The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

by Helgason, Hallgrimur

  I spend the rest of Saturday night home alone, enjoying the European Song Contest 2006 on my big new surround-sound flat screen, which looks more like a fat screen, actually. The counting of the votes was always my favorite. Some screaming Finns in Halloween costumes take home the trophy. Bosnia & Herzegovina comes in third. Severina finishes at number thirteen with only fifty-six votes, all of them coming from the former republic of Yugoslavia. Even the Serbs feel bad enough to give us ten points. Or it was their dicks voting. Apparently the rest of Europe hasn’t seen Severina’s sex tape. If we are ever to win this fucking thing again, we need to create more Balkan states.

  The fridge is full of food. I make a late-night omelet for the hungry hitman in hiding. I take it in the billiard room downstairs, trying to keep low profile and lights off. My landlords are Kristján Þ. Maack and Helena Ingólfsdóttir, and it seems they’ve been enduring these names for about sixty years. The photo albums show a happy mustached couple smiling in all the right places from Florida to Slovenia. They seem to travel for a living. The kitchen calendar shows March in Kenya, April in Bulgaria. Probably thinking of me, Helena has marked this weekend: London, London, London, London. They’re due back on Monday.

  After a long and eventful day, I’m happy to go to their bed. It’s big as a boxing arena, with his and her corners. I can’t find the gloves, but I can see that she’s reading some Italian cookbook and he’s reading Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia. Fucking Talians all the time. How about some press for the honest and hard-working men of the Croatian Mafia? How about some books, some films, some fame? Fuck it. Even some ugly-named nobody on Gun-Free Island is reading about the pasta-poopers. I sleep on her side, reserving my last waking minutes for a survey of my strange situation. What’s next? I could either kill them when they return and stay here until the fridge is empty, or use the ticket Igor bought me at the airport. I don’t see any other possibilities.

  I spend Sunday at home, enjoying a long and luxurious breakfast, trying hard to read the article that accompanies my photo on the back page of the newspaper that came through the front door late last night. The headline reads: Mafíumorðingi á Íslandi? Sounds like Mafia something in Iceland. The question mark is reassuring. There is a mention of Father Friendly and Goodmoondoor’s Christian TV station, along with some words from the preacher himself. I can picture his big-eyed llama-face on a long hairy neck in front of the reporter: “We are in big shock. We didn’t suspect anything. He was very friendly. We consider ourselves lucky to be alive.”

  Igor’s name is not mentioned. He’s my only hope now.

  I try to call Munita, using the Maacks’ house phone. I know it’s not the wisest move, but I just can’t resist. I have to talk to her. I call her mobile and her machine. “So please leave me a massage after the beep.” You got to love that voice. That soft, oily, hairy world that sucks you in like the mother of life itself. Even her speaking mistakes are sexy. She doesn’t answer. And she doesn’t call back. I wonder if she’s OK? Violent death runs in her family.

  I take a long hot bath in the biggest tub east of Vegas, letting bubbles bounce my belly for fifty minutes, then enjoy a naked walk of the house with a cold beer in hand, taking all possible advantage of the extraordinary feeling of being out of sight, out of time. I live in an empty house. I’m the no one who’s at home. I do not exist. I’m just that invisible force that moves a small green can of Heineken beer around this big house, slowly sucking away its contents.

  As I go back inside the bathroom, I’m unpleasantly surprised to see my face in the mirror. For a split second I see Father Friendly. I’m reminded of our quick eye contact in the mirror at JFK and my heart skips a beat. Mr. Friendly is stubborn like a stud on steroids. He just won’t let go. He keeps calling me from his grave like an angry senior complaining about his coffin. I even dreamt him last night. At some open-air gathering of long white gowns and tall green trees, he came over to me and kissed me on the forehead. His lips felt big, thick, and warm. As if he was black. And when he backed away, I saw that in fact he looked like Louis Armstrong, the good old trumpet man.

  I don’t get it. Sixty-six pigs have gone down, without the slightest twinge of conscience, and then all of a sudden: a bald priest killed in an airport bathroom keeps following me around like a retarded girl in love. Maybe he wasn’t just a holyman but a holy man? Like Louis Armstrong.

  The beer makes my brain swim inside my head, like a whale trapped in an undersized aquarium, and I get all confused. I look at myself in the mirror, look for myself in the mirror. Somehow I’m not there. I’m faced with a babushka doll with the face of an American TV preacher. Inside him there is the charming polish housepainter Tadeusz Boksiwic. Inside him is the Russian armsmuggler Igor Illitch. Inside him: Toxic the hitman. Inside him: The fresh-off-the-boat Tom Boksic. And finally, inside him, there is “Champ,” the tiny little Tomo-boy from Split, Croatia.

  Instead of getting depressed about the number and sizes of all my different selves, I add yet another one to the wooden doll: I walk out of the house as Mr. Maack, the successful business man of Guard the Beer, Iceland. I’m wearing a long light brown winter coat, a dark gray hat, and a red scarf around my neck. Shoes from Lloyds, London. On top of it all, I’m holding a brown leather briefcase containing my Russian sneakers and some clean underwear. I must look totally ridiculous, like a royal hitman on his way to a late night job.

  Still, I try to walk like a business man: with a straight back and belly out front. A man who’s got all his successes behind him now doing his victory walk. As if he was not moving his feet himself, but was being pushed down the road by the steady growing interests of his investments. This means that I walk rather slowly along the sidewalk. I’m the only one to do so here in the country of no streetwalkers. It makes me a bit nervous. Every fucking car is full of eyes. Apparently they’ve never seen a walking man before. It’s like being on stage to a full house at the HNK. But this is the only way. Stealing a car wouldn’t be Mr. Maack’s style, and a taxi was too risky.

  The light is on as ever. At 10:33 the sun is still burning on the horizon like an orange lantern at an outdoor Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn. It’s a beautiful evening, actually, with completely calm seas and the customary ten degrees.

  Damn it. Now I sound like a British gentleman. Must be the hat.

  CHAPTER 13

  MURDER & KILLING INC.

  05.21.2006

  I didn’t feel like killing Maack the couple. Their dog was enough. I’m still without my habitual working tool, and to tell the truth, I didn’t fancy another assemotional one. I don’t need two more Friendlys on my back. I also came to the conclusion that Igor was no longer an option.

  I used to think my mistake of presenting myself as Igor at the gates of this country, instead of being Father Friendly all the way from JFK, was a bit of dumb luck, but now I’m not so sure. The fact that Mr. Friendly was traveling on the Icelandair flight that night, but then never showed up in Iceland, must have triggered suspicion in some high places. And when they identified the dead body in the airport bathroom as Friendly’s, they made the easy calculation: his killer was traveling on his ticket that night. They will have then checked the list of passengers and identified them all as guilt-free, glacier-loving tourists except for this one guy. And then the passport controller’s report that night must have given Igor away as a potential Friendly-killer. So leaving Iceland in Igor-disguise is a risk I won’t take. I don’t want to spend the next thirty years eating thirty-two-cent meatloaves and listening to Snoop Dogg thumping out from the next cell. I’m a Creed fan, for crying out loud. I’d rather stay here nameless, gunless, and aimless in The Land of the Ten Degrees.

  The walk from Guard the Beer to Reykjavik is almost one hour long. A white police car goes by. I keep my cool. It’s like walking a tightrope. I have to maintain my concentration all the time. One look to the left and I might fall. Into federal hands.

  I walk the same route that Gunholder d
rove me on day one. I’m going to her house. The butter-blonde is my only hope now. I didn’t dare calling her. Her phone must be bugged by now. I have no reason to believe that she’ll be waiting for me with balloons and brownies, but somehow my Balkan animal instinct tells me she will show me something else than the door.

  I stroll down the barren sidewalk along the Miklabraut. Here I meet the first passerby of the night. A thin gray-haired man comes jogging towards me in a red T-shirt stained with sweat. His face is filled with horrible pain, as if he was playing Christ on the cross. It’s only a matter of years until jogging will be banned along with smoking. I had five jogger friends in NYC. We used to meet in Central Park four times a week, just to keep in shape for the honeys. I managed to quit after six months, but they couldn’t kick the habit. Three years later, three of them had lost all their weight. Well, I have to admit that for a very good reason one of them became my #32, a sad story really, but the other two both died from jogging-related conditions.

  As the tortured jogger passes me, I manage to cover my face by pretending to lift my hat in greeting, like some old-school movie man. I have to be careful. I’m a household face in Iceland now. My picture was even on the TV news earlier tonight. It was the same photo they had in the paper, a terrible mug shot from the early Toxic days in Germany. I look different now, more cheeks and no hair, but a clever face-reader would identify me on the spot.

  The sun seems to be setting at last as I enter the old town. Still there is no sign of darkness. It’s bright as a morgue at midnight. Here the cars are all still, parked outside the small houses, but there are also some passersby to stay clear of. I get lost for a good while, but finally I find Gunholder’s bulletproof house. She’s not home. I use my Swiss knife to get inside.

  In the days since Wednesday, she has only added to the mess in her apartment. How can she live like this? Even an old footman from the Homeland War wouldn’t survive for three days in this dump. All the ashtrays are overflowing, and the situation has called for extreme measures: A small frying pan is sitting on top of the TV, filled with ash and broken butts. Clothes are everywhere, covering floor and furniture like a colorful snowfall. Here and there an empty beer can stands like a tombstone in the snow, a memorial to a long dead party. The bedroom looks to be growing dirty linen, and it smells like a gym. I spot two mags lying at my feet. One is called Dazed & Confused, the other one is Slut Magazine. What did I tell you? The holy couple have produced a ho.

  I take off my coat, hat, and scarf, and start emptying the ashtrays and picking up clothes. In forty minutes’ time, the place looks like it could be photographed for The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning. I’ve just fallen into an armchair, the one facing the kitchen and the front door, when Gunholder opens it. I suck in my stomach. She screams a silent “what!” and then closes the door.

  “What are you doing here?”

  If I was still Father Friendly she would have said: “What the FUCK are you doing here?” The killer has a bit more appeal than the clergyman.

  “What…I don’t…Who are you anyway?! And how did you get…So that’s why you could open the door the other day?”

  She’s a bit drunk. Her beauty is slightly out of focus. Only now she notices the neatness.

  “What? Was Mom here as well?”

  After some more unanswered questions, she settles for a cigarette and lets herself fall down on the sofa.

  “Who are you? What’s your name? What are you doing? Did you really kill the priest? At the airport? Why?”

  There is a touch of admiration in her voice. A hint of a smile on her delicious lips. I tell her my life story minus the sixty-seven homicides, my two years with Munita and my night with Andro. She smokes and listens and looks for an ashtray.

  “Where did you put all the ashtrays?” she asks.

  “There is one right there, in front of you.”

  Apparently she has never seen an empty ashtray before. The Icelandic slut. She smells like a New Jersey Devils’ banner that’s been hanging in the dim corner of a seedy Newark lounge for the past twenty years. I really want to vacuum her with my nose.

  “Oh, thanks,” she says and puts the ashtray to use.

  “You should stop smoking. It can kill you,” I say.

  “Are you telling me about killing?” she says with an offended smile.

  “Yeah. Why not?”

  “You just killed a priest didn’t you? Plus you’re wanted for another murder.”

  I see. They’ve made the connection between the dead man in the airport and the dead man in the dumpsite. Good job.

  “You think the killer doesn’t care about life? You think he doesn’t care about health or keeping a clean house?” I say and point to the tidy room.

  “Very nice,” she says.

  “The killer is a human being like everyone else. He has his rights.”

  “Right. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “So you’re the…the sensitive type of a killer, then?”

  “I don’t know. I just hate it when people discriminate against me, only because I…kill people.”

  Oops. Shouldn’t have said that. She stops in mid-smoke.

  “What do you mean? You’ve killed more people?”

  I’m in trouble. Never show your gun on a first date. But she already knows I killed two guys, plus this is not a date, right? I’m here looking for her help. I’m in trouble.

  “Some people just have to die,” is my solution.

  “And my father’s friend had to die?”

  “Well. He had to be killed. Or else I would be in jail right now, being raped in the shower every morning by black Hulks with limp hose-dicks.”

  She looks surprised by my vocabulary. I am as well.

  “But what do you mean by: Some people have to die?” she asks.

  “Just, you know. There are people who deserve to die.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they’re evil. Evil people who do evil things. People who do the wrong thing. Or refuse to do the right thing. Then they have to be taken away.”

  “Wow. You speak like my dad’s friend, Þórður.”

  “Torture?”

  “You call him that? Ha ha. Fits him well. Are you religious, or…?”

  “I’m Catholic.”

  “OK. How can I be sure you’re not some crazy TV preacher who was Father Friendly’s competitor and wanted him dead?”

  “Because I’m not.”

  “OK. But you say you’re a Catholic?”

  “Yeah, but I’m a Croatian Catholic. There’s nothing religious about that. It only means you go to church two times in your life. When you marry and when you die.”

  “That’s nice. And how often have you been? Once?”

  I have to smile at this one.

  “No.”

  She hesitates for a second before extinguishing her cigarette in the ashtray. Then she says:

  “Who are you then? Just another loser murderer who shot an FBI agent by some mistake and had to flee the fucking States?”

  Well. Fuck her.

  “I’m not a ‘loser murderer,’ I’m a….”

  “Yeah? What?”

  This is going too far.

  “I’m a…professional.”

  “A professional?”

  “Yep. I’m a professional killer. I’ve killed over one hundred people.”

  This is just great. I’m in bed with her by now.

  “Come on. ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE?!”

  I guess the exact number would be something like 125. In the Midwest I used to drive through towns with a sign saying: POP. 125. I always stopped for gas, imagining this was my own personal ADV.

  “Yeah. On the whole. I killed about fifty or sixty as a soldier in the Croatian army defending the land of my father and mother. And since then I have killed exactly sixty-six motherfuckers from various countries in my work as a hitman for the national organization. Father Friendly was my first and only ‘amateur’ murder.”


  She is speechless and remains so, like the Catholic priest in his confession booth.

  “The national organization?” she finally asks.

  “Yeah, the Mafia.”

  “The Mafia? You’re in the Mafia?”

  “Yeah. The Croatian Mafia, that is. Not the Talian shit.”

  She stares at me for some good ten seconds, suddenly looking totally sober. The Mafia. In my early New York days I used to think this was my magic word. I thought every girl in Manhattan dreamt about a real and authentic Mob man with a foreign accent and expert humping style. I always dropped it on the first date, right after the main course. They all reacted in the same way; they politely excused themselves, went to the bathroom, and never came back. Oh, the girls of Manhattan, this whole dating army of mystic blondes and loud brunettes, with their moneytoring eyes, hair smelling of TV soap, and the fame-detector buried deep in their purses. Some even left their purses with me, and twice I went looking for them in the ladies room, but there was no trace of them. Yes, “the Mob” are magic words.

  I slowly learned not to discuss my profession with my bubbly dinner partners, feeling very much like the AIDS-infected dater. I kept that info like a secret weapon, saving it for dumping purposes only, or SOS situations. If I was, for example, stuck on a first date and the food was better than the girl (a Day 3 Girl who was turning into a Day 20 type in the middle of her lecture on the American voting system and how some Nader guy was “our only hope”), all I had to do then was to drop the magic word and bang!—I could reset my radar.

  The reaction is a bit different here. The ice-girl weighs her options until she asks:

  “You’re like a…mass murderer then?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, no?”

  “I’m not a murderer. I’m a killer.”

  “OK.”

  “There is a big difference between murder and killing.”

  “Oh?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.

  “Yes. It’s like the difference between a hobby and a job.”