The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 33} TJ TIME

It’s May 2007. A year has passed since my incidental arrival in Iceland. Since my early retirement from the homicide industry. A winter full of dim days and snowy nights has entered my soul. And now it’s bright again. Spring is here, cold as ever, with endless light and Eurovision, the annual orgy of gorgeous women and gay men.

It’s tonight.

We go to Gunnhildur’s parents for the traditional fjölskylduboð (family gathering). The big Croatian baby inside her is due any moment now, and she looks like the snake who ate the basketball. Gun says I stroke the belly as if I were expecting a million dollars instead of a baby. Sickreader greets us, kissing her daughter and son-in-law on the cheek, the latter for the first time, actually. It’s taken her a whole dark season to accept the fact that her daughter is expecting a future gangster.

“I want you to know that if you let us down, I will go to the phone and call the American embassy at once,” she told me at Christmas Eve, when we accidentally found ourselves alone in her kitchen.

Well-trained in Icelandic customs, I take off my sneakers and put them away in a corner. Gunnhildur is allowed to keep on her almost-Pradas. (According to Icelandic house rules, you’re allowed to enter in your shoes if they cost more than two hundred dollars.) She marches through the living room and out on to the veranda to give her father a kiss. Goodmoondoor is out there fiddling with the gas-grill, the pride of every Icelandic household; a black four-legged creature with a bright yellow udder that silently endures the long winter, loitering out in the icy gardens like an arctic mammal. Originally designed for Texas BBQ parties, I’ve seen the Easelanders dust snow off its back before lighting its flame. Sometimes the well-done steak returns half frozen from the blizzard. These people are true masters of self-deception.

Gunnhildur’s brother, Ari, is next to arrive. He’s home for a few weeks from his computersomething studies in Boston. A blonde guy with red cheeks and glasses, he looks like an updated version of his father. We’re meeting for the first time.

“Hi, I’m Tómas.”

“Hi.”

“We call him Tommy!” Goodmoondoor happily shouts out from the veranda, now wearing a BBQ glove and holding grill pliers. I sometimes call him Goondy.

I chat with Ari about the Westin Copley Place Hotel in Boston where he recently attended his friend’s thirtieth birthday party (and I carried out hit #30 a few years back). Then I watch Gunnhildur open the front door to Olie and Harpa who greet her with a smile, a bottle, and a bouquet. They look a bit like an inter-racial couple: the lute girl is tanned to the max, but the Meat Man is as white as a chef’s toque.

Soon after, Torture and Hanna arrive with their silent kids. As usual his handshake is straight out of the Bible and her natural breath unspoiled by fluoride or mouthwash. They bring their own meat, probably from the lamb that Torture slaughtered himself in his garage. He brings it to Goodmoondoor, and the two men chat for a while out by the smoking grill, looking like tribal chieftains.

“How is it going with the letter?” Hanna asks.

“It’s going OK.”

She’s referring to the Friendly letter.

“That’s good to hear. And are you going to send it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

We eat early, since the live broadcast starts at 7:00 in this part of the world. Goodmoondoor wears his pink tie over his shoulder as he brings the warm meat in from the cold veranda. Ari asks me about work. It sounds like they didn’t inform him of my bloody past. I tell him about my jobs, plural, because by now I uphold the national tradition of having two of them. In the morning I work in the cafeteria at the National Library, and four times a week I’m an usher, a best boy, or whatever you call it, at Torture’s church. This includes mopping the floors of revelation sweat and occasionally comforting the lone woman who stays behind to talk about her losses. In between, I do my Icelandic lessons and work on my letter. This last thing involves research that I usually do in the library on Hanna’s daughter’s old laptop, a twentieth-century brick full of tricks, but devoid of any latter-day luxuries. From time to time I also take karate lessons from Torture in the mattress room.

Olie and Harpa are a bit shy around all the famous people. Olie concentrates on eating, his small earring dancing by his jaw like Sammy’s glasses as he relentlessly chews on the heavenly lamb, but Harpa hardly touches her portion. Torture looks at their bottle of red as if it were filled with the blood of Satan. Olie offers to pour me some but I silently decline. A brief moment of suspense arrives when Gunnhildur asks me to pass the sauce and calls me “Tod.” She bites her lip, but Olie and Harpa are too stressed to notice, and Ari is talking to Hanna.

The conversation turns to the war in Iraq and Iceland’s participation in it. Somehow the no-army nation managed to come up with a single soldier and then sent him down to Baghdad to help out with the big mess. But now he’s being sent back home. It took a whole platoon of Americans to protect the poor bastard.

“They didn’t want to risk a wipeout of the whole Icelandic army,” Ari says in his American accent, and then laughs a certain nerdish laughter I haven’t heard for years, but remember from the university cafeteria in Hanover. Niko’s brother studied computer science and his friends used to laugh like that all the time. Intelligent boys laughing at other people’s stupidity, the “other people” including all the people in the world except the ones who were studying computer science at Hanover University.

Olie laughs with him, but Torture looks at them both from under a set of heavy brows, as if he were contemplating arming his whole congregation and sending it down to Iraq to teach those Muslims how to circumcise their hearts. But instead of saying it, the Bible-boomer turns to me and says this will be the first time he has ever watched the Eurovision Song Contest. He’s doing it for me, he says.

“And you’re looking at a man who once told his people that devoting your time to this festival of fools was a form of devil worship. Ha ha. It was the year we sent a sodomite dressed up as Lucifer himself. No. It’s nothing but vanity and vexation of the spirit. But I will bite my tongue this evening. Ha ha.”

Some heavy biting it will be. Since the monsters from Finland won last year, this year’s contest is being held in Helsinki. The broadcast begins with them playing the winning song, “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” It’s everything but torture to watch Torture’s reaction. Yet, I suspect he admires those religious rockers a bit. It’s his own preaching style, taken to the heavy-metal max.

The Icelandic entry is number five on the list. One weather-beaten leather-wearing rocker with red hair cries out about his “Valentine Lost.” Gunnhildur likes him, so I do, too. I watch her sitting next to her brother on the sofa, stretching her long white legs out on the floor, from beneath the short, black, belly-stretching dress. My Daybreak darling. Red lips and thighs that are one inch thicker than last year. Her behind is almost Latinal by now, and her breasts have risen to the occasion. On the whole her figure is much juicier, apart from the hard basketball-belly. It stems from the water buildup. I haven’t given her any reasons to cry this past winter.

I then take another good look at Torture. My new boss. The Icelandic Dikan. If he had a soft spot for the hallelujah-monsters, he’s back to his hard-rock self by now. The fluttering bright flames of “vanity and vexation of the spirit” are reflected in his glasses, while his contempt is expressed by his lips, moving about in his beard like two worms in the grass. It’s way more entertaining watching him watch this song contest than watching the thing itself. He reminds me of Dikan watching his Dynamo Zagreb lose to my Hajduk.

Like Iceland, Croatia goes for an old-timer this year. It’s the one and only Dado Topić, playing with some kids I haven’t seen before. Dado is the king of Croatian rock. He wrote the soundtrack to my youth. He was even there the night I lost my virginity.

Now he sings: “Vjerujem u ljubav” (I believe in love) in his deep scratchy voice, still sporting his long hair and cowboy boots. The song is pretty good, actually, but Torture says the girl singing with him is out of tune. Bite your tongue, man.

Before the song is over, the doorbell rings. Goodmoondoor goes to the door. He comes back saying it’s for me. I take a quick look at the mother of my child and head for the door. It’s halfway open—the incredible chill of the Icelandic spring comes rushing in my face like some sort of an odorless gas that makes you shiver to the bone—but I can’t see anyone out there. I step on the famous golden threshold and look about. Someone grabs my arm and I can feel the barrel of a gun piercing my left side. My brain may have been washed in the river of Jordan, but my nervous system is still that of a soldier. I sense a gun when I sense it.

It’s Niko.

Of all the guys in the world, it’s fucking Niko.

My heart instantly skips a beat before the needle lands on Britney’s “Toxic.” In one instant my new life is blown away by the old one.

“Nice to see you,” he says in Croatian, with the customary grin, and asks me to join him for a ride, pointing to a black Audi idling out on the street. “I think we have to talk.”

It’s nice to hear my mother’s tongue again.

I tell him I need to get my shoes. Clearly, he wasn’t prepared for this one, and is thrown off guard as he watches me turn back inside the house.

The shoes are behind the door. I should probably call on Olie to jump into the kitchen for a sharp knife or ask Torture to roll out his fiery tongue. But I only bow over my thick-soled sneakers, feeling Niko’s sharp gaze stab me in the back, listening to the final chords of Dado’s song echo from the entrails of the house followed by the crowd’s crazy applause. I put on my shoes and straighten up. When I reach for my black leather jacket, Niko shakes his head.

“But it’s fucking cold,” I say.

“We won’t be long.”

Gunnhildur shouts something from the living room and I hesitate a moment, looking my old friend in the eye, before closing the door behind me.

Once we’re outside, he quickly searches me, looking for an automatic rifle in my armpits, in my pockets, or in my crotch. I’m wearing a thin black sweater over a white T-shirt and some cool jeans that Gun helped me pick out. As I get inside the car, I think I notice some movement in the living room window of my in-laws. As if someone had seen us. I shouldn’t worry, really. The holy men will have their SWAT team of angels come to my rescue.

So for the second year in a row I’m prevented from watching all of Eurovision. I was really looking forward to the Serbian entry. Rumor had it they were entering a lesbian dwarf, who looks like Milošević’s illegitimate daughter, praying for love, peace, a piece of our land, or whatever.

Niko looks the same. His goatee has turned a bit gray though, and his skin shows signs of the cold. But the long nose and the hard black eyeballs are there—this gaze of his that clearly says “Don’t fucking fuck with me!” He throws himself into the seat beside me and the driver darts off. The car smells of leather and luxury. It looks to be about two hours old.

I recognize the driver. It’s the New York Neck-backer. Good old Radovan. Shaved to the skull. He’s even wearing the same fucking sunglasses he wore my last day in America.

So it’s reunion time. Ponovni susret. We must be heading for a fancy restaurant where Don Dikan waits at the end of the table, surrounded by Gun lookalikes and sucking on the fat Havana cigar he’s been trying to light for the past thirty years.

Niko has his eyes on me, keeping his gun LPP, though always pointed at me. It’s his Desert Eagle, a pitch-black semi-automatic made in Israel. I remember when he first got it. He blushed like a boy. He just had to have one after he saw the first Matrix movie. Typical Niko. His black eyeballs resemble the opening of the barrel. Three black holes stare at me. “Don’t fucking fuck with me!” So this is how my victims must have felt when they were faced with the loaded gun and the willing finger. Except I have God on my side. The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good (Proverbs 15:3).

Radovan seems to have spent a week in Reykjavik. He drives like a local already, with great confidence and great speed. The streets are deserted. Everybody’s watching the Serbian lesbian.

“So you waited for the right moment?” I ask.

“We’ve been waiting for this moment,” Niko says.

“Me too,” I say. “It took you longer than I thought.”

“You maybe thought you’d escaped us, ‘Tomaš Leivur’?”

I must admire his research.

“Who’s your man? Truster?”

“Truster? Who’s that?”

“Never mind. What’s happening in New York?”

“You messed up, Toxic.”

Radovan drives the empty road. He seems to be heading for the airport. They’re bringing me back. The only question is whether I’ll be traveling business or cargo.

“What happened?” I ask.

No answer. I try again:

“How did I mess up? I followed orders. I only did what Dikan asked me to do.”

“You messed up, Toxic. Ivo is dead. Zoran is dead. Branko Brown is dead. And Branko Karlovać as well.”

“And Dikan?”

“Boss is OK.”

Radovan breaks in, smiling from the driver’s seat, talking into the rearview mirror:

“Dikan told me to kiss you. When you’re dead! Ha ha.”

“Shut up and drive!” Niko shouts.

So cargo it’ll be. My final fifteen minutes have started ticking. Heart switches from Britney pop to funeral fugue. The black Audi takes us past the long aluminum factory, on the outskirts of town. The soft radio delivers Louis Armstrong, blowing his trumpet “Cheek to Cheek” and telling us he’s in heaven.

“Who killed them? The Feds?” I ask, casually bringing my left foot behind my right.

Being able to speak my language again this close to the end is like a former chain-smoker being offered one last cig before the big event. Croatian words exit my mouth like lustful smoke rings. Actually, seeing Niko’s face again, makes me want to smoke.

“You killed them, Toxic.”

I killed them. The dumpsite hit must have triggered a series of TJs. But the Feds don’t kill people. At least not until they’ve heard their life story through the dirty underwear placed over their heads, encouraged by the crazy police dog barking at their naked genitals. I don’t get it. I was just a hitman. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. And now I’m to blame? I focus on simpler things. I have to keep talking.

“You kill Munita?” I ask my old friend and former roommate, while discretely pushing the tip of my left shoe against the heel of my right.

“Munita?” Niko repeats with a smile and a short nasal blow.

“She had a great body,” Radovan says. “But an ugly head.”

Niko laughs. Niko laughs and this is the right moment. I push the bottom of my right heel with my left toe, quite hard, until the sole breaks loose from the heel: I manage to “open” the shoe at the back, and by raising the foot, and shaking it a bit, the small gun gently rolls out from the back of my shoe. It’s on the floor now. I step on it with my left leg. I’ve done this a hundred times. Been practicing hard all winter. Niko doesn’t notice a thing. He’s still laughing.

“Ugly head,” the meatloaf repeats.

He then turns off the main road and heads down a dirt road in the direction of the mountains. The snowdrifts are almost gone. The moss on the lava is green. The nothingness around us is absolute. No trees, no birds, no nothing. Just some scruffy rocks and splashes of moss here and there. This lunar landscape is pretty far from the white cliffs, decorated with cypresses and olive trees, that I know from the hills around Split. I’ve started to appreciate the ice cold emptiness now, but I have to admit that I still miss my Adriatic spring. Suddenly I start humming our Lijepa naša, the national anthem of Croatia:

“Drava, Sava, keep on flowing,

Danube, you know where you’re going.”

Niko pricks up his ears, but he can’t make out the song, nor the words. I hum a little louder. My eyes get warm. Every time you hear this song, some twenty thousand Croats appear in front of your eyes, all dressed in the red-and-white national jersey, roaring in the stands and crying their lungs out before our last game in France ’98.

“Tell the sea and tell the sand

That a Croat loves his fatherland.”

“SHUT UP!” Niko shouts. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

“OK,” I say. “Can I have a cigarette before you kill me?”

“You started smoking again?” Niko asks.

“Don’t worry. It won’t kill me.”

He looks at me as if he wants to shoot me immediately. He probably would, if the Audi were more than two hours old.