Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

“Is genius with crane. From hundred meter can pick up small money, in very big wind.”

Well, good for him. If he only could use his crane to pick up girls…

I manage to keep my demons at the door, but at night they come creeping through our bedroom window. Gunnhildur prefers to leave it open.

As soon as I fall asleep, the Serbian tanks come rolling in, with treads made of screaming heads—the bloodied and muddied heads of Croatian villagers, old men, women, and children. The Chetnik panzers break through my sleeping defense, speeding across the dark fields of my soul like worked-up rhinos, followed by a platoon of sixty-six American businessmen, armed with cell phones and briefcases, who’re being cheered on by an equal number of widows, yelling out all the way from the deep blue forests of New Jersey to the flat hot roofs of the Manitoban prairie, the whole of it backed by the blessing of a bald priest with a Southern accent dressed in a white karate outfit, sporting a black Bulgarian belt marked: YO BITCH!

They attack us from all sides. They’ve surrounded us: me, my dad, and Dario.

We work our fingers off on the machine guns, turning our small fort into a sprinkler of bullets, but to no avail. We’re overwhelmed. Pretty soon we can hear the horrible shrieks of our own women and children, rolling with the caterpillar tread of the fast approaching tanks, through the super-loud gun sounds.

I suddenly sense that my father is wounded. He’s been shot in the right shoulder. I look behind me and watch him turn slowly towards me. But I can’t do anything about it, for I have to face the enemy, I have to continue shooting. But a second later I can feel his hands on my neck, around my neck. He’s got his ten strong fingers around my neck. I feel he’s about to strangle me when I wake up and see Truster’s red face in the blue morning light that fills the bedroom.

Truster is trying to strangle me. The fucker. I grab his arms and try pushing him away, but he’s strong as a rib-eyed bull. Gunnhildur wakes up and starts screaming his name. This weakens him enough so that I’m able to loosen his grip on my neck: soon we’re fighting on the floor beside the bed, creating a whirlwind of magazines, earrings, condoms, and a lamp. It doesn’t last for long though. The Croatian soldier and Manhattan hitman, worked up by the Word of God, easily defeats the son of a preacher man.

Only to find out that he is not the son of a preacher man. Truster is not Gunnhildur’s brother. He is, or rather, he was her BOYFRIEND.

This is news to me.

For three whole months I’ve been under the impression that he was her brother, that he was Goodmoondoor and Sickreader’s son. And, as a matter of fact, they told me so, right in the very beginning, when I was still playing Friendly and everything was complicated in a more uncomplicated way. They told me he was their son, but their accent made “son-in-law” sound like “son in love” to me. It appeared strange to me at the time, their boasting about their son’s love life, but now I get it.

And now I can see that the ice-girl cheated on him with me. Up in the attic. I was their love-buster. Shortly after, they must have broken up, but the poor bastard didn’t move out of her place, not even after I moved in! The Icelandic male must be one of the most uncomplaining animals on the planet. But of course his blood was boiling under the lid of silence. It had to come out, sooner or later.

And of course he had to move out sooner or later. He does so now.

“How could you NOT know he was my boyfriend? I mean, we were living together, sleeping in the same bed.”

We’re on our way to Silence Grove. The son-in-law-thing has to be settled. I have to face the saviors of my soul and tell them that on top of everything else I’m taking their daughter as well. But I guess her father won’t mind. We’re “living the last days” anyway.

As always, she does the driving. Tommy has a passport but no driver’s license. We drive past the downtown domestic airport. Rain beats the windshield. Radio plays Shakira. “Hips Don’t Lie.” Me and Munita once saw her enter a fancy restaurant on Theatre Row at one of our many pre-foreplay dinners. We both had our eyes on her great Colombian butt, and once it was out of sight, Munita declared it too big. I didn’t want to tell my Bonita that it looked pretty tight compared to her Aztec Temple, so I quickly added the third Latin treasure to the conversation: J-Lo’s biggest asset, concluding that South America was big on behinds in every meaning of the word. It made her laugh all the way to my bed.

I need all my mental strength to lift the three great butts off my mind and register the fact I’m sitting next to my new blonde girlfriend in a car in Iceland.

“Sorry. What did you say?”

“How on earth could you think we were brother and sister?”

“I didn’t think he was your brother. I thought he was your dog.”

She drives for a while. It’s a rainy Reykjavik Sunday. Everybody’s on the move. In their car. Waving to each other with wind-screen wipers. We pass The Pearl, the rooftop restaurant. It’s a dome of glass and steel built on top of some volcano-water tanks. I’d take her there some day if my job involved some money.

“We’d been together for too long,” she says.

“How long?”

“Since high school. But with, you know, some good pauses.”

Very good indeed. Having slept with four football teams (goalies not included).

“OK. And when did you split up?”

“What do you mean?”

“When did you tell him about us?”

“Just, you know, when we started getting serious.”

“And when was that?”

“When you moved in, for example.”

She sounds pissed. I’m holy pissed.

“When I moved in? You only told him then?!”

“Yes, about that time.”

“So for a month he was like… All our nights in the furniture shop… He thought you were still together?!”

“Well, I guess he had his suspicions.”

“So you lied to him, and you lied to me?”

“I didn’t lie to you. You never asked.”

“I never asked? I mean, how could I? I thought we were together! I didn’t know you had a boyfriend!”

“I didn’t know you had A GIRLFRIEND!”

“But she was dead!”

“Not the first time we…”

“No, I know. That was not good. That’s why I left.”

“Bullshit. You left because you found out she was dead and you were in a state of shock.”

“Can you stop the car?”

“What?”

“I want to get out. It’s over.”

“It’s over? Why?”

“I have to be able to trust you completely.”

“But you can.”

“No. You lied to me.”

“I didn’t lie! You never asked!”

“You lied to him and you will lie to me. I’ll never be able to trust you.”

“Jesus, Tod. Why don’t you just shoot me and then you’ll have trust!”

Silence. She steps on the gas, I step on the gun. The one inside my shoe. We both look ahead. Through the foggy rain you can make out the red-lighted butt of a white Nissan Pathfinder driving ahead of us. The wipers work the windshield, going from my side to her side, from her side to my side.

“I’m pregnant.”

Obviously, that’s her talking. And I can only repeat after her, like the first imbecile member of mankind did, when he found out his wife was knocked up.

“Pregnant?”

“Yes.”

“Wow. When did you find out?”

“This morning.”

“And…?”

“And…?”

“Is it mine?”

“YES, OF COURSE IT’S YOURS! WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM! IT’S FUCKING YOURS! I’M HAVING YOUR FUCKING BABY!!!”