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money from the Fußball-Lotto. We were doing it for the fatherland. The Sauerkraut Suckers destroyed half of my grandfather’s generation.
    I’m sitting with the pillows on the sofa, with a white Christian towel around my waist, browsing the local TV channels, when suddenly the front door bangs open and a super-blonde girl in her twenties rushes inside. Without noticing the hitman of her dreams, she beelines for the kitchen and starts opening every one of the drawers. She seems to be in a big hurry, flinging curses inside each drawer before closing it with a bang. “Shit!” Finally, there is silence. She must then have heard the TV, for seconds later she stands in the doorway and asks me something that sounds like:
    “Queer air thew.”
    “Excuse me?”
    She switches to pretty professional English:
    “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
    “I’m To—I’m Father Friendly. I just got in this morning. From New York. They, Goodmoondoor and Sickreader, they told me—”
    “Aha,” she sighs with disinterest and disappears back into the kitchen. On the screen some balding carpenter-type is reading from a book that must be the Bible. The set looks like he built it himself. This must be their channel. Right. The letter A shines in the upper corner. They should call it “Omen” rather than “Amen.” This is one-camera TV: the still-life style of it, the dead plant in the background, the carpenter’s Polish suit, the way he only looks up from the book every three pages (as if he’s checking the red REC light of the camera). It all makes North Korean State TV look like MTV. Poor guys. Dikan’s position as the big boss can’t possibly be hurt by me appearing on this drab channel. Judging from the expression on the carpenter’s face, he knows he’s not talking to more than ten viewers.
    I get up from the sofa, make sure the towel is tight around my waist, and head for the kitchen. I comfort my shy belly—it always withdraws at the sight of serious girls—before appearing in the doorway like a freshly updated and slightly inflated version of Adonis. The girl is still searching the kitchen like a burglar on speed.
    “Are you looking for something?” I ask her. Tone is hymn-like, voice is gym-like.
    “Yeah. My keys,” she murmurs into a cupboard.
    Her body is slim, with small breasts and a tight ass, firm as a fully inflated airbag. If she was the only woman in our platoon and we were stuck in the mountains for a month, I’d start dreaming about 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