The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 18} MORNING OF THE DEAD

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.