Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

Olie and Harpa are a bit shy around all the famous people. Olie concentrates on eating, his small earring dancing by his jaw like Sammy’s glasses as he relentlessly chews on the heavenly lamb, but Harpa hardly touches her portion. Torture looks at their bottle of red as if it were filled with the blood of Satan. Olie offers to pour me some but I silently decline. A brief moment of suspense arrives when Gunnhildur asks me to pass the sauce and calls me “Tod.” She bites her lip, but Olie and Harpa are too stressed to notice, and Ari is talking to Hanna.

The conversation turns to the war in Iraq and Iceland’s participation in it. Somehow the no-army nation managed to come up with a single soldier and then sent him down to Baghdad to help out with the big mess. But now he’s being sent back home. It took a whole platoon of Americans to protect the poor bastard.

“They didn’t want to risk a wipeout of the whole Icelandic army,” Ari says in his American accent, and then laughs a certain nerdish laughter I haven’t heard for years, but remember from the university cafeteria in Hanover. Niko’s brother studied computer science and his friends used to laugh like that all the time. Intelligent boys laughing at other people’s stupidity, the “other people” including all the people in the world except the ones who were studying computer science at Hanover University.

Olie laughs with him, but Torture looks at them both from under a set of heavy brows, as if he were contemplating arming his whole congregation and sending it down to Iraq to teach those Muslims how to circumcise their hearts. But instead of saying it, the Bible-boomer turns to me and says this will be the first time he has ever watched the Eurovision Song Contest. He’s doing it for me, he says.

“And you’re looking at a man who once told his people that devoting your time to this festival of fools was a form of devil worship. Ha ha. It was the year we sent a sodomite dressed up as Lucifer himself. No. It’s nothing but vanity and vexation of the spirit. But I will bite my tongue this evening. Ha ha.”

Some heavy biting it will be. Since the monsters from Finland won last year, this year’s contest is being held in Helsinki. The broadcast begins with them playing the winning song, “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” It’s everything but torture to watch Torture’s reaction. Yet, I suspect he admires those religious rockers a bit. It’s his own preaching style, taken to the heavy-metal max.

The Icelandic entry is number five on the list. One weather-beaten leather-wearing rocker with red hair cries out about his “Valentine Lost.” Gunnhildur likes him, so I do, too. I watch her sitting next to her brother on the sofa, stretching her long white legs out on the floor, from beneath the short, black, belly-stretching dress. My Daybreak darling. Red lips and thighs that are one inch thicker than last year. Her behind is almost Latinal by now, and her breasts have risen to the occasion. On the whole her figure is much juicier, apart from the hard basketball-belly. It stems from the water buildup. I haven’t given her any reasons to cry this past winter.

I then take another good look at Torture. My new boss. The Icelandic Dikan. If he had a soft spot for the hallelujah-monsters, he’s back to his hard-rock self by now. The fluttering bright flames of “vanity and vexation of the spirit” are reflected in his glasses, while his contempt is expressed by his lips, moving about in his beard like two worms in the grass. It’s way more entertaining watching him watch this song contest than watching the thing itself. He reminds me of Dikan watching his Dynamo Zagreb lose to my Hajduk.

Like Iceland, Croatia goes for an old-timer this year. It’s the one and only Dado Topić, playing with some kids I haven’t seen before. Dado is the king of Croatian rock. He wrote the soundtrack to my youth. He was even there the night I lost my virginity.

Now he sings: “Vjerujem u ljubav” (I believe in love) in his deep scratchy voice, still sporting his long hair and cowboy boots. The song is pretty good, actually, but Torture says the girl singing with him is out of tune. Bite your tongue, man.

Before the song is over, the doorbell rings. Goodmoondoor goes to the door. He comes back saying it’s for me. I take a quick look at the mother of my child and head for the door. It’s halfway open—the incredible chill of the Icelandic spring comes rushing in my face like some sort of an odorless gas that makes you shiver to the bone—but I can’t see anyone out there. I step on the famous golden threshold and look about. Someone grabs my arm and I can feel the barrel of a gun piercing my left side. My brain may have been washed in the river of Jordan, but my nervous system is still that of a soldier. I sense a gun when I sense it.

It’s Niko.

Of all the guys in the world, it’s fucking Niko.

My heart instantly skips a beat before the needle lands on Britney’s “Toxic.” In one instant my new life is blown away by the old one.

“Nice to see you,” he says in Croatian, with the customary grin, and asks me to join him for a ride, pointing to a black Audi idling out on the street. “I think we have to talk.”

It’s nice to hear my mother’s tongue again.

I tell him I need to get my shoes. Clearly, he wasn’t prepared for this one, and is thrown off guard as he watches me turn back inside the house.

The shoes are behind the door. I should probably call on Olie to jump into the kitchen for a sharp knife or ask Torture to roll out his fiery tongue. But I only bow over my thick-soled sneakers, feeling Niko’s sharp gaze stab me in the back, listening to the final chords of Dado’s song echo from the entrails of the house followed by the crowd’s crazy applause. I put on my shoes and straighten up. When I reach for my black leather jacket, Niko shakes his head.

“But it’s fucking cold,” I say.

“We won’t be long.”

Gunnhildur shouts something from the living room and I hesitate a moment, looking my old friend in the eye, before closing the door behind me.

Once we’re outside, he quickly searches me, looking for an automatic rifle in my armpits, in my pockets, or in my crotch. I’m wearing a thin black sweater over a white T-shirt and some cool jeans that Gun helped me pick out. As I get inside the car, I think I notice some movement in the living room window of my in-laws. As if someone had seen us. I shouldn’t worry, really. The holy men will have their SWAT team of angels come to my rescue.

So for the second year in a row I’m prevented from watching all of Eurovision. I was really looking forward to the Serbian entry. Rumor had it they were entering a lesbian dwarf, who looks like Milošević’s illegitimate daughter, praying for love, peace, a piece of our land, or whatever.

Niko looks the same. His goatee has turned a bit gray though, and his skin shows signs of the cold. But the long nose and the hard black eyeballs are there—this gaze of his that clearly says “Don’t fucking fuck with me! ” He throws himself into the seat beside me and the driver darts off. The car smells of leather and luxury. It looks to be about two hours old.

I recognize the driver. It’s the New York Neck-backer. Good old Radovan. Shaved to the skull. He’s even wearing the same fucking sunglasses he wore my last day in America.

So it’s reunion time. Ponovni susret. We must be heading for a fancy restaurant where Don Dikan waits at the end of the table, surrounded by Gun lookalikes and sucking on the fat Havana cigar he’s been trying to light for the past thirty years.

Niko has his eyes on me, keeping his gun LPP, though always pointed at me. It’s his Desert Eagle, a pitch-black semi-automatic made in Israel. I remember when he first got it. He blushed like a boy. He just had to have one after he saw the first Matrix movie. Typical Niko. His black eyeballs resemble the opening of the barrel. Three black holes stare at me. “Don’t fucking fuck with me!” So this is how my victims must have felt when they were faced with the loaded gun and the willing finger. Except I have God on my side. The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good (Proverbs 15:3).