The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 14} FROG ON A COLD RED ROOF

My Balkan animal instinct was right. Instead of showing me the door, the preacher’s daughter put me up for the night, up in the attic. It’s pretty cold, but her sleeping bag is warm, plus the loft is a bit darker than the rest of the country. It only has two small windows: one in my corner and a rusty skylight in the middle of the roof. Sleeping up here is not only the preacher’s daughter’s way of punishing me for all my sins. I had to go up here because her brother Truster is her roommate for the time being. I wonder where he sleeps? In the birdhouse, maybe, out in the garden. We came to an agreement that despite his name he should be kept out of this. So I forbid myself to make a sound while he’s in the house. From midnight till dawn I play dead. “He’s working like crazy. He only comes home for sleeping,” his sister tells me. The perfect roommate. He works as a crane operator at some construction site.

“He doesn’t say much, does he?” I ask.

“Yeah. I know. He’s always been like that. And then it’s also his job… I mean, he’s used to spending the whole day in the air, alone, two hundred feet above ground. Plus all his co-workers are from Poland or Lithuania.”

Once Truster is back in the air, I’m allowed downstairs for some toilet work and breakfast. This type of exile is actually more fun than Friendly’s, because this is real exile: a hitman hiding in the hot girl’s attic. The best thing is that I don’t have to do any more acting shit. No more American priests or Polish painters. Though my body is not allowed out of this small house, I feel more free here than when I was running around town with a clergyman’s collar on God’s leash.

I’m Anne Frank online. Gunholder lends me her laptop so I can surf the digital seas. I spend the day digging up my past, looking for and reading war stories by my fellow soldiers. Darko Radovic is the heftiest blogger of them all, probably because he left both his legs in Knin. In our brigade we lost five lives, six legs, three arms, and some fingers. It’s sad to say, but my one-legged brothers still have to keep fighting for their lives. You can see them stumbling on their crutches through the streets of Zagreb or Split, asking for a kuna in their cup. Our government has forgotten all about them, and still its power rests on their dead legs. I was lucky not to lose any limbs to the Chetniks, but sometimes I ask myself if I would rather have lost both my legs instead of my father and brother. Wartime poses questions that peacetime cannot answer. So we’ll always have a new war.

On Darko’s weblog I find a photograph of myself in full gear, a smiling lunatic with an AK-47, on top of a captured Serbian tank back in ’95. The happy face of a murderer in the making. I really look stupid. I always hated the “Kodak Moment.” This all-American happy-go-lucky thing that forces you to smile into the eyes of the future that can only take you for an innocent imbecile who doesn’t know anything about anything, who only has killed two or three people, and yet he’s smiling like he just won an Olympic medal. Looks more like the Special Olympics to me.

I prefer mug shots.

I search too for Senka, my ex-girlfriend, the missing chapter of my life. Ever since the war ended I’ve been trying to track her down, without success. I owe her an oprosti.

Gunholder’s shift at the café starts at ten. “Have a nice day,” she says and leaves me with a smile that I keep warm until she comes back. At first I thought I heard her say, “Have an ice day.” But even she thinks ten in the morning is too early for sarcasm. My ice machine. The slut of my sleepless dreams. My prison guard, my priest. In the afternoons she works for the local music festival called Airways or Airwaves, doing phone calls and other type of secretary work. She’s on speaking terms with tons of pop-stars, some world famous celebrities you’ve never heard of.

“You ever had Creed up here?”

“Greed?”

Forget it. This is never going to work out.

She usually returns around seven or eight, always equipped with food, usually some Thai or Chinese takeout that she has to pay for. After dinner she usually puts on some Icelandic weirdo music, doing her best in introducing me to people like Mugison, Gus Gus or the black sounding Lay Low. I tell her that if she could arrange a gun for me, I could do wonders to the promotion of Icelandic music. Her laugh is slightly offended. But her curiosity is piqued. I watch her smoke while she keeps the questions coming like an intern in the Oval Office. “If some of your victims belonged to other ‘organizations’ they must have tried to kill you, right?” Right. “Have you ever known any of them, your victims?” You bet. She’s fascinated by my job. I finally have a fan.

“And do you remember them all, your victims, I mean?”

“The professional ones, yes.”

“But not the war ones?”

“No. The soldiers are all blurred, but I’m really proud of my hitman work. I always try to do a good job. ‘Victim first’ is my motto. I try to make it as easy for them as possible. Nearly all of them have died instantly. No time for regrets or anger or anything. It’s just biff! and you’re gone. Like turning off a machine. No pain, no nothing. They couldn’t have asked for a better service. I always prepare everything perfectly: the timing, the place, the angle, everything. And I’ve studied the human body like a doctor. Where to aim for the quickest result and stuff like that. If this were a category at the Olympics, I’d be the Mark Spitz of the killing world.”

“And what’s the most difficult thing about it?”

“To hit, of course. To hit the guy in the head, the heart, or the butt, if you find yourself in that position. But in that case you have to make sure the bullet travels straight up his spine. Butt shots are really angle-sensitive. It’s like playing pool.”

“So you have to like… practice?”

“Sure. You have to be in good shape. I had to give up cocaine because of it. You need a steady heart for this kind of work.”

“Wow. And you keep count of them? The dead ones?” she says with big blue eyes. I got her in perfect Lewinsky mode.

“Yeah. Well. I don’t really count them. You sort of remember them. It’s a bit like, I mean, you remember all the guys you’ve slept with, right?”

“Well, I’ve tried to forget some of them,” she says with a sexy grin.

I can’t resist.

“How many in all?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t count them. Forty maybe.”

Slut.

“Forty?”

“You think that’s a lot? My friend has done a hundred and forty or something.”

There we have it. Tarantino has 139 fuck-in-laws in Iceland. He better update his Christmas card list.

“And you’ve done sixty-seven?” she continues.

“Girls? No, you mean hits? Yes. Sixty-seven. Sixty-seven suckers down. Sixty-seven pigs in the oven.”

“And you really remember all of them?”

“I try to keep their memories alive.”

“And you think about them?”

“No. Never.”

“You don’t feel bad about any of them?”

“No.”

“How is that possible? You have no conscience?”

“It’s frozen, I guess. You feel bad about any of your…?”

“My bedfellows?” she says with an icy grin. “No.”

“No? You’ve had forty people between your legs and you don’t feel bad about any of them?”

“I can’t allow myself to. I see them all the time.”

Give me a fucking spring break.

“You’re still seeing them? Forty guys?”

“Not ‘seeing’ them. I just, you know, meet them in the street and stuff. It’s a small town. They come into the café all the time.”

“OK. So, that’s why they hired you?”

She switches from Lewinsky to Britney.

“Hey. Shut the fuck up, will you! We’re talking about dead people here, and yet you make ME look like the guilty one. As if you can compare killing people to making love with them?”

“Love and death. Equally important in life.”

“Love and death? It’s not about love. It’s only about sex!”

“Even more serious.”

She jumps up from the sofa, screaming at me: “OH! Fuck you!” before leaving the room. But she’s back in no time, looking like she just realized that this is her place and not mine. “I don’t know why the hell I’m keeping you here! I really should call the police or Torture or something, but… Argh! Get up! Go upstairs! Get away from me! And shut the fuck up!”

“Sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“Fuck you!”

“Yes, I’ll… I’ll do it later. Please, sit down.”

She goes into the kitchen and stays there for a cigarette’s worth of time. I use those minutes for spanking my green-eyed monkey.

Jealousy is the old and ever-caring aunt that never forgets to show up at my dates. It has long been the driving force in my life, ever since my Hanover girlfriend, the optician’s daughter, dumped me Prussian style. Hildegaard was a Day 8 Girl (as a freshly landed foreigner who spoke little German my chances were limited) who wore turtlenecks half the time, played the violin with an angel’s face, and never used a dirty word, but told me, at the moment of her parting, that she had cheated on me with seventeen men. Seventeen fucking Germans. Ponytail, mustache, and all. It was supposed to make me feel better, she said.

“You should only be happy to get rid of a…”

“…slut like you?”

It took me seven years to bury the bastards in the hard soil of my soul. They’ve hardly bothered me since, but they did turn my mind into a suspicious one forever. As God only knows too well, I’ve a hard time enjoying relationships. I’m always like some fucking secret agent trying to prove that my partner is a counterspy. And when it comes to love I’m like the referee at a soccer match, totally unable to enjoy the game, but always ready with the yellow card.

And here I go again. Aunt Jealousy has ordered Gunholder out in the kitchen. So the old hatch did make it all the way up to Iceland. Still, this should hardly qualify as a date. It’s more like a crash course in the business of shooting people. Killing 101. We’re at the end of our first lesson. The teacher waits for the student to return from her smoking break. In a while she does. Gunholder reappears in the doorway, with red eyes and angry cheeks. She crawls back onto the sofa and lights another cigarette. I watch her inhale and exhale for a while. She makes a small windy sound each time the smoke leaves her mouth.

“How did your parents react when the police came and Father Friendly was gone?” I finally ask her.

“They were in big shock, of course. I mean, they totally believed in you,” she says with a modest laugh.

“Was he angry, your dad?”

“I would say more shocked than angry. And then he started reassuring the police, putting his hand on their shoulders and telling them: ‘God will find him. He will not escape the waking eye of the Lord.’”

She laughs some more. I try to laugh with her. Then all of a sudden we hear the downstairs door open and her smile disappears. She kills her cigarette, stands up, grabs my dish and brings it to the kitchen. I run up the primitive staircase and then pull it up behind me. It comes with a hatch that closes behind it, once the staircase is all up in the attic. I crawl across the splintered floor and get inside my noisy North Face hide. I listen to Truster trot inside the apartment, the poor horse. He’s home early. I hear them exchange the smallest hellos followed by some toilet sounds. He then says something that my wild guess would have as: “Some food left?” She says nay. That’s Icelandic for “no.” She has taught me some phrases already. Tugthúslimur is “good morning” and glæpamaður is “good night.”

Then we have sibling-silence for three hours. They don’t even watch TV together. No music playing, either. What the hell are they doing? Neither of them leaves the house. Are they playing cards? Reading? At midnight there are some toilet sounds again, followed by the sweet sounds of silky underpants gliding down soft white legs. The war gave me a cat’s hearing.

At three in the morning I dial Niko’s number in NYC. I speak with the voice of a dormer mouse, explaining my situation. He listens for a while, but when he finally talks back, he acts like a wannabe Talian on TV: “You callin’ me? Why you callin’ me? Who gave you my number?” Then he hangs up. He hangs up on me. My good old Niko. Niko Nevolja. This is really bad news. Some really, really bad news. I should consider myself dead. At least I should never even think of going back to NYC. Or even Croatia. Fuck. Fucking fucked-up fuck.

I fall asleep at five.

I’m woken at seven by some loud knocking and soft voices downstairs. I’m prepared for this one: Sleeping in my (or Mr. Maack’s) clothes, I pocket my phone and put on my running shoes in less than a second. Two such later and I have thrown the sleeping bag into a dim corner and put away the mattress beneath a box of books. I hear Gunholder acting crazy downstairs.

“QUARY GONGI?!”

Her voice follows me up through the skylight, the small rusty one in the middle of the steep bulletproof roof. It’s freaking cold outside. Gray skies, green trees, and the colorful roofs of Reykjavik. This one is rusty red. I quickly close the window and climb the steep roof. I can spot the white hood of a police car parked on the street below, and I hear the voice of a masculine officer traveling from street to garden. I jump on the other side of the roof, hanging on the ridge by the total sum of eight fingers. Through my belly I can hear the suckers already up in the attic, looking for the hiding man’s hide. Moments later I hear one of them open the fucking skylight. I can’t see him, but he can possibly see my cold white fingertips. I have to let go of the ridge. I do so. I let go. I slide down the roof in a very slow, slow motion, floating down the cold iron on my big Croatian belly. I stretch out my arms and feet, trying to stop myself with my sticky shoes and clammy palms without making a single sound. Two inches later I stop. I fucking stop. I’m spread out on the steep red roof like a gigantic frog.