The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 2} THE FUCK-UP

But now I’m in trouble. For the first time in my spotless career. I’m riding in the company car, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, with Manhattan at my back, Munita in my ear, her body on my mind, and my eyes on driver Radovan’s piggy neck-back. A bullet would have a hard time with this head. The afternoon Manhattan sun throws skyscraper shadows down on the river’s surface.

“Oh, baby. I will miss you,” Munita whispers from behind her desk on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. Two years ago she started on the ground floor. And yet she never did The Apprentice. That’s my Munita. You can’t dislike her. Her voice is half Hindu but the accent is all Peru. Her mother was from Bombay, and she’s got that Indian olive oil skin, a softwear that can keep you going all the way to the North Pole in a golf cart with President Bush at the steering wheel.

“Me, too,” I answer, one more fucking time not totally sure whether this is 100 percent perfect English that I’m speaking. But I guess I’m right. I will miss myself. I will miss my great life in the great city.

I’m going into exile. Disappearing for a while, six months at least. My plane ticket reads: New York – Frankfurt – Zagreb. Signed by Dikan. I will come crawling back under my mother’s kitchen table with a gun in my mouth. I fucked up. Or somebody fucked me. Hit #66 was a miss. Don’t get me wrong. I got the bullet into the guy’s head safe and sound, but there was some serious aftermath. The mustached Polish guy turned out to be a mustached FBI guy. What was supposed to be a bright and sunny murder in broad daylight became a nightmare. I took him to the trash dump over in Queens and put him away in a heap of fake Levi’s jeans and then covered his ugly face with an old Pepsi Max sunbrella. On my way back to the car, I noticed some friends of his had arrived too late for the coffin-free funeral. My old Croatian heart skipped from waltz to death metal, and I turned quickly around. For the next ten minutes I ran like a hurdler at the Obese Olympics through the waste of some six thousand nuclear New York families, all the time heading for the river, and finally sought shelter in a rusty old container full of ancient teddy bears that, strangely enough, smelled of grilled cheese. The Federal Bastards sealed off the area, so I ended up spending the night with them. It was a sleepless night of Manhattan skyline, cold container, and smelly bears. For the empty stomach, the smell of food is like perfume to a boner.

In the morning hours it was a bit lovely to see the rooms in the United Nations Building light up, one after the other—their reflection in the East River scrambled by the running water. It was way before sunrise. I guess every nation on earth has its own office in the building, and the lights in each room are programmed to go on at the same time the sun rises in the country it belongs to. I watched 156 sunrises that night. Before number 157 broke, I was in the river. The ice-cold stream brought me down to a different dumpsite. It was more like a Web site, actually, full of net-like lines and cables.

In the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel, I found a cab. The driver had a problem with the fact that my clothes were all wet, but I took out my gun and dried them in an instant.

Toxic is traveling under the name of Igor Illitch. I was born in Smolensk now, in 1971. I’ve been born all over the place. Once I held a German passport that gave me a pretty happy childhood in the then-capitol Bonn. I even made the effort, on my way through the Rhine valley, to concoct some idyllic childhood memories. Father Dieter worked as a janitor at the Russian embassy, and mother Ilse was a chef at the American embassy. Every night was cold war, with me being Berlin, a wall between my eyes. Though I’m no actor; I don’t mind getting a new life once in a while. In fact, I’ve always enjoyed that part of my work. You get a break from yourself. Except for my weekend as a Serb back in ’99. Then I really felt like killing the man I had become.

But even though they’ve had me born in different cities, they usually use the same year, the right one: 1971. I was born the day before Hajduk finally won the championship after some twenty years of waiting. My football-fanatic father believed I was a good-luck charm and called me “Champ.”

The highway snakes its way through Brooklyn. I look at all the advertisements with almost-tears in my eyes. I just don’t want to leave this town. We pass a big blue billboard: “Eyewitness News at Seven – WABC-TV New York.” Three days in a row my face was there, “…known in Mob circles simply as ‘Toxic’.” But it was never more than a flash. No big story, like the ones they do on the mass killers. Those guys become household names in one day while the honest and hardworking men and women of the assassination industry are only mentioned in passing. The nation that measures everything in money sucks up to amateurs instead of us professionals. I guess I will never fully understand this country. I love New York, but I don’t get the rest.

The suburbs quickly thin out, and soon we enter the land of liftoffs and landings. Igor’s passport sits in my breast pocket, like a Gucci bag made in China. Behind it my heart beats the drum of doubt.

“Doviđenja,” Radovan says outside the International Departures Terminal. I forbid him to follow me inside. His sunglasses scream for the FBI like a gay on a hot tin roof. Stupidity is no disguise for the stupid. I shaved off all my hair this morning and tried my best to dress Russian: black leather jacket, the ugliest jeans in the closet, and Puma Putin running shoes.

Before I left, I turned around in the doorway and fingerkissed my flat screen goodbye. Munita asked me if she could take care of my place while I was away, but I told her no. We don’t have thrust-trust yet. The sex bomb won’t tick for six months without exploding, and I don’t want some Peruvian prick drying his dirty after-sex-sweat on my Prada towels.

The check-in goes smoothly. A shallow blonde with deep dimples tells me not to worry about my bags. I will see them again in Zagreb. Seems they have direct NYC-Zagreb flights for luggage only. Immigration requires self-control. I put on my Igor expression while the officer admires the Chinese handiwork. Then two over-proud security guys make me deliver phone, wallet, and dimes. Jacket, belt, and shoes. In the middle of my coin-cash, they spot an object that makes my heart skip from samba to rock. Turns out my ugliest jeans contain a lone bullet, a beautiful golden 9mm from the Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic that Davor presented me with on my arrival in New York.

“What is this? That’s a bullet! No?” a small Long Island Latino woman in uniform asks me in her horrible mall accent.

“Oh… Yeah. That’s a… That’s a souvenir,” I hit back.

“A souvenir?”

“Eh… Yes. It… It was removed from my brain,” I say, trying to look like the thing did permanent damage to it.

She buys it and lets me go after giving me a full-body massage.

I’ll never get used to this no-gun traveling thing. It’s not in a man’s nature to cross countries or oceans unarmed. Fucking 9/11 makes me really want to shoot bin Laden. But I can’t, since I’m not allowed to carry the gun on the plane.

I’m starting to look forward to Zagreb when two Feds suddenly appear and make their way towards the people standing at the gate, tickets in hand. I’m the last in line. There is no denying it’s them. I can smell undercover all the way from Jersey, like a dog in heat. They’re sporting the usual H&M jackets and sunglasses, all stitched up in the classic FBI hairdo straight out of DC. The look is sort of “official casual,” quite shiny and a bit curly, like Michael Keaton’s in Multiplicity.

I immediately duck for cover behind waiting passengers, pick up my bag, and start walking away from the gate, in the opposite direction of the undercover agents. Doviđenja, Zagreb. My heart’s pounding, but I do not allow myself to look back. Don’t ever look back on danger! Mother used to say. I walk for some six fucking minutes, my shaved skull turning into a fucking fountain on the way. Airport hallways are endless. People stare at me like I was carrying Saddam’s balls in my bag. Finally I spot the everyman sign and take a swift turn to the left. Inside the bathroom I catch my breath and dry my head. While they dry their hands, three businessmen look at me as if I were a Russian arms dealer waiting for a customer. Finally, I set back out on the open sea. Not clear. I immediately hurry back inside the bathroom as I spot one of the Michael Keatons. I know he didn’t see me, though. He was walking by.

I go into one of the stalls and pretend to do what I’m thinking. What the hell can I do now? I can’t possibly go back to my gate. Too risky. The Keatons will be waiting for me there, smiling like silly relatives. But then, what?

The answer comes to me in the shape of a belt, the tip of a belt that introduces itself from below the wall between my stall and the next. I wait for a few moments and pray to God. Finally the owner of the belt finishes and leaves his stall. As I open the cheap door, our eyes meet in the mirror over the row of sinks. God seems to have heard me: just like Igor, Belt Man is shaved to the bone. Two bald and chubby fellow travelers, they look remarkably similar, though Belt Man wears almost invisible glasses and is a bit older than Igor. But he won’t get much older now. Igor puts him out with a near-silent punch in the back of his head, right in the G-spot. His glasses fall into the sink as his head hits the mirror. There is no blood. The fellow is quite heavyset, even more so than me, but still I manage to deliver him into the same stall where he dropped his final shit on this earth, and close the door behind me.

I take his pulse. No heartbeat.

The adrenaline pumping more slowly, I’m rather horrified to realize that #67 is a holy man. He’s wearing a white clerical collar around his neck, plus black shirt, black jacket, black coat. White skin. I search for his ticket, passport, and wallet and pooha! Toxic Igor has a new name: Rev. David Friendly. Born in Vienna, Virginia, on November 8, 1965. I can go for that. I’ve never been an American before. Where is he going? “Reykjavik,” reads the ticket.

Sounds like Europe. With some difficulty I manage to remove the coat and jacket from the holy man’s chubby torso and then start unbuttoning his shirt, sweat pouring off my head again and breathing like a boar. I make a quick break when I hear someone enter the bathroom and try to hide my heavy breathing under the sound of his pee. It’s followed by a quick gush of water and the drying of hands.

As soon as the coast is clear, I emerge from the JFK toilets a born-again Christian, with a halo around my neck and a new mission in life: Gate 2.