The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

guys have no use for family names. Icelanders still uphold the Viking tradition of letting their children’s second names be derived from their father’s first. If I had kids, they’d be honored with the cool and catchy Tómasson (boy) or Tómasdóttir (girl).
    I beg my ministers for an easier version of my new name, and after some thinking they come up with Tommy Olafs.

CHAPTER 24
HARDWORK HOTEL
    06.13.2006
    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