The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

the hand from the mass grave in ADV. It was a girl’s hand, the hand of a teenage girl, and it had those same long nails. And as we were trying to finish the grave, it always stuck out from the dirt. We tried hammering it with our shovels and jumping on top of it, with no success. It always popped up again—this chubby, white girl’s hand with long green nails. And it looked so ridiculous. It did not fit the circumstances; it just didn’t belong in a mass grave. A mass grave was a thing of the past, something that you associated with World War Two or whatever. People in mass graves were old women with dirty headscarves and poor peasant kids dressed in worn out clothes and wooden shoes. And here was this hand, waving to us from the goddamn grave, that was more like a graveyard, really, and it was so fucking modern. It was so very much a today’s hand . You could almost see that two hours ago it had been pushing the Play button on a Walkman with a Michael Jackson tape inside it.
    Out of respect, I had started humming “You Are Not Alone,” the perfect psalm for a mass grave. Still, I couldn’t sing the hand to rest. And after trying for the tenth time to get the fucking palm into the ground, I totally freaked and pulled out my knife, chopped the hand off with some effort, and then threw it away. And this was one of my worst war moments: as I was working on it with my knife, I thought I heard something beneath my feet. Something like a girl’s cry muffled by dirt.
    “Nice nails,” I finally say, looking at Gunholder’s hands.
    She looks at me as if she wants to bury them. In my face.

CHAPTER 14
FROG ON A COLD RED ROOF
    05.22.2006
    My Balkan animal instinct was right. Instead of showing me the door, the preacher’s daughter put me up for the night, up in the attic. It’s pretty cold, but her sleeping bag is warm, plus the loft is a bit darker than the rest of the country. It only has two small windows: one in my corner and a rusty skylight in the middle of the roof. Sleeping up here is not only the preacher’s daughter’s way of punishing me for all my sins. I had to go up here because her brother Truster is her roommate for the time being. I wonder where he sleeps? In the birdhouse, maybe, out in the garden. We came to an agreement that despite his name he should be kept out of this. So I forbid myself to make a sound while he’s in the house. From midnight till dawn I play dead. “He’s working like crazy. He only comes home for sleeping,” his sister tells me. The perfect roommate. He works as a crane operator at some construction site.
    “He doesn’t say much, does he?” I ask.
    “Yeah. I know. He’s always been like that. And then it’s also his job…I mean, he’s used to spending the whole day in the air, alone, two hundred feet above ground. Plus all his co-workers are from Poland or Lithuania.”
    Once Truster is back in the air, I’m allowed downstairs for some toilet work and breakfast. This type of exile is actually more fun than Friendly’s, because this is real exile: a hitman hiding in the hot girl’s attic. The best thing is that I don’t have to do any more acting shit. No more American priests or Polish painters. Though my body is not allowed out of this small house, I feel more free here than when I was running around town with a clergyman’s collar on God’s leash.
    I’m Anne Frank online. Gunholder lends me her laptop so I can surf the digital seas. I spend the day digging up my past, looking for and reading war stories by my fellow soldiers. Darko Radovic is the heftiest blogger of them all, probably because he left both his legs in Knin. In our brigade we lost five lives, six legs, three arms, and some fingers. It’s sad to say, but my one-legged brothers still have to keep fighting for their lives. You can see them stumbling on their crutches through the streets of Zagreb or Split, asking for a kuna in their cup. Our government has forgotten all about them, and still its power rests on their dead legs. I was lucky not to lose any limbs to the Chetniks, but sometimes I ask myself if I would rather have lost both my legs instead of my father and brother. Wartime poses questions that peacetime cannot answer. So we’ll always have a new war.
    On Darko’s weblog I find a photograph of myself in full gear, a smiling lunatic with an AK-47, on top of a captured Serbian tank back in ’95. The happy face of a murderer in the making. I really look stupid. I always hated