Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

I don’t know what I’m doing, but my hand does: Suddenly it goes up. My right hand raises itself, clearly trying to stop the woman. She won’t stop, but her dog does. It scuttles out between two cars and out on the street, over to my side of the white SUV. The slim, almost athletic lady remains on the pavement pulling back the long leash that must be tangled up in the bumper by now. Her gray hair shakes as she orders the dog back, but the little one is a sucker for sadness: it sniffs my tears, the dark wet spots in the asphalt, like some crazy addict in rehab spotting cocaine on his daily walk in the woods. I look up and before I know it I’ve asked its owner a question that surprises me even more than my gesture.

“Excuse me. Do you know if there is a church around here?”

Church is closed. It stands right on The Pond, dressed in armor and painted green. Swans and ducks sail about the still water. Some seem to be sleeping, with their heads hidden beneath a wing.

Quack, quack.

I take a seat on the church steps. A few seagulls fly overhead, hurling abuse at me like drunken angels. Gun calls my new cell two times. I don’t answer. When mourning your spouse, the mistress can’t help. A sleepy-eyed city worker comes driving along the pavement in a small orange machine with a disco light spinning on top. The loud monster is equipped with rotating brooms and an elephant’s trunk he uses for sucking up litter: it all looks like a loud animal feeding on trash. The driver passes without looking at me. Oh, man. If you could only clean up the path of my life.

It’s a fucking graveyard. Since finishing school I haven’t been doing much else except adding crosses to it. There is a stone in my conscience, like the one people get in their kidneys, a stone the size of a kidney. I get up and start walking. I walk into the city center, following the trash-monster.

I met Munita in Arturo’s Restaurant, the coal oven cabin on Houston and Thompson. She waited on me. I waited for her. I came back seven times before she allowed me to put a smile on her face. So much for Mrs. Dick Grinder. I had to order seven different pizzas before I could figure out the code of her heart. It was black olives, red onion, and arugula. Arugula. For months I ate nothing but arugula burgers and arugula pasta. Three months later we had our first kiss. It was a slow process, like passing a heavy bill across Capitol Hill. Not really my hunting style.

I still don’t get why she played so hard-to-get with me, while the unmarried guys at Trump Tower only had to push the elevator button. Every three or four weeks she moved up a floor. No. She didn’t do The Apprentice . But she did everybody else.

I’m standing on the main square in Iceland at 5:02 am, like a death row criminal waiting for his executioner to arrive, plus the angry mob. But nobody’s here. Nothing but the low simmer of the orange animal disappearing down the street. And a lone raven that barks from the top of the small clock standing in the middle of the square. The whale mountain across the bay is buried in gray fog down to its fair blue ankles. I head in its direction.

A small gray car is sitting at the next corner, waiting for the green light. It’s driven by a chubby blonde, a Day 16 type. Must be on her way to work. How often have I found myself in her position, waiting at a red light at four in the morning, deep in the heart of Nowhere City, the only car in sight, and Willie Nelson singing on every waveband to all the girls he’s loved before. I guess more than half of my sixty-six were laid out before noon. Morning is for murder. Nobody expects a bullet for breakfast.

I walk along the shore. A protective wall made of huge stones runs along the shoreline, protecting you from the beast that rests beneath the ocean’s mirror-like surface. My crazy colleague. The paved walking path runs between the wall and an empty boulevard. Munita’s half blue head appears in front of me, floating in the air like a huge and hairy spider. I walk along the shore, talking to her and myself. I’m stuck on Fridge Island, with no one to talk to but all my sins and losses.

Hit #42 was an unlucky business man from Winnipeg, Canada, who owed Dikan some money. I had to go up forty-five floors for this job and ghost myself into his small hotel room. As I entered, he was doing some crazy yoga shit on top of the double bed—legs in the air, ass in my face. He didn’t see death coming until I sent the bullet down his rectum. It was too fucking funny not to give it a try. But he didn’t die right away. I spent about forty seconds agonizing over my next move. I absolutely didn’t want to waste another bullet. I was only two bullets away from my triple six-pack. So I just stood there stroking my gun. Luckily he seemed to understand my situation. He was cooperative. I would totally mention him in my thank-you speech at the Mafia Oscars.

With enormous effort he managed to turn back around and crawl across the bloody bed towards the table. The bullet seemed to have traveled up his colon, through stomach and lungs, making its exit on the border of chest and neck. Blood kept gushing out from under the chin. I rushed over, thinking he must keep a gun in the drawer. But he only reached for his wallet and spent his last breaths looking at photographs of his wife and three kids. Four Canadian faces frozen in fun. Then he drowned in his own blood dripping from his nose. Once the big one got him, I sat on the bed beside him. I sat there for half an hour and finally decided to throw myself out the window, down onto Sixth Avenue. But I couldn’t open the fucking window. Modern hotels.

Then I figured out I could use my own piece, of course. But ambition ruled over depression.

Soon after, on my next date with Munita, I mentioned the idea of us having kids, becoming a family. Mary Lou and Bobby Boksic. I wanted some happy faces in my wallet. But she said she wanted to wait until she had reached the twentieth floor at work. She had five to go. Five unmarried suckers.

The walking path takes me away from the shoreline, following the boulevard into some Belarus neighborhood. Low-rises to my left, higher ones to the right. Reminds me of my week in Minsk. Me and Niko waiting in a hotel room for five days for that briefcase to arrive. Watching every single game of The World Women’s Handball Championship. The Norway girls were hot.

There are some cars now. The morning traffic is picking up, most of it coming toward my face, heading downtown. I have no travel plan. I just follow Munita’s frozen head, appearing in front of me every seven minutes, while hoping for a police car to appear. I’ve reached the moment that arrives, sooner or later, in every killer’s career: When he gets noose-sick. When he starts shouting to his fellow citizens, Please, come get me!

The walk takes me past a cinema (showing some Talian Mob shit) and the local IKEA painted in yellow and blue. The morning is well underway now. Cars come flying like rhymes from a rapper’s mouth. But I’m the only pedestrian around. No other passersby. No wonder the pavement then suddenly comes to an end. I carry on along the road, walking the dirty grass next to the asphalt. There is a concrete mess ahead, all hoops and loops, buzzing with traffic. The car people look at me as if I was Hannibal Lecter on his way to breakfast.

I’m dead sick of dead people. It’s as if my head was a freezer full of goods and now that the plug’s been pulled, it all comes thawing like brooks in spring. A bit like our first day in ADV. In the morning everything was so calm and peaceful, everything was covered in beautiful white snow, after the crazy night of relentless shooting. But by noon the snow had melted and all the bodies came to light.