The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 25} GRANNY’S

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:

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 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.