The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 4} “FATHER FRIENDLY”

The landing wakes me up. It’s a harsh one, with the plane shaking all over, from nose to tail, long after it has touched the ground. A bright, sexy voice rings out over the system, first in the lunar language, and then in English, welcoming us to the local temperature of three degrees Celsius.

I guess Iceland is the right name after all.

The photos didn’t lie. It does look like the moon. Nothing but gray rocky fields topped with moss with small blue mountains in the distance. It’s lava, I guess. Lava fields. This is Volcano Island.

The stewardess gives me another platonic smile as I leave the aircraft. The walkway is made of glass. Actually, the landscape looks like a huge set design from a Star Wars movie. I attempt to enter this strange land like a regular visitor, trying hard to walk like the man I killed last night, swinging his black briefcase like a happy priest, wearing his all-black shoes, shirt, jacket, and coat plus the white collar. I kept the jeans on. I’m a modern minister.

I follow the basketball player inside the terminal. He’s way too small for his profession, shorter even than six-foot me. Maybe they ship all the smallest players to the small nation leagues. Wise Guy said the Icelandic nation only counted three hundred thousand people. Is that even legal? It’s like if Little Italy was a country, with its own flag and everything, a small Olympic team. They’d sure take the Gold in Restaurant Shooting.

The basketball player leads me to Passport Control, where two lines have formed in front of a glass cage housing two officers. One line is for the people of the European Union and the other is for the rest of the world. I’m trying to remember if Russia is a member of the EU when I realize that I’m American now. I’m Friendly! The line moves pretty quickly. This will be easy, I tell myself. I find the holy man’s passport in the inner breast pocket of his black coat, step up to the glass booth, and hand it to the officer, a dark-browed guy with a grayish beard. He opens it and then says something in his own language. I give him a blank look. As he repeats himself I realize he’s speaking Russian. The motherfucker is speaking fucking Russian.

“I’m sorry?” I say.

“You don’t speak Russian?” he asks in English.

“No, I was born in the States.”

He holds up my passport. “It says here that you were born in Smolensk?”

Suddenly all the veins in my neck become as thick as strings on an electric Fender bass. Fuck. I gave him the wrong passport! I gave him Igor’s passport. I’m Igor now, not Friendly. Big, big fuck.

“Eh… Yeah. I was, actually, but we moved… my parents moved to America when… when I was six months old, so in… in my mind…”

“So you’ve been living in America since then?”

“Ah, yes. Yes. Exactly.”

I’m relieved.

“But you speak with a Slavic accent?” the motherfucker asks. What the fuck is going on here? This guy’s way too qualified for his job. Your average Russian physics professor working as a passport control officer?

“Eh… yeah, it’s a kind of strange story. My… my parents… I was living alone with my parents all my childhood, deep in the woods, and I learned the language from them. And they spoke English with a very strong… very strong Russian accent.”

The officer looks at me for two long seconds. Then his eyes glide down to the collar.

“You’re a priest?”

His accent is difficult to decipher.

“Ah, yes. I’m Reverend… Reverend Illitch.”

This is getting ridiculous.

“But it doesn’t say so in the passport.” Damn. He’s like some super stubborn Serbian shitfucker.

He asks me to wait and leaves his glass booth. I hear restless sighs in the line behind me. I don’t look back.

A minute later he’s back in the booth with an older officer in a blue shirt. They look me over like a gay couple auditioning for a threesome. Finally the older one says, in an accent I recognize from Wise Guy and the stewardesses, “You are priest?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here in Iceland? Are you here for business or…?”

Finally I find the voice of Igor. His true orthodox spirit.

“The minister’s job is all pleasure, but you may call it business if you like.”

The blue shirt looks impressed. He looks me over one last time, hands me the passport, and tells me, “OK. Have a good stay.”

Shit. How could I have been so careless? How could I… Or no. Maybe it was the right thing to do. The Feds will probably have found Rev. Friendly’s body by now. How long will it take them to identify it? When they do, it’s better they not find out that someone is surfing the northern seas on his passport. Yeah, it was pure luck.

I follow the flow of passengers deeper inside the air terminal. There is carpet on the hallway floor. And the soft-floored silence brings out the squeaking of Mr. Friendly’s leather shoes. Igor’s running shoes are inside the briefcase, along with his leather jacket. I reach the main hall and wonder what to do. I go to a desk and ask for flights to Frankfurt, Berlin, London, anywhere but here. There are flights, the blonde MILF says, but they’re all sold out. The next available is three days from now, to Copenhagen and then on to Zagreb. I wonder what my bags will say when no one claims them. I find Igor’s VISA card and buy him a ticket to Tomislav’s fatherland. Mr. Friendly looks on as Toxic signs Mr. Illitch’s name. Suddenly my simple life has become quite complicated. A layer cake of IDs.

The mature blonde recommends I go into town and hands me a hotel address. “It’s only forty minutes with the bus,” she says and smiles. Ah, well, I guess three days in Vikingland won’t hurt. Three days without a gun will be hard on Toxic, though.

An escalator carries me down one flight and I walk through the busy luggage hall. The exit gate is divided in two, for those with something to declare and not. My latest identity asks whether I shouldn’t use this opportunity to declare myself guilty of sixty-seven homicides, but I wave all the angels away, like the cloud of mosquitos.

Surprise awaits me outside the exit gate. Out in the small welcoming area, a man with thinning hair and a thick-haired woman are standing, holding a sign that reads: FATHER FRIENDLY. I seem to be out of sync with myself (too many selves, I guess) for I make the huge mistake of stopping short in front of the fucking sign. And me, wearing the fucking collar! They make the obvious connection.

“Mr. Friendly?” the woman smiles out in the more and more familiar sounding accent.

I’m about to say no, when suddenly I spot two policemen standing further out in the hall, close to the exit. So, before leaving my lips, my no turns into a yes. And I’m done for. I’m grounded for the next few hours. I’m forced to be fucking Friendly.

The killer becomes his victim.

“Very nice to see you, Mr. Friendly. Did you have good trip?” the man asks me with a very strong Icelandic accent. I notice his bad teeth when he smiles.

“Yeah, yeah, it was OK.” Suddenly I hate my own accent. Not very Virginian, I guess.

“I hardly recognized you! You look even younger than on your Web site,” the woman says. Always a big smile.

I have a Web site?

“Oh? You… you saw me there?” I mumble.

Fuck it. I’m a hitman, not a spy.

“Yes, of course!” the woman continues. “But we have not seen your TV show.”

My God. I have a TV show? I would like to see that.

“You wouldn’t like to see that,” I say.

“Oh? Of course! We would love to see that!” they both cry out loud like kids high on candy. They’re a happy bunch. God’s doing, I guess. They introduce themselves and their names are incredible. His is Goodmoondoor (must be his stage name) and her name is something like Sickreader. I wonder what their American nicknames would be. Goo & Si? Even “Tomo” was too long for the Yanks. The more people, the shorter the names. The less people, the longer the names.

Suddenly Sickreader looks me down and asks:

“Don’t you have any luggage, Father Friendly?”

I pause for a moment.

“No. The Word is my only luggage.”

They laugh like happy cartoon hamsters. I feel like an actor who has just made an important step in the development of a new character. Hallelujah!

They bring Father Friendly past the two cops (I give them a blessing look) and out on the parking lot where it’s as cold as the inside of a fridge. And me who was looking forward to the Adriatic Spring, chilling on the Riva, sipping pivo and watching the tightly jeaned asses sway by, with the sound of sandal-heels clicking against the white limestone tiles. Ah, the girls of Split…

But, no. Instead I’m standing out in some polar parking lot collecting goosebumps and watching the reflection of my bald new self (I could, actually, pass for a priest) in the window of a silver Land Cruiser two strangers are indicating I should enter. The vehicle has already been blessed by the presence of the great Benny Hinn, they tell me. It seems Goodmoondoor and Sickreader are professional televangelists. They run a small, local Christian TV channel called Amen. Minutes later we’re rolling through the lunar park with the Goodmoondoor at the steering wheel.

“We have many Christian TV show from America. Benny Hinn of course. And also Joyce Meyers, Jimmy Swaggart, and David Cho. And we also have our show, in Icelandic and also in English. We are on TV every night, me and my wife. Sometimes we are together and sometimes we are alone. You will see.”

This is the Goodmoondoor speaking in his primitive English. His nice looking wife sits by his side and smiles to me in the backseat. Her husband continues:

“So, what are you going to talk about tonight? What text are you going to talk from?”

“Eh… Tonight?” I ask.

“Yes. You will be special guest of my show tonight.”

“On TV?”

“Yes!” he laughs with all his crooked teeth, almost like a half-wit.

“Uh… I see. I thought I…”

I’m saved by my mobile. The screen reads “Niko” and without thinking I greet him in Croatian: “Bok.” Niko is Dikan’s personal assistant. The Number Two Man. He asks me where I am, and I tell him the inconceivable truth, stopping short of the fact that I’m sitting in a Christian All-Star vehicle on my way to my first TV mass. He tells me that me landing up here is not so bad after all (does he even know that Iceland is a country?) since things are getting serious after the big fuck-up. “You fucked up real bad, Toxic,” he says. The Fed-ups, as he calls them, have already been to the restaurant, and they’ve also broken into my place. They even visited my mother this morning, in her small hardware shop in the heart of Split, and broke her arm. Dikan’s balls are boiling, Niko says. “If you are in this fucking Iceland then stay there!” he screams. “Don’t go to Zagreb or Split and don’t come here! Just stay where you are and do the LPP!”

As mentioned, that’s short for Lowest Possible Profile. I wonder if Goodmoondoor’s TV show fits into that category.

As I hang up my mobile, Sickreader turns towards me again and asks what language I just used.

“It’s Croatian,” I say.

“Oh? So you speak Croatian?”

“Yes, we have some Croatian people in our church.”

“Where are you from, in the beginning?” the Good Moon driver asks.

“In the beginning we were all God’s children.” I’m too damn good. “But if you are asking about my accent, it’s an acquired one, if you can say so. I was a missionary for many years in the former republic of Yugoslavia.”

“Oh, really?” they both say.

“Yes. Spreading the good word of God in a communist state. That was some tough shit, man. I mean, tough holy shit. And being American over there, man, that was plain suicide. I had to take on another name and get rid of my American accent completely. They called me Tomislav. Tomislav Bokšić. Nowadays everyone thinks I’m from over there. But no. I’m one hundred percent American. I even have Clay Aiken CDs at home. In fact, the Friendly family has been in Virginia since the twelfth century.” I guessed this would be called overacting. “Excuse me, since the eighteenth century.”

They take it all in with a smile. There is a beat—along with my heartbeat, straight out of some suspense film score—before the woman asks:

“How old are you, Father Friendly?”

“I’m… I was born in sixty-five. That makes me… uh… forty.”

“So you have been very young when you were in….”

“In Yugoslavia? Oh, yes. I’m deeply marked by it. I had some really tough times over there.”

It’s a bright and early May morning. I mean, an early morning in early May, and the sun is about to rise from behind the mountains ahead. Their sky has no clouds at all, and on the left-hand side the ocean keeps the waves below its gray-green surface. Still the scene looks just as cold as it is. The arctic May looks like a Midwest March. There are some vacant houses scattered along the coastline. “Summerhouses,” my hosts inform me. OK. So they do have summer up here.

The flight lasted five hours, and the time difference is about the same: a whole night has passed from the restroom scene at JFK. Killing Friendly was my first manual murder since the mustached kid in Knin. I used my hands, a trick I learned from Comrade Prizmić, the oldest one in our platoon, the WWII veteran with the big nostrils and absent cheeks. “It’s just like blowing out a candle,” he used to say. “It all depends on position and speed. Man is wax. Life is flame. Blow out his light and he’s dead.” Good old Prizmić. They cut the breasts off his wife and made him eat them.

There is a sticker on the back of the driver’s seat. It’s in English. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)”

Woe, man. Finally the six o’clock sun breaks out from the sharp mountain edge. Like a bright chicken from a blue egg. The road lights up.

“We drive the road of light!” Goodmoondoor says and turns towards me with a big, happy smile. “The road of light!”