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  THE HITMAN’S GUIDE TO HOUSECLEANING

  THE HITMAN’S GUIDE TO HOUSECLEANING

  HALLGRIMUR HELGASON

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2008 by Hallgrimur Helgason

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  First published by AmazonCrossing in 2012.

  Published by AmazonCrossing

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61109-139-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2011913741

  for Barbara Taylor

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1: TOXIC

  CHAPTER 2: THE FUCK-UP

  CHAPTER 3: ICELANDAIR

  CHAPTER 4: “FATHER FRIENDLY”

  CHAPTER 5: GUNHOLDER

  CHAPTER 6: LILLIPUT ISLAND

  CHAPTER 7: FATHER FURY

  CHAPTER 8: GODFELLAS

  CHAPTER 9: TORTURE

  CHAPTER 10: MOJA ŠTIKLA

  CHAPTER 11: TADEUSZ

  CHAPTER 12: MR. MAACK

  CHAPTER 13: MURDER & KILLING INC.

  CHAPTER 14: FROG ON A COLD RED ROOF

  CHAPTER 15: ICELANDIC ARMS

  CHAPTER 16: LOVE IS IN THE FRIDGE

  CHAPTER 17: THE HOWLING HITMAN

  CHAPTER 18: MORNING OF THE DEAD

  CHAPTER 19: THE AFTERLIFE

  CHAPTER 20: TORTURE THERAPY

  CHAPTER 21: THE GATES OF HELL

  CHAPTER 22: FATHER’S LAND

  CHAPTER 23: MADE IN ICELAND

  CHAPTER 24: HARDWORK HOTEL

  CHAPTER 25: GRANNY’S

  CHAPTER 26: THE MEAT MAN

  CHAPTER 27: LAVA OF LOVE

  CHAPTER 28: BED OF ROSES, BED OF MOSS

  CHAPTER 29: THE KAUNAS CONNECTION

  CHAPTER 30: SCHMAU-WAYISH

  CHAPTER 31: ICE-ROCK

  CHAPTER 32: DETOXED

  CHAPTER 33: TJ TIME

  CHAPTER 34: BOK

  CHAPTER 35: THE SERBIAN ENTRY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  TOXIC

  05.15.2006

  My mother named me Tomislav, and my father was a Bokšić. After my first week in the US, I’d become Tom Boksic. Which then led to Toxic.

  The thing I am today.

  I often wonder if it was me who poisoned my name or the name that poisoned me. Either way, I bring danger. At least, that’s what Munita says. My darling explosive, she’s addicted to danger. Munita was living in Peru until her family got killed in a terrorist bombing. Then she moved to New York and found a job on Wall Street. It so happened that her first day of work was 9/11. On our first trip to Croatia together, she witnessed two killings. I have to admit that one of them was by my own hand, but the other one was totally accidental. I thought it was quite a romantic scene, actually. We were having dinner in Mirko’s restaurant when the guy sitting at the table next to us got a bullet through his brain. Some of his blood splattered into Munita’s glass of wine. I didn’t tell her. She was having red anyway.

  She’s not crazy about violence, she says, but I still think she’s drawn to me because of my toxic nature. Bombing is the basis of our relationship; the sex is always explosive. My Munita is a body-girl and she gets noticed. Men always look her up and down. Like many from Lazy America, she is short, and some people have called her fat, but those people haven’t talked much after that. When she walks down the street I can hear her breasts moving about Jug-jug, jug-jug. My favorite sound in America. If she’s wearing her stiff orange shirt, others can hear it too. When I first saw her I had the feeling I had seen her before. Before we get married I will ask her if she’s ever acted in a porn video or if I saw her on an Internet thumbnail.

  What makes my Munita Bonita perfect for me is the fact that her family is dead. There is no mother in-law, no brother in-law, no Thanksgiving dinners, kids’ birthday parties, or weddings to attend, which would mean standing unprotected out on some stupid lawn, in the screaming sunshine, with fifty people at your back.

  Yes, Munita Rosales is drawn to men of the gun. Before me she was dating some Talian guy from Long Island. (For us “Italian” became “Talian” after Niko accidentally shot the “I” off a sign above one of their restaurants.) His CV was much shorter than mine, but I guess he could still be called a colleague. I’m what they call in our language a plačeni ubojica. In New York they call it a contract killer, or a hitman. Ever since I arrived in New York six years ago, I’ve been keeping the funeral homes busy. I even thought about making a deal with one of them and told Dikan he should secretly buy one. That way we could make more money off our dead victims. Hit and run to the bank.

  Let me tell you about my job. During the week I work as a waiter in the Zagreb Samovar, our beautiful restaurant on East 21st Street. The word “waiter” fits perfectly well since most of my time is spent waiting for the next job, which can be quite boring. The Balkan animal, which is my soul, is always hungry for prey. I get restless if three months go by without firing a gun. My slowest year was 2002: only two hits and one miss. I still regret that one. In this business, missing the target can be deadly. You don’t want some wounded psycho out there shopping around for your goodbye bullet. People tend to get a bit upset if they notice you’re trying to kill them. But let me assure you, my miss of 2002 became my first hit of 2003. Nowadays, I never waste a bullet.

  You see, I’m what they call a triple six-packer. I’ve been told this is a Manhattan record. Some Talian guy named Perrosi became a double six-packer back in the eighties, when John Gotti was king of Queens, but no one has ever gone triple until Toxic came along. Actually, I think the Talians are not the same as they once were. When they’re shooting more movies about you than you are shooting people, it means you’re past the bill. In twenty years’ time we will have our own show, like The Sopranos: The Sliškos. But then I will have become like Shaking Trigger, high on Viagra with a woman’s hairdo.

  I tell Munita that being a six-packer is really all about the environment. I’m an environmentalist. I don’t want to add an unnecessary gunshot to the already noisy city. I told her this on our third date after she had asked me for the third time what I did for a living. It took me four weeks of phone calls and one quick break-in to get her on the fourth.

  Sorry, I forget. Doing a six-pack means that six consecutive bullets produce a funeral. Six bullets, six funerals, weeping widows, flowers, and all.

  With a record like mine, Dikan should have promoted me long ago, but the sucker is stubborn like an ass without a hole. Fucking Fingerlicker. That’s the nickname we gave him because he sucks his short, fat fingers at the end of every meal. But all he ever says is, “Toxic is good waiter. He never misses an order.”

  I will be pleased to follow Bilič’s order when it comes and put an end to Fingerlicker.

  We try to keep up our LPP, or Lowest Possible Profile, as we do our business. This means I usually try to settle the case in the privacy of the person’s hotel room, his car, or his home. Preferably without any witnesses. If this doesn’t work out, we often invite the victim to our restaurant. The “last supper” joke is customary. After dinner I bring him the bill for the whole table, a sum that is so high that they always prefer paying with their life. We have a special room in the back that we take them to. The Red Room, we call it, even though it’s green
.

  As you might have guessed, there are no regular customers at the Zagreb Samovar.

  By the way, the name of the place is totally stupid since a “samovar” is a Russian tea-machine and has nothing to do with hrvatska culture, but Dikan thinks it’s really clever. “Acting stupid is best disguise,” he likes to say.

  Though I’m still waiting for that fucking promotion I can’t really complain. The money is good and food, of course, is excellent. I have my great apartment on Wooster and Spring, a location Munita is willing to fuck for, and I love Noisy York, though I miss my fucking fatherland every fucking day. But earlier this year I struck cable gold and found I could watch HRT and Hajduk Split on my flat screen at home. My mother calls once a year to ask when I’m going back to studies. This is Croatian slang for “the money’s up.” As soon as I hang up, I send her $2000 through the Internet. Good for another year.

  She lives alone with my fat little sister. Both my brother and father got killed in the war. I come from a family of hunters. My grandfather was Tito’s personal gamekeeper. Tito was the head of my ex-fatherland, Yugoslavia. It passed away shortly after he did, like a sad old widow. Tito loved bears. Especially dead ones. I never had the chance to shoot one, but when I was a boy my father often took me boar hunting. “The wild boar is just like a woman,” he said. “You have to pretend that you don’t want to shoot it. So we just wait here.” He was a big waiter. Just like me.

  I see myself as a hunter. I shoot pigs for a living.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE FUCK-UP

  05.15.2006

  But now I’m in trouble. For the first time in my spotless career. I’m riding in the company car, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, with Manhattan at my back, Munita in my ear, her body on my mind, and my eyes on driver Radovan’s piggy neck-back. A bullet would have a hard time with this head. The afternoon Manhattan sun throws skyscraper shadows down on the river’s surface.

  “Oh, baby. I will miss you,” Munita whispers from behind her desk on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. Two years ago she started on the ground floor. And yet she never did The Apprentice. That’s my Munita. You can’t dislike her. Her voice is half Hindu but the accent is all Peru. Her mother was from Bombay, and she’s got that Indian olive oil skin, a softwear that can keep you going all the way to the North Pole in a golf cart with President Bush at the steering wheel.

  “Me, too,” I answer, one more fucking time not totally sure whether this is 100 percent perfect English that I’m speaking. But I guess I’m right. I will miss myself. I will miss my great life in the great city.

  I’m going into exile. Disappearing for a while, six months at least. My plane ticket reads: New York – Frankfurt – Zagreb. Signed by Dikan. I will come crawling back under my mother’s kitchen table with a gun in my mouth. I fucked up. Or somebody fucked me. Hit #66 was a miss. Don’t get me wrong. I got the bullet into the guy’s head safe and sound, but there was some serious aftermath. The mustached Polish guy turned out to be a mustached FBI guy. What was supposed to be a bright and sunny murder in broad daylight became a nightmare. I took him to the trash dump over in Queens and put him away in a heap of fake Levi’s jeans and then covered his ugly face with an old Pepsi Max sunbrella. On my way back to the car, I noticed some friends of his had arrived too late for the coffin-free funeral. My old Croatian heart skipped from waltz to death metal, and I turned quickly around. For the next ten minutes I ran like a hurdler at the Obese Olympics through the waste of some six thousand nuclear New York families, all the time heading for the river, and finally sought shelter in a rusty old container full of ancient teddy bears that, strangely enough, smelled of grilled cheese. The Federal Bastards sealed off the area, so I ended up spending the night with them. It was a sleepless night of Manhattan skyline, cold container, and smelly bears. For the empty stomach, the smell of food is like perfume to a boner.

  In the morning hours it was a bit lovely to see the rooms in the United Nations Building light up, one after the other—their reflection in the East River scrambled by the running water. It was way before sunrise. I guess every nation on earth has its own office in the building, and the lights in each room are programmed to go on at the same time the sun rises in the country it belongs to. I watched 156 sunrises that night. Before number 157 broke, I was in the river. The ice-cold stream brought me down to a different dumpsite. It was more like a Web site, actually, full of net-like lines and cables.

  In the mouth of the Midtown Tunnel, I found a cab. The driver had a problem with the fact that my clothes were all wet, but I took out my gun and dried them in an instant.

  Toxic is traveling under the name of Igor Illitch. I was born in Smolensk now, in 1971. I’ve been born all over the place. Once I held a German passport that gave me a pretty happy childhood in the then-capitol Bonn. I even made the effort, on my way through the Rhine valley, to concoct some idyllic childhood memories. Father Dieter worked as a janitor at the Russian embassy, and mother Ilse was a chef at the American embassy. Every night was cold war, with me being Berlin, a wall between my eyes. Though I’m no actor; I don’t mind getting a new life once in a while. In fact, I’ve always enjoyed that part of my work. You get a break from yourself. Except for my weekend as a Serb back in ’99. Then I really felt like killing the man I had become.

  But even though they’ve had me born in different cities, they usually use the same year, the right one: 1971. I was born the day before Hajduk finally won the championship after some twenty years of waiting. My football-fanatic father believed I was a good-luck charm and called me “Champ.”

  The highway snakes its way through Brooklyn. I look at all the advertisements with almost-tears in my eyes. I just don’t want to leave this town. We pass a big blue billboard: “Eyewitness News at Seven – WABC-TV New York.” Three days in a row my face was there, “…known in Mob circles simply as ‘Toxic’.” But it was never more than a flash. No big story, like the ones they do on the mass killers. Those guys become household names in one day while the honest and hardworking men and women of the assassination industry are only mentioned in passing. The nation that measures everything in money sucks up to amateurs instead of us professionals. I guess I will never fully understand this country. I love New York, but I don’t get the rest.

  The suburbs quickly thin out, and soon we enter the land of liftoffs and landings. Igor’s passport sits in my breast pocket, like a Gucci bag made in China. Behind it my heart beats the drum of doubt.

  “Doviđenja,” Radovan says outside the International Departures Terminal. I forbid him to follow me inside. His sunglasses scream for the FBI like a gay on a hot tin roof. Stupidity is no disguise for the stupid. I shaved off all my hair this morning and tried my best to dress Russian: black leather jacket, the ugliest jeans in the closet, and Puma Putin running shoes.

  Before I left, I turned around in the doorway and fingerkissed my flat screen goodbye. Munita asked me if she could take care of my place while I was away, but I told her no. We don’t have thrust-trust yet. The sex bomb won’t tick for six months without exploding, and I don’t want some Peruvian prick drying his dirty after-sex-sweat on my Prada towels.

  The check-in goes smoothly. A shallow blonde with deep dimples tells me not to worry about my bags. I will see them again in Zagreb. Seems they have direct NYC-Zagreb flights for luggage only. Immigration requires self-control. I put on my Igor expression while the officer admires the Chinese handiwork. Then two over-proud security guys make me deliver phone, wallet, and dimes. Jacket, belt, and shoes. In the middle of my coin-cash, they spot an object that makes my heart skip from samba to rock. Turns out my ugliest jeans contain a lone bullet, a beautiful golden 9mm from the Browning Hi-Power semi-automatic that Davor presented me with on my arrival in New York.

  “What is this? That’s a bullet! No?” a small Long Island Latino woman in uniform asks me in her horrible mall accent.

  “Oh…Yeah. That’s a…That’s a souvenir,” I hit back.

/>   “A souvenir?”

  “Eh…Yes. It…It was removed from my brain,” I say, trying to look like the thing did permanent damage to it.

  She buys it and lets me go after giving me a full-body massage.

  I’ll never get used to this no-gun traveling thing. It’s not in a man’s nature to cross countries or oceans unarmed. Fucking 9/11 makes me really want to shoot bin Laden. But I can’t, since I’m not allowed to carry the gun on the plane.

  I’m starting to look forward to Zagreb when two Feds suddenly appear and make their way towards the people standing at the gate, tickets in hand. I’m the last in line. There is no denying it’s them. I can smell undercover all the way from Jersey, like a dog in heat. They’re sporting the usual H&M jackets and sunglasses, all stitched up in the classic FBI hairdo straight out of DC. The look is sort of “official casual,” quite shiny and a bit curly, like Michael Keaton’s in Multiplicity.

  I immediately duck for cover behind waiting passengers, pick up my bag, and start walking away from the gate, in the opposite direction of the undercover agents. Doviđenja, Zagreb. My heart’s pounding, but I do not allow myself to look back. Don’t ever look back on danger! Mother used to say. I walk for some six fucking minutes, my shaved skull turning into a fucking fountain on the way. Airport hallways are endless. People stare at me like I was carrying Saddam’s balls in my bag. Finally I spot the everyman sign and take a swift turn to the left. Inside the bathroom I catch my breath and dry my head. While they dry their hands, three businessmen look at me as if I were a Russian arms dealer waiting for a customer. Finally, I set back out on the open sea. Not clear. I immediately hurry back inside the bathroom as I spot one of the Michael Keatons. I know he didn’t see me, though. He was walking by.