“Who?”
“The guy.”
“What guy? In the restaurant? Yeah. They must be married.”
“No, the guy you’re…”
Her sweet exotic face, like a sunflower set against the busy twilight traffic. And her sudden expression of pain, as if someone just pinched her in the back.
“The guy I’m what?”
“They guy you’re seeing.”
“The guy I’m seeing? I’m seeing a guy?”
“Yeah. Is he married?”
“No. No, why do you say that?”
Her voice full of innocence. But then the wrong words:
“Tod, you know I’d never do a married man…”
Eyes blinking from blunder. Lips full of regret. And then a hurried monologue full of don’t get me wrongs.
I replayed that fucking sentence seven times a day for the next few months. I fucking studied that sentence like an archeologist studies the brim of a broken glass found deep inside the hills of Mount Ararat. What the hell did it mean? “I’d never do a married man.” I checked the dictionaries, searched the Internet, listened in on countless conversations in the subway, watched a lot of daytime TV, and yet I couldn’t quite figure it out. My English wasn’t up to the task. Not then. I wasn’t familiar with all the nuances of this mother of languages. And yet I had come here a year earlier than she. But of course she was “doing” all those men, learning English through pillow talk and taking lessons well into the weenie hours of the morning, while all my dates went straight to the bathroom after the main course and flushed themselves down the toilet, kamikaze style.
In the end, when this-all-too-casual sentence had flown across my Manhattan sky, for three whole weeks, I swallowed my pride and enrolled in an English class at some immigrant friendly evening school down in Tribeca. A seedy neon-lit room with scruffy plastic chairs was filled with dead-happy Day 15 Girls from the Philippines and a few Al-Qaeda members of the male sex, plus the Finnish-born teacher Kaari, a bony ugly-beauty with long blonde hair, that I could never decide was a Day 5 or a Day 25 type. At the end of the semester, I’d finally worked up my courage and raised my hand to ask the teacher if say…a certain man had been dating a certain woman for a certain period of time and at a certain moment she would reassure him that she’d never do married men…
“It means that you should stop dating her,” went the verdict.
And the class erupted. They fucking erupted with laughter, all the ever-smiling Filipinas and the bin Laden brothers as well. I strongly considered bringing my Uzi to the next lesson, but I guess I was just too thankful to this Kaari woman, who had raised my English level by twenty floors in three months. Seeing all her students die would probably have made her depressed.
I owe my English to Aunt Jealousy. She helped me rise above my situation. Dikan and Co. are still stuck on ground level with their command of the English language. “Take me to car.” It did put me in a bit of an awkward situation (you don’t want to look this much more clever than your boss) and I tried to downplay my skills half the time. But Dikan saw through me and started using me as his interpreter in some of his bigger deals. I always got this bad feeling in my stomach when the Fingerlicker sat beside me in the Zagreb Samovar, sucking on his dead cigar and staring at me, while I explained our case to the Polish boys from Chicago. Dikan always seemed a bit suspicious of my rapid progress and acted like I learned English by secretly dating one of the Bush twins, spending my hit-free weekends in the West Wing, dining with the Head and Mrs. Head of the FBI.
Little did he know it was only the result of my relentless research into Munita’s love life, a procedure that included some spy work as well, that brought no results, I’m ashamed to say.
But by saying she would never do married men, Munita indicated that she was in fact “doing” unmarried men, and her use of the terrible do-word told me that she was doing them by the numbers. Munita was a dick grinder, “heading” for the top of the Trump Tower, equipped with look-at-me! jugs and a clipper cunt.
I never mentioned any of this to her. And yes, I did keep on seeing her. I let her do me. I did her. But love was kept at bay, like a huge white cruise ship that’s too big to enter the harbor. Until now, I guess. And I don’t quite get it. She’s dead and suddenly I’m getting all sentimental about her. I should be happy to see her get the punishment she deserved. She simply went too far, all the way into my great apartment. Onto my fucking bathroom tiles.
But probably she was forced to by the Talian Mobthrob. Her “punishment” was only meant to punish me. It was a TJ thing—Taliation Job. Done in the name of my sixty-six hits. Which one or ones? Doesn’t matter. It was bound to happen sooner or later. The master hitman of Manhattan, the triple six-packer, the cruel Croat, the one and only Toxic, had to be taken down. Or was it maybe one of our own? Niko? The why-you-callin’-me Niko? The doorman said Munita went upstairs with “some Italian looking guy.” He could just as well have been a Croat.
I get it.
They killed her. My friends and employers killed my girl. And now I have to mourn her. I didn’t know how much she meant to me, until now. She was not the worst, really. She brought me flowers almost every time she came over. She gave me the massage of my life. And every other week she would cook me her favorite dishes from her childhood in Lima—a shark or a sea bass ceviche or the simple and honest anticuchos, the Peruvian brochette, that always reminded me of our ćevapi.
I fucking miss her.
I can see now that her infamous sentence wasn’t so brutal after all. “You know I’d never do a married man,” only means that she would not do him if the opportunity arrived. She was using the future if-sense or whatever it’s called. But then again…if the opportunity arrived she would probably do an unmarried man….
Aw. Fuck it. She’s dead now.
I walk down the street, and suddenly I can see her inside that car, that Japanese car parked over there at the other side, in the neon bright Icelandic night. She waves and smiles, just like she always did when she came to pick me up in her small Honda. What about the car? Her apartment? Her job? She has no relatives. I should probably call her friend Wendy and tell her…
Suddenly the big damp cloud over Reykjavik reaches my eyes. They fill up like a woolen sweater with blood from a shot wound, and suddenly I’m crying as if it was a heart attack or something. I can’t fucking control it. It just comes. I haven’t cried since we lost that game in the semifinals against France, in Paris ’98. Fucking Thuram scored twice. I have to rest against a small SUV that sits silently in its parking space and bears with my breakdown like a white army horse.
An elderly lady comes walking around the corner with her old dog on a long leash. It’s that early morning stroll. I look up and our eyes meet. I must look like a bum weeping for his bottle. Still, she looks at me as if she was used to seeing New York mobsters sobbing on her street at five in the morning. She’s a Day 365 Girl, wearing a tight turtleneck and some slim-fitting pants. Gray hair, white Nikes. She makes me think of the Manhattan ladies you see on the Upper East Side, going from breakfast to lunch, with the final hair-do on their heads while wearing brand new kid’s shoes on their feet. As if they wanted their bodies to represent their life’s story, from childhood to coffin.
I don’t know what I’m doing, but my hand does: Suddenly it goes up. My right hand raises itself, clearly trying to stop the woman. She won’t stop, but her dog does. It scuttles out between two cars and out on the street, over to my side of the white SUV. The slim, almost athletic lady remains on the pavement pulling back the long leash that must be tangled up in the bumper by now. Her gray hair shakes as she orders the dog back, but the little one is a sucker for sadness: it sniffs my tears, the dark wet spots in the asphalt, like some crazy addict in rehab spotting cocaine on his daily walk in the woods. I look up and before I know it I’ve asked its owner a question that surprises me even more than my gesture.
“Excuse me. Do you know if there is a church around here?”
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br /> CHAPTER 18
MORNING OF THE DEAD
05.23.2006
Church is closed. It stands right on The Pond, dressed in armor and painted green. Swans and ducks sail about the still water. Some seem to be sleeping, with their heads hidden beneath a wing.
Quack, quack.
I take a seat on the church steps. A few seagulls fly overhead, hurling abuse at me like drunken angels. Gun calls my new cell two times. I don’t answer. When mourning your spouse, the mistress can’t help. A sleepy-eyed city worker comes driving along the pavement in a small orange machine with a disco light spinning on top. The loud monster is equipped with rotating brooms and an elephant’s trunk he uses for sucking up litter: it all looks like a loud animal feeding on trash. The driver passes without looking at me. Oh, man. If you could only clean up the path of my life.
It’s a fucking graveyard. Since finishing school I haven’t been doing much else except adding crosses to it. There is a stone in my conscience, like the one people get in their kidneys, a stone the size of a kidney. I get up and start walking. I walk into the city center, following the trash-monster.
I met Munita in Arturo’s Restaurant, the coal oven cabin on Houston and Thompson. She waited on me. I waited for her. I came back seven times before she allowed me to put a smile on her face. So much for Mrs. Dick Grinder. I had to order seven different pizzas before I could figure out the code of her heart. It was black olives, red onion, and arugula. Arugula. For months I ate nothing but arugula burgers and arugula pasta. Three months later we had our first kiss. It was a slow process, like passing a heavy bill across Capitol Hill. Not really my hunting style.
I still don’t get why she played so hard-to-get with me, while the unmarried guys at Trump Tower only had to push the elevator button. Every three or four weeks she moved up a floor. No. She didn’t do The Apprentice. But she did everybody else.
I’m standing on the main square in Iceland at 5:02 am, like a death row criminal waiting for his executioner to arrive, plus the angry mob. But nobody’s here. Nothing but the low simmer of the orange animal disappearing down the street. And a lone raven that barks from the top of the small clock standing in the middle of the square. The whale mountain across the bay is buried in gray fog down to its fair blue ankles. I head in its direction.
A small gray car is sitting at the next corner, waiting for the green light. It’s driven by a chubby blonde, a Day 16 type. Must be on her way to work. How often have I found myself in her position, waiting at a red light at four in the morning, deep in the heart of Nowhere City, the only car in sight, and Willie Nelson singing on every waveband to all the girls he’s loved before. I guess more than half of my sixty-six were laid out before noon. Morning is for murder. Nobody expects a bullet for breakfast.
I walk along the shore. A protective wall made of huge stones runs along the shoreline, protecting you from the beast that rests beneath the ocean’s mirror-like surface. My crazy colleague. The paved walking path runs between the wall and an empty boulevard. Munita’s half blue head appears in front of me, floating in the air like a huge and hairy spider. I walk along the shore, talking to her and myself. I’m stuck on Fridge Island, with no one to talk to but all my sins and losses.
Hit #42 was an unlucky business man from Winnipeg, Canada, who owed Dikan some money. I had to go up forty-five floors for this job and ghost myself into his small hotel room. As I entered, he was doing some crazy yoga shit on top of the double bed—legs in the air, ass in my face. He didn’t see death coming until I sent the bullet down his rectum. It was too fucking funny not to give it a try. But he didn’t die right away. I spent about forty seconds agonizing over my next move. I absolutely didn’t want to waste another bullet. I was only two bullets away from my triple six-pack. So I just stood there stroking my gun. Luckily he seemed to understand my situation. He was cooperative. I would totally mention him in my thank-you speech at the Mafia Oscars.
With enormous effort he managed to turn back around and crawl across the bloody bed towards the table. The bullet seemed to have traveled up his colon, through stomach and lungs, making its exit on the border of chest and neck. Blood kept gushing out from under the chin. I rushed over, thinking he must keep a gun in the drawer. But he only reached for his wallet and spent his last breaths looking at photographs of his wife and three kids. Four Canadian faces frozen in fun. Then he drowned in his own blood dripping from his nose. Once the big one got him, I sat on the bed beside him. I sat there for half an hour and finally decided to throw myself out the window, down onto Sixth Avenue. But I couldn’t open the fucking window. Modern hotels.
Then I figured out I could use my own piece, of course. But ambition ruled over depression.
Soon after, on my next date with Munita, I mentioned the idea of us having kids, becoming a family. Mary Lou and Bobby Boksic. I wanted some happy faces in my wallet. But she said she wanted to wait until she had reached the twentieth floor at work. She had five to go. Five unmarried suckers.
The walking path takes me away from the shoreline, following the boulevard into some Belarus neighborhood. Low-rises to my left, higher ones to the right. Reminds me of my week in Minsk. Me and Niko waiting in a hotel room for five days for that briefcase to arrive. Watching every single game of The World Women’s Handball Championship. The Norway girls were hot.
There are some cars now. The morning traffic is picking up, most of it coming toward my face, heading downtown. I have no travel plan. I just follow Munita’s frozen head, appearing in front of me every seven minutes, while hoping for a police car to appear. I’ve reached the moment that arrives, sooner or later, in every killer’s career: When he gets noose-sick. When he starts shouting to his fellow citizens, Please, come get me!
The walk takes me past a cinema (showing some Talian Mob shit) and the local IKEA painted in yellow and blue. The morning is well underway now. Cars come flying like rhymes from a rapper’s mouth. But I’m the only pedestrian around. No other passersby. No wonder the pavement then suddenly comes to an end. I carry on along the road, walking the dirty grass next to the asphalt. There is a concrete mess ahead, all hoops and loops, buzzing with traffic. The car people look at me as if I was Hannibal Lecter on his way to breakfast.
I’m dead sick of dead people. It’s as if my head was a freezer full of goods and now that the plug’s been pulled, it all comes thawing like brooks in spring. A bit like our first day in ADV. In the morning everything was so calm and peaceful, everything was covered in beautiful white snow, after the crazy night of relentless shooting. But by noon the snow had melted and all the bodies came to light.
Hit #51 was the Jersey thing. The family house. The fat little cheeseburger with the mustache who’d been hiding in his home out in the Jersey woods for more than a month. I sat in my car for two hours, until his wife and kids had left. Once he was on the floor, coloring the carpet with urine and blood, his wife came back. She’d forgotten something. “It’s me!” her voice rang out. She went straight for the kitchen, and I quickly ducked behind a sofa. While she ransacked cupboards and drawers, I managed to crawl over to the window, hiding behind the thick floor-length curtains. I didn’t want to kill her as well. Kids waiting out in the car and stuff. In fact, I’ve never killed a woman. (Well, except for the two old hags in ADV, but they had long ceased being women.)
Then I heard the woman enter the living room: “Hi, honey, I just…” And then some big time screaming.
I had to stand there for a fucking hour before I managed to escape. She screamed for half an hour and then just sat there for another, paralyzed, before she finally called the cops. I should have gunned her down as well. She might have been better off. Instead I ended up going to the fucking funeral, mostly to check out the widow. She was hot. Which was good. Beautiful women are quicker to recover from those things. This one looked like she could be on America’s Freshest Widow, and seeing that at least six handsome bachelors had shown up at the funeral made me feel better. Maybe I had
just found the perfect ending for her cheating game.
My head’s full of heads. Screaming heads and silent ones. Munita’s hairy one appears again, always some ten feet ahead of me, making me walk a bit faster. I have to admit that there were times when I did actually ask for her head on a silver plate. And here it is. She breaks into a quirky smile, and suddenly I want to kiss her cold purple lips. But she keeps her distance, crossing the slip road ahead. I follow her. A big band of car horns plays me an angry tune.
Hit #56 was the Robert Redford look-alike, a muscular guy with a yellow tie, strong jaw, and gray hair. He took several minutes to die, in the back of our restaurant. I really felt like I had achieved something, taking down such an all-American face.
Hit #59 was the Polish porn producer out in Queens. An April day of low sun and long shadows. I had to wear a mask, as his girlfriend was there.
I walk up a small steep hill of grass at the side of the road. It takes me up on the overpass, the small concrete bridge that crosses the boulevard I’ve been walking the past hour. The cars drive faster up here.
Hit #63 was the small, shy Chinese guy on Canal Street. He seemed so lonely that he was more than happy to open the door to death.
Hit #68 is when I jump off the fucking bridge, saying a quick good-bye to Split.
CHAPTER 19
THE AFTERLIFE
05.23.2006
I’m almost crawling as I finally reach the fucking house. Yes, it’s their house. I recognize the silver Land Cruiser. That must mean they’re home. I’m the only one who walks in this country. The bleeding seems to have stopped. But the tooth’s still missing. I must look like I’ve been hanging on a cross for a day or two. I’m out of breath when I ring the bell.
When I ring the fucking church bells.
Sickreader comes to the door and immediately slams it back on my broken nose. More church bells. Goodmoondoor’s face shows itself in the vertical window beside the door. The good old llama head with the long front teeth. As someone who has hitchhiked to the core of his own soul, he’s able to cut through the blood, sweat, and tears. He recognizes me and opens the door. We face each other: the toothbrushed and the toothcrushed.
The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning Page 11