The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

by Helgason, Hallgrimur

  The Man from the Black Sea underscores his origins with a black sweater, black beard, black hair, and black brows over a pair of blackberries. He seems to be for all things black.

  “Is black,” he informs me in his thirty-word English when the odd black woman appears in the middle of the dental white daytime soap. “I fuck black. Is good.”

  I dive into the fridge, reaching for my container of white milk.

  During the day, it’s just me and him. Me and Balatov. Besides advertising his sexual preferences six times a day, he smells like horse manure marinated in petrol. Plus he uses every opportunity to make you his running mate. “I show picture of black. Is in room. Come.” It’s like being stuck with a tiger on a small boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean. You have to think about your every move. I silently smuggle my lunches out of the kitchen and only see Lenin when his boombox gives me a go, spending hours in my cell trying hard to separate the writing of the prophets from the wonderful sounds of The Best of Bulgarian Heavy Metal. In a way, those ambitious bands could as well be from Arkansas or Ecuador. The hairy rockers of this world seem to belong to one nation, though being spread all over the earth. The Jews of tomorrow.

  But Mr. Black Sea won’t take my LPP for a sign. He fucking knocks on my door. My instant reaction is to look for my gun. I miss it like the cleaner his mop.

  “You have saving cream?” he asks me.

  “I wish.”

  “What is?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I don’t have any.”

  “I will save face.”

  “I see. Good for you.”

  “You Iceland?”

  “Ah, well…Partly. I’m partly Icelandic.”

  This country sucks me up like a volcano in reverse. Come winter and I’ll wake up with a snowball face and a pebble nose.

  “You no work?”

  What’s next? He’ll ask for my passport? He asks about Good Knee and Goodmoondoor. I give short answers, with eyes fixed on the top of his skull. It shows through his black hair like the head of a baby breaking out from a thickly bushed vagina.

  “Good Knee and priest is friend?” he says with a short laugh full of satisfaction, as if this was the thing he was really after, and then we’re back to his favorite color. “You fuck black?”

  “Eh…yes. I have.”

  “Is good?” he says with a disgusting smile that breaks out in a nasty laughter. “Is good!” He laughs all the way to his cell. “Black is good.”

  I’m going to ask Torture if his therapy allows for one last little murder.

  Saturday night the Good Knee appears with a cardboard box full of vodka bottles that scream SMUGGLED! He places it on the kitchen table, looking very much like a nineteenth-century Southern landowner who knows how to treat his slaves. He doesn’t open the thing, only sighs out through his big nose in his busy way and then leaves in his noisy windbreaker. I prepare myself for a sleepless night, but nothing happens until the day after. Sunday morning the Poles are up early, working on the vodka box like grasshoppers on sugar canes. By noon they’re singing their polka hits out in the kitchen and shouting for Tomasz.

  I pretend to be dead when they knock on the door. Dead as I wanted to be.

  They find it pretty strange that an “islandski” guy is living in a place like this. Hardwork Hotel has always been for foreign workers only. For them I must be like an SS officer who voluntarily checks into Auschwitz. I try to tone it all down by telling them that I’m only 25 percent Icelandic, making up a long, boring story of a father from Fresno, Mr. Chuck Ólafsson, who was half Icelandic, went into the army, and died in some small war in the Caribbean during the Reagan era (“it was friendly fire, a sad story”), and a German mother who later married this Croatian priest and that they now live in Vienna.

  “You know Rapid Wien?” I quickly ask them.

  “Is football club, yes? They play Legia Warszawa in last year. Is your club?”

  “Yes. I was ten when my dad died and then we moved to Austria. I’ve been living there until now.”

  I space out for a brief while. Why did I pick Vienna? I was only there for a weekend. But I had my BMM there, Best Massage Moment. Hungarian girl, who told me she was twenty but looked to be fifty, dragged her big breasts up and down my back, it was the most heavenly feeling, as if they were God’s balls or something. I come back to my senses and finish the paragraph:

  “Actually, I’ve never lived in Iceland before.”

  “But you speak Icelandic?” one of the three Poles asks. Somehow they all look like soldiers from WWII. Could be stand-ins in some black-and-white Oscar-nominated Jews-R-Us movie, sitting in the back of an army truck, about to be blown up in the next scene.

  “Just a little. My mother, no, my grandmother used to speak to me in Icelandic when I was a boy.”

  I went a bit too far. One of them disappears for a while and comes back with a letter in Icelandic, full of crazy letters—a pregnant I, and an A making love to an E—asking me to translate it for him. I take it to my stall and make a quick call to Hanna. It takes me forever, though, to read her the unreadable words. It turns out to be a simple invitation to the inauguration of some building the guy was working on. He can’t go, he says, too busy working at another construction site. The Seven Elevens are real working machines. Their bodies are so used to going to sleep at midnight and waking at six, that they’re unable to sleep in Sunday morning. Therefore they can’t get drunk on a Saturday night but have to do it the day after. They start at seven in the morning and finish at eleven at night.

  CHAPTER 25

  GRANNY’S

  06.17.2006

  It must be Balatov’s good influence, but after a week on the Hardwork floor I can’t think of much else other than sex. My Bible reading hours are crowded by memories, fantasies, and daydreams. Sometimes they all collide into one, into one big Senka, my Split girlfriend. My great Split girlfriend. Again and again her head pops up from the dirty pool of my unconscious. I even dream about her for three nights in a row. It’s kind of strange, for she hasn’t really visited my mind in years, though I try googling her name every once in a while.

  Senka was always big fun, and a bit crazy, with her triangular breasts pointing east and west, and her short, black hair pointing up and down. She had a big black birthmark on her left cheek that made her look a tiny bit like Brooke Shields. Her lips were full and soft, but her cheeks kind of hard, angled. Somehow you always wanted to press them with your finger. And despite the dimples they always made her look kind of boyish.

  She had a much older sister and her mustached mother was old enough to be her grandmother. Her stepfather was a poet, a very serious, very unknown poet. Senka knew a lot of poems by heart and sometimes she would recite some for me. I don’t know why, really, but I always remember this one, written by one of her stepfather’s friends:

  Svatko tko je putovao zna da se jabuke nigdje ne jedu kao na ulici i trgu nekog stranog grada.

  (Anyone who has travelled knows that apples taste / the sweetest on a street or a square of a new city.)

  Now the two lines only appeal to my dick, making him rise up from his den, trying to listen. (Mr. Crotch Dweller has a very good ear for poetry.) I spend my days between her strong, almost manly, thighs, remembering her clumsy dancing style or going through our early morning lovemaking on that beach in Brač. The still blue water, the loud white pebbles, her wicked smile…

  I don’t get it really. I’m held hostage by Senka. By good and solid old-fashioned pre-war sex. Yugoslavian national sex.

  Senka’s was the hairiest crotch of the Adriatic. (I’ve always been a bushman. To me the idea of a bald pussy is like steak without sauce.) She used to suffer from it, she said, but I tried my best to convince her that hairy wasn’t scary, that Brazilian wax was to sex what this new French cuisine was to cooking. No fucking sauce.

  I wake up with her on top of me and before falling asleep at night I bury my face in her bushy crotch, humming old Arsen Dedič songs. I
probably just miss my country.

  The good man that goes by the name of Good Knee seems to feel my frustration, and my week of Homeland Sex finds its appropriate conclusion when the good slave master decides to take all his subjects to Granny’s, a strip club buried deep in an industrial zone close by.

  We walk past rusty car bodies and a blue container that must be full of teddy bears stuffed with heroine. After all, this is the town of Cop War. Once past the standard heavyweight bouncer, we enter another world. The new me had thought of staying home, but after a week under Balatov’s surveillance, I had welcomed the strip-trip. I’m really starting to think the Black Sea man might be something other than the stranded whale he looks to be. At least his interrogation technique smells of the FBI.

  “Black is for me. OK?” he assures the two Lithuanians as we walk down the red carpet stairs.

  I take a deep breath and enter the loud cave. Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain and sheweth him all the sexiest women of the world, and the glory of them, and saith unto him: You can have them all tonight if you promise not to kill them after use.

  That’s the Devil for me, or God, for that matter. The big sinner is allowed to sin in a small way, as the drug addict is allowed to smoke cigarettes after getting off heroine.

  Although it’s still pretty early (the Poles only last until midnight, remember), the club is quite crowded. The design seems to have been based on a twenty-year-old Muslim’s idea of paradise. Lots of booze, half-naked babes (might not all be virgins, though), and loud sexy music. The “Thong Song” boffs the sound system, and a thonged blonde shines in the spotlight, polishing the pole with all her softest body parts. Around her a few foreign workers are sitting, fingering their half empty beer glasses that are standing on the edge of the round stage. Further away some pebble-nosed and beer-bellied locals are buried in deep armchairs, enjoying the company of pole dancers on pause, looking anxiously cool as men tend to look when they’re forced to hide their inner excitement.

  It’s your average strip joint. Could be Miami. Could be Munich.

  The Good Knee introduces us to his good friend, the owner: a round moon-faced man named August, like the month, but better known as “Goosty Granny.” He could, in fact, pass for a happy grandmother as he swings his big fat belly around the place along with his great double chin that vibrates from his happy laugh like lemon Jell-O on a flying saucer. He’s got some lovely dark hair, but there are no signs of any growth in his smooth cheeks. His nose is a small rosy pebble.

  Granny would make a great belly dancer, no doubt.

  As he goes to get the menu, our man explains the joke about his name: the phonetic translation of “Goosty Granny” would be Thin Goosty. I voice my surprise of discovering such a joint in No Ho Land and some of the Poles agree with me. Good Knee tells his friend, once he’s back with the wine list, that we didn’t know that places like this existed in Iceland.

  “But it doesn’t!” Goosty bursts out loud and shakes his sexy booty with a happy laugh. “It doesn’t!”

  The menu lists meat courses only. Bare or medium bare, Baltic, Czech, or Russian style. The prices are as high as the silent pole in the middle of the stage, but our fat friend offers a fifty-percent discount for all of Good Knee’s men.

  “Because you deserve it! Because you are building the new Iceland!” he exclaims with a set of red cheeks and beaming eyes.

  “You have black?” Balatov asks.

  “Black Russian?” Goosty laughs, then suddenly stops, and snaps his fingers in the air.

  A slim Caribbean princess, a pearl-eyed Day 5 Girl, appears from a corner as dark as her skin, and the Black Sea man immediately orders a bottle of champagne. I settle for a big beer, standing by the bar, watching my friends scatter all over the place, each one nursing his sexual loneliness.

  A new song fills the air—“Hot in Herre.” It’s an old Kelly hit. Or, Nelly? Belly even. I put my tongue where the missing tooth is and watch the dancer tear off her thong, and we have…a cactus crotch. The Gillette Generation has turned sex into a fucking surgery. I say a silent “skull!” to all my hairy queens, remembering Munita’s pitch-black rainforest. “I have to think of the ozone layer,” she used to joke.

  Her look-alike appears by my side, asking me in bad English whether she can “join my drink.” She calls herself Angel, a name that is at least one Atlantic away from her gypsy looks. Angel is a big-lipped, dark-skinned mother of two big tits, a small woman mounted on sky-high heels. She’s a rather pathetic copy of Munita—a Day 6, my old man Toxic would have it—but at least her head’s still connected to her body. I try to buy time with a little chat about her three weeks in Cop War while resting my eyes on the Day 3 Latvian beauty at the other side of the bar who looks uncomfortably much like Gun.

  The story of my life.

  Remembering Goosty’s generous offer, I ask the dark Angel whether one can super-size one’s meals in this joint. You can, she says, and winks the Latvian Gun over. She wears a blue satin dress and a lustful smile hiding a set of heavy braces, some excellent Baltic handiwork that really should call for an even deeper discount. But I have my fifty-percent off already. I put my virgin credit card, Torture’s special gift to me (laden with contributions from hardworking supermarket cashiers to his church fund) on the bar table and watch the waitress, a freshly retired stripper with wrinkled cleavage, squeeze out of it the equivalent of a two month’s stay at Hardwork Hotel, in exchange for a bottle filled with twenty minutes of double fantasy. This might just be the most expensive bottle in the history of mankind.

  I follow the four high heels down an alley of curtains. Behind one of them, Balatov must be trying hard to save his white cream for his last sip of black champagne. The deeper we go into the cave, the darker it gets, but the music doesn’t fade one bit. It’s Beyoncé time now. She and Jay-Z. “Crazy in Love.”

  At the end of the alley, Angel opens a curtain and leads us into the thinly veiled private space, furnished with a big box of Kleenex and a very laid-back La-Z-Boy. The blonde girl, who calls herself Ina, opens the bottle and fills our glasses: three flutes’ worth my mother’s salary for standing ten hours a day, six days a week, for three whole months in her hardverski store in Split, copying keys and searching out those hard-to-get .765 caliber cartridges she keeps in the back.

  I should probably tell her about this born-again thing.

  I throw myself into the chair. Angel starts moving about, but Ina kneels by my side and starts rubbing my left knee. Must be an order from the Good one. The stripper seems lost without her pole, like a pole-vaulter without his tool. But who’s going to criticize dancing when it comes with stripping? Not me, at least, though Crotch Dweller remains unimpressed. No standing ovation. I should be worried. I’m buying him the most expensive date of his life, and his first sandwich in years, and he better be up to it. My heart goes out to those hardworking supermarket cashiers, the donating members of the Church of Torture. I can’t let their contributions be in vain.

  Dweller doesn’t buy my arguments.

  I don’t quite get it. In the past, the flag of my manhood has been successfully raised by countless soldiers of sex, but now it’s turning into a fag. Must be all that Bible reading. I call out my fantasy-squad, the elite cells of my brain, and with the help of another bubbly glass I manage to fully morph the two girls into a pirate copy of Gun and Munita.

  Finally, as the dark one lets out her twins and the blonde one takes off her dress, unveiling a slim and very Gun-like body dressed in some delicious underwear, I sense something that could pass for boner-building. I rise to my feet and clumsily start to slow dance with the two ladies of my life. The image of the born-again hitman dancing to Beyoncé brings a smile to their faces, and Gun lends her hand to the buildup down under. The development aid from Latvia works like magic, and now my worries are all focused on her braces. They scare me. Could cause injury. Whether it’s because I want to check out their sharpness, the good feeli
ng from the girl’s hand, her close likeness to my ice-queen, or simply the bubbly wine, I get carried away for a very brief second and I try to bloody kiss her.

  Like a fucking priest in a fucking brothel in some fucking century.

  She immediately turns her head away from my lips and removes her hand from my pathetic crotch. It’s like a slap in the face. Out of old habit, I automatically reach for my semi-automatic problem-solver, but there is none, of course, and I have no other option but to walk away.

  As I rush up the alley, the curtains swing a bit open as I pass by them. I look behind me and see men lying in La-Z-Boys being nursed by half-naked women. They kneel down beside them like widows mourning their dead husbands. I walk away from it all and head for the bar. I wave the waitress over and ask her whether it’s possible to get a doggy bag.

  “A what?”

  “A doggy bag!”

  Damn. I’m fucking angry.

  “For what?”

  “I couldn’t finish the meal I just paid for!”

  “The what? The…meal?”

  “I PAID FOR TWO HEADS! I WANT TWO HEADS IN A DOGGY BAG!”

  I guess my voice must have cut through Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s loud lovemaking, for suddenly I’m the center of everybody’s attention. Even the dancer on stage stops dancing. The Good Knee appears from a nearby chair, followed by Thin Goosty. As he draws closer, he waves his hand like a football captain trying to prevent a teammate from receiving the red card. He’s about to say something, but I won’t hear it. I’m gone.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE MEAT MAN

  06.21.2006

  I ask Goodmoondoor to get me a job. Please. The Bible is OK, but I can’t possibly spend ten hours a day on it. I’m not a monk. Plus I owe Torture a night at Granny’s.

  After a few phone calls, the TV-man finds me a job in the kitchen of Samver, a Christian catering service for the needy, that his friend runs in a nearby suburb. Every morning the chef makes three hundred meals out of three fish. I have to be there at one o’clock to do the dishes as they start returning. I even take the bus, something I haven’t done since childhood. Usually I’m the only passenger aboard the big yellow bus 24 that takes me almost directly from our hotel to the industrial zone overlooking most of Reykjavik. The driver is Kosovan, and we sometimes joke that we should fill the bus with bombs and head for the Serbian embassy.