The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

sky, for three whole weeks, I swallowed my pride and enrolled in an English class at some immigrant friendly evening school down in Tribeca. A seedy neon-lit room with scruffy plastic chairs was filled with dead-happy Day 15 Girls from the Philippines and a few Al-Qaeda members of the male sex, plus the Finnish-born teacher Kaari, a bony ugly-beauty with long blonde hair, that I could never decide was a Day 5 or a Day 25 type. At the end of the semester, I’d finally worked up my courage and raised my hand to ask the teacher if say…a certain man had been dating a certain woman for a certain period of time and at a certain moment she would reassure him that she’d never do married men…
    “It means that you should stop dating her,” went the verdict.
    And the class erupted. They fucking erupted with laughter, all the ever-smiling Filipinas and the bin Laden brothers as well. I strongly considered bringing my Uzi to the next lesson, but I guess I was just too thankful to this Kaari woman, who had raised my English level by twenty floors in three months. Seeing all her students die would probably have made her depressed.
    I owe my English to Aunt Jealousy. She helped me rise above my situation. Dikan and Co. are still stuck on ground level with their command of the English language. “Take me to car.” It did put me in a bit of an awkward situation (you don’t want to look this much more clever than your boss) and I tried to downplay my skills half the time. But Dikan saw through me and started using me as his interpreter in some of his bigger deals. I always got this bad feeling in my stomach when the Fingerlicker sat beside me in the Zagreb Samovar, sucking on his dead cigar and staring at me, while I explained our case to the Polish boys from Chicago. Dikan always seemed a bit suspicious of my rapid progress and acted like I learned English by secretly dating one of the Bush twins, spending my hit-free weekends in the West Wing, dining with the Head and Mrs. Head of the FBI.
    Little did he know it was only the result of my relentless research into Munita’s love life, a procedure that included some spy work as well, that brought no results, I’m ashamed to say.
    But by saying she would never do married men, Munita indicated that she was in fact “doing” unmarried men, and her use of the terrible do-word told me that she was doing them by the numbers. Munita was a dick grinder, “heading” for the top of the Trump Tower, equipped with look-at-me! jugs and a clipper cunt.
    I never mentioned any of this to her. And yes, I did keep on seeing her. I let her do me. I did her. But love was kept at bay, like a huge white cruise ship that’s too big to enter the harbor. Until now, I guess. And I don’t quite get it. She’s dead and suddenly I’m getting all sentimental about her. I should be happy to see her get the punishment she deserved. She simply went too far, all the way into my great apartment. Onto my fucking bathroom tiles.
    But probably she was forced to by the Talian Mobthrob. Her “punishment” was only meant to punish me. It was a TJ thing—Taliation Job. Done in the name of my sixty-six hits. Which one or ones? Doesn’t matter. It was bound to happen sooner or later. The master hitman of Manhattan, the triple six-packer, the cruel Croat, the one and only Toxic, had to be taken down. Or was it maybe one of our own? Niko? The why-you-callin’-me Niko? The doorman said Munita went upstairs with “some Italian looking guy.” He could just as well have been a Croat.
    I get it.
    They killed her. My friends and employers killed my girl. And now I have to mourn her. I didn’t know how much she meant to me, until now. She was not the worst, really. She brought me flowers almost every time she came over. She gave me the massage of my life. And every other week she would cook me her favorite dishes from her childhood in Lima—a shark or a sea bass ceviche or the simple and honest anticuchos , the Peruvian brochette, that always reminded me of our ćevapi .
    I fucking miss her.
    I can see now that her infamous sentence wasn’t so brutal after all. “You know I’d never do a married man,” only means that she would not do him if the opportunity arrived. She was using the future if-sense or whatever it’s called. But then again…if the opportunity arrived she would probably do an unmarried man….
    Aw. Fuck it. She’s dead now.
    I walk down the street, and suddenly I can see her inside