The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

by Helgason, Hallgrimur

  “OK. I better not let them down.”

  “No. At least don’t kill them.”

  I like this girl.

  “What about you and Truster?”

  “We had a fight. It’s been a crazy week.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m sleeping here tonight. In my old room, for the first time in six years or something. Þórður is coming tomorrow.”

  “Oh? Torture time?”

  She laughs.

  “Yeah. He’s gonna take you to his church.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. You have to pass through the Gates of Hell or something, my dad says.”

  Holy shit.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE GATES OF HELL

  05.31.2006

  It’s Torture Therapy: Step 2.

  I’m standing on the carpeted floor in the bearded man’s church, with a big Band-Aid on my forehead and one tooth missing. But the swelling is gone, my ankle is bearable, and the right shoulder only shrieks a little. I must have lost twenty pounds. For the shy stomach, fasting works like psychotherapy.

  They made me lie in the trunk for the drive up here. Those guys have my total respect. I don’t get it, really, why they’re going to these lengths for their friend’s killer. Why don’t they just send me straight to hell? Or maybe this is it?

  “The Gates of Hell.”

  The church is empty. Mr. T went to his office. He comes back in a funny white robe, plus he’s barefooted. Around his waist he wears a black belt, and as he comes closer I can see that this is actually a karate—karaoke?—outfit. Something Japanese at least. It has that gung-ho gay feel to it. A barefooted fighter wearing a lady’s robe.

  Torture tells me to follow him out in the lobby. To the right of the entrance there is a dark red door. We enter a square room about fifteen feet square. At least the ceiling is high and the walls are white, with small windows on top. A solid white, squared column stands in the middle of the room. The floor is covered in mattresses with dark red plastic covers. The air smells of old sweat.

  “Take off your shoes, shirt, and pants,” he says, while locking the door and turning on the lights.

  I’m in for a manly rape, Japanese style.

  “As you must have heard, the world is divided in two: heaven and hell. Separating the two is The Great Wall of Fire. It runs all the way from Eden to our present day, from the depths of the darkest coal mine to the fingertips of the Universe. No bird can fly over it. No fish can swim under it. NO SOUL CAN PASS THROUGH IT!” he suddenly shouts, before whispering: “But there is a gate.”

  He walks in a big circle around the column, breathing heavily, looking very much like some movie madman. I take off most of my clothes and put them away in a corner. Even I can smell the underpants I’ve been wearing for days; some black-and-white Joe Boxers from Mr. Maack’s great collection. Torture picks up his speech:

  “Now, you know THE GOLDEN GATE, right? People think they can enter The Golden Gate. Even the sinner of all sinners thinks he can enter the Golden Gate. Not so,” he says, waving his index finger in the air. He’s walking pretty fast now, circling the room and me. “Not so. People think they go to heaven or hell when they die. Not right. THEY ARE THERE ALREADY! You are there already. Either you are in heaven or you are in hell. There is nothing in between. There is no fumbling about. There is no compromise! And you, my friend, YOU ARE IN HELL!!! And now that you want to go to heaven, you first have to leave hell. To be able to enter The Golden Gate, you first have to exit THE GATES OF HELL!”

  Suddenly he turns fatherly:

  “Tell me, Tomislav…my dear friend Tomislav…Tell me why all the fancy entrances, like the ones you see in banks and churches, like the one out here for example…Why they all have TWO DOORS? Why are they all built with DOUBLE DOORS?”

  “I don’t know. So it’s not easy to…escape?”

  “So the air outside won’t mingle with the air inside. The first one closes before the second one opens. It’s a perfect system. And the same principle applies for THE TWO GATES. The golden one and the burning one. You wouldn’t like the nasal-burning air of hell to get inside our air-conditioned heaven. So now you have to go through THE GATES OF HELL!” he shouts like a Serbian general high on gunpowder before he suddenly jumps at me, Jackie Chan style, crying out some karate shit and kicking me hard in the face with his right foot. My lips explode as if he just hit a balloon full of blood.

  WHAT THE FUCK!

  Then he comes at me from behind, hitting me in the back of my head with his brick of a hand. I fall on the floor. Blood stains the mattresses. I’m half out of this world and inside those fucking GATES, when the Bible-blaster grabs me by the ears and starts pouring his blessed acid into them:

  “YOU FUCKING BALKAN SON OF A BITCH! YOU FUCKING DESERVER OF NOTHING! YOU FILTHY MURDERER AND MUDDY MANSWINE! YOU FILTHY SCUM OF THE EARTH! YOU DEVIL OF ALL DEVILS! YOU ASSHOLE OF THE UNIVERSE!”

  He picks me up by my ears, then head-butts me down again with his biblical forehead so I’m almost KO’d, crawling in my own blood, then kicks me in the groin. He kicks me again and then throws his heavy body on top of me, like a G-string clad wrestler in Madison Square Garden. He puts his right arm around my throat and twists my head with his left one. Fuck it. I’m being whacked by a priest.

  I can’t let it happen.

  The good old soldier from the Hrvatska army rises deep inside me, like Tito from his grave, and goes straight to work. In an instant my mental and physical weakness is gone. In a flash, my starved body is seized with the force of the hungry boar. I bite his hand to the bone and whip the fucker off my back with a swift turn of the spine. He lands on the floor, red with pain, and I land on top of him. I put my hands around his neck and let the grip tighten like a noose. I’m about to silence him for good when Comrade Tito suddenly appears in front of me. He’s in his good old general’s outfit, holding Munita’s head. I close my eyes and shake my own head. I reopen them and they’re still there. Head and leader. Leader and head. I fasten my grip around Torture’s neck, the image becomes clearer. I let go a little, the image disappears. I fasten it again and the image reappears. It’s like those plastic toys that squeak when you squeeze them. What’s it supposed to mean? The head of my life with the head of my love.

  Torture senses my confusion and comes to life, starts pulling my hands away from his neck. As he manages to loosen my left one, it gets tangled up in his glasses and they fly off his face. I instantly forget Tito and go back to work on my holy victim, getting back my grip on his throat. With a violent force, I manage to turn his head from red to purple, from purple to pale, from pale to white. I do not look up, I do not dare to look. But somebody keeps on bugging me: Suddenly the face of Torture becomes the face of my father. Without the glasses he looks just like him. Suddenly I’m holding my father by the neck.

  The fuck.

  I immediately let go, jump to my feet, and hurry into a corner, turning away from the man, catching my breath, blood dripping from my loud-breathing snot.

  What the fuck.

  The seven days of soul-saving have come to nothing. I finish the week of fasting by killing a boar. The born-again is dead again. Being a double priest-killer didn’t look good on my application for heaven, but being a triple one will surely destroy it.

  I pass a few more moments in hell before I sense some movement on the plastic covered mattresses behind me. The holy animal slowly rises.

  “Tomislav Bokšić…” The voice is broken but extremely dramatic. “Tomislav Bokšić. The Balkan soldier…” He seems to have done his homework. “I cannot beat you at your own game, so we better try mine.”

  He grabs my shoulder and turns me around. The glasses are back on his face and his cheeks show some color, but his bloodstained gown is in great disorder. He breathes a little. I welcome the fact.

  “You little son of a Croatian cunt,” he says and slaps me in the face. “You little son of a crazy Croatian cunt!” He grabs me by the shoulders.
“Who do you think you are, huh? You think you’re something more than a lousy little louse that crawls around the kitchen floor in the kingdom of God, with a small hellish flame on its back? YOU FOOL!”

  He pushes me around. I do not react. He sort of drives me backwards around the room, with his hands on my shoulders, his feet fumbling from exhaustion. He uses me as his underpants-wearing Zimmer frame. Speaking like a drunkard: “You bloody fool. You bloody son of a Serbo-Croatian fool.”

  “Croatian.”

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

  He stops. We stand still. Facing each other. Then he asks, in a more calm way, “How many people have you killed?”

  “Eh, how many? One hundred twenty something.”

  “One hundred and twenty SOMETHING!?”

  “Yes. I’m not totally sure.”

  “What do you mean? You don’t count them? You don’t count them like the women you’ve had? How many women have you had?”

  “I don’t know. Counting hookers?”

  “Counting hookers? I don’t have all day.”

  “Then…I’m not sure…sixty, seventy maybe…”

  “Sixty, seventy? You’ve killed more people than you’ve slept with? You’re worse than I thought.”

  “But I’ve never killed a hooker.”

  “What?”

  “I mean…a woman. I’ve never killed woman.”

  “Never killed a woman?”

  “No…well, yes, some people in the war were women, but that was not an issue.”

  “Not an issue?”

  “We were just ordered to shoot. It was like shooting deer. Shoot or be shot. That was our choice.”

  A pause. He takes a long, loud-breathing look at me. Then:

  “Do you know what you’ve done?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have killed people.”

  “Yes.”

  “You have taken into your hands the power of God.”

  “You mean…?”

  “And that is a sin. The sin of all sins.”

  “You mean, God…kills people, or?”

  “He creates and he kills, he reigns and he rules! You should obey and not betray! How does it feel?”

  “How does it feel, what?”

  “How does it feel TO KILL someone?”

  “It…it feels like…”

  “Yes?”

  “It feels like…preaching.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. It makes you feel powerful. You’re in control.”

  “Bullshit. You think you’re in control, while you’re being controlled by…Who was the first?”

  “What?”

  “Who was your first victim?”

  “My first hit?”

  “Yes. Who was your first hit?”

  As quickly as a missile leaves an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, my mind shoots to the bottom of my list—through concrete floors and rusty iron hatches, all the way down to my beneathest basement where the dark is smelly and the smell is dark—breaking open an old moldy coffin lying in a damp and dusty corner.

  “My father,” I say.

  “Your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “You killed your father?”

  “Yes.”

  I killed my father. I probably should have mentioned this before.

  “You killed your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “You killed your own father?”

  “Yes. But nobody knows.”

  “Nobody knows?”

  “No. I didn’t tell anyone. Nobody saw it.”

  “Nobody saw it? God sees everything! Murder is murder, no matter if…and a father…a father is always a father. How could you do it? How in the bloody hell could you kill your own father?”

  “I…It was…”

  “Yes? It was what? Your hot blood chilled with ice from the Devil’s fridge?”

  “It was accidental.”

  I’ve never talked about this before, and the mere thought of it, especially in the presence of this guy, is enough to bring me to my knees. I kneel before him like a semi-naked knight in front of his white-gowned queen. She lets him feel her sword.

  “An accident? But you did kill him?”

  “Yes. But…”

  “But what?”

  “It was his fault.”

  “His fault?”

  “Yes, because…”

  I’m at the end of my battery. Like a dose of poison timed to go to work some fifteen years after it was consumed, my big secret suddenly takes hold of my body and knocks me over. All of a sudden, I’m lying at the feet of Torture.

  “What? Because of what?”

  “Because…”

  I’m taken with a coughing fit, mixed with a bawling I didn’t know I had in me. I must sound like a baby seal being beaten with a baseball bat. He listens to me for a while and then brings the scene to its conclusion.

  “You have killed your father. May God save your soul.”

  I can feel that he puts his bare foot on my quaking back, like a triumphant general on his fallen enemy. Somehow this gesture seems to calm my bawling a bit. But instead, I’m taken over with an incredibly strong feeling of hunger. An all-you-can-order, all-you-can-eat hunger. I want to run out in the church, up to the altar, and start gnawing away at the big wooden cross like a desperate horse.

  With my left ear I can feel a slight and gentle man-made wind. This either came from Torture’s back end, or it’s a breeze from his doing the sign of the cross over my hapless body.

  “May God save your soul,” he repeats. “If he can.”

  And give me something to eat. If he can.

  CHAPTER 22

  FATHER’S LAND

  05.31.2006

  So I exit the Gates of Hell, carrying the slim body of my dear father, and ring the huge Golden Doorbell. God lets me wait a while. I guess my application has to be approved by the Committee of Die Hard Cases before it reaches his eyes.

  Meanwhile Torture takes me over to his place, a huge white house on a hill close to his church, and puts me up in a window-free space in his basement, visited only by him and his wife. They tell me they have three kids. I can’t see them, nor can I hear them. Apparently they spend their days in silence, reading the Bible. Just like me. Every morning the preacher-man picks three chapters I’m supposed to read that day. “Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?”

  It’s Torture Therapy: Step 3.

  Torture’s secret weapon is his wife, Hanna. She’s just as classic-looking as him: a burly woman with soft skin, nice leathery wrinkles, a biblical bust, and a pleasant voice. She moves silently about the house, wearing colorless T-shirts and long skirts, with long graying hair like a horse tail and not a stitch of makeup. If there were a TV show called Miss Mother Earth, she’d be visited with lights and lenses by the all-American camera crew. One has the feeling that her hair grows a foot a day and that she cuts it every night before going to bed. And that every morning she milks her breasts, putting what the household needs in the fridge, but donating the rest to the milk fund of CWCC, Career Women with Carbon Chests. She speaks English with an accent that goes a bit deeper than the Icelandic one. As if she belonged to some hot spring nation. She’s more like the mountain behind the man than “the woman behind the man.” She is the Christian country of care that her husband, the eyes-on-fire ambassador, represents in his clumsy way.

  Hanna’s big drawback is her incredibly bad breath, which doesn’t really go with her incredibly good vibes. It probably stems from the biblical amount of frustration she’s had to swallow over the years. It can’t be easy being married to Torture.

  Still, if she was the only woman on our platoon and we were stuck in the mountains for a month, I’d start dreaming about her on day seven.

  Breakfast is a slice of homemade bread that
I kiss before eating. And a glass of milk that I keep hoping is homemade as well. Lunch is exactly the same, but dinner is always meat. A lamb, a calf, or a foal. Some animal that Torture has slaughtered up in his garage, I’m sure. I’m back in the Old Testament. In the care of Sarah, wife of Abraham. My room has no windows, my bed is hard, my book is the Bible, my days are simple, and my nights are getting more and more peaceful.

  Therapy seems to be working.

  I’ve done away with a hundred hits. Only one remains. Every day my glasses-wearing guardian angel comes downstairs and listens for half an hour. His lust for violence is biblical. His crazy eyes have calmed a bit though. Or I have grown accustomed to them. He informs me about his outside-the-box methods.

  “I have the black belt in both judo and karate. This is where I come from. I didn’t meet God until I met my wife, when I was thirty-five. I always say that I married God,” the bearded man says with a gentle laugh. I think I’m starting to understand his talk about circumcising the heart. It’s probably crucial when you’re married to God. He laughs a little more, adding: “I was lucky.” Somehow his laughter sounds a bit learned. As if he had learned it at Preaching School, to spice up his speeches with short chuckles here and there. “No. I’m only putting my knowledge and expertise to the service of the Lord. We have a saying in Icelandic that you have to fight evil with evil.”

  By going through the disaster of my life, calmly and carefully, I’m slowly trying to bury it. Trying to bury my father properly. It’s like this artist once told me in some dingy little diner on the East Side: He only painted the picture he did not want to see ever again. “It’s just takin’ out the trash, man.” He was going through a tough divorce, he said, and only painted his ex-wife. Big horrible nudes.

  For fifteen years I have carried this thing inside me. For fifteen years my dead father has been the unborn child I’ve been carrying in my womb. I guess that’s why I’ve always been on the fat side. By finally giving birth to it I can possibly stop living like an ostrich stuffed with shame. The delivery was painful as hell, but I had this great midwife: an Icelandic priest in a karate outfit. The newborn baby looks like this: