The Hitman's Guide to Housecleaning

of any latter-day luxuries. From time to time I also take karate lessons from Torture in the mattress room.
    Olie and Harpa are a bit shy around all the famous people. Olie concentrates on eating, his small earring dancing by his jaw like Sammy’s glasses as he relentlessly chews on the heavenly lamb, but Harpa hardly touches her portion. Torture looks at their bottle of red as if it were filled with the blood of Satan. Olie offers to pour me some but I silently decline. A brief moment of suspense arrives when Gunnhildur asks me to pass the sauce and calls me “Tod.” She bites her lip, but Olie and Harpa are too stressed to notice, and Ari is talking to Hanna.
    The conversation turns to the war in Iraq and Iceland’s participation in it. Somehow the no-army nation managed to come up with a single soldier and then sent him down to Baghdad to help out with the big mess. But now he’s being sent back home. It took a whole platoon of Americans to protect the poor bastard.
    “They didn’t want to risk a wipeout of the whole Icelandic army,” Ari says in his American accent, and then laughs a certain nerdish laughter I haven’t heard for years, but remember from the university cafeteria in Hanover. Niko’s brother studied computer science and his friends used to laugh like that all the time. Intelligent boys laughing at other people’s stupidity, the “other people” including all the people in the world except the ones who were studying computer science at Hanover University.
    Olie laughs with him, but Torture looks at them both from under a set of heavy brows, as if he were contemplating arming his whole congregation and sending it down to Iraq to teach those Muslims how to circumcise their hearts. But instead of saying it, the Bible-boomer turns to me and says this will be the first time he has ever watched the Eurovision Song Contest. He’s doing it for me, he says.
    “And you’re looking at a man who once told his people that devoting your time to this festival of fools was a form of devil worship. Ha ha. It was the year we sent a sodomite dressed up as Lucifer himself. No. It’s nothing but vanity and vexation of the spirit. But I will bite my tongue this evening. Ha ha.”
    Some heavy biting it will be. Since the monsters from Finland won last year, this year’s contest is being held in Helsinki. The broadcast begins with them playing the winning song, “Hard Rock Hallelujah.” It’s everything but torture to watch Torture’s reaction. Yet, I suspect he admires those religious rockers a bit. It’s his own preaching style, taken to the heavy-metal max.
    The Icelandic entry is number five on the list. One weather-beaten leather-wearing rocker with red hair cries out about his “Valentine Lost.” Gunnhildur likes him, so I do, too. I watch her sitting next to her brother on the sofa, stretching her long white legs out on the floor, from beneath the short, black, belly-stretching dress. My Daybreak darling. Red lips and thighs that are one inch thicker than last year. Her behind is almost Latinal by now, and her breasts have risen to the occasion. On the whole her figure is much juicier, apart from the hard basketball-belly. It stems from the water buildup. I haven’t given her any reasons to cry this past winter.
    I then take another good look at Torture. My new boss. The Icelandic Dikan. If he had a soft spot for the hallelujah-monsters, he’s back to his hard-rock self by now. The fluttering bright flames of “vanity and vexation of the spirit” are reflected in his glasses, while his contempt is expressed by his lips, moving about in his beard like two worms in the grass. It’s way more entertaining watching him watch this song contest than watching the thing itself. He reminds me of Dikan watching his Dynamo Zagreb lose to my Hajduk.
    Like Iceland, Croatia goes for an old-timer this year. It’s the one and only Dado Topić, playing with some kids I haven’t seen before. Dado is the king of Croatian rock. He wrote the soundtrack to my youth. He was even there the night I lost my virginity.
    Now he sings: “Vjerujem u ljubav” (I believe in love) in his deep scratchy voice, still sporting his long hair and cowboy boots. The song is pretty good, actually, but Torture says the girl singing with him is out of tune. Bite your tongue, man.
    Before the song is over, the doorbell rings. Goodmoondoor goes to the door. He comes back saying it’s for me. I take a quick look at the mother of