The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

roadside, beside the car.
    “You haven’t thought about that?” she asks.
    “No, I mean, you have to think of my situation. I only take one day at a time.”
    “What about MY SITUATION?” she says in a rather harsh way and then takes a quick draw from her half-burned cigarette, with shaking lips.
    I have nothing to say. I didn’t know this girl could cry. The bird is back, screaming at us. At me.
    “I’m sorry, Gun…Gunnhildur.”
    “What do you think this is?”
    “You and me? It’s been the hottest summer of my life.”
    My shoulders shake from the cold.
    “Really?”
    “Yes. The best summer I’ve…”
    “What’s the matter then? You’re still not sure?”
    “I mean, Gun. You’re a nice girl and I’m a…”
    “You’re a great guy.”
    I am?
    “You’re a fucking great guy. And now you’re telling me that…”
    She can’t finish. Only her cigarette. That she throws away before walking over to the driver’s side of the car.
    “So you want to…?” I try to say.
    “YES!” she screams, opens the car, gets inside, and slams the door.
    I’m left standing alone between the car and Iceland, holding two half empty beer bottles. She seems to be serious about us.
    Am I?
    A brand new looking SUV approaches from the east. It slows down as it passes by. I’m faced with a Talian looking couple in their fifties. Some gray haired lovers with a heavy tan, wearing dark blue windbreakers over yellow polo shirts. Dead happy bastards. They’re smiling so hard that you have to suspect that the site of the world’s first outdoor parliament must be hosting an outdoors senior group sex festival this weekend. The woman in the passenger’s seat even has her arm around her partner who, come to think of it, looks a bit like a retired hitman.

CHAPTER 29
THE KAUNAS CONNECTION
    08.06.2006
    We drive back in silence. Even the radio is quiet. I gaze out the window thinking about my two NY bags that now have been circling the baggage carousel in Zagreb for eighty days in a row. The midnight sunset is mostly over, but a few clouds maintain their red glow out on the horizon, hovering like a flock of zeppelins over the glacier that tips the peninsula called Snow Fall’s Ness or something similar to that. Closer, the city of Reykjavik spreads in front of us like a desperate lady begging me to love her. It kind of reminds you of LA at night: flat, vast, and full of lights. The tower of the impossibly named church that stands on the hill in the middle of town is the only thing that rises above the horizon, a dark dildo against the pink sky.
    Gun drives into my dead neighborhood of furniture stores and fugee camps and stops the car at an empty traffic circle close to my cell. I tell her I’ll call her. She answers by making her lips disappear inside her mouth. It makes her look a bit like her mother.
    It’s about three in the morning when I check into the hotel. The Seven Elevens are fast asleep, as well as their dirty steel-toed shoes at the top of the staircase. From the end of the hallway, I hear the low murmur of TV. Balatov’s out in the kitchen, sitting at the table, wearing only his dingy underpants and still-white undershirt, plus a pair of black socks. He’s as hairy as a gorilla. It’s even hard to see were his socks come to an end and leg hair takes over. He’d need a truckload of “saving cream” for a full body shave. On the screen some stupid actor pretends to be a gunman, holding his weapon like an amateur, looking very much like the pope with a plunger.
    “Fuck white night. I want black,” murmurs the voice between the two hairy shoulders.
    For the first time since meeting him, I almost don’t dislike him. I grab a beer from the fridge and join him at the kitchen table. I need a friend.
    “What about the Icelandic girls? You don’t like them?” I ask him.
    “No Iceland girl in Granny Club.”
    New friend has limitation.
    We watch for a while. It’s one of those “Everybody freeze!” films. I guess every second movie made on this planet has someone like me for a main character, or the main character spends the whole fucking movie going after a guy like me, and always succeeds just before the credits start rising like spirits from the bad guy’s grave. The Mafia hitman is one of the most popular heroes of our time. Then why can’t I live like the actor who plays me, in a Hollywood mansion with a Nobel prize-swimming pool and palm trees all around it? A handful of servants arguing in