The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 24} HARDWORK HOTEL

To go with my illegal passport, they put me up in an illegal housing close to Torture’s church. It’s a pretty young building that houses a fancy furniture shop on the ground floor and some grungy immigrant workers on the first floor.

I enter the Icelandic underground. It seems we’ve switched roles, me and my holy friends. Goodmoondoor’s man from the political party, a big-nosed guy with no neck named Good Knee, (no relation to the Wounded one) has that international Mob look in his eyes that is quite difficult to explain to the innocent reader but his colleague can’t fail to notice. Those are eyes that have seen all of life and some of death.

He scuttles over to the entrance from his black and bruised SUV, a chubby unkempt man of fifty wearing a dark blue windbreaker that seems to be oversized, but on a closer look is just overweight with pockets full of keys (and guns?). He brings out a dozen and tries three of them before finding the right one.

Goodmoondoor introduces me, looking quite ridiculous, like a proud father recommending his son to a famous football coach. Good Knee gives me a dull eye for a second and murmurs an all-Icelandic “hi” before entering the shabby entrance flooded with colorful, but footprinted, advertising brochures and unread local newspapers. We follow him up the staircase and down a long, raw looking corridor with a new door every fifteen feet, left and right. The ceiling is pretty high, rising up in the middle, but the walls, being only about eight or nine feet high, don’t connect with it.

At the end of the hallway, a few red-eyed and dark-browed men with small white bits of concrete in their hair are sitting in a small kitchen clutching beers. A small TV sits on the cheap worktop, beside an ancient looking microwave. Some amateur murder thing lights the screen, but the workers are not watching. Good Knee greets them with a few inaudible words in Mobish.

One of the workers answers him in English with a thick Slavic accent and points down the corridor we just walked:

“Number three on right.”

That’s my cell. The president’s son has to settle for storage space built for spare parts and divided into for-sleeping-only stalls by paper thin walls. The bed is a futon mounted on leftovers from the wall-building, with piled up sawlogs for legs. There is nothing else in the room except for an old, cheap office chair, a lamp lacking both bulb and shade, and a lonely silver spoon lying on the dirty floor. The wall facing the door is basically one big window with an oblong radiator beneath it. The view is a building similar to this one, with shops on the ground floor and a parking lot in front of it. Goodmoondoor throws a black plastic bag, containing some sheets, on the bed, saying, “this is good” to his friend before turning to me with his born-again smile:

“You know that you can always come to our house to eat, washing the clothes, or watching TV.”

Something I never heard my father say.

The Good Knee gives me the good key plus his billion-dollar cell phone number in case there’ll be an uprising in the barracks or some hostage taking. I better not tell those foreigners that they’re sharing a roof with the president of Iceland’s only son. I should probably ask the Good Moon to give the dump a quick blessing, but the two Goodfellas are off. My new life begins.

It starts with a small sports bag and a big Bible.

My fellow inmates are from Poland and Lithuania, plus one black-browed but thin-haired Bulgarian named Balatov who looks like a fellow hitman. It’s the good old Warsaw Pact. Our only bathroom is called the Mausoleum. According to house rules, you either go there to see Lenin (the yellow thing) or Stalin (the brown thing). The camp itself they call Hardwork Hotel. They usually come home around eleven at night and are gone by seven, sighing out in the hallway and kicking themselves into their steel-toed shoes.

“I no Seven-Eleven,” Balatov informs me. He stays home all day playing loud Iron Curtain Rock on his small boombox and watching TV out in the kitchen, cursing everything that appears on the screen in his native language. I have to take good care not to show him that I understand some of these words.

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.