The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

find it “so freaky, man” to be drinking with a priest. The clergyman asks them about the gay situation up here, the abortion issue, and whether Iceland honors the death penalty? No. Apparently Iceland is a gun-free, abortion crazy, gay paradise with no death sentence. Father Friendly has come to the right place.
    “Our Gay Pride Festival is even bigger than that of the seventeenth of June, our Independence Day.”
    Father Friendly takes it all in stride. I try to sit on his gay-bashing, death-dooming self. He only nods his head and adjusts the collar around his neck.
    Actually, I wonder why the hell I’m still wearing this stupid collar. I guess I could forget Father Friendly altogether, go back to my toxic self and check into a hotel. No. Not wise. I think it’s better to keep the sucker alive. Otherwise my preacher friends would contact the police and the police would contact his family and all hell would break loose.
    “What about murders? How many homocides have you got each year?” I ask them.
    “ Homocides?” they ask, with bewildered eyes.
    “Yeah. How many gays are killed each year in this country?”
    “Gays? None, I guess,” Hell G says, a bit shocked by the harshness of the vicar’s words.
    “Oh? But how many homicides then? How many regular people are killed?” Friendly continues.
    “Sometimes one, sometimes none,” Ziggy says.
    Seems my intuition this morning was right. I’m in heaven. No army, no guns, no murders…They don’t even have a red-light district. It’s a ho-free city, they tell me.
    “There are no prostitutes in Iceland, but we’ll be forced to have some when we join the European Union,” they tell me with another laugh.
    Sex is still free, but the beer costs a bear. Igor’s card bleeds with each glass. I’ve drunk an iPod’s worth of alcohol since stumbling into this place some hours ago, recommended to me by this horribly charming bookstore clerk, a Day 5 type. Two beers later I found out that Café Bahrain is the most famous bar in the land, heavily featured in some hip movie years back. So much for my LPP. How can you lay low in Lilliput Island?
    “So what do you do then if you can’t buy sex and don’t do murders? You have drugs?”
    There is a beat. This pastor is something else, they seem to be thinking.
    “Yeah. Sure,” Ziggy tells the stranger with an even stranger pride. “We, we have a lot of drugs.”
    And his friend adds, “We also have a lot of murders in books . In the last years we have many good crime novel writers here in Iceland, like Arnaldur Indridason for example. Also Ævar Orn Josephsson, Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Arni Thorarinsson.”
    Icelandic names are like Scud missiles. Their trails linger in the air long after they’ve reached their target. Still, these guys have my respect. Being a crime writer in the land of no murders can’t be easy. It seems you need the creative powers of a genius just to be able to provide your murderer with a gun. I close my ears, but keep my Friendly smile on, as the two barflies go on about their country, trying hard to convince the clergyman that it’s no Sunday school.
    I’m pretty spaced out. I feel the alcohol searching out my jet lag and amplifying it. Jesus. I wonder what my holy hosts are up to. They must be on TV already. Goodmoondoor never called. I sure hope the embassy bastards didn’t catch my face on camera. There must be a poster of me on every one of their bedroom walls. I killed one of their men. In fact, I have exactly sixty-seven crosses in American graveyards to my credit, so they would have a good reason to put my face on the sidewalk. But not all sixty-seven were happy-go-lucky greencarders. Some were Talians, some Russians, quite a few Serbs, and one Swedish or Norwegian guy, if I remember it right. It was the strangest accent I have put to rest. But most of them were square-faced, burger-butted Marshmallow Men. With that many dead Americans to my credit, I could probably get an honorary membership in Al-Qaeda.
    Yes. I’m on the most wanted list. Yes. I have to remember that this is exile. Yes. I have to maintain LPP. And yes. My name is David Friendly.
    Suddenly I hear a familiar voice.
    “So there you are!” Gunholder is back in a party outfit, dressed to thrill, and spots me in the corner. “What the hell are you doing here? My dad’s been looking for you! He called me like twice. You’re supposed to be on TV!”
    “He never called me,” I