The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

car. This car,” he says and points towards his silver Land Cruiser. “I was driving here in Reykjavik and then suddenly a very big whale was swimming beside me. He was swimming fast, and he even went before me. He was on the street. Just like a car. And when he was beside me, he looked at me and he said something. But I could not hear it, because I was in the car and the window was not down.”
    Goodmoondoor looks at Father Friendly as if he was hoping for his American brother to interpret the dream as a major event in the history of Christianity.
    “Wow,” I say and look to the sky for advice. The shark-like clouds pass overhead. I suddenly feel that I’m stuck in some underwater cartoon for kids, doing the voice of “Marty the Monkfish.”
    “That’s amazing, man,” I say. “You should maybe call him and tell him? Maybe he can tell you what it means.”
    “You know that brother Branham died in 1965.”
    Fuck.
    “Sure. I’m not talking about a phone call. I’m talking about a soul call,” I say.
    “A soul call?”
    “Yes. We do that all the time, in our congregation down in Richmond. Every Tuesday night people come in and speak with their dead relatives. It’s very popular. People really like it. I turn myself into a human switchboard and make the connection through the Lord.”
    He starts to laugh. I stress out.
    “I don’t know the Baptist Church very well, but in my church we never talk to the dead. We say it’s a hairy sea,” he says.
    A hairy sea.
    “Yeah, I know. But it’s like, you know, we don’t call them. They call us.”
    The temperature must be close to thirty-three degrees Fahrenheit, and here we are, on a sunny spring night, standing out in some backdoor parking lot in the middle of the North Atlantic, me and him, Father Friendly and Father Fury, two complete strangers drunk on beer and God, talking complete nonsense. Exile is a hairy sea.
    “We are living the last days. I am saying this on my TV for over fourteen years. We are living the last days. But now I have the feeling that there are not so many days left,” Goodmoondoor says and burns his eyes into my face in that crazy preacher way, not letting go until he’s one hundred percent sure I have received the message.
    Looking away is like turning my face away from a bonfire.

CHAPTER 8
GODFELLAS
    05.16.2006
    “Good evening, dear friends, and welcome to our program. I am very happy to tell you that tonight we have a dear guest with us, and this is the reason we are speaking in English tonight. This is Father Friendly, visiting from our friends at CBN in America. He is a good friend of Pat Robertson, that you have seen here on Amen and the Sermon Channel. He has a very popular TV show in America. And he is one of the best known preachers in many states. A true Christian brother in the faith of the living God, Reverend David Friendly from Richmond, Virginia. Father Friendly, welcome.”
    “Thank you, Brother Goodmoondoor. It’s a pleasure to be with you here.”
    “I have to tell you that Father Friendly has a Yugoslavia…What do you call it?”
    “Accent.”
    “Yes. He has a Yugoslavia accent because he was teaching the word of Jesus over there in the time when they were Communist. Hallelujah! ”
    He almost hits me in the head as he throws his hands in the air, but I manage to step aside. We are standing behind a white lectern, with a blue curtain behind us and a messy TV studio in front of us. I count five people in the room. One man is standing behind a camera, a smiling Sickreader stands in a doorway, and an audience of three pious people is waiting for me to save their souls.
    “Communists don’t believe in God, Father Friendly?”
    “No. You’re absolutely right about that, brother Goodmoondoor. And this is the reason why they don’t exist anymore.”
    “Well. You can find some of them even today,” my preacher friend says with the funniest smile. It’s the smile of someone not too clever showing off his cleverness. It’s quite hilarious. I need all my strength not to laugh as I carry on:
    “Indeed. But they are in hiding! They are hiding in the darkness of their godless existence!” I try to speak with the preacher-man’s blind faith. “For they do not dare to come out into the light! The light of God. The light of Godness. The light of Goodness! The good of the light! We are here in Iceland, in the island of light, where God lets it shine long into the night. He lights up the night. He makes