Gun Baby Gun. Iain Overton
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 with small pierced ears, asked her mother for a hug; to her side a man laughed and swung his son between his legs. And in front of these children, the police flipped the body, and the man’s destroyed face stared up into the deep black sky.
Orlin, his face caught in the camera’s brightness, stood before the body and delivered his lines, repeated a thousand times before. And the image on the video screen showed him, the whiteness of the light hard contrasting with the sulphur-tinted streets, like a broken angel. Luminescent. Then the camera’s light went out, and Orlin turned and took one more photo with his phone, and another crumpled face of death was captured.
When they finally put the dead man into a long, rustling black bag, the crowd grew bored and drifted away: the show was over. And the police tipped the body into the back of the forensic truck and then they too left; and all that remained were patches of sticky, coagulating blood, thick on the ground.
Orlin walked back to his vehicle. I caught a glimpse of his face lit in the reflection of his phone. He was looking to see if any more murders had been called in that night. And so it goes, I thought. The endless hunger for death in these streets never sated – one that totally consumed this slight, sad-faced man. I climbed back into the car and we drove away.
The low barbed-wire-rimmed walls of the district flickered beyond the window. And the silent homes of the people of San Pedro, with their contained patches of blue electricity, began to thin out, until all that was left were the spotlights of the car and the silence, and the yellow streets in the rear window diminished into the night.
The coffins attached to the wall are the pricier ones, Daisy Quinteros explained to me the next day, pointing to the far end of the funeral parlour shop.
‘The most expensive is 54,000 lempiras,’ she said, smiling – just shy of $3,000. She was a good saleswoman and dressed appropriately for this sad room: motherly. Her hair was flecked with lines of white, and her trousers a smart grey that strained slightly around her hips. She wore a tastefully embroidered white shirt. The look clearly worked – she sold about three coffins a week, getting a commission from each. She once earned over a thousand US dollars in just one month, she said.
We were overlooking a street lined with funeral homes. The kerbs were filled with solemn cars, and beside them pine trees cast spots of shadow onto the baked pavement. One of the funeral-home owners had planted white, almost translucent, orchids in pots leading up one stairway; and all around the entrances and pavements were swept clean. Unlike other parts of the city, this area was free of graffiti. This street looked the richest of them all.
I had come here to see one more community impacted by the gun – to look at the art of the undertaker. In San Pedro you did not have to travel far to meet one.
Daisy beckoned me to sit down at the glass table in the centre of the showroom. Unusually around here, she had not lost anyone personally to the violence. That was not to say that it had not affected her; the suddenness, the shock of death coming unexpectedly, these were the things that still disconcerted her.
‘You can see it in the eyes of the family members,’ she said, and leaned forwards and touched my arm; 90 per cent of her clients had died violently.
‘It’s not all bad, though. The other day we buried this old man. He was 102. No one lives that long here.’ And she smiled a thin smile, because she knew this wasn’t what I was here to write about.
I asked her if earning a living from the violence bothered her.
‘Well, we’ve been here twenty-one years. We provide a service – we are a necessity. I don’t think our business is taking advantage at all. What would they do without us?’ She talked quickly and without pause, her moving hands covered in gold rings. ‘Everyone is going to need this service some day.’ She pushed a folder towards me. It was filled with images of coffins and garlands, plaques and headstones: a catalogue of death.
‘So – how would you like to be buried?’ I asked, and through the tinted windows you could see a chain of cars pass slowly outside. Another cortège. Another profit line reached.
‘I’d