The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 23} MADE IN ICELAND

Hanna’s big hands are incredibly white. Much paler than her arms. It’s almost as if she’s wearing white gloves. Her long and strong fingers move softly about in a very swift but silent way. There is hardly any noise to be heard as she gathers my empty plate and glass. My mom is the absolute opposite. When she was doing the dishes, it always felt like there was a punk band rehearsing out in the kitchen. Maybe Dad didn’t give her enough sex. If that’s the reason, Torture must be biblical in bed.

“Are you feeling better?” she asks me in her homely voice that is red wine to my ears, but rotten to my nose.

“Yes.”

“That is good.”

For some mystical reason she has 100 percent faith in me. I’ll be “góður,” she says half the time. It both means “good” and “to get well.”

Once again I read the story of Saul, the self-made holyman from Tarsus, Turkey. It’s the same story as Goodmoondoor spontaneously told his audience my first night in Iceland, and now it has become the foundation of my recovery, Torture says. I get the point. Like me, this guy also changed his name. And like me he has a bloody past. Yet he became St. Paul, “the father of the church.” I’m sure to become St. Tom, father of something. Hopefully not a church, though.

Deep into my second week in Torture’s basement, Hanna brings me a letter after dinner. She lays it gently on my chest, with a nodding smile that wrinkles her skin around the eyes, and says “read it” before she silently gathers empty dinnerware from my bedside table and goes back upstairs, her great horse tail swaying behind her back, above her round and solid bottom.

I open the letter. It’s handwritten. No e-mails in the house of Abraham. Nice hand. Blue ink. “Dear Thordur.” It’s Father Friendly writing, from his house in Virginia, last October.

Professional but Friendly. The busy brother.

Poor guy. For staying at his wife’s deathbed he was rewarded with his own death. How cruel of me.

The letter is accompanied by an autographed color photo showing the Friendly family standing in front of a big white house that could either be their church, their home, or both. Here is my bald victim with the white collar around his neck and his beaming blonde wife Judy by his side, the woman I was married to for two whole seconds in Goodmoondoor’s car earlier this spring. She’s a southern semi-beauty that could pass for Laura Dern’s well-preserved mother. A Day 7 type. The couple proudly stands behind two kids, about ten and eight years old. One is black, one white. The latter sits in a wheelchair. Like only American women are capable of doing, Mrs. Friendly is smiling so hard she cannot possibly see the camera. She’s blinded by bliss. Actually, they’re all smiling with the same enthusiasm as if they were modeling for the brochure of the best hotel in heaven. The disabled kid has a bit of a disabled smile, though. A touch of disappointment with life in general.

I sum up my impression of Rev. David Friendly from letter and looks. He doesn’t strike me as the usual southern televangelist, the con man of Christ. Somehow he seems genuine. I guess he didn’t deserve to die at the age of forty. Despite all his homophobia. The soul-saver outweighs the widow-maker on any scale. Plus he has a crippled child, and another one adopted… And now the kids are orphans, fatherless, and motherless little creatures. I should probably offer to adopt them.

The day after, Hanna rubs it all in. Did I read the letter and see the photo? Yes, I did.

“He was a good man,” she says with wrinkled eyes and without the slightest hint of accusation in her voice.

“And he lost his wife?”

“No,” she says. “She had an accident and is para… What do you call it?”

“Paralyzed?”

“Yes. She is in a wheelchair.”

“But Goodmoondoor told me she died.”

“No, no. She almost died but she is getting better, I think.”

“And they have two kids?”

“Yes. They have two adopted kids. The younger one is from Gambia. And the other one is in a wheelchair, also.”

No shit. The crippled one is adopted as well. How fucking holy can you be? And now there are eight wheels in the family…

“You maybe want to write to them?” Mrs. Torture continues.

No.

“Yes, maybe.”

“Of course you don’t tell them who you are. You just say that you knew Father Friendly as a preacher and that you heard about his death, and that you are sorry.”

She makes a pause. We look at each other. Me and Mother Earth.

“If you are,” she adds.

“Yes, of course I’m sorry.”

“That’s good. You’re getting better.”

And here comes the good part. She strokes my cheek with her big white hand. With her strong, soft fingers. If this was a movie, I would now grab her with my Tom Cruise arms and we would kiss like two people eating their first grapefruit after a week in the desert, and then I would tear off her clothes and in one cut we’d be making biblical love on my Old Testament bed. The movie would be titled Trinitatis, containing a love triangle between sinner, priest, and his wife.

“I just think it could be good for you to write them a letter.”

“OK. I’ll think about it.”

Actually, I should write the other sixty-six widows as well. I should write them all a standard sorry letter.

This is the last time I will use my father’s name. It’s dead now. My attempt at suicide wasn’t a complete flop.

The new me comes with a new name. After killing two priests, I’m baptized by two more.

“Good morning, Mister Ólafsson!” Goodmoondoor says as he suddenly appears at the end of my second week in hiding, smiling his teeth out. He hands me a brand-new Icelandic passport sporting my face and my own Icelandic social security number, called kennitala. I’m resurrected under the name of “Tómas Leifur Ólafsson.” The two preachers have a good laugh when they watch me read it. They just can’t control themselves. I don’t know exactly why, but they find it extremely funny.

“Tómas Leifur Ólafsson! Congratulations! You are Icelandic now! You have to learn Icelandic!” Goodmoondoor almost shouts.

I study the passport. It looks impeccable. Even more so than the Chinese-made one for Igor.

“How did you…? Where did you get it?” I ask them.

“It’s made in Iceland! Handmade!”

Goodmoondoor can hardly control his joy, nor can he hide the immense pride he feels from having been able to arrange this illegal artifact.

“I have a friend in the police,” he says and winks at me with the silliest of smiles. “And another one in politic party.”

I want to run outside and laugh myself to death. There is nothing more hilarious in this world than holy men doing illegal things.

They produce another round of laughs when they ask me to say my new name. “Thomas, leave her” is my first, and for me quite logical, attempt. Apparently “Toe Mash Lay Fur” is more like it. They make me say it some ten times before they’re ready to wet my post-Friendly hair with the tap water that Torture makes holy with a blessing and a smile. They’re having the time of their lives.

“Actually, you should have been Tómas Leifur Bogason,” Torture explains. “That’s the direct translation of your Croatian name, and for a long time this was the tradition here in Iceland. Immigrants were forced to take on an Icelandic name that was usually a translation or some version of the original one. But we don’t want to risk anything, do we, so we came up with this one. Ólafsson means ‘son of Ólaf’ and that’s the name of our president.”

That’s his first name, that is. Those guys have no use for family names. Icelanders still uphold the Viking tradition of letting their children’s second names be derived from their father’s first. If I had kids, they’d be honored with the cool and catchy Tómasson (boy) or Tómasdóttir (girl).

I beg my ministers for an easier version of my new name, and after some thinking they come up with Tommy Olafs.