The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

Bible. Just like me. Every morning the preacher-man picks three chapters I’m supposed to read that day. “Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and forbearance and longsuffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance?”
    It’s Torture Therapy: Step 3.
    Torture’s secret weapon is his wife, Hanna. She’s just as classic-looking as him: a burly woman with soft skin, nice leathery wrinkles, a biblical bust, and a pleasant voice. She moves silently about the house, wearing colorless T-shirts and long skirts, with long graying hair like a horse tail and not a stitch of makeup. If there were a TV show called Miss Mother Earth , she’d be visited with lights and lenses by the all-American camera crew. One has the feeling that her hair grows a foot a day and that she cuts it every night before going to bed. And that every morning she milks her breasts, putting what the household needs in the fridge, but donating the rest to the milk fund of CWCC, Career Women with Carbon Chests. She speaks English with an accent that goes a bit deeper than the Icelandic one. As if she belonged to some hot spring nation. She’s more like the mountain behind the man than “the woman behind the man.” She is the Christian country of care that her husband, the eyes-on-fire ambassador, represents in his clumsy way.
    Hanna’s big drawback is her incredibly bad breath, which doesn’t really go with her incredibly good vibes. It probably stems from the biblical amount of frustration she’s had to swallow over the years. It can’t be easy being married to Torture.
    Still, if she was the only woman on our platoon and we were stuck in the mountains for a month, I’d start dreaming about her on day seven.
    Breakfast is a slice of homemade bread that I kiss before eating. And a glass of milk that I keep hoping is homemade as well. Lunch is exactly the same, but dinner is always meat. A lamb, a calf, or a foal. Some animal that Torture has slaughtered up in his garage, I’m sure. I’m back in the Old Testament. In the care of Sarah, wife of Abraham. My room has no windows, my bed is hard, my book is the Bible, my days are simple, and my nights are getting more and more peaceful.
    Therapy seems to be working.
    I’ve done away with a hundred hits. Only one remains. Every day my glasses-wearing guardian angel comes downstairs and listens for half an hour. His lust for violence is biblical. His crazy eyes have calmed a bit though. Or I have grown accustomed to them. He informs me about his outside-the-box methods.
    “I have the black belt in both judo and karate. This is where I come from. I didn’t meet God until I met my wife, when I was thirty-five. I always say that I married God,” the bearded man says with a gentle laugh. I think I’m starting to understand his talk about circumcising the heart. It’s probably crucial when you’re married to God. He laughs a little more, adding: “I was lucky.” Somehow his laughter sounds a bit learned. As if he had learned it at Preaching School, to spice up his speeches with short chuckles here and there. “No. I’m only putting my knowledge and expertise to the service of the Lord. We have a saying in Icelandic that you have to fight evil with evil.”
    By going through the disaster of my life, calmly and carefully, I’m slowly trying to bury it. Trying to bury my father properly. It’s like this artist once told me in some dingy little diner on the East Side: He only painted the picture he did not want to see ever again. “It’s just takin’ out the trash, man.” He was going through a tough divorce, he said, and only painted his ex-wife. Big horrible nudes.
    For fifteen years I have carried this thing inside me. For fifteen years my dead father has been the unborn child I’ve been carrying in my womb. I guess that’s why I’ve always been on the fat side. By finally giving birth to it I can possibly stop living like an ostrich stuffed with shame. The delivery was painful as hell, but I had this great midwife: an Icelandic priest in a karate outfit. The newborn baby looks like this:
    It was at the end of my first week in uniform. We’d volunteered for the big offensive out east, me, my father, and Dario, shortly after the fall of Vukovar. Our assignment was to cross the river Vuka.
    But they didn’t want a whole family out in the front lines so they told me to stay behind. “Keep post and shoot every sucker you see!” I spent the cold night