“Our man English says he’s been working up and down the coast, says he knows what he’s doing. That right, English?”

“That’s right.”

“We’ll see about that,” Gomez said with a self-satisfied smirk, his crossed arms resting on the wide shelf of his belly.

Milton went back and forth between the storeroom, the cold cupboard and his station, hauling in the ingredients that he knew he would need for the night: three hundred pounds of French fries in waxy brown ten-pound bags; fish tubs full of breaded fillets (the cod dusted with cornmeal already going gooey in the humid air); three-gallon buckets of floury batter; boxes of clam strips; cases of calamari; rock shrimp and chicken cutlets. He looked around at the others, methodically going through the same routine that they would have repeated night after night in a hundred different restaurants: getting their towels ready, stacking their pans right up close so that they could get to them in a hurry, sharpening their knives and slotting them into blocks, drinking as much water as they could manage.

The front of house girl who Milton had met earlier put her head through the kitchen’s swing-door. “Hey Gomez,” Milton heard her call out. “Coach of gringo tourists outside. Driver says can we fit them in? I said we’re pretty full but I’d ask anyway — what you wanna do?”

“Find the space.”

The machine began rattling out orders. Milton gritted his teeth, ready to dive into the middle of it all. The first time he had felt the anticipation was in a tiny, understaffed restaurant in Campo Bravo, Brazil. He needed a way to forget himself, that had been the thing that he had returned to over and over as he worked the boat coming over, the desire to erase his memories, even if it was only temporary. After five minutes in that first restaurant he had known that it was as good a way as any. A busy kitchen was the best distraction he had ever found. Somewhere so busy, so hectic, so chaotic, somewhere where there was no time to think about anything other than the job at hand.

The first orders had barely been cleared before the next round had arrived, and they hadn’t even started to prepare those before another set spewed out of the ticket machine, and then another, and another. The machine didn’t stop. The paper strip grew long, drooping like a tongue, spooling out and down onto the floor. They could easily look out into the restaurant from the kitchen and they could see that the big room was packed out. It got worse and worse and worse. Milton worked hard, concentrating on the tasks in front of him, trying to adapt to the unpleasant sensation that there suddenly wasn’t enough air on the line for all of them to breathe. Within minutes he felt like he was baking, sweat pouring out into his whites, slicking the spaces beneath his arms, the small of his back, his crotch. His boots felt like they were filling with sweat. It ran into his eyes and he cranked the ventilation hood all the way to its maximum but, with it pumping out the air at full blast, the pilots on his unused burners were quickly blown out. He had to keep relighting them, the gas taps left open as he smacked a pan down on the grate at an angle, hard enough to draw a spark.

He sliced bags of fries open with the silver butterfly knife that he always carried in his pocket and emptied them straight into the smoking fryers. The floor was quickly ankle-deep in mess: scraps of food that they swept off the counters, torn packaging, dropped utensils, filthy towels; it was all beneath the sill of the window and invisible from the restaurant so Gomez didn’t care. Still the heat rose higher and higher. Milton stripped out of his chef coat and T-shirt because the water in them had started to boil.

It was hard work, unbelievably hard, but Milton had been doing it for months now and he quickly fell into the routine. The craziness of it, the random orders that spilled from the machine, the unexpected disasters that had to be negotiated, the blistering heat and the mind-bending adrenaline highs, the tunnel vision, the relentless focus, the crashing din, the smell of calluses burning, the screams and curses as cooks forgot saucepan handles were red-hot, the crushing pressure and the pure, raw joy of it all as the rest of his world fell away and everything that he was running away from became insignificant and, for that small parcel of a few hours at the end of a long day, for those few hours, at least, it was all out of mind and almost forgotten.

11

Caterina sat on the bus and stared through the cracked window as they moved slowly through the city. It was getting late, seven in the evening, and yet the sun still baked at ninety, and Juárez quivered under the withering blows of summer, a storm threatening to blow in from the north, tempers running high. A steady hum of traffic rose from the nearby interstate and the hot air, blowing in through the open windows, tasted of chemicals, car exhaust, refinery fumes, the gasses from the smelter on the other side of the border, the raw sewage seeping into the what was left of the river. The bus was full as people made their way out for the evening.

Caterina had made an effort as she left the flat, showering and washing her hair and picking out a laundered shirt to go with the jeans and sneakers she always wore.

She was thinking about all the girls that she had been writing about. Delores was different. She had dodged the fate that had befallen the others. She had managed to escape, and she was willing to talk.

And she said she could identify one of them men who had taken her.

The brakes wheezed as the bus pulled over to the kerb and slowed to a halt. Caterina pulled herself upright and, with her laptop and her notes in the rucksack that she carried over her shoulder, she made her way down the gangway, stepping over the outstretched legs of the other passengers, and climbed down to the pavement. The heat washed over her like water, torpid and sluggish, heavy like Jell-O, and it took a moment to adjust. The restaurant was a hundred yards away, an island in the middle of a large parking lot, beneath the twenty foot pole suspending the neon sign that announced it.

Leon was waiting for her. She stepped around a vendor with a stack of papers on his head and went across to him.

“This better be good,” he said, a smile ameliorating the faux sternness of his greeting. “I had tickets for the Indios tonight.”

“I would never let you pick football over this.”

“It’s good?”

“This is it. The story I want us to tell.”

She was excited, garbling a little and giddy with enthusiasm. Leon was good for her when it came to that. She needed to be calm, and he was steady and reliable. Sensible. It seemed to come off him in gentle waves. Smiling with a warm hearted indulgence she had seen many times before, he put out his hands and rested them on her shoulders. “Take a deep breath, mi cielo, okay? You don’t want to frighten the poor girl away.”

She allowed herself to relax and smiled into Leon’s face. It was a kind face, his dark eyes full of humanity, and there was a wisdom there that made him older than his years. He was the only man she had ever met who could do that to her; he was able to cut through the noise and static of Juárez, her single-minded dedication to the blog and the need to tell the story of the city and its bloodied streets, and remind her that other things were important. They had dated for six months until they had both realised that their relationship would never be the most important thing in her life. They had cooled it before it could develop further, the emotional damage far less than it would have been if it had been allowed to follow its course. There were still nights when, after they had written stories into the small hours, he would stay with her rather than risk the dangerous journey home across the city, and, on those nights, they would make love with an appetite that had not been allowed to be blunted by familiarity. Being with Leon was the best way to forget about all the dead bodies in the ground, the dozens of missing women, the forest of shrines that sprouted across the wastelands and parks, the culverts and trash heaps.