The congregation takes to its feet (in fact they hardly ever sit), and the hairy ladies throw their hands in the air, repeating Torture’s hallelujah. It’s like Harlem without the choreography. Before I know it, I’m hugging a skinny disabled man with a very cold cheek. “Velkominn,” he says, in a weak voice. Then the preacher switches back to Icelandic, and to my surprise I understand most of it.
“You should know your enemies! You should know that Sin is your worst enemy! And you should never invite Sin to your house! Never invite Sin over for dinner! YOU SHOULD NOT EVEN BUY SIN A CUP OF COFFEE!” he screams in his manly baritone, sounding more like a Hell’s Angel than God’s mouthpiece. “For Sin will ask for cream in its coffee. And Sin will ask for sugar. And Sin will ask for WHISKEY in the coffee. So before you know, Sin will be drinking IRISH COFFEE! And soon YOU will be drinking with her. You’ll be drinking with Sin, singing with Sin, and dancing with Sin, to all her favorite songs! So let me tell you one more time: DON’T YOU EVER BUY SIN A CUP OF COFFEE! HALLELUJAH!”
I hear myself echo the last word, along with the crowd, while feeling the form of my old new gun with the sole of my right foot. The small piece fits just right in my size forty-six shoe. I bought myself a pair of sneakers, the ones with the thickest sole in the shop, and did a little surgery on the right one, removing enough of the layers in its sole to fit the PP9 right into it. So now I’m “walking on God’s road” as Goodmoondoor says, with a gun in my shoe. It’s pretty uncomfortable, but when the time comes, I will be prepared.
I don’t think the Pearly Gates come with a metal detector anyway.
My warm Gun doesn’t know about the cold one. This is not her problem; we have enough already. Don’t get me wrong. Gunnhildur is great. The real problem is me. I haven’t shared an apartment with anyone since good old Niko back in our Hanover days. Living with him gave me a bachelor’s degree in tolerance, but Gunnhildur’s endless smoking, and her habit of throwing jeans, sweaters, underpants, empty bottles, ashtrays, and pizza boxes around the house, finally get on my nerves. I may be a sociopath, but I like my place in order.
“I just don’t fucking understand how you can be the daughter of your parents. I mean, their house is like the White House while yours is a complete Shit House.”
“OK, so let’s get some house help.”
“We already talked about that. We can’t afford it.”
“We don’t have to. You just kill her after she’s finished her first cleaning. And then we hire another one, and you kill her as well. I mean, you’re a fucking professional aren’t you?”
This is how all our arguments end. My ex-job is always there, like some psycho ex-girlfriend. When you’ve killed more than a hundred people, you have no right to complain about a dirty floor or a messy room. That’s just the way it is. She’s almost made it into an art. Every time she finds herself in a corner, she bursts out with: “You’re probably more used to dealing with dead people, aren’t you?” or “You can’t stand people who do boring things like breathing and talking, can you?” or simply “Why don’t you just kill me?”
Apart from that things are OK.
We go to our jobs and then team up for dinner before I drag her with me to see the latest Spiderman movie, or I let her drag me to one of the countless concerts this small city has to offer. I must have quite a crush on her for I don’t mind standing for two whole hours, nodding to worthless indie bands like Earplugs and The Sleeping Pills, while Creed plays inside my head to the fire-blooming invasion of Knin.
The only real downer is Truster, who doesn’t seem to be even searching for a place to live. His silent presence can easily break your brand new self to pieces and allow the old one to shine through. For the first two weeks, he used no more than two fucking words. “Hi” and “bye.” When I hand him his fucking dinner, a killer of a goulash that I held in my lap for some twenty minutes on a bus full of rainmen and rape victims, he doesn’t even say a single “takk.” Luckily he’s at work most of the time. One of the Seven Elevens recently worked with Truster on a construction site. Apparently the silent bird is a star in the concrete world.
“Is genius with crane. From hundred meter can pick up small money, in very big wind.”
Well, good for him. If he only could use his crane to pick up girls…
I manage to keep my demons at the door, but at night they come creeping through our bedroom window. Gunnhildur prefers to leave it open.
As soon as I fall asleep, the Serbian tanks come rolling in, with treads made of screaming heads—the bloodied and muddied heads of Croatian villagers, old men, women, and children. The Chetnik panzers break through my sleeping defense, speeding across the dark fields of my soul like worked-up rhinos, followed by a platoon of sixty-six American businessmen, armed with cell phones and briefcases, who’re being cheered on by an equal number of widows, yelling out all the way from the deep blue forests of New Jersey to the flat hot roofs of the Manitoban prairie, the whole of it backed by the blessing of a bald priest with a Southern accent dressed in a white karate outfit, sporting a black Bulgarian belt marked: YO BITCH!
They attack us from all sides. They’ve surrounded us: me, my dad, and Dario.
We work our fingers off on the machine guns, turning our small fort into a sprinkler of bullets, but to no avail. We’re overwhelmed. Pretty soon we can hear the horrible shrieks of our own women and children, rolling with the caterpillar tread of the fast approaching tanks, through the super-loud gun sounds.
I suddenly sense that my father is wounded. He’s been shot in the right shoulder. I look behind me and watch him turn slowly towards me. But I can’t do anything about it, for I have to face the enemy, I have to continue shooting. But a second later I can feel his hands on my neck, around my neck. He’s got his ten strong fingers around my neck. I feel he’s about to strangle me when I wake up and see Truster’s red face in the blue morning light that fills the bedroom.
Truster is trying to strangle me. The fucker. I grab his arms and try pushing him away, but he’s strong as a rib-eyed bull. Gunnhildur wakes up and starts screaming his name. This weakens him enough so that I’m able to loosen his grip on my neck: soon we’re fighting on the floor beside the bed, creating a whirlwind of magazines, earrings, condoms, and a lamp. It doesn’t last for long though. The Croatian soldier and Manhattan hitman, worked up by the Word of God, easily defeats the son of a preacher man.
Only to find out that he is not the son of a preacher man. Truster is not Gunnhildur’s brother. He is, or rather, he was her BOYFRIEND.
This is news to me.
For three whole months I’ve been under the impression that he was her brother, that he was Goodmoondoor and Sickreader’s son. And, as a matter of fact, they told me so, right in the very beginning, when I was still playing Friendly and everything was complicated in a more uncomplicated way. They told me he was their son, but their accent made “son-in-law” sound like “son in love” to me. It appeared strange to me at the time, their boasting about their son’s love life, but now I get it.
And now I can see that the ice-girl cheated on him with me. Up in the attic. I was their love-buster. Shortly after, they must have broken up, but the poor bastard didn’t move out of her place, not even after I moved in! The Icelandic male must be one of the most uncomplaining animals on the planet. But of course his blood was boiling under the lid of silence. It had to come out, sooner or later.
And of course he had to move out sooner or later. He does so now.
CHAPTER 32
DETOXED
09.10.2006
“How could you NOT know he was my boyfriend? I mean, we were living together, sleeping in the same bed.”
We’re on our way to Silence Grove. The son-in-law-thing has to be settled. I have to face the saviors of my soul and tell them that on top of everything else I’m taking their daughter as well. But I guess her father won’t mind. We’re “living the last days” anyway.
As always, she does the driving. T
ommy has a passport but no driver’s license. We drive past the downtown domestic airport. Rain beats the windshield. Radio plays Shakira. “Hips Don’t Lie.” Me and Munita once saw her enter a fancy restaurant on Theatre Row at one of our many pre-foreplay dinners. We both had our eyes on her great Colombian butt, and once it was out of sight, Munita declared it too big. I didn’t want to tell my Bonita that it looked pretty tight compared to her Aztec Temple, so I quickly added the third Latin treasure to the conversation: J-Lo’s biggest asset, concluding that South America was big on behinds in every meaning of the word. It made her laugh all the way to my bed.
I need all my mental strength to lift the three great butts off my mind and register the fact I’m sitting next to my new blonde girlfriend in a car in Iceland.
“Sorry. What did you say?”
“How on earth could you think we were brother and sister?”
“I didn’t think he was your brother. I thought he was your dog.”
She drives for a while. It’s a rainy Reykjavik Sunday. Everybody’s on the move. In their car. Waving to each other with wind-screen wipers. We pass The Pearl, the rooftop restaurant. It’s a dome of glass and steel built on top of some volcano-water tanks. I’d take her there some day if my job involved some money.
“We’d been together for too long,” she says.
“How long?”
“Since high school. But with, you know, some good pauses.”
Very good indeed. Having slept with four football teams (goalies not included).
“OK. And when did you split up?”
“What do you mean?”
“When did you tell him about us?”
“Just, you know, when we started getting serious.”
“And when was that?”
“When you moved in, for example.”
She sounds pissed. I’m holy pissed.
“When I moved in? You only told him then?!”
“Yes, about that time.”
“So for a month he was like…All our nights in the furniture shop…He thought you were still together?!”
“Well, I guess he had his suspicions.”
“So you lied to him, and you lied to me?”
“I didn’t lie to you. You never asked.”
“I never asked? I mean, how could I? I thought we were together! I didn’t know you had a boyfriend!”
“I didn’t know you had A GIRLFRIEND!”
“But she was dead!”
“Not the first time we…”
“No, I know. That was not good. That’s why I left.”
“Bullshit. You left because you found out she was dead and you were in a state of shock.”
“Can you stop the car?”
“What?”
“I want to get out. It’s over.”
“It’s over? Why?”
“I have to be able to trust you completely.”
“But you can.”
“No. You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie! You never asked!”
“You lied to him and you will lie to me. I’ll never be able to trust you.”
“Jesus, Tod. Why don’t you just shoot me and then you’ll have trust!”
Silence. She steps on the gas, I step on the gun. The one inside my shoe. We both look ahead. Through the foggy rain you can make out the red-lighted butt of a white Nissan Pathfinder driving ahead of us. The wipers work the windshield, going from my side to her side, from her side to my side.
“I’m pregnant.”
Obviously, that’s her talking. And I can only repeat after her, like the first imbecile member of mankind did, when he found out his wife was knocked up.
“Pregnant?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. When did you find out?”
“This morning.”
“And…?”
“And…?”
“Is it mine?”
“YES, OF COURSE IT’S YOURS! WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM! IT’S FUCKING YOURS! I’M HAVING YOUR FUCKING BABY!!!”
She starts crying. Tears outside, tears inside. Difficult driving conditions. She pulls over at the next gas station. I try to tell her how sorry I am. How wonderful it is that she’s having my child. MY CHILD! It must be the best news I’ve heard since Suker sacked the Germans in France ’98. I offer her my arms, and she unfastens her seatbelt before falling into my lap. She cries for a while. I guess half of it comes from the fact that she’s pregnant. Munita once told me pregnant women cry a lot. It’s something about water building up in the womb and adding to the water supply, causing overflow at times. I stare out the windshield. The brand new gas station also houses a fast food joint. I watch a young father pass under the bright red Kentucky Fried sign, holding the hand of his small son. She cries a bit longer. My crotch is getting wet. It’s precipitation returning to the source. Cycle of life.
Our emotional outbursts put steam on the windows, turning the car into some kind of a cocoon. She then finally rises with a tear-torn face. I repeat my sorries.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you upset. I’m very happy about it.”
“You are?”
“Yes. Of course. I’m thrilled.”
“So you think you can like, trust me?”
“Can you trust me?”
I feel the gun’s texture with my foot.
“Yes.”
“But you know who I am, Gunnhildur. You know what I’ve done. I don’t get it. How can you trust me? How can you start a family with someone like me?”
“I love you.”
“Me…me, too.”
It might not be grammatically perfect, but she gets the meaning and we kiss. I’ve come a pretty long way. I’ve come all the way from pulling a gun out of a guy’s rectum in a forty-fifth-floor hotel room in midtown Manhattan, to embracing a butter-blonde girl in a Red Cross–red Škoda at some shitty suburban gas station in Iceland and telling her I love her. And I’m not lying. I guess.
Feels fucking good.
To put things in the most absolute perspective, the radio DJ decides that this is the perfect moment to play Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” Quite incredible really. Back in NYC it used to be “my song” of course. The boys would tease me with it. I kind of liked it, actually, and even ended up buying the bloody CD and used to play it, loud, on my way to a gun-job. It made me powerful, got me into the mood for a good killing. Hearing it now can only appeal to the old self that the new one has swallowed up, the former small as a bullet, the latter big as love.
I’m detoxed.
Gunnhildur doesn’t notice the song, and after a prolonged moment of hardcore happiness, we drive on. The two-lane highway takes us through a tunnel, down a slope and up another, then under a flyover. Fancy SUVs speed past us, stirring up “dust” made of water. She makes the turn into Garðabær, the sleepy town where her parents live. Then, out of the blue, she says:
“So you want to live in Iceland, then?”
“Yeah. But only while you’re alive. As soon as you’re dead, I’m off.”
“So you’ll probably kill me?”
“Not if you marry me.”
“Is that a proposal?”
“No, it’s a threat.”
She looks at me with a grin I could kill for. Sorry, no. With a grin I could let myself be killed for.
We’re two happy hamsters expecting the third as we pull up in front of her parents’ house. I give her a quick and serious look, asking:
“Should we also tell them about the baby?”
Her face is almost back to normal, though her eyes are still a bit red.
“No, not now. I’m not sure if I want to keep it.”
“What? Gunnhildur? No!”
She looks at me for a while, cultivating a smile on her juicy lips. “Relax. It was just a test.”
CHAPTER 33
TJ TIME
05.12.2007
It’s May 2007. A year has passed since my incidental arrival in Iceland. Since my early retirement from the homic
ide industry. A winter full of dim days and snowy nights has entered my soul. And now it’s bright again. Spring is here, cold as ever, with endless light and Eurovision, the annual orgy of gorgeous women and gay men.
It’s tonight.
We go to Gunnhildur’s parents for the traditional fjölskylduboð (family gathering). The big Croatian baby inside her is due any moment now, and she looks like the snake who ate the basketball. Gun says I stroke the belly as if I were expecting a million dollars instead of a baby. Sickreader greets us, kissing her daughter and son-in-law on the cheek, the latter for the first time, actually. It’s taken her a whole dark season to accept the fact that her daughter is expecting a future gangster.
“I want you to know that if you let us down, I will go to the phone and call the American embassy at once,” she told me at Christmas Eve, when we accidentally found ourselves alone in her kitchen.
Well-trained in Icelandic customs, I take off my sneakers and put them away in a corner. Gunnhildur is allowed to keep on her almost-Pradas. (According to Icelandic house rules, you’re allowed to enter in your shoes if they cost more than two hundred dollars.) She marches through the living room and out on to the veranda to give her father a kiss. Goodmoondoor is out there fiddling with the gas-grill, the pride of every Icelandic household; a black four-legged creature with a bright yellow udder that silently endures the long winter, loitering out in the icy gardens like an arctic mammal. Originally designed for Texas BBQ parties, I’ve seen the Easelanders dust snow off its back before lighting its flame. Sometimes the well-done steak returns half frozen from the blizzard. These people are true masters of self-deception.
Gunnhildur’s brother, Ari, is next to arrive. He’s home for a few weeks from his computersomething studies in Boston. A blonde guy with red cheeks and glasses, he looks like an updated version of his father. We’re meeting for the first time.
“Hi, I’m Tómas.”
“Hi.”
The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning Page 19