The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

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