The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

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