The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 7} FATHER FURY

I’m sitting in Café Bahrain. Yeah. I think it’s called Café Bahrain. Nothing Arabic about it, though. Just a nice little old-timer with squeaky chairs and Day 3 Girls. Some people are smoking. I haven’t been to a smoky bar in years, and it’s a bit hard on my eyes. I understand the smoking ban is on its way up here, in a sunny sailboat named the Al Gore. On the other hand, Croatia is more likely to see another war than quit smoking. Only when you’ve had some fifty warless years do you start worrying about things like air quality in bars.

I’m celebrating my first day in exile. With beer number five. It’s almost eight o’clock in the evening, but it’s still morning outside. The sun refuses to set here, they say. “It’s up all night, and so are we.” “They” are Ziggy and Hell G, two scruffy local barflies with broken wings.

“The Reykjavik nightlife only has two nights, basically. One is bright and lasts from April to September. And the other one is dark and lasts from October to March,” they tell me.

“And which one is more fun?”

“The bright one of course. Icelandic girls don’t like to do it in the dark,” they say with a laugh.

They’re younger, thinner, and hairier than me, smoke like machines, and find it “so freaky, man” to be drinking with a priest. The clergyman asks them about the gay situation up here, the abortion issue, and whether Iceland honors the death penalty? No. Apparently Iceland is a gun-free, abortion crazy, gay paradise with no death sentence. Father Friendly has come to the right place.

“Our Gay Pride Festival is even bigger than that of the seventeenth of June, our Independence Day.”

Father Friendly takes it all in stride. I try to sit on his gay-bashing, death-dooming self. He only nods his head and adjusts the collar around his neck.

Actually, I wonder why the hell I’m still wearing this stupid collar. I guess I could forget Father Friendly altogether, go back to my toxic self and check into a hotel. No. Not wise. I think it’s better to keep the sucker alive. Otherwise my preacher friends would contact the police and the police would contact his family and all hell would break loose.

“What about murders? How many homocides have you got each year?” I ask them.

“Homocides?” they ask, with bewildered eyes.

“Yeah. How many gays are killed each year in this country?”

“Gays? None, I guess,” Hell G says, a bit shocked by the harshness of the vicar’s words.

“Oh? But how many homicides then? How many regular people are killed?” Friendly continues.

“Sometimes one, sometimes none,” Ziggy says.

Seems my intuition this morning was right. I’m in heaven. No army, no guns, no murders… They don’t even have a red-light district. It’s a ho-free city, they tell me.

“There are no prostitutes in Iceland, but we’ll be forced to have some when we join the European Union,” they tell me with another laugh.

Sex is still free, but the beer costs a bear. Igor’s card bleeds with each glass. I’ve drunk an iPod’s worth of alcohol since stumbling into this place some hours ago, recommended to me by this horribly charming bookstore clerk, a Day 5 type. Two beers later I found out that Café Bahrain is the most famous bar in the land, heavily featured in some hip movie years back. So much for my LPP. How can you lay low in Lilliput Island?

“So what do you do then if you can’t buy sex and don’t do murders? You have drugs?”

There is a beat. This pastor is something else, they seem to be thinking.

“Yeah. Sure,” Ziggy tells the stranger with an even stranger pride. “We, we have a lot of drugs.”

And his friend adds, “We also have a lot of murders in books. In the last years we have many good crime novel writers here in Iceland, like Arnaldur Indridason for example. Also Ævar Orn Josephsson, Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Arni Thorarinsson.”

Icelandic names are like Scud missiles. Their trails linger in the air long after they’ve reached their target. Still, these guys have my respect. Being a crime writer in the land of no murders can’t be easy. It seems you need the creative powers of a genius just to be able to provide your murderer with a gun. I close my ears, but keep my Friendly smile on, as the two barflies go on about their country, trying hard to convince the clergyman that it’s no Sunday school.

I’m pretty spaced out. I feel the alcohol searching out my jet lag and amplifying it. Jesus. I wonder what my holy hosts are up to. They must be on TV already. Goodmoondoor never called. I sure hope the embassy bastards didn’t catch my face on camera. There must be a poster of me on every one of their bedroom walls. I killed one of their men. In fact, I have exactly sixty-seven crosses in American graveyards to my credit, so they would have a good reason to put my face on the sidewalk. But not all sixty-seven were happy-go-lucky greencarders. Some were Talians, some Russians, quite a few Serbs, and one Swedish or Norwegian guy, if I remember it right. It was the strangest accent I have put to rest. But most of them were square-faced, burger-butted Marshmallow Men. With that many dead Americans to my credit, I could probably get an honorary membership in Al-Qaeda.

Yes. I’m on the most wanted list. Yes. I have to remember that this is exile. Yes. I have to maintain LPP. And yes. My name is David Friendly.

Suddenly I hear a familiar voice.

“So there you are!” Gunholder is back in a party outfit, dressed to thrill, and spots me in the corner. “What the hell are you doing here? My dad’s been looking for you! He called me like twice. You’re supposed to be on TV!”

“He never called me,” I say in a drunken drawl.

“He didn’t? You have your phone with you?”

I search my coat and jacket. No mobile. The butter-blonde looks down at me like a mother at a child who has lost his school bag. Ziggy and Hell G watch her in silence, like two skinny puffins on freeze-frame.

“OK,” she says. “I will call him.”

Half a beer later, the Good Moon himself walks into the bar, looking very much like a reindeer entering Macy’s on Christmas Eve, with horns blinking and eyes glowing. Still, he puts on the smile as he spots his fellow preacher half fallen into the depths of hell. He holds out his hand. I grab it.

“Hello, Father Friendly. I’m glad I found you.” Always the happy one. “Gunholder told me that you have helped her in this morning.”

“Yes. Our true faith can open any door there is,” I say with a drunken smile.

“But you forgot the phone. It was in the house. I was calling it and I heard it ringing upstairs!”

He laughs like a happy child. I have to laugh too. This guy’s just too damn Good. Either you have to shoot him in the face point-blank or you just go along with him. And I have no gun.

“We have to be quick. We begin after twenty minutes,” he says.

“OK. I’m really sorry.”

I wonder if he notices I’m drunk. Does he really want me on his show? I watch him say good-bye to his beautiful blonde daughter who has joined her girlfriend (a Day 2 brunette that probably has Tarantino’s name on her done-list) at a nearby table. He pauses for a brief second as he watches her suck on the cigarette in her left hand, ready with her white wine in the right. I spot a small movement of Goodmoondoor’s lips, a tiny signal that betrays a willingness to smash his daughter in the head with a large-format, hardcover edition of the King James Bible. He bites his tongue and begs her farewell in Icelandic. Then she finally looks up and blows smoke into his face, with cold eyes, and says in the most chilling voice: “Bless, Pappy.”

Clearly it can only mean “Bye, Dad” but the hateful tone of it breaks a hitman’s heart.

We go outside. The ice-cold evening is as bright as an opened fridge. If this is the hottest city in Europe, I guess we can cool it about this global warming thing. The Good Man drives out of old town on a freshly built highway that takes us past some spruced-up commie projects. Those white-spotted leopards surrounding the city are bathed in sunlight, and seagulls flutter from one light pole to another. The small, grey clouds drift against a light-blue sky. Most look like human sperm to me, others like small whales that swim slowly across town. I try to give sober answers to the holy man’s questions.

“I was totally stranded because I didn’t have your address and I forgot to get your daughter’s phone number. So I just ended up sitting in this café. Talking to some Icelanders. It was OK, actually.”

“Yes, but the coffeehouses in Reykjavik can be dangerous place,” he says with a smile and starts laughing.

His laughter seems to indicate that he himself once had a drinking problem, before God dried him up and gave him a TV station, but the longer it lasts, it becomes clear that he’s trying to cover up the pain caused by the sight of his daughter sitting in a dark demon’s den, smoking and drinking, dressed for action. I must be under the good spell of Father Friendly, for I have to admit that it was quite a horrible sight. For a brief second, she really looked like the Devil’s daughter, with eyes of fire and a mouth full of smoke. I try to laugh with him.

“Like it says in Luke: 21, the day will come over you like snare, if you spend it drinking and surfeiting,” the preacher says as he turns left from the highway into a short Brooklyn-ish boulevard with three floored houses on each side. Is he talking about me? As he parks behind one of the buildings, I can feel the clerical collar turning into a snare around my neck.

“Do you know Brother Branham?” Goodmoondoor asks as we walk from car to building.

“Yes, of course,” Father Friendly says with drunken determination.

His Icelandic colleague stops dead in his tracks and gets all agitated:

“Do you know his theories?”

“Yes, I think I can say so.”

“Do you remember when he said that Los Angeles will sink under water and sharks will swim on the streets?”

“Eh… yes.”

“It’s very interesting, because I was dreaming last night. I was dreaming that I was driving in my car. This car,” he says and points towards his silver Land Cruiser. “I was driving here in Reykjavik and then suddenly a very big whale was swimming beside me. He was swimming fast, and he even went before me. He was on the street. Just like a car. And when he was beside me, he looked at me and he said something. But I could not hear it, because I was in the car and the window was not down.”

Goodmoondoor looks at Father Friendly as if he was hoping for his American brother to interpret the dream as a major event in the history of Christianity.

“Wow,” I say and look to the sky for advice. The shark-like clouds pass overhead. I suddenly feel that I’m stuck in some underwater cartoon for kids, doing the voice of “Marty the Monkfish.”

“That’s amazing, man,” I say. “You should maybe call him and tell him? Maybe he can tell you what it means.”

“You know that brother Branham died in 1965.”

Fuck.

“Sure. I’m not talking about a phone call. I’m talking about a soul call,” I say.

“A soul call?”

“Yes. We do that all the time, in our congregation down in Richmond. Every Tuesday night people come in and speak with their dead relatives. It’s very popular. People really like it. I turn myself into a human switchboard and make the connection through the Lord.”

He starts to laugh. I stress out.

“I don’t know the Baptist Church very well, but in my church we never talk to the dead. We say it’s a hairy sea,” he says.

A hairy sea.

“Yeah, I know. But it’s like, you know, we don’t call them. They call us.”

The temperature must be close to thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit, and here we are, on a sunny spring night, standing out in some backdoor parking lot in the middle of the North Atlantic, me and him, Father Friendly and Father Fury, two complete strangers drunk on beer and God, talking complete nonsense. Exile is a hairy sea.

“We are living the last days. I am saying this on my TV for over fourteen years. We are living the last days. But now I have the feeling that there are not so many days left,” Goodmoondoor says and burns his eyes into my face in that crazy preacher way, not letting go until he’s one hundred percent sure I have received the message.

Looking away is like turning my face away from a bonfire.