on the left, lay a body placed on its side. It – he – was naked, and his legs were crooked and twisted. He had been shot in the jaw, and flies flickered above him.
The director leaned towards me in the molasses air and said there was no real danger of infection. ‘The dead are healthy. They didn’t die from diseases.’ Later, I walked outside and saw bags of seeping waste left against a wall, frenzied flies thick above the trailing lines of blackened ooze, and was not so sure.
We left and I followed Hector upstairs. A fire had ripped through half of the morgue on a summer’s night a year before and now the upper floor lay derelict: tortured iron railings and marked walls. Such is the state of Honduras’s morgues. As if death had seeped into the very structure of this place and left it rotten and mould-tainted.
Later, he introduced me to his medical colleagues. They shifted in their blue shirts when I shook their hands – they were embarrassed to be asked questions about what they did. Their work was difficult, Hector explained, and I asked what sort of people were drawn to this type of task. He repeated the words of the funeral worker outside: there is not much other employment around. Death creates its own labour.
I offered the coroner team something to eat, and we sat down together. Around the table were Sanchez, Garcia and Rodriguez, two doctors and a forensic photographer. I had bought fried chicken and, despite the sugar stench of death coming from just beyond the door, they ate their lunch. I did not; I had gone to the toilet to wash my hands and found neither soap nor towels.
I asked about the smell. There was a smirk. ‘What smell?’ These men had been busy and were hungry. On the day before they had nine bodies brought in: six homicides. Outside lay two more bodies. I looked at the white chicken meat and fried strips of skin in their hands and focused on writing notes.
‘Look at this. This one has been shot in the head,’ said the forensic photographer, glancing at the laptop before him, his mouth full. I shifted across to his screen: it was one of the women who had been killed the day before. There was the child’s Spiderman bike. The doctors looked too but were unmoved. The only thing shocking, they told me, is working with children who’d been tortured. One of them let out a low whistle. ‘It’s really common.’
They described how victims’ hands and feet were often tied together and the rope wrapped around the neck, then lashed to the feet. ‘So, when they tire from struggling, they let themselves go. Their feet drop, and they end up choking to death. The rope just tightens around their throat. If they are lucky, someone shoots them before it gets to this.’
Luck, fate. These were the things they talked about – as if that’s all you could pin your hopes on. ‘Some people are shot twenty times and end up in hospital, still living,’ said Sanchez, a heavy-set man with eyes dark rimmed and deep. ‘Then there are people who are only shot just the once – a small wound – and they end up here.’
‘The beautiful thing about this job,’ said Garcia, wiping his fingers with a napkin to clean off the chicken grease, ‘is seeing up close what a bullet can really do to you.’ And then he picked up another chicken leg.
That night I met Orlin Armando Castro – a local TV journalist with a fixed gaze and an impish laugh. He had a fizzing energy that meant he never stopped moving. Beside him was his cameraman, Osman Castillo, a solid man in ripped jeans and a white shirt. Osman hardly spoke; Orlin was his voice.
On Orlin’s belt was a police radio that buzzed from time to time, and in his hand, always, was a Blackberry phone. He constantly scanned both and replied to his messages with a focus that could have been mistaken for something else. He was constantly awaiting that call – to a murder scene, to another death. On hearing of one, he and Osman would jump into their scraped blue Hyundai Tucson, whose passenger door did not open from the outside, and drive fast to where a body was sure to be lying. There they did what they were paid to do: they filmed murder.
I had arranged to meet Orlin because he was a local journalist here and I had been told – out of everyone – he was the first to get to San Pedro’s murder scenes. The one reporter the police would call whenever there was a shooting, his life was defined by gun killings. And I wanted to know what that could do to a man – to be a constant witness to the tortured secrets of this city, to have a career marked so powerfully by the gun’s ultimate legacy.
It was late when we met outside the chipped and long-shut-down hairdresser on a darkened corner of a crossroads. We shook hands, and then, casually, Orlin pulled open his car door and showed me his guns: a 12mm shotgun and a 9mm Beretta pistol.
‘Have you used them?’ I asked him in the half-light.
‘Yes,’ Orlin said. I wasn’t used to journalists packing heat, less so firing them. One time, he said, he drove into a gunfight by accident. He had to put down his microphone and pull out his pistol and start shooting, because the gangs, in the confusion, had begun to shoot at him. Even so, he refuses to wear a bulletproof vest because the gangs might think he’s a cop and then they’d be sure to kill him.
He had worked for the past eleven years for a national Honduran news channel, Canal 6, and had seen things on these eternal, yellow-lit night streets that you should not see. A six-month-old killed in the middle of a gunfight; whole families executed in their homes. He looked at me, his head tilted slightly, and flipped around the screen of his white Blackberry phone. On it was the decapitated body of a woman, her vagina on display. His thumb flicked, and another image appeared. Three day-old dead men lay in cornfields, the heat causing their eyes to pop out of their heads. He laughed, his eyes twinkling, and he showed me another woman, semi-naked in death. His phone was filled with corpses. Young men from the 18 gang slumped in awkward positions, as if asleep. Before and after shots of the living and the dead, from smiling to something else.
When he does not work, he gets bored, he said. There’s so much drama in what he does. The closer he gets to death, the more alive he feels. This, he told me, was real journalism. I began to fear this little man’s love for the tenebrous corners of this city.
There’s much that he cannot report – if he did he’d be killed. Some murder scenes he just has to stay away from: he knows things would get too complicated with the gangs if he reported on certain killings. He feels he’s walking on an edge. ‘On the one side there is deep, dark water, on the other side there is fire. Here you don’t know who is who. In a war you take sides. You know who an army is – they are in green. But here . . . you have no idea,’ he said.
A call came in. There had been a shooting in the Barrio Rivera Hernandez, and Orlin’s face changed. We jumped into his car and we were off, pushing through the down-lit streets to the murder scene. In this light the street took on the colour of jaundice, the plaster on the low-slung houses hanging like pockmarked skin, the grill-lined windows the shade of mustard gas.
The body lay still under the ash-blond glare. The policemen were placing small fluorescent triangle markers out under the shadowed light, tracing where the spent rounds had fallen. The body lay awkwardly, his legs twisted, the shoulders tucked underneath. The dead man was wearing an orange polo shirt, which looked almost white now, and you could glimpse tartan boxer shorts poking above his stained blue jeans. When the cameraman turned on his light, you could see the blood still seeping gently from the man’s back.
The police took out a tape measure and began to measure the ballistic range, but you felt they were doing this because the television crew was nearby. The police spoke to no one, and the street’s occupants stood back in the shadows. All the neighbours had come out to look and to talk in quiet voices. A fat baby sat on the sidewalk, gurgling; a girl, about three years old, in a pink frilly dress
