The water in the tub is crazy hot. Volcano water. I have to cool it down before adding my body to it. I lie there for an hour while my mind travels the bushy regions of the sweet old republic of Munita. The dark forest reeks of clit extract; drops thick with lust run down heavy leaves in very slow motion. Down by the harbor I come across my mother standing outside her little shop, in her horrible communist skirt and Marilyn Monroe blouse, with a white cast on her right arm, and a fist on her left, pounding the air and shouting at me:
“This tandoori woman is all pleasure and no partner! When you pick a wife you must have conference between heart and brain. But you don’t talk to any of them and let your dick decide! I loved your father for forty-two years. He loved me for forty. The first two years he was still fucking Gordana, the Serbian whore. But then he got bored with her and kept his dick at home after that. You are lucky to be born after his sex life was over! Or else you would have been a Serb and your brother would have killed you in the war. Let me tell you, lust don’t last! Only love does! You break my heart, you break my arm, and you break all your promises. Tell me, Tomo, when are you going back to your studies?”
I studied architectural landscaping for a year and a half in the wonderful town of Hanover, Germany. There I met Niko Nevolja (Naughty Niko) who introduced me to the science of the con. It all started with a couple of small-time cocaine deals. Then we got on to drug and gun smuggling and finally, we were introduced to the art of game-fixing. Every Friday night we dined with a different soccer referee from one of the lower German Bundesligas. They were not the most fun dinner partners (“I always iron my jersey the night before the match”) but watching them perform the day after was nothing less than addictive. Giveaway penalties and excellent goals denied. Angry players and a crowd gone mad. And it was all our work. Architectural landscaping was out, social landscaping was in. We being Croatian added an extra kick to it. No matter if the fucking Germans won the international games against us, we won all the games in their Bundesligas. And then we collected the money from the Fußball-Lotto. We were doing it for the fatherland. The Sauerkraut Suckers destroyed half of my grandfather’s generation.
I’m sitting with the pillows on the sofa, with a white Christian towel around my waist, browsing the local TV channels, when suddenly the front door bangs open and a super-blonde girl in her twenties rushes inside. Without noticing the hitman of her dreams, she beelines for the kitchen and starts opening every one of the drawers. She seems to be in a big hurry, flinging curses inside each drawer before closing it with a bang. “Shit!” Finally, there is silence. She must then have heard the TV, for seconds later she stands in the doorway and asks me something that sounds like:
“Queer air thew.”
“Excuse me?”
She switches to pretty professional English:
“Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I’m To—I’m Father Friendly. I just got in this morning. From New York. They, Goodmoondoor and Sickreader, they told me—”
“Aha,” she sighs with disinterest and disappears back into the kitchen. On the screen some balding carpenter-type is reading from a book that must be the Bible. The set looks like he built it himself. This must be their channel. Right. The letter A shines in the upper corner. They should call it “Omen” rather than “Amen.” This is one-camera TV: the still-life style of it, the dead plant in the background, the carpenter’s Polish suit, the way he only looks up from the book every three pages (as if he’s checking the red REC light of the camera). It all makes North Korean State TV look like MTV. Poor guys. Dikan’s position as the big boss can’t possibly be hurt by me appearing on this drab channel. Judging from the expression on the carpenter’s face, he knows he’s not talking to more than ten viewers.
I get up from the sofa, make sure the towel is tight around my waist, and head for the kitchen. I comfort my shy belly—it always withdraws at the sight of serious girls—before appearing in the doorway like a freshly updated and slightly inflated version of Adonis. The girl is still searching the kitchen like a burglar on speed.
“Are you looking for something?” I ask her. Tone is hymn-like, voice is gym-like.
“Yeah. My keys,” she murmurs into a cupboard.
Her body is slim, with small breasts and a tight ass, firm as a fully inflated airbag. If she was the only woman in our platoon and we were stuck in the mountains for a month, I’d start dreaming about her on Day 1.
“Your keys? You live here?”
This priest is turning into a moron, or a Mormon, or whatever.
She turns her head and looks at me for a while. Belly instantly ducks for cover, crawling all the way up into my rib cage. Poor little thing. The girl seems to feel sorry for the belly and can’t help but look for it, letting her eyes travel to my middle, probably wondering whether her software supports the updated version of Adonis. I’m almost out of breath when she’s finally done.
But it does give me time to examine her.
Her hair is more than blonde. It has the color of butter fresh from the fridge, before it gets all soft and yellow. Her skin looks incredibly smooth, as white as Philadelphia cream cheese, untouched in the box. The nose is small, with an upward tip that looks like the top of an ice-cream cone, that last bit coming out of the machine that you put in your mouth first. Her eyes are ice-blue like Gatorade Frost and her thick lips glisten like strawberry sorbet.
Oooh. My stomach comes out of hiding and starts whining like a kid for candy. Man. She’s not just a Day 1 Girl; she’s a Daybreak Girl.
“No, I don’t live here,” she finally says with a heavy sigh full of irritation. “I’m their daughter. I lost my keys. I can’t get into my apartment. Argh! I have to be at work at ten and I can’t go like this!”
She’s the preachers’ daughter though she speaks like a pagan prom queen, or a porn queen, for that matter. Her English is straight from MTV, and she wiggles her head along with her words in an imitation of black n’ bitchy. She belongs to a tattooed generation of waxing masters brought up on thong songs, intent on making the stomach “the new boobs.” This particular one is crowned with a pierced navel and proudly bares itself between a tight thin blouse and some deadly cool jeans. The tips of her black shoes are shaped like their high heels, and she cuts the air with her long white fingernails while she talks.
“Are the keys supposed to be here?” I ask in a fatherly way.
“Yeah. Mom said she had an extra key but I can’t fucking find it.”
She already said “shit” and here comes the F-word. The holy couple have produced a ho.
“Why don’t you call her?” I ask her.
“They’re taping her show now. Her phone’s on silent.”
She seems pained by her mother’s TV fame. I feel pity for the poor girl and say:
“Maybe I can help you to get into your place.”
“You mean, without a key? Are you going to use the cross?”
“We might try that. A cross and a quick blessing,” I say in a tone that is perfectly Friendly.
I have the priest under my skin by now. Even naked I can appear to be a man of the cloth. She looks at me with surprise in her Gatorade eyes while I enter the kitchen and start searching the drawers for a knife that resembles the tiny Swiss wonder that I’ve kept in my pocket since Comrade Prizmić gave it to me on his deathbed, a shaky kitchen table in some bombed-out house in All Dead Village, ADV. Thanks to bin Laden, I had to leave it behind in NYC. Ah ha! I find a suitable substitute.
It’s not until we’re outside, sitting in her well-used Škoda Fabia with me freshly dressed in my holy outfit, that I ask for her name.
“Gunholder,” she answers and darts off down the street.
CHAPTER 6
LILLIPUT ISLAND
05.16.2006
Gunholder drives over two hills, scarcely planted with low and ugly buildings, and approaches the city of Reykjavik. The name sounds like Dubrovnik, but it’s more like entering Split, with all
its highways and billboards plus the occasional sports field. (I notice that the stands are hardly bigger than the bench.) Like my hometown, this city seems to have a split personality: a historical center with hysterical suburbs.
They seem to have had their share of communism up here as well. Concrete housing projects line the side of the road and salute my Titolitarian past. We used to live in one of those gray monsters close to the stadium before we moved downtown, into a building older than New York City itself. I remember we had to leave our car behind since the narrow streets in the old town don’t support any gas-related traffic, but every Sunday father took me and my older brother Dario to visit our good old Yugo, where it still held its parking space in our ugly old neighborhood.
Gunholder lives downtown, close to The Pond, a small swan lake close to the harbor. Here we’re back with the bourgeoisie: houses with gabled roofs and French windows fill the slopes around the water, gazing out at it, like over-proud guests at a New Year’s ball standing around an empty dance floor. But we’re not there yet. The girl is still driving a highway called Killing My Rabbit or something close to that. Icelanders seem to have a Native American taste in naming people and places. Gunholder tells me we just drove through a town called Cop War.
“But this is Reykjavik?” Father Friendly asks her, adjusting the stiff collar to his thick neck with one hand while pointing out the windshield with the other.
“Yeah, now we’re in Reykjavik.”
“They say it’s a Tarantino town?” Oops. This sounds a bit too cool for the churchman. I quickly add, “I mean, Tarantino’s favorite city?”
She quickly looks me over—wondering whether she’s sitting in a car with some famous Scientology pastor, a man who spends his holidays playing golf with Tom Cruise and John Travolta—before saying:
“Yeah. He was here for New Year’s Eve. My girlfriend knows him. He’s OK.”
I’m glad I didn’t kill him.
Across an islanded bay, a long mountain guards the city to the north. It has the shape of a giant whale stranded ashore. Further north and out east, more mountains surround the city, lying out along the horizon like blue leopards dotted with white snowdrifts. Though they are as far away as the Hamptons from Harlem, I can see them as clearly as the tips of my shoes, for the air is as clean as a Trump Tower window. The ocean is a strong blue, and I can see waves forming and breaking as far as the eye can fly. Everything around here is crystal-clear. Like in the mind of a cold-blooded killer.
The car radio delivers Justin Timberlake. The streets are buzzing with traffic, but the sidewalks are totally empty. Kind of reminds me of Sarajevo during the curfew. Excellent conditions for roof-to-sidewalk hits. The cars are mostly Japanese or European, and all of them look brand new. These people have money. Every other one is an SUV, and many of them are driven by butter-blonde ice-queens like Gunholder. Where are all their husbands?
“Did you have a war recently?” I ask.
“A war? No. We don’t even have an army.”
Tell me another one.
“Why do you ask?” she asks.
“I just wonder where all the men are. I only see single women driving those cars.”
“Most people have two cars. One for him, one for her.”
I look at the black Range Rover in the lane next to us. One of those Virginia Madsen types is at the wheel.
“I see. But that’s not exactly a lady’s car?”
Gunholder gives me a fierce look.
“In Iceland women are equal to men.”
I look at her for a moment, and judging from the determined tilt of her ice-cream nose, I should at least try to believe her. Equal to men. No shit.
She is clearly pissed at me and only gives the shortest possible answers to my following questions. Yes, five degrees is a bit cold for this time of year. Ten degrees is normal(!). Yes, she was partying last night. And yes, Justin Timberlake is quite big in Iceland. (I seem to have decided that Father Friendly is a pretty boring guy.)
Gunholder enters the old town. Here the trees are taller and the streets more narrow. She parks her Škoda on a steep side street, outside a small green house with a rusty red roof. Like the other downtown houses, this one is covered in curly-waved iron on all sides, dressed to kill in a suit of armor. Actually, we could have used this back home: bulletproof vests for buildings.
Gunholder lives on the second floor. Father Friendly does the sign of the cross in front of her door before unlocking it with a small kitchen knife from her mother’s collection. The girl looks at him as if she just witnessed a miracle.
“Here you go,” I say in the most blessed way and open the door for her. She tells me to wait and disappears inside. Her place is the total opposite of her face; it’s a complete mess. I notice a tower of empty pizza boxes on the kitchen worktop; underwear, jeans, and jerseys on the floor; a half-used lipstick and a half-eaten sandwich. The smell of beer that has been sitting open for a week. Yet, in some strange way, this apartment seems much closer to Christ than her parents’ place. It’s much more believable as an apostle’s den.
Gunholder works in a café downtown. She’s a fellow waiter. She offers to drive the miracle man back to the holy house, but I can’t stomach going back to Silence Grove. Anyway, she’s already late for her shift. I walk her to work. The priest and the preacher’s daughter. She walks like a nutty New Yorker, and Father Friendly needs all his energy to keep up with her. Before I know it, we pass the American Embassy; a building as long as Laura Bush’s smile, and as white as her teeth. The front is decorated with six surveillance cameras. Some duck-eyed imbecile in uniform guards the entrance. I lower my head and shift sides, passing the embassy with Gunholder as a human shield, LPP style. She voices her surprise at my sudden move, and her sweet fucking face brings out my own fucking self: I accidentally murmur a “fuck.” She hears it.
“A priest that says ‘fuck’?”
“Sure,” I say, “we can say it. We just can’t do it.”
She slows down a bit.
“Oh, right. So you’ve never…you’re a virgin?”
“That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Her café turns out to be a pretty cool bistro in the heart of town called Café Paris. It looks like a three-star Starbucks with a smoking section, but I’m happy to be inside, wringing my hands like it was January. They’re not kidding about the arctic spring. Gunholder puts on her apron and brings me an All Icelandic Latte with a double shot of irritation. Despite all his miracle-working, she still seems to hate Father Friendly and his deflatable stomach. He gives her a stupid holy smile.
“Does your father keep a gun in the house?”
“A gun? That’s a strange question.”
“Yes. In the States we all keep a gun in the house. You never know. Especially if you’re a priest.”
She rolls her great eyes.
“Nobody has a gun in Iceland. It’s a safe country.”
Safe country, my ass. I make a few calls and within a week it’ll be a Croatian colony.
It’s 10:30 AM on a Wednesday morning and there are three of us in the café. I count two people out on the street. If this is downtown, no wonder the suburbs are silent. Cars sail by in slow motion. I can’t get over all these driving ladies that look like millionaires’ wives or daughters, with Prada sunglasses, Barbie hair, and airbag lips. On my scale, they all range from Day 2 to Day 4.
It reminds me of my week in Switzerland, when my architectural studies took me to a small village in the Alps to research a brand-new skiing area. The week felt like a month. It was even calmer than the fucking Belarus. The only people out were some totally unfucked housewives with Gucci hairdos doing hundred-dollar lunches in the village restaurant. Their husbands spent their days in the city, locked up in their bank safes. They reminded me of the queen of Spain, these ladies in fur and heels, as they slowly passed the jewelry stores (rich people always walk slowly, because of the deep pockets, I guess). They were all Day 26 types, but by the fifth da
y, I was on the brink of a mass rape. I pictured the headline in the International Herald Tribune: “Student Fucks Fifteen, Then Self.”
I finish my coffee and put it on Igor’s card. Gunholder doesn’t seem to notice. I ask her for things for the Friendly tourist to do. She points out the window.
“It’s all there: the cathedral, the parliament, the statue of John Secretson, our national hero…”
She must be joking. The cathedral is the size of God’s dog house (I imagine he has a tricolor Chihuahua), and the parliament building is no bigger than my grandfather’s country house in Gorski Kotar. I’m on Lilliput Island.
I try to dive into the downtown area, but it’s only three blocks square. It’s easier to lose it than get lost in it. How am I to keep up my LPP in this town?
I drift past a hunter’s shopping paradise, and the sight of a rifle tempts me inside. The clerk is a kind-looking gentleman with the soft eyes of a prey animal. I ask for a handgun, shotgun, whatever. Just something that’s good for mailing bullets. He looks at me for a moment before telling me, in a wannabe British accent, that they only sell rifles for hunting, no handguns.
“OK. Can you tell me where I can buy a pistol in this town?”
“I’m sorry, you can’t. Not in a shop at least.”
What is it with these Icelanders? No army. No guns. No nothing. Only gorgeous women driving luxury jeeps, roaming around Big Chill City in their pussy-warm wagons, hoping to pick up a professional killer posing as a priest.
Since I can’t get a gun, I settle for a Swiss army knife, similar to my old one.
I wonder if Father Friendly is Catholic, or does he have a wife? Kids? Actually, I don’t know why the hell I’m thinking about this. Usually I don’t want to know anything about my victims. It’s like back in the war. I kill strangers. I don’t feel for them. They’re just another head to swamp my bullet into. I don’t even want to know why they deserve to die. Usually they have refused to pay their tithe, failed to deliver for Dikan, or they show up with the same tie as he at the Mafia Oscars. But I have to admit that killing Father Friendly was different. It wasn’t professional, it was emotional. I had to kill him to save my own ass. It was assemotional.
The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning Page 4