for the sound of it. The screen shows ten thousand people singing in Christian unison in some overblown indoor sports arena down south. “Our God Is an Awesome God!” Pretty awesome, I have to admit. Born-again people are so energetic. Screaming like newborns. I switch to The Bold and the Beautiful and try reading the subtitles. Looks like Hungarian to me.

  In the kitchen I spot some letters addressed to Guðmundur Engilbertsson and Sigríður Ingibjörg Sigurhjartardóttir. It takes about two minutes to read each name. And back in the living room I find some family photos standing in frames on a big cabinet. They seem to have two kids. A girl and a boy. The little snow-haired girl looks a bit like her mother. Still the house seems totally kid-free. Maybe they store them away at some papal prep school. Or they donated them to missionary work down in Mozambique. There is a nice photo showing the whole family in America: Four holy smiles at some outdoor rodeo mass. Somehow it reminds me of hit #43. The fat man outside the church in Atlanta. My bullet traveled the incredible distance of two city blocks before entering his head. One of my master hits. He was wearing a white cowboy hat made out of felt—the kind of material that absorbs liquid. By the time I drove past the scene it all looked quite wonderful, so calm and innocent: A fat man had fallen on the sidewalk, nothing more. A fat man in a beautiful red hat.