I pause briefly, regretting using the wrong words. He looks at me like a freshly cuckolded llama. Big eyes, long teeth, hairy neck. His wife whispers something about my jet lag before I continue:
“I mean, I’m just saying that nothing can be in the way, so that his word can travel through me. No tiredness, no nothing… I always have to be in super shape for TV.”
“But,” he finally says, “I said on my show that you will come tonight and talk to the people.”
“Oh? You did?”
“Yes. I cannot cheat my promise to them. They are very faithful people.”
Poor guy. He looks heartbroken. But I have to think of my LPP.
“How many people watch the show?”
I guess, for the small time TV-man, this question is a no-no. He gets all tangled up in his face, like a politician faced with a difficult question, and comes out with an excusing laugh.
“We have many people watching.”
I see. He only has ten viewers.
“OK. We’ll see. You just call me, in the afternoon.”
I don’t know what in the hell I’m doing. I give him my NYC number. The priest gives his colleague a hitman’s number.
“OK, that’s good,” the Good Man says. His smile is back but a bit dented from the shock I just gave him. “You can stay here today and get a rest. Just be like in your home. We have to go to work now. In the TV station.”
From my window I watch them board the fancy SUV. The believers always seem to have the best cars. God knows how to reward his people. Of course he knows you do need an SUV to reach heaven. The preacher’s wife wears a skirt and has lovely legs. If she were the only woman in our platoon and we were stuck in the mountains for a month, I’d start dreaming about her on Day 12.
I’m left alone in the house. Despite the glacial spring outside, the rooms are warm like a July midnight in Memphis. That’s where I carried out a rather clumsy operation under an ugly bridge. When it comes to killing, I’m no racist, but shooting black people has never been my favorite. There’s nothing fresh about that.
I strip to my true self, happy to get away from God’s collar, Friendly’s shirt, and Igor’s jeans, and crawl into bed. How soft, how cozy. And how incredibly quiet. It’s almost too much. It’s the loudest silence I’ve heard. I realize that I’ve been living in a disco for a decade or so and now, finally, I have stepped outside. I’m not kidding. There is absolutely no sound to be heard. It’s as silent as the Serbian skull my mother keeps on the shelf above her bed.
Then suddenly the room is flooded by sunlight. White room, bright sun. If I were to wake up here, in this sunny silence, lying in this soft eiderdown bed with crispy, clean sheets, and the signed picture of the Lord on the opposite wall, I would think I was dead and gone to heaven. But of course I’ll never go there. I’m stuck in traffic on the highway to hell.
Damn. It’s so fucking silent I can’t sleep. For a man who’s lived in the noise all his life, being sung to sleep by Chetnik bombs and SoHo manholes, this is hard to take.
I give up and go downstairs, roaming around the house with my piggy belly sticking out over my Calvin Klein black boxers. The beautiful mountain morning fills every window, the light harsh and cold and very strong. Ice-sun. And I get this touristy feeling: the stupid surprise you experience when you realize that the same sun has also been rising here for the past million years. Also here, in this north-of-all-nuts city, people have been waking up and going to sleep for centuries. I remember when I first came back to Split after four years in NYC and was shocked to see that my mother had aged. I was almost angry at her, as if she had betrayed me, and started talking to her about moisturizing and masturbation techniques. I guess I was just not made to travel. I’m a One Place Man.
I never should have left Split. But when you’ve fought so hard for something, you can’t really enjoy it. I guess I’d still be in Croatia if it wasn’t called Croatia.
The house is full of fancy stuff and this kind of furniture-store-furniture. A big black sofa full of pillows fills the TV-corner, the dining set shines like a piece of porcelain, and every windowsill is crowded with vases and statues. A small St. Bernard looks me in the eye, a wine barrel hanging around its neck, to be broken in case of emergency if God deserts you. The walls sport real paintings (some lunar landscapes in golden frames) and all kinds of stuff made for hanging on nails—a small Jesus, some dried roses, and this colorful Japanese thing that I don’t know the word for but is used for creating wind where there is no breeze. Still, the living room looks as if no one lives here. It could well be an installation at The Icelandic Museum of Modern Living. Plus, I find it all a bit too luxurious for devout followers of Christ. I doubt that any of the apostles possessed such a big flat screen. But at least it’s all as clean as the Savior’s conscience.
I turn on the bathtub, for my jet lag, and the TV, for the sound of it. The screen shows ten thousand people singing in Christian unison in some overblown indoor sports arena down south. “Our God Is an Awesome God!” Pretty awesome, I have to admit. Born-again people are so energetic. Screaming like newborns. I switch to The Bold and the Beautiful and try reading the subtitles. Looks like Hungarian to me.
In the kitchen I spot some letters addressed to Guðmundur Engilbertsson and Sigríður Ingibjörg Sigurhjartardóttir. It takes about two minutes to read each name. And back in the living room I find some family photos standing in frames on a big cabinet. They seem to have two kids. A girl and a boy. The little snow-haired girl looks a bit like her mother. Still the house seems totally kid-free. Maybe they store them away at some papal prep school. Or they donated them to missionary work down in Mozambique. There is a nice photo showing the whole family in America: Four holy smiles at some outdoor rodeo mass. Somehow it reminds me of hit #43. The fat man outside the church in Atlanta. My bullet traveled the incredible distance of two city blocks before entering his head. One of my master hits. He was wearing a white cowboy hat made out of felt—the kind of material that absorbs liquid. By the time I drove past the scene it all looked quite wonderful, so calm and innocent: A fat man had fallen on the sidewalk, nothing more. A fat man in a beautiful red hat.
The water in the tub is crazy hot. Volcano water. I have to cool it down before adding my body to it. I lie there for an hour while my mind travels the bushy regions of the sweet old republic of Munita. The dark forest reeks of clit extract; drops thick with lust run down heavy leaves in very slow motion. Down by the harbor I come across my mother standing outside her little shop, in her horrible communist skirt and Marilyn Monroe blouse, with a white cast on her right arm, and a fist on her left, pounding the air and shouting at me:
“This tandoori woman is all pleasure and no partner! When you pick a wife you must have conference between heart and brain. But you don’t talk to any of them and let your dick decide! I loved your father for forty-two years. He loved me for forty. The first two years he was still fucking Gordana, the Serbian whore. But then he got bored with her and kept his dick at home after that. You are lucky to be born after his sex life was over! Or else you would have been a Serb and your brother would have killed you in the war. Let me tell you, lust don’t last! Only love does! You break my heart, you break my arm, and you break all your promises. Tell me, Tomo, when are you going back to your studies?”
I studied architectural landscaping for a year and a half in the wonderful town of Hanover, Germany. There I met Niko Nevolja (Naughty Niko) who introduced me to the science of the con. It all started with a couple of small-time cocaine deals. Then we got on to drug and gun smuggling and finally, we were introduced to the art of game-fixing. Every Friday night we dined with a different soccer referee from one of the lower German Bundesligas. They were not the most fun dinner partners (“I always iron my jersey the night before the match”) but watching them perform the day after was nothing less than addictive. Giveaway penalties and excellent goals denied. Angry players and a crowd gone mad. And it was all our work. Architectural landscaping was out, social landscaping was in. We being Croatian added an extra kick to it. No matter if the fucking Germans won the international games against us, we won all the games in their Bundesligas. And then we collected the money from the Fußball-Lotto. We were doing it for the fatherland. The Sauerkraut Suckers destroyed half of my grandfather’s generation.