The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 26} THE MEAT MAN

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.”

“But, seven years… It must have been boring?”

“Yeah, a little bit. But I studied cooking and French and… Then my relationship with Harpa was never better. I mean, I didn’t have to listen to her, go shopping with her, or go see her mom anymore, you know. I only got the good stuff. Sex in jail is the best, man,” he says with an icy smile as he throws his cigarette out on the wet parking lot overlooking some drab industrial blocks and the rest of leafy Reykjavik.

“You never shot anybody?” I ask him.

“With a gun? No. Killing somebody with a gun is like making love with a mouse,” he says, picking up his slimy knife. “You know, computer mouse.”

I better be impressed with my holy benefactors, the comedy duo known as Good ‘n Torture. They do have some interesting friends. Just the other day, Balatov told me the Good Knee already served in Norwegian prison for drug trafficking. He was caught fishing something fishy off the coast of Lofoten.

If society were drawn as a circle, the PC-preaching, re- and bicycling majority would be on top (all those people who never cross the street on a red light but start licking the TV screen each time Tony fucking Soprano appears on it). To the right we’d have the gun-loving old-timers who prefer beating their wives to sleeping with them, and on the left we’d have the anti-global guys, the bitter bunch who’re against all the good things of this world, like meat, porn, and global warming. I would find myself at the bottom, where the extreme right meets the violent left. Where holy men and women sit next to murderers and art thieves.

It’s here where the ring closes. In the kitchen for the needy. I can see how the two worlds meet in the sharp edge of Olie’s knife.

It’s my first “honest” job since my short stint as a waiter back in bitte-schön days, and I find it more than OK. Not having to think is a welcome relief; washing the brown plastic trays is my form of meditation. First I clean off most of the food (the needy of Iceland are clearly not so needy), and then I rinse them with water before placing them in the big old dishwasher, about which Sammy asks me every time he drops by, as if it were his aging mother. “How’s she doing today?”

Olie sometimes drives me “home,” speeding past the bus stop where le Chien waits along with the local loonies, and even his famous girlfriend once gave me a ride in her little white Polo. Harpa is an all-Icelandic butter-blonde with a fake tan and tribal tattoos up her sleeve, and she tells me her name means “harp.” Actually, “lute” would better fit her long neck and big ass. Yet, she’s kind of sexy. I’d probably start killing for her on Day 10 or 11.

It feels kind of cool to come back from work every day without having killed anybody. My warehouse sleep may not be perfect, but at least I’ve stopped adding new bodies to the inventory.

I’m usually back in the barracks by five or six, accompanied by the leftovers from the Samver lunch that I warm up in the prehistoric microwave and eat in the kitchen if Balatov’s not around. I have to watch my budget, plus Olie’s food is all right. Knowing that the chef’s a convicted killer, a man who relishes cutting meat, adds an extra flavor to the meal. After I started working for a living, I realized that Iceland is the most expensive country in the world. It costs a fridge’s worth to fill one. Half a kilo of cheese costs as much as half a kilo of weed. Many foreigners only eat expired food that the supermarkets leave at their back door every night, and Gun told me about a German tourist who suffered a mild heart attack after getting the check for a couple of cocktails in a trendy hotel downtown.

I always tell her that “the best country in the world” has to be like the best night club: it must be the most expensive one.

According to therapy rules, I’m not allowed out at night. Torture doesn’t even allow me any books apart from the holy one, and absolutely no DVD-gazing nor Internet browsing. So, apart from the short ebony poems recited by Balatov (“I think Oprah in shower. Is good.”), the Bible is my only form of entertainment. Reading was never my thing, though I did read two or three novels when Dikan had me touring the States, doing a hit in every town. Those long hotel days couldn’t be spent on call girls only.

So I spend my long white nights with the big black book.

Of course there is the small TV out in the kitchen, but it’s all Icelandic programming—some butter-blonde bimbos reading the small town news, followed by American dumbos eating live maggots—plus it’s monopolized by Balatov who, rather than watching it, has started guarding the TV set as if it was a safe. He curses every single subtitle that appears on the screen, while scratching his armpits, the loudspeakers of smell. (If he is indeed working for the Feds, his would be the best disguise in the history of the Bureau. Very far from the Michael Keaton hairdos.)

I really have to force myself through the fucking Old Testament. It’s got some nice stories and everything, but most of it is just pro-Israel crap about tribal feuds and boundary conflicts. How this-and-that Mr. Pushy pushed this-and-that Palestine or Philistine off his land. Pretty similar to what we have on the TV news today. Those guys are still stuck in the Old Testament; they should at least check out the new one. Jesus is OK, though I have a pretty hard time with the concept of handing over your sins and letting him deal with them. I find it kind of cheap. Plus he must be really busy. It’s like taking your trash to church and leaving it there, by the altar. Or maybe that’s the idea behind it all. The church as a recycling container. In a way, it’s not unlike the system we have at the Zagreb Samovar. There is this guy, Tomislav, called The Cleaner, who, every time needed, comes in to clean up our sins.

I think God made a huge mistake in showing his face, his hand, or whatever it was that Moses saw on that mountaintop. He was just writing a check of trouble for the whole fucking region. Ten thousand years of trouble.

It reminds me of that play I once saw at the HNK in Split. Senka was a big theatre fan and made me sit through all kinds of crazy things. One of them was this play from Poland where the author was sitting on stage during the performance, all the time shouting his commandments at the actors. I guess it was the first time I considered killing someone.

You can’t fucking change your play after the curtain rises. And that goes for God as well.

I never thought reading the Bible would make you angry. But maybe it’s meant to. At least when you think of Torture. God is like alcohol, I guess. The deeper you dive into it, the more you wonder if it was such a good idea in the first place. The more religious your country is, the more likely it is to see war. At least God never showed his face in Iceland. Olie tells me it wasn’t even created by him. No wonder it’s the most peaceful country in the world.

“I thought you guys were all born-agains?” I ask him the day after.

“Well, God is Sammy’s friend. He’s helped him a lot. He even bailed him out of prison and lent him some money to start this company and everything,” he says with a grin, while emerging from the fridge with a leg of lamb. “But as for me, I don’t know. After I killed this guy, for me it’s all just…” He pauses while he searches for the right word, then shakes his head and places the leg on the worktop. “…meat.”

“Meat?”

“Yeah. I love life and all that, but it’s all just meat to me.”

“OK.”

“Life is very simple. It’s just either dead meat or moving meat.”

He picks up his knife. His favorite kitchen knife. He’s talking to it now. I’m just a bystander. It’s all between man and knife. Chien is out by the sink, washing the frying pans. Olie’s voice turns low, the small golden earring shivering against his cold looking cheek.

“When I sliced this guy’s throat, it was… it was like seeing God, or something. I saw… I saw how life is. And it’s just…”

He looks up now. He looks at me.

“You know, we made love while he was still on the floor. It was crazy really, but it was like God.”

I guess I picked the wrong weapon.