As I walk I notice the people of Reykjavik move quickly about, as if they believe this were New York and not the smallest capital in history. As if they were all late for a job interview at Merrill Lynch. It must be the cold. The only fellows warming the benches are too drunk to feel it.
All around me the Icelandic national face: round, with a small nose, like a snowball with a pebble in it. I guess every nation has its one distinctive facial feature. We, the Slavs, have the nose, that big strong dog’s snout that enables us to smell trouble all the way back to the twelfth century. The Africans have the lips, the Arabs, the brows, the Americans, the jaw, the Germans, the mustache, the English, the teeth, and the Talians, the hair. The Icelanders seem to have picked the cheeks. Some of these faces are just two cheeks with a hole and two eyes pressed between them.
But for the most part they speak better English than I do. I talk to three of them before I find the city library. Here you have 470,000 books at your disposal, all in Icelandic. (The guy from the plane said writing was one of the basic industries in Iceland.) And here you have Internet access. A bookish bearded guy hands me a code. I punch in the numbers on a keyboard, and the big world opens up for me. Reverend David Friendly is the minister of the Westmoro Baptist Church down in Richmond, Virginia. Sorry, was minister. Plus, he had his own TV show, “The Friendly Hour,” on CBN, The Christian Broadcasting Network, owned by crazy man Pat Robertson, the former presidential candidate and the eternal opponent of abortion and gay rights. In a photo, Rev. Friendly appears as his fat, full self: a round bald head with a big smile and small glasses. He’s surrounded by happy children, all white, plus the customary black one. On a Web site he voices his stance against “same-sex blessings.” Father Friendly was a homophobe. He deserved to die, I guess.
I try googling his name along with different keywords like “murdered,” “killed,” and “death” without any serious results. He hasn’t made the news yet. They still haven’t identified his body, even though I left the fatty gay-basher wearing his own smelly socks, pants, and underpants, sleeping in the men’s room. The lone result to my last search contains a Friendly interview where he voices “an understanding for the people like senator Coburn who favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life.”
Reverend Friendly wants me dead.
CHAPTER 7
FATHER FURY
05.16.2006
I’m sitting in Café Bahrain. Yeah. I think it’s called Café Bahrain. Nothing Arabic about it, though. Just a nice little old-timer with squeaky chairs and Day 3 Girls. Some people are smoking. I haven’t been to a smoky bar in years, and it’s a bit hard on my eyes. I understand the smoking ban is on its way up here, in a sunny sailboat named the Al Gore. On the other hand, Croatia is more likely to see another war than quit smoking. Only when you’ve had some fifty warless years do you start worrying about things like air quality in bars.
I’m celebrating my first day in exile. With beer number five. It’s almost eight o’clock in the evening, but it’s still morning outside. The sun refuses to set here, they say. “It’s up all night, and so are we.” “They” are Ziggy and Hell G, two scruffy local barflies with broken wings.
“The Reykjavik nightlife only has two nights, basically. One is bright and lasts from April to September. And the other one is dark and lasts from October to March,” they tell me.
“And which one is more fun?”
“The bright one of course. Icelandic girls don’t like to do it in the dark,” they say with a laugh.
They’re younger, thinner, and hairier than me, smoke like machines, and find it “so freaky, man” to be drinking with a priest. The clergyman asks them about the gay situation up here, the abortion issue, and whether Iceland honors the death penalty? No. Apparently Iceland is a gun-free, abortion crazy, gay paradise with no death sentence. Father Friendly has come to the right place.
“Our Gay Pride Festival is even bigger than that of the seventeenth of June, our Independence Day.”
Father Friendly takes it all in stride. I try to sit on his gay-bashing, death-dooming self. He only nods his head and adjusts the collar around his neck.
Actually, I wonder why the hell I’m still wearing this stupid collar. I guess I could forget Father Friendly altogether, go back to my toxic self and check into a hotel. No. Not wise. I think it’s better to keep the sucker alive. Otherwise my preacher friends would contact the police and the police would contact his family and all hell would break loose.
“What about murders? How many homocides have you got each year?” I ask them.
“Homocides?” they ask, with bewildered eyes.
“Yeah. How many gays are killed each year in this country?”
“Gays? None, I guess,” Hell G says, a bit shocked by the harshness of the vicar’s words.
“Oh? But how many homicides then? How many regular people are killed?” Friendly continues.
“Sometimes one, sometimes none,” Ziggy says.
Seems my intuition this morning was right. I’m in heaven. No army, no guns, no murders…They don’t even have a red-light district. It’s a ho-free city, they tell me.
“There are no prostitutes in Iceland, but we’ll be forced to have some when we join the European Union,” they tell me with another laugh.
Sex is still free, but the beer costs a bear. Igor’s card bleeds with each glass. I’ve drunk an iPod’s worth of alcohol since stumbling into this place some hours ago, recommended to me by this horribly charming bookstore clerk, a Day 5 type. Two beers later I found out that Café Bahrain is the most famous bar in the land, heavily featured in some hip movie years back. So much for my LPP. How can you lay low in Lilliput Island?
“So what do you do then if you can’t buy sex and don’t do murders? You have drugs?”
There is a beat. This pastor is something else, they seem to be thinking.
“Yeah. Sure,” Ziggy tells the stranger with an even stranger pride. “We, we have a lot of drugs.”
And his friend adds, “We also have a lot of murders in books. In the last years we have many good crime novel writers here in Iceland, like Arnaldur Indridason for example. Also Ævar Orn Josephsson, Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Arni Thorarinsson.”
Icelandic names are like Scud missiles. Their trails linger in the air long after they’ve reached their target. Still, these guys have my respect. Being a crime writer in the land of no murders can’t be easy. It seems you need the creative powers of a genius just to be able to provide your murderer with a gun. I close my ears, but keep my Friendly smile on, as the two barflies go on about their country, trying hard to convince the clergyman that it’s no Sunday school.
I’m pretty spaced out. I feel the alcohol searching out my jet lag and amplifying it. Jesus. I wonder what my holy hosts are up to. They must be on TV already. Goodmoondoor never called. I sure hope the embassy bastards didn’t catch my face on camera. There must be a poster of me on every one of their bedroom walls. I killed one of their men. In fact, I have exactly sixty-seven crosses in American graveyards to my credit, so they would have a good reason to put my face on the sidewalk. But not all sixty-seven were happy-go-lucky greencarders. Some were Talians, some Russians, quite a few Serbs, and one Swedish or Norwegian guy, if I remember it right. It was the strangest accent I have put to rest. But most of them were square-faced, burger-butted Marshmallow Men. With that many dead Americans to my credit, I could probably get an honorary membership in Al-Qaeda.
Yes. I’m on the most wanted list. Yes. I have to remember that this is exile. Yes. I have to maintain LPP. And yes. My name is David Friendly.
Suddenly I hear a familiar voice.
“So there you are!” Gunholder is back in a party outfit, dressed to thrill, and spots me in the corner. “What the hell are you doing here? My dad’s been looking for you! He called me like twice. You’re supposed to be on TV!”
“He never called me,” I say in a drunken drawl.
>
“He didn’t? You have your phone with you?”
I search my coat and jacket. No mobile. The butter-blonde looks down at me like a mother at a child who has lost his school bag. Ziggy and Hell G watch her in silence, like two skinny puffins on freeze-frame.
“OK,” she says. “I will call him.”
Half a beer later, the Good Moon himself walks into the bar, looking very much like a reindeer entering Macy’s on Christmas Eve, with horns blinking and eyes glowing. Still, he puts on the smile as he spots his fellow preacher half fallen into the depths of hell. He holds out his hand. I grab it.
“Hello, Father Friendly. I’m glad I found you.” Always the happy one. “Gunholder told me that you have helped her in this morning.”
“Yes. Our true faith can open any door there is,” I say with a drunken smile.
“But you forgot the phone. It was in the house. I was calling it and I heard it ringing upstairs!”
He laughs like a happy child. I have to laugh too. This guy’s just too damn Good. Either you have to shoot him in the face point-blank or you just go along with him. And I have no gun.
“We have to be quick. We begin after twenty minutes,” he says.
“OK. I’m really sorry.”
I wonder if he notices I’m drunk. Does he really want me on his show? I watch him say good-bye to his beautiful blonde daughter who has joined her girlfriend (a Day 2 brunette that probably has Tarantino’s name on her done-list) at a nearby table. He pauses for a brief second as he watches her suck on the cigarette in her left hand, ready with her white wine in the right. I spot a small movement of Goodmoondoor’s lips, a tiny signal that betrays a willingness to smash his daughter in the head with a large-format, hardcover edition of the King James Bible. He bites his tongue and begs her farewell in Icelandic. Then she finally looks up and blows smoke into his face, with cold eyes, and says in the most chilling voice: “Bless, Pappy.”
Clearly it can only mean “Bye, Dad” but the hateful tone of it breaks a hitman’s heart.
We go outside. The ice-cold evening is as bright as an opened fridge. If this is the hottest city in Europe, I guess we can cool it about this global warming thing. The Good Man drives out of old town on a freshly built highway that takes us past some spruced-up commie projects. Those white-spotted leopards surrounding the city are bathed in sunlight, and seagulls flutter from one light pole to another. The small, grey clouds drift against a light-blue sky. Most look like human sperm to me, others like small whales that swim slowly across town. I try to give sober answers to the holy man’s questions.
“I was totally stranded because I didn’t have your address and I forgot to get your daughter’s phone number. So I just ended up sitting in this café. Talking to some Icelanders. It was OK, actually.”
“Yes, but the coffeehouses in Reykjavik can be dangerous place,” he says with a smile and starts laughing.
His laughter seems to indicate that he himself once had a drinking problem, before God dried him up and gave him a TV station, but the longer it lasts, it becomes clear that he’s trying to cover up the pain caused by the sight of his daughter sitting in a dark demon’s den, smoking and drinking, dressed for action. I must be under the good spell of Father Friendly, for I have to admit that it was quite a horrible sight. For a brief second, she really looked like the Devil’s daughter, with eyes of fire and a mouth full of smoke. I try to laugh with him.
“Like it says in Luke: 21, the day will come over you like snare, if you spend it drinking and surfeiting,” the preacher says as he turns left from the highway into a short Brooklyn-ish boulevard with three floored houses on each side. Is he talking about me? As he parks behind one of the buildings, I can feel the clerical collar turning into a snare around my neck.
“Do you know Brother Branham?” Goodmoondoor asks as we walk from car to building.
“Yes, of course,” Father Friendly says with drunken determination.
His Icelandic colleague stops dead in his tracks and gets all agitated:
“Do you know his theories?”
“Yes, I think I can say so.”
“Do you remember when he said that Los Angeles will sink under water and sharks will swim on the streets?”
“Eh…yes.”
“It’s very interesting, because I was dreaming last night. I was dreaming that I was driving in my car. This car,” he says and points towards his silver Land Cruiser. “I was driving here in Reykjavik and then suddenly a very big whale was swimming beside me. He was swimming fast, and he even went before me. He was on the street. Just like a car. And when he was beside me, he looked at me and he said something. But I could not hear it, because I was in the car and the window was not down.”
Goodmoondoor looks at Father Friendly as if he was hoping for his American brother to interpret the dream as a major event in the history of Christianity.
“Wow,” I say and look to the sky for advice. The shark-like clouds pass overhead. I suddenly feel that I’m stuck in some underwater cartoon for kids, doing the voice of “Marty the Monkfish.”
“That’s amazing, man,” I say. “You should maybe call him and tell him? Maybe he can tell you what it means.”
“You know that brother Branham died in 1965.”
Fuck.
“Sure. I’m not talking about a phone call. I’m talking about a soul call,” I say.
“A soul call?”
“Yes. We do that all the time, in our congregation down in Richmond. Every Tuesday night people come in and speak with their dead relatives. It’s very popular. People really like it. I turn myself into a human switchboard and make the connection through the Lord.”
He starts to laugh. I stress out.
“I don’t know the Baptist Church very well, but in my church we never talk to the dead. We say it’s a hairy sea,” he says.
A hairy sea.
“Yeah, I know. But it’s like, you know, we don’t call them. They call us.”
The temperature must be close to thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit, and here we are, on a sunny spring night, standing out in some backdoor parking lot in the middle of the North Atlantic, me and him, Father Friendly and Father Fury, two complete strangers drunk on beer and God, talking complete nonsense. Exile is a hairy sea.
“We are living the last days. I am saying this on my TV for over fourteen years. We are living the last days. But now I have the feeling that there are not so many days left,” Goodmoondoor says and burns his eyes into my face in that crazy preacher way, not letting go until he’s one hundred percent sure I have received the message.
Looking away is like turning my face away from a bonfire.
CHAPTER 8
GODFELLAS
05.16.2006
“Good evening, dear friends, and welcome to our program. I am very happy to tell you that tonight we have a dear guest with us, and this is the reason we are speaking in English tonight. This is Father Friendly, visiting from our friends at CBN in America. He is a good friend of Pat Robertson, that you have seen here on Amen and the Sermon Channel. He has a very popular TV show in America. And he is one of the best known preachers in many states. A true Christian brother in the faith of the living God, Reverend David Friendly from Richmond, Virginia. Father Friendly, welcome.”
“Thank you, Brother Goodmoondoor. It’s a pleasure to be with you here.”
“I have to tell you that Father Friendly has a Yugoslavia…What do you call it?”
“Accent.”
“Yes. He has a Yugoslavia accent because he was teaching the word of Jesus over there in the time when they were Communist. Hallelujah!”
He almost hits me in the head as he throws his hands in the air, but I manage to step aside. We are standing behind a white lectern, with a blue curtain behind us and a messy TV studio in front of us. I count five people in the room. One man is standing behind a camera, a smiling Sickreader stands in a doorway, and an audience of three pious people is waiting for me to save their sou
ls.
“Communists don’t believe in God, Father Friendly?”
“No. You’re absolutely right about that, brother Goodmoondoor. And this is the reason why they don’t exist anymore.”
“Well. You can find some of them even today,” my preacher friend says with the funniest smile. It’s the smile of someone not too clever showing off his cleverness. It’s quite hilarious. I need all my strength not to laugh as I carry on:
“Indeed. But they are in hiding! They are hiding in the darkness of their godless existence!” I try to speak with the preacher-man’s blind faith. “For they do not dare to come out into the light! The light of God. The light of Godness. The light of Goodness! The good of the light! We are here in Iceland, in the island of light, where God lets it shine long into the night. He lights up the night. He makes the night bright. I have to say: You are very fortunate, you are fortunate people. You live in God’s land. The land of the living God. Hallelujah!”
What in the hell am I saying?
“Yes, Father Friendly. Maybe you can tell us about your work in Yugoslavia. Was it before the war?”
“It was before the war, when Comrade Tito was president of all Yugoslavia, of all the countries that we now know as Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina and others.”
What the fuck am I saying? Friendly must have been all of fifteen when Tito died.
“This was the time of oppression and imprisonments. My father…My father the Lord guided me through the dark streets of dictatorship, to seek out the souls willing to open their hearts for the light of God. We had to be very careful with our conviction and sometimes we had to betray with our tongue the faith we kept sacred in our hearts, just in order to survive. In that sense we were almost like secret agents, like James Bond or…Ray Liotta in the movie Goodfellas…”
The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning Page 5