The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

her on Day 1.
    “Your keys? You live here?”
    This priest is turning into a moron, or a Mormon, or whatever.
    She turns her head and looks at me for a while. Belly instantly ducks for cover, crawling all the way up into my rib cage. Poor little thing. The girl seems to feel sorry for the belly and can’t help but look for it, letting her eyes travel to my middle, probably wondering whether her software supports the updated version of Adonis. I’m almost out of breath when she’s finally done.
    But it does give me time to examine her.
    Her hair is more than blonde. It has the color of butter fresh from the fridge, before it gets all soft and yellow. Her skin looks incredibly smooth, as white as Philadelphia cream cheese, untouched in the box. The nose is small, with an upward tip that looks like the top of an ice-cream cone, that last bit coming out of the machine that you put in your mouth first. Her eyes are ice-blue like Gatorade Frost and her thick lips glisten like strawberry sorbet.
    Oooh. My stomach comes out of hiding and starts whining like a kid for candy. Man. She’s not just a Day 1 Girl; she’s a Daybreak Girl.
    “No, I don’t live here,” she finally says with a heavy sigh full of irritation. “I’m their daughter. I lost my keys. I can’t get into my apartment. Argh! I have to be at work at ten and I can’t go like this!”
    She’s the preachers’ daughter though she speaks like a pagan prom queen, or a porn queen, for that matter. Her English is straight from MTV, and she wiggles her head along with her words in an imitation of black n’ bitchy. She belongs to a tattooed generation of waxing masters brought up on thong songs, intent on making the stomach “the new boobs.” This particular one is crowned with a pierced navel and proudly bares itself between a tight thin blouse and some deadly cool jeans. The tips of her black shoes are shaped like their high heels, and she cuts the air with her long white fingernails while she talks.
    “Are the keys supposed to be here?” I ask in a fatherly way.
    “Yeah. Mom said she had an extra key but I can’t fucking find it.”
    She already said “shit” and here comes the F-word. The holy couple have produced a ho.
    “Why don’t you call her?” I ask her.
    “They’re taping her show now. Her phone’s on silent.”
    She seems pained by her mother’s TV fame. I feel pity for the poor girl and say:
    “Maybe I can help you to get into your place.”
    “You mean, without a key? Are you going to use the cross?”
    “We might try that. A cross and a quick blessing,” I say in a tone that is perfectly Friendly.
    I have the priest under my skin by now. Even naked I can appear to be a man of the cloth. She looks at me with surprise in her Gatorade eyes while I enter the kitchen and start searching the drawers for a knife that resembles the tiny Swiss wonder that I’ve kept in my pocket since Comrade Prizmić gave it to me on his deathbed, a shaky kitchen table in some bombed-out house in All Dead Village, ADV. Thanks to bin Laden, I had to leave it behind in NYC. Ah ha! I find a suitable substitute.
    It’s not until we’re outside, sitting in her well-used Škoda Fabia with me freshly dressed in my holy outfit, that I ask for her name.
    “Gunholder,” she answers and darts off down the street.

CHAPTER 6
LILLIPUT ISLAND
    05.16.2006
    Gunholder drives over two hills, scarcely planted with low and ugly buildings, and approaches the city of Reykjavik. The name sounds like Dubrovnik, but it’s more like entering Split, with all its highways and billboards plus the occasional sports field. (I notice that the stands are hardly bigger than the bench.) Like my hometown, this city seems to have a split personality: a historical center with hysterical suburbs.
    They seem to have had their share of communism up here as well. Concrete housing projects line the side of the road and salute my Titolitarian past. We used to live in one of those gray monsters close to the stadium before we moved downtown, into a building older than New York City itself. I remember we had to leave our car behind since the narrow streets in the old town don’t support any gas-related traffic, but every Sunday father took me and my older brother Dario to visit our good old Yugo, where it still held its parking space in our ugly old neighborhood.
    Gunholder lives downtown, close to The Pond, a small swan lake close to the harbor. Here we’re back with the bourgeoisie: