The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

phone calls and one quick break-in to get her on the fourth.
    Sorry, I forget. Doing a six-pack means that six consecutive bullets produce a funeral. Six bullets, six funerals, weeping widows, flowers, and all.
    With a record like mine, Dikan should have promoted me long ago, but the sucker is stubborn like an ass without a hole. Fucking Fingerlicker. That’s the nickname we gave him because he sucks his short, fat fingers at the end of every meal. But all he ever says is, “Toxic is good waiter. He never misses an order.”
    I will be pleased to follow Bilič’s order when it comes and put an end to Fingerlicker.
    We try to keep up our LPP, or Lowest Possible Profile, as we do our business. This means I usually try to settle the case in the privacy of the person’s hotel room, his car, or his home. Preferably without any witnesses. If this doesn’t work out, we often invite the victim to our restaurant. The “last supper” joke is customary. After dinner I bring him the bill for the whole table, a sum that is so high that they always prefer paying with their life. We have a special room in the back that we take them to. The Red Room, we call it, even though it’s green.
    As you might have guessed, there are no regular customers at the Zagreb Samovar.
    By the way, the name of the place is totally stupid since a “samovar” is a Russian tea-machine and has nothing to do with hrvatska culture, but Dikan thinks it’s really clever. “Acting stupid is best disguise,” he likes to say.
    Though I’m still waiting for that fucking promotion I can’t really complain. The money is good and food, of course, is excellent. I have my great apartment on Wooster and Spring, a location Munita is willing to fuck for, and I love Noisy York, though I miss my fucking fatherland every fucking day. But earlier this year I struck cable gold and found I could watch HRT and Hajduk Split on my flat screen at home. My mother calls once a year to ask when I’m going back to studies. This is Croatian slang for “the money’s up.” As soon as I hang up, I send her $2000 through the Internet. Good for another year.
    She lives alone with my fat little sister. Both my brother and father got killed in the war. I come from a family of hunters. My grandfather was Tito’s personal gamekeeper. Tito was the head of my ex-fatherland, Yugoslavia. It passed away shortly after he did, like a sad old widow. Tito loved bears. Especially dead ones. I never had the chance to shoot one, but when I was a boy my father often took me boar hunting. “The wild boar is just like a woman,” he said. “You have to pretend that you don’t want to shoot it. So we just wait here.” He was a big waiter . Just like me.
    I see myself as a hunter. I shoot pigs for a living.

CHAPTER 2
THE FUCK-UP
    05.15.2006
    But now I’m in trouble. For the first time in my spotless career. I’m riding in the company car, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, with Manhattan at my back, Munita in my ear, her body on my mind, and my eyes on driver Radovan’s piggy neck-back. A bullet would have a hard time with this head. The afternoon Manhattan sun throws skyscraper shadows down on the river’s surface.
    “Oh, baby. I will miss you,” Munita whispers from behind her desk on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. Two years ago she started on the ground floor. And yet she never did The Apprentice. That’s my Munita. You can’t dislike her. Her voice is half Hindu but the accent is all Peru. Her mother was from Bombay, and she’s got that Indian olive oil skin, a softwear that can keep you going all the way to the North Pole in a golf cart with President Bush at the steering wheel.
    “Me, too,” I answer, one more fucking time not totally sure whether this is 100 percent perfect English that I’m speaking. But I guess I’m right. I will miss myself. I will miss my great life in the great city.
    I’m going into exile. Disappearing for a while, six months at least. My plane ticket reads: New York – Frankfurt – Zagreb. Signed by Dikan. I will come crawling back under my mother’s kitchen table with a gun in my mouth. I fucked up. Or somebody fucked me. Hit #66 was a miss. Don’t get me wrong. I got the bullet into the guy’s head safe and sound, but there was some serious aftermath. The mustached Polish guy turned out to be a mustached FBI guy. What was supposed to be a bright and sunny murder in broad daylight became a nightmare. I took him to the trash dump