The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 17} THE HOWLING HITMAN

I come downstairs. I don’t care anymore. I open the hatch and bring down the staircase. They wake up of course. Truster comes at me with a flying fist, as if I was a simple burglar. I stop his blow in mid-air, holding his arm in my hand. He’s pretty strong, but of course he was never a soldier. The girl cools her brother down and asks me what the hell I’m doing?

“I don’t care anymore.”

She looks at me with a frozen face and Truster looks at her, even more bewildered.

“You know him?” he asks her in Icelandic, which must mean I don’t look like a priest anymore.

She doesn’t answer. He’s naked except for some crazy underpants. Homer Simpson looks at me out from his crotch, a tongue in cheek. She wears a dark blue T-shirt that says “Sorry” in white. I’m fully dressed. I got my running shoes on. Igor’s running shoes. Gun follows me out of the apartment and down the staircase asking all kinds of questions that I do not answer. And I avoid looking at her face. It would spur the wrong thoughts.

I don’t care anymore. I go outside. Bye.

It’s very early. The streets are even more silent than during the day. They’re beyond silence. Reminds me of All Dead Village. It’s bright as hell, but cloudy. One big massive and foggy cloud hangs low over the city like a lid on a saucepan. It seems to be sinking lower and lower. It has the light-gray color of ice. As ever, the temperature is that of a refrigerator.

A fucking fridge.

I’m looking for a plate to put my head on.

I walk down the street. I haven’t got the faintest idea where I’m going or what I’m doing. I just have to go somewhere. When your head turns dead, your feet take over. I’m a walking headless chicken spurting blood from my sore, sore throat.

Between the houses I can make out The Pond. A silly looking swan sails slowly between a roof and a light pole. They put her head on a plate. Why the fuck did they do that? To scare me? The more I think of it, the more it smells like Talian cooking. In their language your girlfriend’s head in the fridge translates into heavy shit. Why can’t they just come find me and kill me right away? Cut the fucking poetry!

I can’t believe she’s dead. My girl, Munita. And such a shameless, tasteless violent death. All according to family tradition. They took the head off her body… That holy body… Last night she was the hottest girl on the planet, today she’s in the fridge.

As am I.

I guess this is my punishment, being locked inside this icy land. I guess I deserve it. I cheated on her. But at least my head is still connected to my body. She must have cheated ten times harder, ten times more often. Gave up her head for the head she gave. I knew it. I fucking knew it. The Hindu-Hispanic wonder was not to be trusted. I know they say that no human is to be trusted completely, except for Jesus Christ and Laura Bush, but you can always hope that your partner has at least applied for a trial membership of their holy club.

I remember once when we were coming from a dinner at a classy restaurant on the Upper East Side and the soft breeze was as warm as the air from an exhaust pipe. She walked slowly out on to the pavement, rearranging the strap of her purse on her shoulder, and I could feel her great thighs rubbing against each other beneath her noisy red satin dress. (Munita was one of those rare women who wear dresses half the time.) It had this triangular opening at the back (one of those things I don’t know the English word for), going almost all the way down to her butt. And as the yellow cabs rushed by her great voluptuous body wrapped in red, my sick mind was hiding in the darkness inside her dress, right there up in the triangular opening, on the border of butt and thighs, contemplating whether she’d had another man that week, that day, that year…

Inside the restaurant we’d been talking about relationships in general and making fun of the square SWAP or WASP (or whatever you call it) couple three tables away. “She must have a zipper cunt,” Munita whispered over her spoon full of Thai soup. I’d never heard that one before. A zipper cunt? The two words instantly unzipped my hard love for her. This woman was the girl of all my difficult dreams. I paid the bill with a hard-on and decided to tell her that I loved her once we were outside.

It would have been the first time I’d have told her.

But as we came out on the street, and my mind was hiding in her private shadows, I suddenly saw this hand between her thighs, a grown man’s hand with hair on its back, fingering its way up her leg. One of the fingers wore a thick golden wedding ring. It was just a vision, quick as a flash of light.

She turned her royal sweetness around, flipping my eyes from rear to front, and smiled her sweet smile, with closed juicy lips: that sexy grin of hers.

“Thanks for dinner, honey. It was great.”

A kiss. And the sound of a fire engine some ten blocks down.

“Is he married?”

“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?”