The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

that car, that Japanese car parked over there at the other side, in the neon bright Icelandic night. She waves and smiles, just like she always did when she came to pick me up in her small Honda. What about the car? Her apartment? Her job? She has no relatives. I should probably call her friend Wendy and tell her…
    Suddenly the big damp cloud over Reykjavik reaches my eyes. They fill up like a woolen sweater with blood from a shot wound, and suddenly I’m crying as if it was a heart attack or something. I can’t fucking control it. It just comes. I haven’t cried since we lost that game in the semifinals against France, in Paris ’98. Fucking Thuram scored twice. I have to rest against a small SUV that sits silently in its parking space and bears with my breakdown like a white army horse.
    An elderly lady comes walking around the corner with her old dog on a long leash. It’s that early morning stroll. I look up and our eyes meet. I must look like a bum weeping for his bottle. Still, she looks at me as if she was used to seeing New York mobsters sobbing on her street at five in the morning. She’s a Day 365 Girl, wearing a tight turtleneck and some slim-fitting pants. Gray hair, white Nikes. She makes me think of the Manhattan ladies you see on the Upper East Side, going from breakfast to lunch, with the final hair-do on their heads while wearing brand new kid’s shoes on their feet. As if they wanted their bodies to represent their life’s story, from childhood to coffin.
    I don’t know what I’m doing, but my hand does: Suddenly it goes up. My right hand raises itself, clearly trying to stop the woman. She won’t stop, but her dog does. It scuttles out between two cars and out on the street, over to my side of the white SUV. The slim, almost athletic lady remains on the pavement pulling back the long leash that must be tangled up in the bumper by now. Her gray hair shakes as she orders the dog back, but the little one is a sucker for sadness: it sniffs my tears, the dark wet spots in the asphalt, like some crazy addict in rehab spotting cocaine on his daily walk in the woods. I look up and before I know it I’ve asked its owner a question that surprises me even more than my gesture.
    “Excuse me. Do you know if there is a church around here?”

CHAPTER 18
MORNING OF THE DEAD
    05.23.2006
    Church is closed. It stands right on The Pond, dressed in armor and painted green. Swans and ducks sail about the still water. Some seem to be sleeping, with their heads hidden beneath a wing.
    Quack, quack.
    I take a seat on the church steps. A few seagulls fly overhead, hurling abuse at me like drunken angels. Gun calls my new cell two times. I don’t answer. When mourning your spouse, the mistress can’t help. A sleepy-eyed city worker comes driving along the pavement in a small orange machine with a disco light spinning on top. The loud monster is equipped with rotating brooms and an elephant’s trunk he uses for sucking up litter: it all looks like a loud animal feeding on trash. The driver passes without looking at me. Oh, man. If you could only clean up the path of my life.
    It’s a fucking graveyard. Since finishing school I haven’t been doing much else except adding crosses to it. There is a stone in my conscience, like the one people get in their kidneys, a stone the size of a kidney. I get up and start walking. I walk into the city center, following the trash-monster.
    I met Munita in Arturo’s Restaurant, the coal oven cabin on Houston and Thompson. She waited on me. I waited for her. I came back seven times before she allowed me to put a smile on her face. So much for Mrs. Dick Grinder. I had to order seven different pizzas before I could figure out the code of her heart. It was black olives, red onion, and arugula. Arugula. For months I ate nothing but arugula burgers and arugula pasta. Three months later we had our first kiss. It was a slow process, like passing a heavy bill across Capitol Hill. Not really my hunting style.
    I still don’t get why she played so hard-to-get with me, while the unmarried guys at Trump Tower only had to push the elevator button. Every three or four weeks she moved up a floor. No. She didn’t do The Apprentice . But she did everybody else.
    I’m standing on the main square in Iceland at 5:02 am, like a death row criminal waiting for his executioner to arrive, plus the angry mob. But nobody’s here. Nothing but the low simmer of the orange animal disappearing