The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

my mother this morning, in her small hardware shop in the heart of Split, and broke her arm. Dikan’s balls are boiling, Niko says. “If you are in this fucking Iceland then stay there!” he screams. “Don’t go to Zagreb or Split and don’t come here! Just stay where you are and do the LPP!”
    As mentioned, that’s short for Lowest Possible Profile. I wonder if Goodmoondoor’s TV show fits into that category.
    As I hang up my mobile, Sickreader turns towards me again and asks what language I just used.
    “It’s Croatian,” I say.
    “Oh? So you speak Croatian?”
    “Yes, we have some Croatian people in our church.”
    “Where are you from, in the beginning?” the Good Moon driver asks.
    “In the beginning we were all God’s children.” I’m too damn good. “But if you are asking about my accent, it’s an acquired one, if you can say so. I was a missionary for many years in the former republic of Yugoslavia.”
    “Oh, really?” they both say.
    “Yes. Spreading the good word of God in a communist state. That was some tough shit, man. I mean, tough holy shit. And being American over there, man, that was plain suicide. I had to take on another name and get rid of my American accent completely. They called me Tomislav. Tomislav Bokšić. Nowadays everyone thinks I’m from over there. But no. I’m one hundred percent American. I even have Clay Aiken CDs at home. In fact, the Friendly family has been in Virginia since the twelfth century.” I guessed this would be called overacting. “Excuse me, since the eighteenth century.”
    They take it all in with a smile. There is a beat—along with my heartbeat, straight out of some suspense film score—before the woman asks:
    “How old are you, Father Friendly?”
    “I’m…I was born in sixty-five. That makes me…uh…forty.”
    “So you have been very young when you were in….”
    “In Yugoslavia? Oh, yes. I’m deeply marked by it. I had some really tough times over there.”
    It’s a bright and early May morning. I mean, an early morning in early May, and the sun is about to rise from behind the mountains ahead. Their sky has no clouds at all, and on the left-hand side the ocean keeps the waves below its gray-green surface. Still the scene looks just as cold as it is. The arctic May looks like a Midwest March. There are some vacant houses scattered along the coastline. “Summerhouses,” my hosts inform me. OK. So they do have summer up here.
    The flight lasted five hours, and the time difference is about the same: a whole night has passed from the restroom scene at JFK. Killing Friendly was my first manual murder since the mustached kid in Knin. I used my hands, a trick I learned from Comrade Prizmić, the oldest one in our platoon, the WWII veteran with the big nostrils and absent cheeks. “It’s just like blowing out a candle,” he used to say. “It all depends on position and speed. Man is wax. Life is flame. Blow out his light and he’s dead.” Good old Prizmić. They cut the breasts off his wife and made him eat them.
    There is a sticker on the back of the driver’s seat. It’s in English. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)”
    Woe, man. Finally the six o’clock sun breaks out from the sharp mountain edge. Like a bright chicken from a blue egg. The road lights up.
    “We drive the road of light!” Goodmoondoor says and turns towards me with a big, happy smile. “The road of light!”

CHAPTER 5
GUNHOLDER
    05.16.2006
    They want me to stay in their house. “We never let our guest stay at hotel. Our home is your home,” Goodmoondoor assures me. I thank him. It’s a small suburban villa on two shiny floors, in a neighborhood called Guard the Beer, or something like that, situated between the city center and the airport. Therefore I still haven’t seen the famous Reykjavik that I read about on the plane: “the hottest city in Europe, the capital of cool.” Apparently this is where Tarantino goes if he wants to play up his celebrity status. Bad luck it wasn’t him next to me in the men’s room. Then I’d be entering town in a white limo, with a gold chain around my neck and his VIP passport in my pocket, waving out the window to the young girls lining up at the side of the road holding up their old Pulp Fiction posters. Instead, I’m offered a seat in a silent suburban kitchen with no