The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 3} ICELANDAIR

It’s fucking amazing. I’m moving across the North Atlantic sky at the speed of sound and yet his soul has caught up with me. I feel restless, buried in some extra-small window seat on a plane full of blonde women and bland men. I don’t know what’s happening, but my legs are absolutely killing me. Mr. Friendly must have connections in heaven; an army of angels is pinching me with their pointy fingernails and strangling my throat with the clerical collar.

Holy men are the worst.

Back during the war I once was ordered to guard a church in a small village near the town of Knin. The Serbs had been using it for storing their bombs, but now we were taking control of the region. On a foggy Sunday morning, the fucking village priest suddenly appeared out of the blue and said he wanted to hold a mass. I said no way, nobody was allowed inside the church. He was an old man with a white beard and white hair around his ears. In a way he looked more like a monk than a priest. And his face was full of this peaceful fatigue. Looking into his eyes was like getting a sneak preview of the afterlife: two silent ponds in the Everwoods. It was as if he was already dead. As if he didn’t care anymore. Without saying a word, he just walked past me, towards the church door. I ran after him and told him again in cut-throat-clear Croatian that nobody was allowed inside the church. I had my orders.

“ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOBODY!” I screamed into his hairy ear.

He just closed his eyes for a slow moment and then made for the door. I tried to push him away with my rifle, but I couldn’t really do it. I just couldn’t get physical with this old man who was like the Spirit of Humanity itself or some high-brewed shit like that. In pure Sunday silence, he brought out his large key and started opening the wooden door. I had already spent four years in the war and had shot more people than were sitting in my family tree, but I was still shaking all over like the badly made cigarettes I would smoke later that day. What the hell was going on? I was being outplayed by an eighty-year-old unarmed priest! How could this be happening? As I watched him disappearing inside the church, I finally freaked out and shot him in the back. He fell on the stony floor, crucifixion-style, like the guy hanging on the opposite wall.

I shut the door and sat down with my back against it. I would have cried if the war hadn’t cast all my tears in stone. So I just sat there, stone faced, cursing the whole thing: my land, his land, our land, and the whole fucking war. I sat there for some twenty cigarettes. My Sunday in hell. I had killed a holy man, and I was deadly surprised by the effect it had on me. I had killed older guys before, even one that could have been a lady, without suffering this type of moral hangover. But somehow this one was three tons more dramatic—probably about the weight of his chapel. I could feel horns breaking through my hairline, and the fast-growing tail between my buttocks made sitting painful.

It was then that I began to lose my mind. A strange feeling started growing in me. I felt like the big bang of my rifle shot was still vibrating inside the small village church, that the horrid sound was slowly filling it up, all the way up to the bell. I even heard the bloody bronze thing resonating with rage, filling my head with the same heavy-metal droning. And before I knew it, I started firing at the fucking church bell like a crazy boy shooting at chickens. It cried out into the fog like a woman in childbirth.

After some fifteen bullets had banged the bell, a different kind of shooting rang out. I threw myself in the wet grass, ducking from a blizzard of bullets blowing straight out of hell. In a split second, all the church windows were shattered to pieces. Moments later, the whole holy thing blew up in a big yellow blast. Rubble punched my back like some iron-fingered masseuse and a cornerstone dented my helmet. I was left semi-conscious.

He who kills a man of the church will be killed by a church.

I’ve never been inside one since. For weeks and months my young sick soul was tortured by the image of an eighty-year-old Jesus facedown on a stony floor. Every night I hammered a big iron-nail into his back and out through his heart, which exploded, painting my entire world red.

They offer Sideways on the plane TV, but also vintage stuff like Seinfeld, some rusty old reruns of weirdo hairdos. Seinfeld was typically American in that show. He was a pretty funny guy, but he had no sense of style. Tacky like a Texan tux. Tasteless dressing and tasteful jokes. That’s Seinfeld for me. I would have preferred it the other way around.

The guy sitting next to me is reading some paperback monster that looks to be one of those Mob thrillers (how many volumes can they write about those Sicilian brats?). Occasionally he murmurs a yes or a no to the older gentleman sitting in the aisle seat who keeps popping some pills. They must be uppers since he can’t seem to allow the poor fellow to read his book without peppering him with questions in a bizarre accent. It turns out the talking guy is Icelandic and the reading guy is a basketball player, born and bred in Boise, Idaho, but now on a transfer to the Schniefel Stickholmers or something like that—a small team in the Icelandic conference.

Oh, yeah. I forget to mention that this is a nonsmoking Icelandair flight from New York to Reykjavik, Iceland. This was the surprise that awaited me at Gate 2. My exile has taken a northern turn. By the touch of my index finger, the video screen abandons Seinfeld’s hairdo for an info-map: A red airplane, the size of Britain, slowly crawls up the Atlantic, past some white thing that the talking man says is Greenland. Iceland on the other hand looks pretty green. The chatty one takes the next ten minutes to explain his theory about this mix-up: When the Norwegian Vikings discovered Iceland in some year before 1000, they found Irish monks up there, who’d already named the land Island, or The Land of Christ, for Jesus was Isu in their language. The Vikings, however, took the Savior for ice. I’m glad they did. Or else I’d be traveling to Christland.

“OK. Cool. What about Greenland then?” the basketball player asks.

“The first settlers wanted all of Iceland for themselves, so they named the other one Greenland, so that next wave of immigrants would go there instead. Many people say it was the first PR trick in history. It really should be the other way around. Greenland should be called Iceland and Iceland, Greenland.”

Cool. I’m traveling under a pseudonym to a country with a pseudonym. Not too bad. I’ve heard about Iceland before. A friend of Dikan’s went there once for some arms-for-legs deal. The nights are bright and the girls are long, he said. Or was it the other way around? It’s a small island (ah, well, it’s two times bigger than Croatia) in the middle of the North Atlantic. The in-flight magazine shows lunar landscapes and sunny faces. Mossy rocks and fuzzy sweaters. They say Iceland is a young, hot country that’s still very active, shaking from eruptions and earthquakes almost daily, with boiling water and running lava breaking up through the surface. I wonder what brings Rev. David Friendly to this remote place? That’s me, that is. I have to start thinking like a priest.

Bless my soul.

Once more I try to find the right position for my aching legs. The stewardesses all have nice bodies and speak English with super confidence. Bright girls, long nights. Yeah, that’s how it was. The Icelandic look seems to be a cross between Julia Stiles and Virginia Madsen. Broad faces, barren cheeks. Cold eyes, cool lips. One of them hands me a tray of food and gives me an innocent, oh-what-a-sweet-puppy smile. Must be the dog collar I’m wearing. I’m not a man anymore. I’m a priest.

In that way the bloody collar works. It keeps the sin away. Or keeps it all inside. My mind starts giving Munita a very long leash as I try to picture myself in bed with one of these northern nymphs. I don’t succeed. Munita has the upper hand. I miss her soft skin already.

They make you pay for food. I find a few holy bills in Friendly’s wallet and send him my warmest thanks. Then I find out airline food tastes no better even when you’re paying for it. Maybe your taste buds stop working at five thousand feet. Suddenly the Wise Guy raises his voice as well as his glass of red wine, and, smiling, says “skull!” to me and the basketball player. At first I think he must be toasting my fresh hairdo, but he explains that this is the Icelandic version of “cheers!” The Vikings used to celebrate their victories by filling their victims’ brain shells with booze.

I love this country already.

After dinner I try to fall asleep. I really need my after-killing nap. But I seem to be the only one who wants to shut his eyes. The Vikings scream for another skull of cognac. And then the captain starts his voice-over bit, his manly voice tuned to the max in the overhead speakers. As with all his colleagues around the world, he speaks in Airish, the incomprehensive language of the skies. Those cockpit-monologues always sound to me like some Latin prayer, asking God for permission to cross his lawn. This one is fourteen minutes long.

I keep my eyes shut. Being Friendly is an iron collar around my neck.

Behind me I can hear the stewardess take yet another drinking order from two happy Vikings. And down the aisle, a group of chubby women have drunk themselves back to their high-school days. The Icelanders seem to be related to the Russians, who can never leave their motherland without being totally hammered and would never return to it in a sober state. Makes me think of old Ivica, who used to live in our street in Split. He was so afraid of his wife that he had to soak himself in courage each time he wanted to leave the house, and never dared return unless he was deaf from booze.

“Skull!” “Skull!” I hear them say behind me, all around me. I give up on sleeping and open my priestly eyes.

Now it’s selling time. They’ve turned the plane into a flying mall, with the stewardesses all busy running credit cards and handing out sunglasses and silky ties. I’ve never seen that before, not even on Aeroflot. But it seems like an effective but deadly combination: drinking and shopping. I think to myself that Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s should definitely consider opening bars in their men’s and women’s departments. Or, maybe there are no shops in Iceland?

Despite the captain’s prayer, the angels keep on pinching my legs and punching a conscience I thought I’d lost. Normally my profession carries no side effects, though I do get tired after a hit. The post-slaying siesta is a close relative to the after-sex nap; though there’s little physical effort (she always prefers to be on top), the inner achievement calls for a little rest.

I finally manage to tune out the drunken shopping of my fellow travelers and fall asleep with Munita on top of me—her wonder balls bouncing and her long, black hair tickling my chubby chest, like the tip of God’s long white beard touching my sick soul.