Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

She starts crying. Tears outside, tears inside. Difficult driving conditions. She pulls over at the next gas station. I try to tell her how sorry I am. How wonderful it is that she’s having my child. MY CHILD! It must be the best news I’ve heard since Suker sacked the Germans in France ’98. I offer her my arms, and she unfastens her seatbelt before falling into my lap. She cries for a while. I guess half of it comes from the fact that she’s pregnant. Munita once told me pregnant women cry a lot. It’s something about water building up in the womb and adding to the water supply, causing overflow at times. I stare out the windshield. The brand new gas station also houses a fast food joint. I watch a young father pass under the bright red Kentucky Fried sign, holding the hand of his small son. She cries a bit longer. My crotch is getting wet. It’s precipitation returning to the source. Cycle of life.

Our emotional outbursts put steam on the windows, turning the car into some kind of a cocoon. She then finally rises with a tear-torn face. I repeat my sorries.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you upset. I’m very happy about it.”

“You are?”

“Yes. Of course. I’m thrilled.”

“So you think you can like, trust me?”

“Can you trust me?”

I feel the gun’s texture with my foot.

“Yes.”

“But you know who I am, Gunnhildur. You know what I’ve done. I don’t get it. How can you trust me? How can you start a family with someone like me?”

“I love you.”

“Me… me, too.”

It might not be grammatically perfect, but she gets the meaning and we kiss. I’ve come a pretty long way. I’ve come all the way from pulling a gun out of a guy’s rectum in a forty-fifth-floor hotel room in midtown Manhattan, to embracing a butter-blonde girl in a Red Cross–red Škoda at some shitty suburban gas station in Iceland and telling her I love her. And I’m not lying. I guess.

Feels fucking good.

To put things in the most absolute perspective, the radio DJ decides that this is the perfect moment to play Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” Quite incredible really. Back in NYC it used to be “my song” of course. The boys would tease me with it. I kind of liked it, actually, and even ended up buying the bloody CD and used to play it, loud, on my way to a gun-job. It made me powerful, got me into the mood for a good killing. Hearing it now can only appeal to the old self that the new one has swallowed up, the former small as a bullet, the latter big as love.

I’m detoxed.

Gunnhildur doesn’t notice the song, and after a prolonged moment of hardcore happiness, we drive on. The two-lane highway takes us through a tunnel, down a slope and up another, then under a flyover. Fancy SUVs speed past us, stirring up “dust” made of water. She makes the turn into Garðabær, the sleepy town where her parents live. Then, out of the blue, she says:

“So you want to live in Iceland, then?”

“Yeah. But only while you’re alive. As soon as you’re dead, I’m off.”

“So you’ll probably kill me?”

“Not if you marry me.”

“Is that a proposal?”

“No, it’s a threat.”

She looks at me with a grin I could kill for. Sorry, no. With a grin I could let myself be killed for.

We’re two happy hamsters expecting the third as we pull up in front of her parents’ house. I give her a quick and serious look, asking:

“Should we also tell them about the baby?”

Her face is almost back to normal, though her eyes are still a bit red.

“No, not now. I’m not sure if I want to keep it.”

“What? Gunnhildur? No!”

She looks at me for a while, cultivating a smile on her juicy lips. “Relax. It was just a test.”

It’s May 2007. A year has passed since my incidental arrival in Iceland. Since my early retirement from the homicide industry. A winter full of dim days and snowy nights has entered my soul. And now it’s bright again. Spring is here, cold as ever, with endless light and Eurovision, the annual orgy of gorgeous women and gay men.

It’s tonight.

We go to Gunnhildur’s parents for the traditional fjölskylduboð (family gathering). The big Croatian baby inside her is due any moment now, and she looks like the snake who ate the basketball. Gun says I stroke the belly as if I were expecting a million dollars instead of a baby. Sickreader greets us, kissing her daughter and son-in-law on the cheek, the latter for the first time, actually. It’s taken her a whole dark season to accept the fact that her daughter is expecting a future gangster.

“I want you to know that if you let us down, I will go to the phone and call the American embassy at once,” she told me at Christmas Eve, when we accidentally found ourselves alone in her kitchen.

Well-trained in Icelandic customs, I take off my sneakers and put them away in a corner. Gunnhildur is allowed to keep on her almost-Pradas. (According to Icelandic house rules, you’re allowed to enter in your shoes if they cost more than two hundred dollars.) She marches through the living room and out on to the veranda to give her father a kiss. Goodmoondoor is out there fiddling with the gas-grill , the pride of every Icelandic household; a black four-legged creature with a bright yellow udder that silently endures the long winter, loitering out in the icy gardens like an arctic mammal. Originally designed for Texas BBQ parties, I’ve seen the Easelanders dust snow off its back before lighting its flame. Sometimes the well-done steak returns half frozen from the blizzard. These people are true masters of self-deception.

Gunnhildur’s brother, Ari, is next to arrive. He’s home for a few weeks from his computersomething studies in Boston. A blonde guy with red cheeks and glasses, he looks like an updated version of his father. We’re meeting for the first time.

“Hi, I’m Tómas.”

“Hi.”

“We call him Tommy!” Goodmoondoor happily shouts out from the veranda, now wearing a BBQ glove and holding grill pliers. I sometimes call him Goondy.

I chat with Ari about the Westin Copley Place Hotel in Boston where he recently attended his friend’s thirtieth birthday party (and I carried out hit #30 a few years back). Then I watch Gunnhildur open the front door to Olie and Harpa who greet her with a smile, a bottle, and a bouquet. They look a bit like an inter-racial couple: the lute girl is tanned to the max, but the Meat Man is as white as a chef’s toque.

Soon after, Torture and Hanna arrive with their silent kids. As usual his handshake is straight out of the Bible and her natural breath unspoiled by fluoride or mouthwash. They bring their own meat, probably from the lamb that Torture slaughtered himself in his garage. He brings it to Goodmoondoor, and the two men chat for a while out by the smoking grill, looking like tribal chieftains.

“How is it going with the letter?” Hanna asks.

“It’s going OK.”

She’s referring to the Friendly letter.

“That’s good to hear. And are you going to send it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

We eat early, since the live broadcast starts at 7:00 in this part of the world. Goodmoondoor wears his pink tie over his shoulder as he brings the warm meat in from the cold veranda. Ari asks me about work. It sounds like they didn’t inform him of my bloody past. I tell him about my jobs, plural, because by now I uphold the national tradition of having two of them. In the morning I work in the cafeteria at the National Library, and four times a week I’m an usher, a best boy, or whatever you call it, at Torture’s church. This includes mopping the floors of revelation sweat and occasionally comforting the lone woman who stays behind to talk about her losses. In between, I do my Icelandic lessons and work on my letter. This last thing involves research that I usually do in the library on Hanna’s daughter’s old laptop, a twentieth-century brick full of tricks, but devoid of any latter-day luxuries. From time to time I also take karate lessons from Torture in the mattress room.