Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

A pause. He takes a long, loud-breathing look at me. Then:

“Do you know what you’ve done?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Yes.”

“You have killed people.”

“Yes.”

“You have taken into your hands the power of God.”

“You mean…?”

“And that is a sin. The sin of all sins.”

“You mean, God… kills people, or?”

“He creates and he kills, he reigns and he rules! You should obey and not betray! How does it feel?”

“How does it feel, what?”

“How does it feel TO KILL someone?”

“It… it feels like…”

“Yes?”

“It feels like… preaching.”

“What?”

“Yeah. It makes you feel powerful. You’re in control.”

“Bullshit. You think you’re in control, while you’re being controlled by… Who was the first?”

“What?”

“Who was your first victim?”

“My first hit?”

“Yes. Who was your first hit?”

As quickly as a missile leaves an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, my mind shoots to the bottom of my list—through concrete floors and rusty iron hatches, all the way down to my beneathest basement where the dark is smelly and the smell is dark—breaking open an old moldy coffin lying in a damp and dusty corner.

“My father,” I say.

“Your father?”

“Yes.”

“You killed your father?”

“Yes.”

I killed my father. I probably should have mentioned this before.

“You killed your father?”

“Yes.”

“You killed your own father?”

“Yes. But nobody knows.”

“Nobody knows?”

“No. I didn’t tell anyone. Nobody saw it.”

“Nobody saw it? God sees everything! Murder is murder, no matter if… and a father… a father is always a father. How could you do it? How in the bloody hell could you kill your own father?”

“I… It was…”

“Yes? It was what? Your hot blood chilled with ice from the Devil’s fridge?”

“It was accidental.”

I’ve never talked about this before, and the mere thought of it, especially in the presence of this guy, is enough to bring me to my knees. I kneel before him like a semi-naked knight in front of his white-gowned queen. She lets him feel her sword.

“An accident? But you did kill him?”

“Yes. But…”

“But what?”

“It was his fault.”

“His fault?”

“Yes, because…”

I’m at the end of my battery. Like a dose of poison timed to go to work some fifteen years after it was consumed, my big secret suddenly takes hold of my body and knocks me over. All of a sudden, I’m lying at the feet of Torture.

“What? Because of what?”

“Because…”

I’m taken with a coughing fit, mixed with a bawling I didn’t know I had in me. I must sound like a baby seal being beaten with a baseball bat. He listens to me for a while and then brings the scene to its conclusion.

“You have killed your father. May God save your soul.”

I can feel that he puts his bare foot on my quaking back, like a triumphant general on his fallen enemy. Somehow this gesture seems to calm my bawling a bit. But instead, I’m taken over with an incredibly strong feeling of hunger. An all-you-can-order, all-you-can-eat hunger. I want to run out in the church, up to the altar, and start gnawing away at the big wooden cross like a desperate horse.

With my left ear I can feel a slight and gentle man-made wind. This either came from Torture’s back end, or it’s a breeze from his doing the sign of the cross over my hapless body.

“May God save your soul,” he repeats. “If he can.”

And give me something to eat. If he can.

So I exit the Gates of Hell, carrying the slim body of my dear father, and ring the huge Golden Doorbell. God lets me wait a while. I guess my application has to be approved by the Committee of Die Hard Cases before it reaches his eyes.

Meanwhile Torture takes me over to his place, a huge white house on a hill close to his church, and puts me up in a window-free space in his basement, visited only by him and his wife. They tell me they have three kids. I can’t see them, nor can I hear them. Apparently they spend their days in silence, reading the Bible. Just like me. Every morning the preacher-man picks three chapters I’m supposed to read that day. “Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?”

It’s Torture Therapy: Step 3.

Torture’s secret weapon is his wife, Hanna. She’s just as classic-looking as him: a burly woman with soft skin, nice leathery wrinkles, a biblical bust, and a pleasant voice. She moves silently about the house, wearing colorless T-shirts and long skirts, with long graying hair like a horse tail and not a stitch of makeup. If there were a TV show called Miss Mother Earth , she’d be visited with lights and lenses by the all-American camera crew. One has the feeling that her hair grows a foot a day and that she cuts it every night before going to bed. And that every morning she milks her breasts, putting what the household needs in the fridge, but donating the rest to the milk fund of CWCC, Career Women with Carbon Chests. She speaks English with an accent that goes a bit deeper than the Icelandic one. As if she belonged to some hot spring nation. She’s more like the mountain behind the man than “the woman behind the man.” She is the Christian country of care that her husband, the eyes-on-fire ambassador, represents in his clumsy way.

Hanna’s big drawback is her incredibly bad breath, which doesn’t really go with her incredibly good vibes. It probably stems from the biblical amount of frustration she’s had to swallow over the years. It can’t be easy being married to Torture.

Still, if she was the only woman on our platoon and we were stuck in the mountains for a month, I’d start dreaming about her on day seven.

Breakfast is a slice of homemade bread that I kiss before eating. And a glass of milk that I keep hoping is homemade as well. Lunch is exactly the same, but dinner is always meat. A lamb, a calf, or a foal. Some animal that Torture has slaughtered up in his garage, I’m sure. I’m back in the Old Testament. In the care of Sarah, wife of Abraham. My room has no windows, my bed is hard, my book is the Bible, my days are simple, and my nights are getting more and more peaceful.

Therapy seems to be working.

I’ve done away with a hundred hits. Only one remains. Every day my glasses-wearing guardian angel comes downstairs and listens for half an hour. His lust for violence is biblical. His crazy eyes have calmed a bit though. Or I have grown accustomed to them. He informs me about his outside-the-box methods.

“I have the black belt in both judo and karate. This is where I come from. I didn’t meet God until I met my wife, when I was thirty-five. I always say that I married God,” the bearded man says with a gentle laugh. I think I’m starting to understand his talk about circumcising the heart. It’s probably crucial when you’re married to God. He laughs a little more, adding: “I was lucky.” Somehow his laughter sounds a bit learned. As if he had learned it at Preaching School, to spice up his speeches with short chuckles here and there. “No. I’m only putting my knowledge and expertise to the service of the Lord. We have a saying in Icelandic that you have to fight evil with evil.”

By going through the disaster of my life, calmly and carefully, I’m slowly trying to bury it. Trying to bury my father properly. It’s like this artist once told me in some dingy little diner on the East Side: He only painted the picture he did not want to see ever again. “It’s just takin’ out the trash, man.” He was going through a tough divorce, he said, and only painted his ex-wife. Big horrible nudes.