The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

thought.”
    “But I’ve never killed a hooker.”
    “What?”
    “I mean…a woman. I’ve never killed woman.”
    “Never killed a woman?”
    “No…well, yes, some people in the war were women, but that was not an issue.”
    “Not an issue?”
    “We were just ordered to shoot. It was like shooting deer. Shoot or be shot. That was our choice.”
    A pause. He takes a long, loud-breathing look at me. Then:
    “Do you know what you’ve done?”
    “Yes. I do.”
    “Do you regret it?”
    “Yes.”
    “You have killed people.”
    “Yes.”
    “You have taken into your hands the power of God.”
    “You mean…?”
    “And that is a sin. The sin of all sins.”
    “You mean, God…kills people, or?”
    “He creates and he kills, he reigns and he rules! You should obey and not betray! How does it feel?”
    “How does it feel, what?”
    “How does it feel TO KILL someone?”
    “It…it feels like…”
    “Yes?”
    “It feels like…preaching.”
    “What?”
    “Yeah. It makes you feel powerful. You’re in control.”
    “Bullshit. You think you’re in control, while you’re being controlled by…Who was the first?”
    “What?”
    “Who was your first victim?”
    “My first hit?”
    “Yes. Who was your first hit?”
    As quickly as a missile leaves an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, my mind shoots to the bottom of my list—through concrete floors and rusty iron hatches, all the way down to my beneathest basement where the dark is smelly and the smell is dark—breaking open an old moldy coffin lying in a damp and dusty corner.
    “My father,” I say.
    “Your father?”
    “Yes.”
    “You killed your father?”
    “Yes.”
    I killed my father. I probably should have mentioned this before.
    “You killed your father?”
    “Yes.”
    “You killed your own father?”
    “Yes. But nobody knows.”
    “Nobody knows?”
    “No. I didn’t tell anyone. Nobody saw it.”
    “Nobody saw it? God sees everything! Murder is murder, no matter if…and a father…a father is always a father. How could you do it? How in the bloody hell could you kill your own father?”
    “I…It was…”
    “Yes? It was what? Your hot blood chilled with ice from the Devil’s fridge?”
    “It was accidental.”
    I’ve never talked about this before, and the mere thought of it, especially in the presence of this guy, is enough to bring me to my knees. I kneel before him like a semi-naked knight in front of his white-gowned queen. She lets him feel her sword.
    “An accident? But you did kill him?”
    “Yes. But…”
    “But what?”
    “It was his fault.”
    “His fault?”
    “Yes, because…”
    I’m at the end of my battery. Like a dose of poison timed to go to work some fifteen years after it was consumed, my big secret suddenly takes hold of my body and knocks me over. All of a sudden, I’m lying at the feet of Torture.
    “What? Because of what?”
    “Because…”
    I’m taken with a coughing fit, mixed with a bawling I didn’t know I had in me. I must sound like a baby seal being beaten with a baseball bat. He listens to me for a while and then brings the scene to its conclusion.
    “You have killed your father. May God save your soul.”
    I can feel that he puts his bare foot on my quaking back, like a triumphant general on his fallen enemy. Somehow this gesture seems to calm my bawling a bit. But instead, I’m taken over with an incredibly strong feeling of hunger. An all-you-can-order, all-you-can-eat hunger. I want to run out in the church, up to the altar, and start gnawing away at the big wooden cross like a desperate horse.
    With my left ear I can feel a slight and gentle man-made wind. This either came from Torture’s back end, or it’s a breeze from his doing the sign of the cross over my hapless body.
    “May God save your soul,” he repeats. “If he can.”
    And give me something to eat. If he can.

CHAPTER 22
FATHER’S LAND
    05.31.2006
    So I exit the Gates of Hell, carrying the slim body of my dear father, and ring the huge Golden Doorbell. God lets me wait a while. I guess my application has to be approved by the Committee of Die Hard Cases before it reaches his eyes.
    Meanwhile Torture takes me over to his place, a huge white house on a hill close to his church, and puts me up in a window-free space in his basement, visited only by him and his wife. They tell me they have three kids. I can’t see them, nor can I hear them. Apparently they spend their days in silence, reading the