The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

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.

CHAPTER 26
THE MEAT MAN
    06.21.2006
    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