Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

“Queer air thew.”

“Excuse me?”

She switches to pretty professional English:

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I’m To—I’m Father Friendly. I just got in this morning. From New York. They, Goodmoondoor and Sickreader, they told me—”

“Aha,” she sighs with disinterest and disappears back into the kitchen. On the screen some balding carpenter-type is reading from a book that must be the Bible. The set looks like he built it himself. This must be their channel. Right. The letter A shines in the upper corner. They should call it “Omen” rather than “Amen.” This is one-camera TV: the still-life style of it, the dead plant in the background, the carpenter’s Polish suit, the way he only looks up from the book every three pages (as if he’s checking the red REC light of the camera). It all makes North Korean State TV look like MTV. Poor guys. Dikan’s position as the big boss can’t possibly be hurt by me appearing on this drab channel. Judging from the expression on the carpenter’s face, he knows he’s not talking to more than ten viewers.

I get up from the sofa, make sure the towel is tight around my waist, and head for the kitchen. I comfort my shy belly—it always withdraws at the sight of serious girls—before appearing in the doorway like a freshly updated and slightly inflated version of Adonis. The girl is still searching the kitchen like a burglar on speed.

“Are you looking for something?” I ask her. Tone is hymn-like, voice is gym-like.

“Yeah. My keys,” she murmurs into a cupboard.

Her body is slim, with small breasts and a tight ass, firm as a fully inflated airbag. If she was the only woman in our platoon and we were stuck in the mountains for a month, I’d start dreaming about her on Day 1.

“Your keys? You live here?”

This priest is turning into a moron, or a Mormon, or whatever.

She turns her head and looks at me for a while. Belly instantly ducks for cover, crawling all the way up into my rib cage. Poor little thing. The girl seems to feel sorry for the belly and can’t help but look for it, letting her eyes travel to my middle, probably wondering whether her software supports the updated version of Adonis. I’m almost out of breath when she’s finally done.

But it does give me time to examine her.

Her hair is more than blonde. It has the color of butter fresh from the fridge, before it gets all soft and yellow. Her skin looks incredibly smooth, as white as Philadelphia cream cheese, untouched in the box. The nose is small, with an upward tip that looks like the top of an ice-cream cone, that last bit coming out of the machine that you put in your mouth first. Her eyes are ice-blue like Gatorade Frost and her thick lips glisten like strawberry sorbet.

Oooh. My stomach comes out of hiding and starts whining like a kid for candy. Man. She’s not just a Day 1 Girl; she’s a Daybreak Girl.

“No, I don’t live here,” she finally says with a heavy sigh full of irritation. “I’m their daughter. I lost my keys. I can’t get into my apartment. Argh! I have to be at work at ten and I can’t go like this!”

She’s the preachers’ daughter though she speaks like a pagan prom queen, or a porn queen, for that matter. Her English is straight from MTV, and she wiggles her head along with her words in an imitation of black n’ bitchy. She belongs to a tattooed generation of waxing masters brought up on thong songs, intent on making the stomach “the new boobs.” This particular one is crowned with a pierced navel and proudly bares itself between a tight thin blouse and some deadly cool jeans. The tips of her black shoes are shaped like their high heels, and she cuts the air with her long white fingernails while she talks.

“Are the keys supposed to be here?” I ask in a fatherly way.

“Yeah. Mom said she had an extra key but I can’t fucking find it.”

She already said “shit” and here comes the F-word. The holy couple have produced a ho.

“Why don’t you call her?” I ask her.

“They’re taping her show now. Her phone’s on silent.”

She seems pained by her mother’s TV fame. I feel pity for the poor girl and say:

“Maybe I can help you to get into your place.”

“You mean, without a key? Are you going to use the cross?”

“We might try that. A cross and a quick blessing,” I say in a tone that is perfectly Friendly.

I have the priest under my skin by now. Even naked I can appear to be a man of the cloth. She looks at me with surprise in her Gatorade eyes while I enter the kitchen and start searching the drawers for a knife that resembles the tiny Swiss wonder that I’ve kept in my pocket since Comrade Prizmić gave it to me on his deathbed, a shaky kitchen table in some bombed-out house in All Dead Village, ADV. Thanks to bin Laden, I had to leave it behind in NYC. Ah ha! I find a suitable substitute.

It’s not until we’re outside, sitting in her well-used Škoda Fabia with me freshly dressed in my holy outfit, that I ask for her name.

“Gunholder,” she answers and darts off down the street.

Gunholder drives over two hills, scarcely planted with low and ugly buildings, and approaches the city of Reykjavik. The name sounds like Dubrovnik, but it’s more like entering Split, with all its highways and billboards plus the occasional sports field. (I notice that the stands are hardly bigger than the bench.) Like my hometown, this city seems to have a split personality: a historical center with hysterical suburbs.

They seem to have had their share of communism up here as well. Concrete housing projects line the side of the road and salute my Titolitarian past. We used to live in one of those gray monsters close to the stadium before we moved downtown, into a building older than New York City itself. I remember we had to leave our car behind since the narrow streets in the old town don’t support any gas-related traffic, but every Sunday father took me and my older brother Dario to visit our good old Yugo, where it still held its parking space in our ugly old neighborhood.

Gunholder lives downtown, close to The Pond, a small swan lake close to the harbor. Here we’re back with the bourgeoisie: houses with gabled roofs and French windows fill the slopes around the water, gazing out at it, like over-proud guests at a New Year’s ball standing around an empty dance floor. But we’re not there yet. The girl is still driving a highway called Killing My Rabbit or something close to that. Icelanders seem to have a Native American taste in naming people and places. Gunholder tells me we just drove through a town called Cop War.

“But this is Reykjavik?” Father Friendly asks her, adjusting the stiff collar to his thick neck with one hand while pointing out the windshield with the other.

“Yeah, now we’re in Reykjavik.”

“They say it’s a Tarantino town?” Oops. This sounds a bit too cool for the churchman. I quickly add, “I mean, Tarantino’s favorite city?”

She quickly looks me over—wondering whether she’s sitting in a car with some famous Scientology pastor, a man who spends his holidays playing golf with Tom Cruise and John Travolta—before saying:

“Yeah. He was here for New Year’s Eve. My girlfriend knows him. He’s OK.”

I’m glad I didn’t kill him.

Across an islanded bay, a long mountain guards the city to the north. It has the shape of a giant whale stranded ashore. Further north and out east, more mountains surround the city, lying out along the horizon like blue leopards dotted with white snowdrifts. Though they are as far away as the Hamptons from Harlem, I can see them as clearly as the tips of my shoes, for the air is as clean as a Trump Tower window. The ocean is a strong blue, and I can see waves forming and breaking as far as the eye can fly. Everything around here is crystal-clear. Like in the mind of a cold-blooded killer.