Out of respect, I had started humming “You Are Not Alone,” the perfect psalm for a mass grave. Still, I couldn’t sing the hand to rest. And after trying for the tenth time to get the fucking palm into the ground, I totally freaked and pulled out my knife, chopped the hand off with some effort, and then threw it away. And this was one of my worst war moments: as I was working on it with my knife, I thought I heard something beneath my feet. Something like a girl’s cry muffled by dirt.
“Nice nails,” I finally say, looking at Gunholder’s hands.
She looks at me as if she wants to bury them. In my face.
CHAPTER 14
FROG ON A COLD RED ROOF
My Balkan animal instinct was right. Instead of showing me the door, the preacher’s daughter put me up for the night, up in the attic. It’s pretty cold, but her sleeping bag is warm, plus the loft is a bit darker than the rest of the country. It only has two small windows: one in my corner and a rusty skylight in the middle of the roof. Sleeping up here is not only the preacher’s daughter’s way of punishing me for all my sins. I had to go up here because her brother Truster is her roommate for the time being. I wonder where he sleeps? In the birdhouse, maybe, out in the garden. We came to an agreement that despite his name he should be kept out of this. So I forbid myself to make a sound while he’s in the house. From midnight till dawn I play dead. “He’s working like crazy. He only comes home for sleeping,” his sister tells me. The perfect roommate. He works as a crane operator at some construction site.
“He doesn’t say much, does he?” I ask.
“Yeah. I know. He’s always been like that. And then it’s also his job… I mean, he’s used to spending the whole day in the air, alone, two hundred feet above ground. Plus all his co-workers are from Poland or Lithuania.”
Once Truster is back in the air, I’m allowed downstairs for some toilet work and breakfast. This type of exile is actually more fun than Friendly’s, because this is real exile: a hitman hiding in the hot girl’s attic. The best thing is that I don’t have to do any more acting shit. No more American priests or Polish painters. Though my body is not allowed out of this small house, I feel more free here than when I was running around town with a clergyman’s collar on God’s leash.
I’m Anne Frank online. Gunholder lends me her laptop so I can surf the digital seas. I spend the day digging up my past, looking for and reading war stories by my fellow soldiers. Darko Radovic is the heftiest blogger of them all, probably because he left both his legs in Knin. In our brigade we lost five lives, six legs, three arms, and some fingers. It’s sad to say, but my one-legged brothers still have to keep fighting for their lives. You can see them stumbling on their crutches through the streets of Zagreb or Split, asking for a kuna in their cup. Our government has forgotten all about them, and still its power rests on their dead legs. I was lucky not to lose any limbs to the Chetniks, but sometimes I ask myself if I would rather have lost both my legs instead of my father and brother. Wartime poses questions that peacetime cannot answer. So we’ll always have a new war.
On Darko’s weblog I find a photograph of myself in full gear, a smiling lunatic with an AK-47, on top of a captured Serbian tank back in ’95. The happy face of a murderer in the making. I really look stupid. I always hated the “Kodak Moment.” This all-American happy-go-lucky thing that forces you to smile into the eyes of the future that can only take you for an innocent imbecile who doesn’t know anything about anything, who only has killed two or three people, and yet he’s smiling like he just won an Olympic medal. Looks more like the Special Olympics to me.
I prefer mug shots.
I search too for Senka, my ex-girlfriend, the missing chapter of my life. Ever since the war ended I’ve been trying to track her down, without success. I owe her an oprosti.
Gunholder’s shift at the café starts at ten. “Have a nice day,” she says and leaves me with a smile that I keep warm until she comes back. At first I thought I heard her say, “Have an ice day.” But even she thinks ten in the morning is too early for sarcasm. My ice machine. The slut of my sleepless dreams. My prison guard, my priest. In the afternoons she works for the local music festival called Airways or Airwaves, doing phone calls and other type of secretary work. She’s on speaking terms with tons of pop-stars, some world famous celebrities you’ve never heard of.
“You ever had Creed up here?”
“Greed?”
Forget it. This is never going to work out.
She usually returns around seven or eight, always equipped with food, usually some Thai or Chinese takeout that she has to pay for. After dinner she usually puts on some Icelandic weirdo music, doing her best in introducing me to people like Mugison, Gus Gus or the black sounding Lay Low. I tell her that if she could arrange a gun for me, I could do wonders to the promotion of Icelandic music. Her laugh is slightly offended. But her curiosity is piqued. I watch her smoke while she keeps the questions coming like an intern in the Oval Office. “If some of your victims belonged to other ‘organizations’ they must have tried to kill you, right?” Right. “Have you ever known any of them, your victims?” You bet. She’s fascinated by my job. I finally have a fan.
“And do you remember them all, your victims, I mean?”
“The professional ones, yes.”
“But not the war ones?”
“No. The soldiers are all blurred, but I’m really proud of my hitman work. I always try to do a good job. ‘Victim first’ is my motto. I try to make it as easy for them as possible. Nearly all of them have died instantly. No time for regrets or anger or anything. It’s just biff! and you’re gone. Like turning off a machine. No pain, no nothing. They couldn’t have asked for a better service. I always prepare everything perfectly: the timing, the place, the angle, everything. And I’ve studied the human body like a doctor. Where to aim for the quickest result and stuff like that. If this were a category at the Olympics, I’d be the Mark Spitz of the killing world.”
“And what’s the most difficult thing about it?”
“To hit, of course. To hit the guy in the head, the heart, or the butt, if you find yourself in that position. But in that case you have to make sure the bullet travels straight up his spine. Butt shots are really angle-sensitive. It’s like playing pool.”
“So you have to like… practice?”
“Sure. You have to be in good shape. I had to give up cocaine because of it. You need a steady heart for this kind of work.”
“Wow. And you keep count of them? The dead ones?” she says with big blue eyes. I got her in perfect Lewinsky mode.
“Yeah. Well. I don’t really count them. You sort of remember them. It’s a bit like, I mean, you remember all the guys you’ve slept with, right?”
“Well, I’ve tried to forget some of them,” she says with a sexy grin.
I can’t resist.
“How many in all?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t count them. Forty maybe.”
Slut.
“Forty?”
“You think that’s a lot? My friend has done a hundred and forty or something.”
There we have it. Tarantino has 139 fuck-in-laws in Iceland. He better update his Christmas card list.
“And you’ve done sixty-seven?” she continues.
“Girls? No, you mean hits? Yes. Sixty-seven. Sixty-seven suckers down. Sixty-seven pigs in the oven.”
“And you really remember all of them?”