The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

by Helgason, Hallgrimur

  I’m falling out of character here.

  “Or like the first followers of Jesus Christ,” the host helps me out.

  “Yes! Exactly. Thank you, Brother Goodmoondoor. We were just like the apostles. We had to hide. We had to be careful. But we were never doubtful. God was showing us the way. He was…He was the searchlight that we needed, so that we were able to walk the dark street of dictatorship.”

  “And then you were a young American boy?”

  “Yes. Yes, exactly. I was young David. David Friendly, a…young boy from Vienna, Virginia. What the hell was I doing over there, in old Europe? I was sent there as a missionary. I…I had been…Back home, I was what they call a…a teenage dirtbag, a bad boy. A very bad boy. Instead of doing my homework I was out stealing and fucking girls.”

  I can feel the smile freeze on Goodmoondoor’s face. Better watch my language.

  “But I always did it in the missionary position.”

  Fuck it. I’m still drunk. I even allow myself to smile a bit. The old lady in the front row closes her eyes for two seconds.

  “Sorry. But here is the story. I was once robbing a local church with two friends of mine. We were running away with some candlesticks, chalices, and stuff, and I was the last one out, because I was then, just like I am now, a little bit on the chubby side.”

  I can see that Sickreader laughs in her sweet and discrete way.

  “So, my friends were already outside when all of a sudden the light came on and I heard this great voice. ‘You can carry away all the silver you want, Brother Judas, but it will never save your soul!’ I didn’t even dare to look back. I just stopped for a second before I ran to the door and threw myself out in the dark. I did escape, but I could not escape those words. They came back to me again and again. Maybe because I didn’t know who it was who spoke them. The voice was very deep, a very deep man’s voice, and in my mind it was the voice of God himself. ‘But it will never save your soul!’ For days my soul was totally tortured by those words. Finally, I went back to the church with all the stuff I had stolen. I put it on a bench inside the church and I was about to run outside when I heard the voice again. It was the rector. We had a long talk. And half a year later, I found myself on the streets of Sarajevo spreading the word of God. With a searchlight.”

  I smile. This one is right on target. Father Friendly would be proud of this performance.

  “Hallelujah! Holy brother. Hallelujah,” my Icelandic colleague calls out. “You are like Paul the Postuli, Paul the Apostle, St. Paul. You had same experience like him. Did you also be blind?”

  “What?”

  “Did you also be blind when the light came?”

  “In the church, you mean? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I was totally blinded by the light. That’s why I had to stop.”

  Goodmoondoor has that reindeer expression again. He looks at me as if I just parted the Atlantic Ocean all the way down to the Canary Islands for his people to go on vacation. He puts his hand on the top of my head as if he was baptizing me, and suddenly his English improves:

  “Blessed be your soul, holy brother. Hallelujah! Amen. The force of the living God is with us. Hallelujah! Blessed be your soul, Father Friendly. For you are anointed. Your soul is saved.” He then removes his hand from my bald skull and faces the camera. “For let it be heard: The Story of the Postuli, Chapter Nine, that is Acts Nine in the English Bible…It tells the story of Saul, of Levitan Saul, this ordinary man from Tarsus, this simple man working as an executioner for the Roman government. And they sent him to Damascus, so that he could carry the Christians in robes…”

  “In ropes,” I quickly correct him, suddenly sounding like a Bible expert.

  “…So he could put them in ropes and carry them to Jerusalem. But on his way, before he came to Damascus, he saw a great light and a voice spoke to him: ‘Saul, Saul, why you persecute me?’ And Saul said, ‘Who are you?’ And the voice said, ‘I am the Lord.’ And the Lord told him to stop working against the Christians, and Saul was blind for many days, until the Lord sent Ananias to him. And Ananias came to him and told him to see again. And Saul became Paul. The executioner became number two in God’s Church on earth. Jesus was number one, and Paul was number two. Hallelujah! And he wrote a big part of this book!”

  Goodmoondoor holds the black Bible in the air.

  “He wrote a big part of the holy book, the book of books, the Word of God. His soul was saved. He became a holy man. A holy man. Hallelujah!”

  “Hallelujah!” I repeat after him. I really do. Must be the beer.

  CHAPTER 9

  TORTURE

  05.19.2006

  The best thing about the war was sleeping outside. In the Dinara Mountains. The cuckoo was our alarm clock. I never saw him, but he always got us up before dawn, for the land was on our side. The Serbs were still asleep, behind the hill and the next. Lazy bastards. Never started fighting before eight. I guess we can thank them for those beautiful mornings. Sunny silent mornings with the best breakfast in the world: a woodcutter’s coffee and povitica bread. We ate in silence, watching the first morning rays deal with the butter still cold from the night.

  One of those early dawns, Andro, the crazy boy from Pula, suddenly started talking about the morning dew. In a little while he was shouting about:

  “We are fighting for dew! We can’t let the Serbs have the dew! We want more dew! Stupid war! Fighting for dew!”

  Then he sprang to his feet and started running around the hill pointing to different spots on the ground.

  “Croatian dew! Serbian dew! No-ownership dew!”

  Javor, our commander, pulled out his handgun and shot him in the back of his head. Andro fell in the grass like a dead calf.

  “Now you can drink it, you stupid son of the ugliest whore in Pula!” the lava-faced Javor spit out of his mouth.

  Piti rosu, to drink the dew, became our phrase for dying. I felt a bit sorry for Andro. Among all the members of our squad, I probably had the biggest tolerance for his nuttiness. I owed him.

  Andro was a big Madonna fan and even named his rifle after the American pop star. Every now and then he would burst out with “…like a virgin,” in his Morrissey voice. And he always carried a small crucifix in the breast pocket of his uniform. The mini-Jesus was white, but his cross was sort of brown, thus blending in with the dark green of the uniform. The effect was that the small Messiah always stuck out of the pocket as if waving his hands, saying: “Hey guys, listen!” Maybe Andro did, because from time to time he would start philosophizing about the pointlessness of war, not really the type of thing a soldier needs to hear. And every now and then he would do something crazy, like running naked through the enemy line and back, or now, screaming about dew. He was unstable, and Javor was absolutely right to kill him.

  But me and Andro once spent a whole night together, drinking and singing out in the open. We had lost our group and spent all our bullets when we stumbled upon a blown-up Chetnik tank. Inside it we found a bottle of rakjia that quickly released our singing spirits. It was the most stupid thing we could do, singing Croatian songs in the heart of a Serbian night. A bullet could have silenced us any minute. But you have to understand that fighting in a war is like playing Russian roulette 24/7. Every breath could be your last. It’s a dreadful thought, but it slowly becomes a thrilling one; you kind of get addicted to it. You even start teasing the limits. We were young and fearless, tired from killing, and couldn’t care less.

  Luckily, we were singing the Yugoslavian winner of the 1989 European Song Contest when a dead-drunk Serbian soldier suddenly appeared in front of us, in full army gear. Could he join us? he asked, did we have booze? Apparently he thought we were his countrymen, as we were sitting on top of a Serbian tank and singing a Yugoslavian song. Only after the first sip did he realize that we were the enemy, when he spotted the Hrvatska emblems on my uniform. There was this long moment of suspense as he stared at it and we looked at his rifle. Ours were lying on the ground below us
, devoid of all ammunition. Then, Andro saved the night by picking up the song again, and the Serbian guy joined in. Together we screamed like a trio of alley cats, all three of us: “Rock me baby! Nije vazno šta je. Rock me baby! Samo neka traje.”

  Eurovision saved my life. Andro saved my life.

  At the end of our bottle, Andro came out with the truth. He was gay. He wanted to kiss me. Andro was a handsome kid. Black hair, fair skin, thick lips. I guess he was a Day 156 type, and the war had already lasted half a year and…Okay, I almost wanted to kiss him. (War either makes you a fascist or a fag.) But I just couldn’t, not for the memory of my Serb-fucking father. But we all got excited, and pants went down. Andro jerked us off, me and the Serb. It was the strangest image I have from that fucking war. The crazy gay boy from Pula jerking us off in the deep Dalmatian night, with a prick in each hand: one Serbian, one Croatian.

  If we had gay nations, there would be less wars.

  I wake up with war shadows fluttering about the bright white room. My dark past tries to balance out my life here in the bright, silent island, where you go to sleep in broad daylight and wake up in screaming sunshine at six in the morning. It’s hard to sleep. I feel like I’m in a hospital. A neon-bright, deadly-silent, no-one-wears-shoes-indoors hospital. Goodmoondoor even walks around his own house wearing only his socks. It’s disgusting.

  And this peaceful land has never seen war. Not in a thousand years. Must be the island thing. No extra dew to fight for.

  Was it necessary for all those people to die just so that we could claim Knin as a Croatian town? I still ask myself that question. Shortly after the war, I drove through it, this insignificant town of fifteen thousand people. The sight of our flag flying above those broken roofs made me sick to my stomach. I actually had to stop the car and puke. I puked on the land that we had claimed, the land I had been willing to give up my life for. Yet we had to do it. We had to. Don’t ask me why. We just fucking had to.

  Every man belongs to a nation, a thing greater than himself. A nation is the sum of our strengths, as well as of our collective stupidity. War makes the former obey the latter.

  I get up and go to the bathroom. It’s so freaky clean. This is where the angels shit. I have a holy hangover. Not only from the beer, but also from all the hallelujahs I said on TV. Goodmoondoor was very happy with my performance. His American colleague didn’t let him down.

  I wonder if they have a TV guard at the US embassy, some pimpled wacko whose job it is to watch all the local programs and check if they contain some blow-Bush or fuck-the-FBI messages. And then, in the middle of the night, he suddenly would have seen me on the screen, the bald round face that matches the America’s Most Wanted poster on the wall beside the TV set. The Croatian clitsucker that killed the FBI agent in Queens last week, posing as the priest they found dead in a JFK bathroom last Tuesday. I’ve been waiting all night long for the SWAT team to show up, waking up every half an hour. At 4.00 AM I called my love, Munita. No answer.

  The holy couple gets up at 7:00. Morning prayer starts at 7:30. Father Friendly has to show up. “Dear God. Save me from my sins.”

  After breakfast they take me sightseeing. There the president lives, there the shopping mall is, there they store the volcano water. Here they make the world famous dairy product called Scare, and the swimming pool over there is one of the world’s best. In fact, they do their best to convince me that their country is the “best in the world.” They go on and on about the longest life, the happiest people, the cleanest air, etc. I really want to tell them that a country devoid of brothels and gun shops can’t even think of claiming such a title, but instead the Friendly one nods his head, slowly but persistently, like a Texas oil drill.

  Goodmoondoor drops his wife off at the TV station to tape her show and we drive on, though he feels the need to explain.

  “I don’t think woman should work outside the house, but my wife is doing her work for God and that is different, I think.”

  “She’s working in the house of God,” I have Mr. Friendly say.

  Goodmoondoor is pleased with the answer and laughs a bit before asking a rather tricky question:

  “What about your wife? She work outside the home?”

  Oops. I have a wife.

  “She? No, she prefers housework. And I’m very pleased with that.”

  “I was very sad when I heard about her accident.”

  Oh? My wife was in a car crash? Hope she’s OK.

  “Yeah. Thank you,” I say with sorrowful eyes, like a bad actor in a stupid commercial.

  “You must miss her very much.”

  Oops, there went my wife. This is like watching a thriller movie backwards.

  “Yeah, you bet. It’s hard being alone.”

  “And you don’t have any children with her?”

  Wow. That’s a tough one.

  “Eh…No, I don’t think so.” Fuck. That was terrible. “I mean, no. Not technically.” Don’t ask me what I mean by this. I have no idea.

  He drives on in silence. He doesn’t ask any more questions. It’s quite uncomfortable. Does he suspect anything? I break the silence by going back to the start of the conversation, women and work.

  “But Gunholder, she works in a café?”

  “Yeah. I am giving her time. She has time to think. When I was thirty year old, I was on the street. I was drinking. I didn’t see the light. When the wine goes in, the brain goes out.”

  I take a good hard look at him. Not so holy after all.

  We visit his friend’s church in the neighboring town of Cop War. It looks more like an aerobics gym than a regular church, and the smell of sweat fills the air. His friend’s name is shorter than either of my hosts,’ but it’s much harder to say. Written as Thordur, it sounds like “Torture” when they try helping me out. He has a round face with round glasses and a full, biblical beard. The only modern thing about him is his long hair that he anoints with blessed gel. Actually, he reminds me a bit of my broad-faced father, bless his soul. Goodmoondoor tells me that Torture appears on his TV channel every day. It shows: His speech is loud and clear, as if he were still on camera. He doesn’t let go of the Bible the entire thirty minutes, holding it in his hand like a holy hammer. Once or twice he pounds it into the air as if he were nailing his theses to the front door of his church. His views are unorthodox and extreme, his language more colorful than most.

  “People sometimes ask me if you need to be circumcised to enter into heaven. I tell them no. There is no need to. It’s not about the genitals, but the heart. The question is: are you ready to open up the foreskin of your heart and let in the light of the living God?”

  The fire of homophobia rages in his eyes. When I look deeply into them I see, through the flames, a skinny gay fellow nailed to a cross belting out “I Will Survive.” Father Friendly adds fuel to this fire, while Toxic remembers his night with Andro.

  “We used to have this gay guy at our congregation in Virginia,” I say. “But after I ripped the ring out of his earlobe with pincers, he went from GAY to OK.”

  Goodmoondoor looks at his bearded friend like a small boy, and Torture laughs like the devil himself, answering in his fine English:

  “Heh, heh. That’s the way to do it. Brand them by the balls!”

  Friendly gets carried away. “Or use them as fire extinguishers. I once had an altar boy who looked way too feminine for his age. I had to teach him a lesson. So I used him for putting out candles. With his mouth. I used to tell him, ‘Better to blow the light of the Lord than the dick of darkness!’”

  They both stare at me for a moment before they start laughing like two middle-aged fraternity brothers having a chance meeting in a hotel lobby forty years later. “The dick of darkness! Ha ha!”

  “Father Friendly was very good on TV last night. Did you see him?” Goodmoondoor asks his friend.

  “Yes, I saw him. He’s an excellent footman in the army of God,” Torture says and puts his right hand on my shoulder. The arm of
fire.

  CHAPTER 10

  MOJA ŠTIKLA

  05.20.2006

  The days go by. I slowly adapt to exile existence. It’s going OK. I’m getting used to the silence and the brightness, as well as the sterility of the house, but the cold is more difficult to handle. It’s the coldest May of my life. Still, everywhere they talk of the loveliest spring.

  “We are happy if we get ten degrees here in Iceland,” Sickreader explains.

  Poor guys. I’m happy if I only get ten more minutes up here.

  In the morning Father Friendly visits various churches and volunteer organizations where they treat him like the pope on tour, fill him with coffee and cookies, and load him up with booklets and brochures that show off their good work. They’re building a kindergarten in Kenya, a primary school in India. The priests are all men, the volunteers all women. I make my objections to Goodmoondoor once we’re in the car.

  “I’m worried to see all those women working outside their homes,” I say.

  “It’s all right because they are not paid,” he answers and winks at me in the funniest way.

  My afternoons are usually my own. I walk around the city LPP-style, moving slowly down Liquor Vicar, the main street, women-watching and window-shopping, forever seeking the gun of my dreams. I follow my weight all the way down the hill, to the main square, which looks more like an empty parking lot than a city plaza. In a warm bookstore near the square, you can buy Handgun Magazine, the hitman’s favorite. Seems Smith & Wesson has a new model out. “Easy on your hand, easy on your target.” Pretty close to the “guilt-free gun” that we hangmen have been dreaming about for six hundred years. I wrap my scarf around the collar before paying for the mag at the cash register. One more local wonder girl, a Day 3 type, hands me the receipt. It’s a well-known fact that Croatia has the most beautiful women in the world, but Iceland might be a close runner-up. They are very different, though, those butter-blondes from our dark-haired ljepotice. From a bench by the big pond behind the cathedral, I watch the ducks and swans sail about. It’s a beautiful setting, really, perfect for a cigarette. But I won’t break my five-year abstinence from tobacco, even though I guess I’ve got good excuses to do so. Have to take care of my health. Instead I read about this innovation called NSK (No Spill Kill) made possible by the new, revolutionary bullet from Eagle Eye “big enough to ice your victim instantly, but so small that it won’t spill any blood at all.” Only in the most God-fearing, Christian country on the planet would they allow such a publication. Who’s buying it up here, on Gun-Free Island? I throw it in the garbage before entering Café Paris. The butter-blonde is on duty. I suck in my stomach and pick one of her tables.