The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

^{CHAPTER 29} THE KAUNAS CONNECTION

We drive back in silence. Even the radio is quiet. I gaze out the window thinking about my two NY bags that now have been circling the baggage carousel in Zagreb for eighty days in a row. The midnight sunset is mostly over, but a few clouds maintain their red glow out on the horizon, hovering like a flock of zeppelins over the glacier that tips the peninsula called Snow Fall’s Ness or something similar to that. Closer, the city of Reykjavik spreads in front of us like a desperate lady begging me to love her. It kind of reminds you of LA at night: flat, vast, and full of lights. The tower of the impossibly named church that stands on the hill in the middle of town is the only thing that rises above the horizon, a dark dildo against the pink sky.

Gun drives into my dead neighborhood of furniture stores and fugee camps and stops the car at an empty traffic circle close to my cell. I tell her I’ll call her. She answers by making her lips disappear inside her mouth. It makes her look a bit like her mother.

It’s about three in the morning when I check into the hotel. The Seven Elevens are fast asleep, as well as their dirty steel-toed shoes at the top of the staircase. From the end of the hallway, I hear the low murmur of TV. Balatov’s out in the kitchen, sitting at the table, wearing only his dingy underpants and still-white undershirt, plus a pair of black socks. He’s as hairy as a gorilla. It’s even hard to see were his socks come to an end and leg hair takes over. He’d need a truckload of “saving cream” for a full body shave. On the screen some stupid actor pretends to be a gunman, holding his weapon like an amateur, looking very much like the pope with a plunger.

“Fuck white night. I want black,” murmurs the voice between the two hairy shoulders.

For the first time since meeting him, I almost don’t dislike him. I grab a beer from the fridge and join him at the kitchen table. I need a friend.

“What about the Icelandic girls? You don’t like them?” I ask him.

“No Iceland girl in Granny Club.”

New friend has limitation.

We watch for a while. It’s one of those “Everybody freeze!” films. I guess every second movie made on this planet has someone like me for a main character, or the main character spends the whole fucking movie going after a guy like me, and always succeeds just before the credits start rising like spirits from the bad guy’s grave. The Mafia hitman is one of the most popular heroes of our time. Then why can’t I live like the actor who plays me, in a Hollywood mansion with a Nobel prize-swimming pool and palm trees all around it? A handful of servants arguing in Spanish out in the kitchen and a bunch of small time celebrities with big time boobs wailing outside my front door, hungry for sex. Fuck it. I should have all that instead of idling up here in the arctic nowhere, a born-again dishwasher with an ugly name and a jumpy girlfriend, sipping on stolen Polish beer and discussing philosophy with the grandson of King Kong.

“What do you think of movies about the Mafia written by some wimps high on soy lattes. Some unshaven campus kids who’ve never even seen a gun in their lives?”

“What is?”

“Aw, nothing.”

We go back to the movie and Balatov does a round of Bulgarian swearing. Our part of the world is the true home of colorful language. Croatia holds the world record in men’s cursing. I’m only a word away from coming back at him with: “You look like you just fucked a porcupine!” Or: “I just fucked your dead mother’s rotten body in the hole where her left tit used to be!”

“You girl is good,” the bastard then suddenly says.

“My girl?”

“I see you and girl in shop,” he says with the slimiest smile and a very hairy thumbs-up. “Is good.”

“You mean…?”

“I see you make sex in shop. Is daughter priest, yes?”

There you have it. He’s been spying on me. So he’s working for the Fucking Bureau of Impotents after all.

“So why don’t you call them? Why don’t you just arrest me then?”

“What is?”

No. After a quick interrogation I have to conclude that he’s not an agent undercover. He’s too genuinely stupid. But then what is he doing up here? Why the hell is he staying in this horrible country of sunny nights and Sanskrit subtitles if he hates it so much?

“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.