Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

As I walk I notice the people of Reykjavik move quickly about, as if they believe this were New York and not the smallest capital in history. As if they were all late for a job interview at Merrill Lynch. It must be the cold. The only fellows warming the benches are too drunk to feel it.

All around me the Icelandic national face: round, with a small nose, like a snowball with a pebble in it. I guess every nation has its one distinctive facial feature. We, the Slavs, have the nose, that big strong dog’s snout that enables us to smell trouble all the way back to the twelfth century. The Africans have the lips, the Arabs, the brows, the Americans, the jaw, the Germans, the mustache, the English, the teeth, and the Talians, the hair. The Icelanders seem to have picked the cheeks. Some of these faces are just two cheeks with a hole and two eyes pressed between them.

But for the most part they speak better English than I do. I talk to three of them before I find the city library. Here you have 470,000 books at your disposal, all in Icelandic. (The guy from the plane said writing was one of the basic industries in Iceland.) And here you have Internet access. A bookish bearded guy hands me a code. I punch in the numbers on a keyboard, and the big world opens up for me. Reverend David Friendly is the minister of the Westmoro Baptist Church down in Richmond, Virginia. Sorry, was minister. Plus, he had his own TV show, “The Friendly Hour,” on CBN, The Christian Broadcasting Network, owned by crazy man Pat Robertson, the former presidential candidate and the eternal opponent of abortion and gay rights. In a photo, Rev. Friendly appears as his fat, full self: a round bald head with a big smile and small glasses. He’s surrounded by happy children, all white, plus the customary black one. On a Web site he voices his stance against “same-sex blessings.” Father Friendly was a homophobe. He deserved to die, I guess.

I try googling his name along with different keywords like “murdered,” “killed,” and “death” without any serious results. He hasn’t made the news yet. They still haven’t identified his body, even though I left the fatty gay-basher wearing his own smelly socks, pants, and underpants, sleeping in the men’s room. The lone result to my last search contains a Friendly interview where he voices “an understanding for the people like senator Coburn who favor the death penalty for abortionists and other people who take life.”

Reverend Friendly wants me dead.

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.