Халлгримур Хельгасон - The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

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 feeling 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.

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.

“You shouldn’t take the bus, Tommy,” the chef assures me. “People might see you.”

“What do you mean?”

“The bus is only for old ladies and lunatics. And the new people.”

“The new people?”

“The Poles and the yellow dogs… If you’re Icelandic, you don’t take the bus.”

The chef calls himself Óli, pronounced something like “Olie,” a nickname derived from Ólafur, the name of my father, the president. He’s a chain smoker, pale, with a big birthmark on the left side of his chin, a small round earring in his left ear, and a great attitude towards foreigners. His English is surprisingly good. The third man in the kitchen is a small Vietnamese guy called Chien, with a virgin mustache and a hundred small teeth, and Olie reminds him ten times a day that his name means “dog” in French. The Toxic Croat is safe though, since he’s twenty-percent ice and carries a local name. I try not to smile as he shouts at me from his open door smoking corner:

“Hey! Tommy! Tell the dog to empty the trash as well.”

The owner, Goodmoondoor’s friend Sammy, is a small guy with a potbelly and a swollen forehead who chews on gum like a cow on hay, keeping the small glasses on the tip of his nose dancing all day. He wears that born-again-for-the-fifth-time-and-definitely-not-the-last smile on his face, a smile that says his life is in God’s hands and though the Old one might occasionally drop it on the floor, he’ll always pick it up again. Sammy and Olie went to jail together, the chef tells me at the end of my second day. The former for stealing some forged paintings and the latter for manslaughter in the first degree. A crime of passion executed with a butcher knife, he says, pointing his weapon at me, in the middle of slicing up beef for the next day’s goulash. “He was fucking my girl, the bastard. I had to do it, or she would have dumped me on the spot.” Apparently they’re still together. Harpa is her name. “There is nothing like the love of a woman you’ve killed for.”

I should give it a thought.

By letting me in on his secret, Olie gains my respect. At last I have met a real man in this land of limps. I’m curious about his seven years in the pen. Whether he got raped in the shower. No, he says. Icelandic prison is more like an American college campus: endless football games and all the drugs you can dream of.

“Icelandic prison is very popular with foreigners. The Mafia guys from Litháen sometimes come up here just to get caught. For them it’s like a spa or something.”

I could love this country.

“What about your victim? You think about him when you were inside?”

“No. Not much. It was a happy murder. The days after, I was the happiest man alive. I mean, he totally deserved it. Sometimes I even wish he was alive so I could do it again.”