“I work in housing build. I no pay. I wait money.”
Of course it’s quite possible that this man is a genius acting stupid and that he is really undercover. But then the cover would be so thick that he would never be able to get any information through.
The next day we’re woken up by the usual Polish Sunday morning prayer. Some altar wine and a sermon on modern day slavery in Western society. But the drunken brawl is soon overshadowed by an uproar in the Lithuanian camp. Some hefty arguing goes on at their end of the floor, for a good hour, until one of them rushes out, slamming doors behind him. Somehow the Lits all have the same look: flat dark hair and a pale face full of birthmarks.
Outside my cell, Balatov informs me that we have a dead man on our floor. The small guy who only joined our little society last week passed away. After flying up here with a kilo of cocaine in his stomach, he came down with constipation. He’s been lying in the cell down the hallway for five days now, the blackbeard says. He couldn’t shit, not for his life.
“I see him. Belly was balloon.”
Balatov offered his help, he says, but they didn’t accept it. For some reason, he seems to think quite highly of himself when it comes to the inner workings of the human body.
Somehow the Poles have heard the sad news and come flying out of the kitchen like drunken crows. They want to call their beloved master, the Good Knee, at once. Some even want the White Hats. But the Lits won’t have any of it. It’s a pretty funny scene, actually. A shouting match in English between Poland and Lithuania.
“No call police!”
“No! Call! Please!” The argument swiftly ends when one of the Lit guys brings out a gun. It’s a small German model, similar to the one the Hanover Polizei uses. The Poles look dumb-founded then immediately shut their mouths and return to their bottles of Wyborowa. Balatov plays the wise old man, telling the gunman to cool it.
Seeing the gun makes me all warm inside. It’s like seeing an old friend. I stand for a while, dizzy from gunsickness, watching him walk down the hall, before retreating to my cell.
It’s a long Sunday. I lay in bed, with the Bible open to “The Raising of Lazarus,” while my heart plays the theme from The Twilight Zone. I try to call Gun three times. She doesn’t answer. I could try to sneak out of the barracks and crawl back into Torture’s basement, but I guess it’s better to stay cool. I guess I should be more afraid of my Lithuanian colleagues than the White Hats. I reach for Tommy’s overcoat, search out his Icelandic passport, and put it in the pocket of my pants. Just in case.
Every half an hour I hear the dead man’s friends rush up and down the hallway, up and down the stairs, talking loudly on the phone in their even-weirder-than-Icelandic language. Actually, I didn’t know Nokia phones supported Lithuanian. I go to the bathroom and see one of the pale ones disappear inside the dead man’s room. Out in the kitchen, the vodka party has settled for a game in the Icelandic premier league. From a distance you might think it was women playing. Icelandic soccer is pretty close to regular soccer except the players are all on heavy tranquilizers. The minute they run onto a football field, those fast-forward Icelanders switch to slow motion. It would take kilos of cocaine to fix these games.
When the zero-everything match is over, we’re all in the mood for pizza. Tommy is kindly asked to show off his Icelandic by ordering five pepperonis and six liters of Coke. I manage to say “Gouda dying” (good day) before leaving the kitchen and do the rest in low-pitch English down the hall. Forty minutes later the delivery boy arrives. He turns out to be a Serbo-Croat and does a round of dobro veče for the laughing Poles. Then, for a brief moment he turns his Serbian eye on me and puts on a quirky smile, as if he spotted the national emblem tattooed on my soul.
The pizza party brings us all together, and this is probably the best hour of my lager life. Even Balatov is smiling, showing off his yellowed teeth. But in the middle of our happy meal, one of the pale skins comes asking for a word with the Bulgarian. We watch in silence as he wipes his mouth with the bushy back of his hand, gets up, and follows the Lithuanian down the corridor. Some minutes later he returns to the kitchen and holds up his hand like a routine surgeon talking to his nurses:
“Knife.”
I lend him mine, and the smell of pizza is soon replaced by the most gut-clearing smell ever to hit my nose. And that’s coming from a man who once had to open a three-week-old mass grave in ADV because Javor had lost his glasses and ordered me to find him some new ones.
It sounds crazy, but the black-loving Bulgarian tells us he has a doctor’s “B-gree” from some university in Sofia. I guess a B-gree in medicine allows you to operate on dead people only. We watch him walk down the hall, knife in hand, his legs like two parentheses, looking more like a killer than a physician. But apparently he knows his craft. He performs the autopsy with great skill: The goldmining procedure is a success. The Lits stop mourning their friend the moment Dr. Balatov hands them the slimy condoms full of white gold. His own cut is a hundred grams. Not being a fan of white, he immediately offers to sell me some, but I have to say no.
I guess it’s all part of my therapy. Torture is still testing me, or else he would have set me up in his mother’s basement full of mobiles and cuckoo clocks instead of in this loft space charged with strip-trips and fresh-from-inside-the-dealer drugs.
After dinner the Poles go back to drinking. As soon as the vodka starts working, they begin singing slow funeral songs from the Karpaty Mountains or whatever. I hold my breath and make my way to the Lithuanian corner to retrieve my Swiss army knife. The smell is overwhelming, but I manage to knock on the dead man’s door. It’s quickly opened, but barely so. The gap is only wide enough for the word “knife” to cut through. Still, I manage to see that the room is full of some exciting items while waiting for my instrument. It comes with a warning. Two Litheads emerge from the cell to assure me that the Kaunas version of a certain organization will do me in if I ever tell anyone about the bloody mess. I count the birthmarks in their faces (as many as the capitals on the map of Europe) while I restrain from asking who their hitman is, how many he’s done, how he would kill me, the details that matter.
At midnight, the smell still fills the floor like an invisible fog. I hear some heavy breathing out in the hallway, accompanied by the sound of a heavy suitcase being dragged across a sandy floor and bumping down the stairs. I look out the giant window to see my Baltic colleagues put it in the back of a rundown white van and drive away.
This is my cue.
I patiently wait until the house doctor is in the bathroom and all the Seven Elevens are in bed. With my heart on techno, I dive down the hallway, accompanied by the longest log from my bed stand. I place it upside down beside the dead man’s door, step on top of it, and climb the wall. It goes smoothly, though I get tangled up in a brightly colored basketball banner on the way down. The stall is filled with plastic bags and cardboard boxes full of Apples. Five virgin flat screens are stored away in a corner. I search all the right places, and wrapped inside a yellow plastic bag from Bónus, the food store, I find a small German army pistol, a Walther P99, similar to the one I saw earlier today. Fair enough. I feel like a free man at last, holding a gun in my hand. I’m fucking Toxic again. It’s even loaded. The magazine holds twelve bullets. I’m ready for two six-packs.
I must be beside myself with joy, for I don’t even fucking notice that there is a police car in the parking lot. The White Hats are already inside the building. I can hear them coming down the hallway, heading my way.
CHAPTER 30
SCHMAU-WAYISH
08.07.2006 – 08.08.2006
I’m Catman. I’m crouching on top of the wall between the dead man’s cell and the next one, holding on to the thick overhead ceiling beam touching the back of my head. I have a fly’s view of the whole floor. Some six stalls on this side and another six on the other. A narrow hallway between. In the far end, the kitchen.
I can hear the officers talking down the
corridor. They speak in Icelandic between themselves and in English to one of the Poles, who sounds both drunk and as if he just woke up.
“Are you Polish?”
“No, you police!”
There are two cells between the wall I’m crouching on top of and my space. The closer one is empty. I wonder about the other. My heart skips from trash metal to speed metal when I hear the policemen try to open the door to the closest cell. But after shaking the handle for a second, I hear the Polish guy murmur no, no, and soon they’re at the dead man’s door. I just hope my saw log will keep quiet.
I wait until they start hammering loudly on the door and working on it with a crowbar. Then I gently slide myself down the wall, Catman style, and onto the windowsill in the cell next to the one I just robbed. The white police car outside is empty. No hat to be seen, though the night is still bright enough for reading. The police continue their carpentry and I climb the next wall, carefully peeking into the cell behind it. It belongs to one of the Poles, probably the squealer, because the bed is empty and the door is open.
I turn down the music in my heart before gliding down from wall to windowsill and then move across it, soundless, with my eyes on the open door. Nobody sees me, and then I’m in my room. Speed metal gives way to power ballad. It almost has me singing “With Arms Wide Open.” My favorite Creed song.
I spend the next fifteen minutes thinking where to hide the gun—THE GUN!—but I still haven’t made up my mind when the White Hats knock on my door. There are two of them standing out in the hallway, two round pebble-nosed snowballs in uniform, and suddenly I’m dead convinced that they’re the same guys who had a small chat with Tadeusz, the Polish housepainter, that fateful night last May. Some of Tadeusz’s vodka-weary countrymen are standing behind the two policemen, and one of them explains to them that I’m a local.
“You are Icelandic?” the police asks me in Icelandic.
“Schmau-wayish,” I answer with a lot of nods and a smile.
This means “a tiny bit,” a magical word Gun taught me this summer that turns out to be a real ass-saver here. I then bring out my mountain-blue passport, and my heart plays the drum ‘n’ base version of the Icelandic national anthem while they ponder the impeccable craftsmanship. They read my name aloud, examining my Slavic face, with a stern look.
“Tómas Leifur Ólafsson?” they say.
“Jau. Tommy!” I hit back with an acting-stupid smile and tell my right hand to stay the hell out of my right pocket.
“Where do you work?” they ask me in their cold language.
I switch to English (explaining that my father was half American and all that shit), and tell them about Samver. Their faces instantly light up.
“Do you know Sammy?”
The Good Samaritan’s name works like a hair dryer on the frosty situation, and we talk for a while about the small man with the dancing glasses. The two policemen know him from work. One of the most fun guys to arrest, they assure me. Then they get serious again and ask me whether I’ve any connections with the Kaunas guys. I tell them no.
“Did you notice something spacious in the house today or tonight?”
“Suspicious, you mean?”
I’ve got the upper hand now. I can relax.
“Yes,” they say.
Without thinking or blinking, I decide to be a good sport, forgetting all about the Lithuanian threats. Must be the gun. Or a belated show of gratitude towards the White Hats for giving me the summer of my life.
“Yes. I saw them take the dead man’s body outside, just some twenty minutes ago. I saw it from my window,” I say, inviting them inside my cell. “They had it in a big suitcase. It looked quite heavy. They put it in the back of a white van and drove away.”
“Did you see the number of it?”
“The license number? Yes. It was SV seven-four-one.”
I’m not kidding. I remember the fucking license number. The two officers look at me as if they want to invite me on a Caribbean cruise. First class. Next summer. Just the three of us. They then come to their senses.
“And where was the car?”
“Just…right here below. Outside the entrance.”
We’re by the window and one of them leans over to my side to have a better look outside. In doing so, he accidentally touches the hard little thing in my pocket with his left hip. The policeman automatically turns his face towards me and says in the most polite way:
“Afsaky.”
This is Icelandic for: “Sorry, I didn’t mean to touch your gun.”
The day after, when I come home from work, I see three white police SUVs parked outside our beloved hotel. Some yellow police tape rattles in the freezing summer breeze, and a White Hat guards the entrance. I keep walking past the building, at a good distance, once again taking on the role of the odd stroller on the empty sidewalks of Iceland.
An hour later I ring Gunnhildur’s bell. She opens the door and soon we’re up in her messy kitchen, kissing like a pair of desperate lovers. I completely forget myself and hug her too hard: she feels the hard thing in my pants.
“What’s that?”
“German steel.”
CHAPTER 31
ICE-ROCK
08.08.2006 – 09.08.2006
Torture talks, Tomo walks.
The great man takes me back to Hardwork Hotel to pick up my things and has a word with the police, using his powers of persuasion and invaluable TV fame to explain my case. Tommy Olafs is his protégé, a real sensitive guy who only wanted to get to know the country of his origin and can’t bear living with cruel and reckless criminals. I say goodbye to my Polish friends, and to my surprise I lean into Balatov’s cheek for a quick hug. Exile is a hairy sea.
I spend the night in my Old Testament room in Torture and Hanna’s house. At work the day after, I have a crucial talk with Olie, and in the evening he greets me and Torture, at his doorstep, on the third floor of an old concrete building close to Gun’s house. Harpa is out for the night shift at her solarium, and me and Olie act out a little scripted scene for our beloved Torture: pretending that I’m renting a room at his place. Apparently Bible Man knows Meat Man, through Sammy, and they chat about the underestimated role of violence in teaching the Gospel while I examine Olie’s great collection of kitchen knives that he has hanging over his fancy gas stove. Despite being aware of the chef’s violent past, Torture has perfect faith in him as my landlord.
“As long as you pay the rent, he won’t kill you,” he said in the car, with a hearty laugh.
Some minutes after the preacher has left in his holy SUV, I’m over at Gun’s place, asking her where to put my things. She looks stressed, taking the cigarette into her bedroom (something she normally doesn’t do) and points at two empty shelves in her large wardrobe with a shaky finger.
“Something’s wrong?” I ask.
“No. Why?”
“You maybe think we’re not ready to start living together?”
“No, no. It’s just…”
“I thought you wanted this. Is it Truster?”
A heavy sigh, then: “Yes.”
“You’re afraid he’ll tell your parents about us?”
“No, it’s not that. I don’t mind.”
It’s not that. It’s something else. But what it is, she won’t say. I offer to sleep upstairs, in the attic, but she says no, and soon we’re in her bed, trying to cheer ourselves up with some cheerless sex. Afterward, she picks up her cell and has a long and visibly difficult talk with her brother, who doesn’t seem to fancy living with a hitman. Shortly before midnight he shows up, pale and gloomy. Without even saying “hi,” he retreats into his small room out by the entrance and plays loud ice rock until two o’clock in the morning. Gunnhildur is shaken and smokes a whole packet before brushing her teeth for twenty long minutes.
We lie in her bed, cast in marble, locked in a silent embrace, like ancient lovers in a museum. This not my favorite really, to lie together like this, but I put my preferenc
es on hold for the special occasion: my first night living together with a person I’ve had sex with, plus we’re not getting any sleep anyway with the ice-rock blasting through the wall. I’m missing Balatov already. Thirty more minutes of musical torture and his name has acquired the distinction of a famous classical composer. Then the poor guy puts the same song on repeat for the next half an hour. The singer screams as if he were stuck at the bottom of a glacial canyon, with a broken thigh.
“What’s he singing?”
“Sódóma,” she answers in a weak voice.
“What does that mean?”
“Just…you know…Sodom…”
“Like in Sodom and Gomorrah?”
“Yeah. I guess.”
Bible-reading is paying off. And the priest’s son across the wall knows how to get his message through. Gunnhildur clings to me like a dying mouse. Finally Truster has exhausted his sibling jealousy, and the two sodomites get their sleep.
Luckily the crane bird spends even less time around the house now than back in springtime days, when yours truly was a freshman fugitive and everything was a bit more exciting. I slowly adapt to the Icelandic every day. I spend the mornings on the Internet, googling my various names along with the “FBI,” “David Friendly,” or “Lithuanian Mafia” without much success, writing emails to people who could possibly know where my good old Senka might be found, or writing letters to my mother, which Gunnhildur’s friend brings with her to London and posts at some royal post office. Noon has me standing at the main square again, waiting for bus 6 along with the local loonies. The month of August finishes with a more traditional timing of sunset. I welcome the dark.
Torture Therapy fades out in the form of a few check-up calls from the master, plus regular visits to the crazy masses at his sweaty church. At my first visit he welcomes me with bravado and introduces Tommy to his desperate we-take-the-bus crowd as “a good Icelander and a dear friend! A man who spent most of his life in Hotel Hell but has now checked out and rented a room in heaven, God bless his soul! Hallelujah!”
The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning Page 18