“So, what are you going to talk about tonight? What text are you going to talk from?”
“Eh… Tonight?” I ask.
“Yes. You will be special guest of my show tonight.”
“On TV?”
“Yes!” he laughs with all his crooked teeth, almost like a half-wit.
“Uh… I see. I thought I…”
I’m saved by my mobile. The screen reads “Niko” and without thinking I greet him in Croatian: “Bok.” Niko is Dikan’s personal assistant. The Number Two Man. He asks me where I am, and I tell him the inconceivable truth, stopping short of the fact that I’m sitting in a Christian All-Star vehicle on my way to my first TV mass. He tells me that me landing up here is not so bad after all (does he even know that Iceland is a country?) since things are getting serious after the big fuck-up. “You fucked up real bad, Toxic,” he says. The Fed-ups, as he calls them, have already been to the restaurant, and they’ve also broken into my place. They even visited my mother this morning, in her small hardware shop in the heart of Split, and broke her arm. Dikan’s balls are boiling, Niko says. “If you are in this fucking Iceland then stay there!” he screams. “Don’t go to Zagreb or Split and don’t come here! Just stay where you are and do the LPP!”
As mentioned, that’s short for Lowest Possible Profile. I wonder if Goodmoondoor’s TV show fits into that category.
As I hang up my mobile, Sickreader turns towards me again and asks what language I just used.
“It’s Croatian,” I say.
“Oh? So you speak Croatian?”
“Yes, we have some Croatian people in our church.”
“Where are you from, in the beginning?” the Good Moon driver asks.
“In the beginning we were all God’s children.” I’m too damn good. “But if you are asking about my accent, it’s an acquired one, if you can say so. I was a missionary for many years in the former republic of Yugoslavia.”
“Oh, really?” they both say.
“Yes. Spreading the good word of God in a communist state. That was some tough shit, man. I mean, tough holy shit. And being American over there, man, that was plain suicide. I had to take on another name and get rid of my American accent completely. They called me Tomislav. Tomislav Bokšić. Nowadays everyone thinks I’m from over there. But no. I’m one hundred percent American. I even have Clay Aiken CDs at home. In fact, the Friendly family has been in Virginia since the twelfth century.” I guessed this would be called overacting. “Excuse me, since the eighteenth century.”
They take it all in with a smile. There is a beat—along with my heartbeat, straight out of some suspense film score—before the woman asks:
“How old are you, Father Friendly?”
“I’m… I was born in sixty-five. That makes me… uh… forty.”
“So you have been very young when you were in….”
“In Yugoslavia? Oh, yes. I’m deeply marked by it. I had some really tough times over there.”
It’s a bright and early May morning. I mean, an early morning in early May, and the sun is about to rise from behind the mountains ahead. Their sky has no clouds at all, and on the left-hand side the ocean keeps the waves below its gray-green surface. Still the scene looks just as cold as it is. The arctic May looks like a Midwest March. There are some vacant houses scattered along the coastline. “Summerhouses,” my hosts inform me. OK. So they do have summer up here.
The flight lasted five hours, and the time difference is about the same: a whole night has passed from the restroom scene at JFK. Killing Friendly was my first manual murder since the mustached kid in Knin. I used my hands, a trick I learned from Comrade Prizmić, the oldest one in our platoon, the WWII veteran with the big nostrils and absent cheeks. “It’s just like blowing out a candle,” he used to say. “It all depends on position and speed. Man is wax. Life is flame. Blow out his light and he’s dead.” Good old Prizmić. They cut the breasts off his wife and made him eat them.
There is a sticker on the back of the driver’s seat. It’s in English. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20)”
Woe, man. Finally the six o’clock sun breaks out from the sharp mountain edge. Like a bright chicken from a blue egg. The road lights up.
“We drive the road of light!” Goodmoondoor says and turns towards me with a big, happy smile. “The road of light!”
CHAPTER 5
GUNHOLDER
They want me to stay in their house. “We never let our guest stay at hotel. Our home is your home,” Goodmoondoor assures me. I thank him. It’s a small suburban villa on two shiny floors, in a neighborhood called Guard the Beer, or something like that, situated between the city center and the airport. Therefore I still haven’t seen the famous Reykjavik that I read about on the plane: “the hottest city in Europe, the capital of cool.” Apparently this is where Tarantino goes if he wants to play up his celebrity status. Bad luck it wasn’t him next to me in the men’s room. Then I’d be entering town in a white limo, with a gold chain around my neck and his VIP passport in my pocket, waving out the window to the young girls lining up at the side of the road holding up their old Pulp Fiction posters. Instead, I’m offered a seat in a silent suburban kitchen with no chicks in sight.
Sickreader prepares a wonderful breakfast table with coffee, toast, and two boiled eggs that instantly make me think of Dikan’s balls. What the hell do they mean it was my fault? My fuck-up? I killed the right guy. Then it turns out he was FBI. That’s not my fault. I should be mad at them.
“If you will be so kind, Father Friendly? We always ask the guest to say the table prayer,” Goodmoondoor says when we are seated.
“Yes. Of course.”
Again I have to regret not having killed Tarantino instead of this priest guy. But then again, it wouldn’t have been easy to mess with the writer of Kill Bill. Yeah, I guess I was lucky. At least the clergyman looked a bit like me. At least they believe I am him. That’s pretty low profile, I guess.
OK. Here we go. Table prayer. I bow my head and close my eyes.
“Dear God, dear beloved God. Thank you for this… for those eggs. Thank you for… thank you for having Friendly… friendly people around here. Thanks for sending me up here to this beautiful island and meeting those beautiful… those good and kind people. Thank you for giving me safe harbor in the sea of trouble. And breakfast as well. Amen.”
Not too bad. They murmur their “amen,” and then it’s smiling time again.
“Do you have many people in your organization, Father Friendly?”
I lose my grip on the situation here. Accidentally it’s Toxic who answers. “About forty.”
“Forty thousand?”
“Forty thousand? Oh, yes, about forty thousand. Forty thousand registered members. But we have millions of people tuning in each week.”
I remind myself to ask for the latest ratings report the next time I meet my program producer.
After breakfast they show me to my room on the upper floor. I’m back to Catholic school. A crucifix hangs over the bed and two studio photos of Jesus Christ are on the opposite wall. White linen, white curtains, white rug.
They tell me I must be tired from the long flight. I say you bet and then use the opportunity to tell Goodmoondoor that I cannot possibly go on TV tonight.
“I’m sorry, but I just have to be totally relaxed when I go on TV. If God is to speak through me, I have to be totally empty inside.”