Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

“As long as you pay the rent, he won’t kill you,” he said in the car, with a hearty laugh.

Some minutes after the preacher has left in his holy SUV, I’m over at Gun’s place, asking her where to put my things. She looks stressed, taking the cigarette into her bedroom (something she normally doesn’t do) and points at two empty shelves in her large wardrobe with a shaky finger.

“Something’s wrong?” I ask.

“No. Why?”

“You maybe think we’re not ready to start living together?”

“No, no. It’s just…”

“I thought you wanted this. Is it Truster?”

A heavy sigh, then: “Yes.”

“You’re afraid he’ll tell your parents about us?”

“No, it’s not that. I don’t mind.”

It’s not that. It’s something else. But what it is, she won’t say. I offer to sleep upstairs, in the attic, but she says no, and soon we’re in her bed, trying to cheer ourselves up with some cheerless sex. Afterward, she picks up her cell and has a long and visibly difficult talk with her brother, who doesn’t seem to fancy living with a hitman. Shortly before midnight he shows up, pale and gloomy. Without even saying “hi,” he retreats into his small room out by the entrance and plays loud ice rock until two o’clock in the morning. Gunnhildur is shaken and smokes a whole packet before brushing her teeth for twenty long minutes.

We lie in her bed, cast in marble, locked in a silent embrace, like ancient lovers in a museum. This not my favorite really, to lie together like this, but I put my preferences on hold for the special occasion: my first night living together with a person I’ve had sex with, plus we’re not getting any sleep anyway with the ice-rock blasting through the wall. I’m missing Balatov already. Thirty more minutes of musical torture and his name has acquired the distinction of a famous classical composer. Then the poor guy puts the same song on repeat for the next half an hour. The singer screams as if he were stuck at the bottom of a glacial canyon, with a broken thigh.

“What’s he singing?”

“Sódóma,” she answers in a weak voice.

“What does that mean?”

“Just… you know… Sodom…”

“Like in Sodom and Gomorrah?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

Bible-reading is paying off. And the priest’s son across the wall knows how to get his message through. Gunnhildur clings to me like a dying mouse. Finally Truster has exhausted his sibling jealousy, and the two sodomites get their sleep.

Luckily the crane bird spends even less time around the house now than back in springtime days, when yours truly was a freshman fugitive and everything was a bit more exciting. I slowly adapt to the Icelandic every day. I spend the mornings on the Internet, googling my various names along with the “FBI,” “David Friendly,” or “Lithuanian Mafia” without much success, writing emails to people who could possibly know where my good old Senka might be found, or writing letters to my mother, which Gunnhildur’s friend brings with her to London and posts at some royal post office. Noon has me standing at the main square again, waiting for bus 6 along with the local loonies. The month of August finishes with a more traditional timing of sunset. I welcome the dark.

Torture Therapy fades out in the form of a few check-up calls from the master, plus regular visits to the crazy masses at his sweaty church. At my first visit he welcomes me with bravado and introduces Tommy to his desperate we-take-the-bus crowd as “a good Icelander and a dear friend! A man who spent most of his life in Hotel Hell but has now checked out and rented a room in heaven, God bless his soul! Hallelujah!”

The congregation takes to its feet (in fact they hardly ever sit), and the hairy ladies throw their hands in the air, repeating Torture’s hallelujah. It’s like Harlem without the choreography. Before I know it, I’m hugging a skinny disabled man with a very cold cheek. “Velkominn,” he says, in a weak voice. Then the preacher switches back to Icelandic, and to my surprise I understand most of it.

“You should know your enemies! You should know that Sin is your worst enemy! And you should never invite Sin to your house! Never invite Sin over for dinner! YOU SHOULD NOT EVEN BUY SIN A CUP OF COFFEE!” he screams in his manly baritone, sounding more like a Hell’s Angel than God’s mouthpiece. “For Sin will ask for cream in its coffee. And Sin will ask for sugar. And Sin will ask for WHISKEY in the coffee. So before you know, Sin will be drinking IRISH COFFEE! And soon YOU will be drinking with her. You’ll be drinking with Sin, singing with Sin, and dancing with Sin, to all her favorite songs! So let me tell you one more time: DON’T YOU EVER BUY SIN A CUP OF COFFEE! HALLELUJAH!”

I hear myself echo the last word, along with the crowd, while feeling the form of my old new gun with the sole of my right foot. The small piece fits just right in my size forty-six shoe. I bought myself a pair of sneakers, the ones with the thickest sole in the shop, and did a little surgery on the right one, removing enough of the layers in its sole to fit the PP9 right into it. So now I’m “walking on God’s road” as Goodmoondoor says, with a gun in my shoe. It’s pretty uncomfortable, but when the time comes, I will be prepared.

I don’t think the Pearly Gates come with a metal detector anyway.

My warm Gun doesn’t know about the cold one. This is not her problem; we have enough already. Don’t get me wrong. Gunnhildur is great. The real problem is me. I haven’t shared an apartment with anyone since good old Niko back in our Hanover days. Living with him gave me a bachelor’s degree in tolerance, but Gunnhildur’s endless smoking, and her habit of throwing jeans, sweaters, underpants, empty bottles, ashtrays, and pizza boxes around the house, finally get on my nerves. I may be a sociopath, but I like my place in order.

“I just don’t fucking understand how you can be the daughter of your parents. I mean, their house is like the White House while yours is a complete Shit House.”

“OK, so let’s get some house help.”

“We already talked about that. We can’t afford it.”

“We don’t have to. You just kill her after she’s finished her first cleaning. And then we hire another one, and you kill her as well. I mean, you’re a fucking professional aren’t you?”

This is how all our arguments end. My ex-job is always there, like some psycho ex-girlfriend. When you’ve killed more than a hundred people, you have no right to complain about a dirty floor or a messy room. That’s just the way it is. She’s almost made it into an art. Every time she finds herself in a corner, she bursts out with: “You’re probably more used to dealing with dead people, aren’t you?” or “You can’t stand people who do boring things like breathing and talking, can you?” or simply “Why don’t you just kill me?”

Apart from that things are OK.

We go to our jobs and then team up for dinner before I drag her with me to see the latest Spiderman movie, or I let her drag me to one of the countless concerts this small city has to offer. I must have quite a crush on her for I don’t mind standing for two whole hours, nodding to worthless indie bands like Earplugs and The Sleeping Pills, while Creed plays inside my head to the fire-blooming invasion of Knin.

The only real downer is Truster, who doesn’t seem to be even searching for a place to live. His silent presence can easily break your brand new self to pieces and allow the old one to shine through. For the first two weeks, he used no more than two fucking words. “Hi” and “bye.” When I hand him his fucking dinner, a killer of a goulash that I held in my lap for some twenty minutes on a bus full of rainmen and rape victims, he doesn’t even say a single “takk. ” Luckily he’s at work most of the time. One of the Seven Elevens recently worked with Truster on a construction site. Apparently the silent bird is a star in the concrete world.