“Smith.”

“You cook?”

“That’s right.”

“Where?”

“Wherever. I’ve been travelling up the coast. Ensenada, Mazatlán, Acapulco.”

“And then Juárez? Not Tijuana?”

“Tijuana’s too big. Too Californian.”

“Last stop before America?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Are you the owner?”

“Near enough for you, cabrón. That accent — what is it? Australian?”

“English. I’m from London.”

Gomez took a beer from the fridge and cracked it open. “You want a beer, English?”

“No, thanks. I don’t drink.”

Gomez laughed at that, a sudden laugh up from the pit of his gut that wobbled his pendulous rolls of fat, his mouth so wide that Milton could see the black marks of his filled teeth. “You don’t drink and you say you want to work in my kitchen?” He laughed again, throwing his head all the way back. “Hombre, you either stupid or you ain’t no cook like what I ever met.”

“You won’t have any problems with me.”

“You work a fryer?”

“Of course, and whatever else you need doing.”

“Lucky for you I just had a vacancy come up. My fry cook tripped and put his arm into the fryer all the way up to his elbow last night, stupid bastardo. Out of action for two months, they say. So maybe I give you a spin, see how you get on. Seven an hour, cash.”

“Fifteen.”

“In another life, compadre. Ten. And another ten says you won’t still be here tomorrow.”

Milton knew that ten was the going rate and that he wouldn’t be able to advance it. “Deal,” he said.

“When can you start?”

“Tonight.”

2

Milton asked Gomez to recommend a place to stay; the man’s suggestion had come with a smirk. Milton quickly saw why: it was a hovel, a dozen men packed into a hostel that would have been barely big enough for half of them. He tossed his bag down on the filthy cot that he was assigned and showered in the foul and stained cubicle. He looked at his reflection in the cracked mirror: his beard was thick and full, the black silvered with flecks of white, and his skin had been tanned the kind of colour that six months on the road in South America would guarantee. The ink of the tattooed angel wings across his shoulders and down his back had faded a little, sunk down into the fresh nutty brown.

He went out again. He didn’t care that he was leaving his things behind. He knew that the bag would be rifled for anything worth stealing, but that was fine; he had nothing of value, just a change of clothes and a couple of paperbacks. He travelled light. His passport was in his pocket. A couple of thousand dollars were pressed between its pages.

He took a scrap of paper from his pocket. He had been given it in Acapulco by an American lawyer who had washed up on the shores of the Pacific. The man used to live in New Mexico and had visited Juárez for work; he had been to meetings here and had written down the details. Milton asked a passer-by for directions and was told it was a twenty minute walk.

He had time to kill. Time enough to orient himself properly. He set off.

Milton knew about Juárez. He knew it was the perfect place for him. It was battered and bloodied, somewhere where he could sink beneath the surface and disappear. Another traveller had left a Lonely Planet on the seat of the bus from Chihuahua and Milton had read it cover to cover. The town had been busy and industrious once, home to a vibrant tourist industry as Texans were lured over the Rio Bravo by the promise of cheap souvenirs, Mexican exotica and Margaritas by the jug (served younger than they would have been in El Paso’s bars). They came in their thousands to fix their teeth, to buy cheap spectacles, to buy Prozac and Viagra and other medications for a fraction of the amount charged by domestic pharmacies. There was still a tourist industry — Milton passed shops selling sombreros, reproduction Aztec bric-a-brac, ponchos and trinkets — but the one-time flood of visitors had dwindled now to a trickle.

That was what the reputation of being the most murderous place on the planet would do to a town’s attractiveness.

The town was full of the signs of a crippled and floundering economy. Milton passed the iron girder skeleton of a building, squares of tarpaulin flapping like loose skin, construction halted long ago. There were wrecked cars along the streets, many with bullet holes studding their bodywork and their windscreens shot out. Illicit outlets — picaderos — were marked out by shoes slung over nearby telegraph wires and their shifty proprietors sold cocaine, marijuana, synthetic drugs and heroin. The legitimate marketplace at Cerrajeros was busy with custom, a broad sweep of unwanted bric-a-brac for sale: discarded furniture, soda fountains, hair curlers, Kelvinator fridges. A block of sixties’ cookers jostled for space next to a block of armchairs and another block of ancient electronics, reel-to-reel tape recorders, VHS players and cheap imported stereos. Army humvees patrolled the crowds, soldiers in their pale desert camouflage, weapons ready, safeties off. Everything sweated under the broiling desert sun.

Milton walked on, passing into a residential district. The air sagged with dust and exhaust and the sweet stench of sewage. He looked down from the ridge of a precarious development above the sprawling colonia of Poniente. Grids of identical little houses, cheap and nasty, built to install factory workers who had previously lived in cardboard shacks. Rows upon rows of them were now vacant and ransacked, the workers unable to pay the meagre rent now that Asian labourers would accept even less than they would. Milton saw one street where an entire row had been burnt out, blackened ash rectangles marking where the walls had once stood. Others bore the painted tags of crack dens. These haphazard streets had been built on swampland, and the park that had been reserved for children was waterlogged; the remains of a set of swings rusted in the sun, piercing the muddy sod like the broken bones of a skeleton. Milton paused to survey the wide panorama: downtown El Paso just over the border; burgeoning breeze-block and cement housing slithering down into the valley to the south; and, in the barrio, dogs and children scattered among the streets, colourful washing drying on makeshift lines, radio masts whipping in the breeze, a lattice of outlaw electricity supply cables and satellite dishes fixed to the sides of metal shacks.

He reached the church in thirty minutes. It was surrounded by a high wire fence and the gate was usually locked, necessary after thieves had broken in and made off with the collection one time too many. The sign hanging from the mesh was the same as the one Milton had seen around the world: two capitalised letter A’s within a white triangle, itself within a blue circle. His first meeting, in London, seemed a lifetime ago now. He had been worried sick then: the threat of breaching the Official Secrets Act, the fear of the unknown, and, more, the fact that he would have to admit that he had a problem he couldn’t solve on his own. He had dawdled for an hour before finding the guts to go inside, but that was more than two years ago now, and times had changed.

He went inside. A large room to the left had been turned into a creché, where parents with jobs in the factories could abandon their children to listless games of tag, Rihanna videos on a broken-down TV and polystyrene plates divided into sections for beans, rice and a tortilla. The room where the meeting was being held was similarly basic. A table at the front, folding chairs arranged around it. Posters proclaiming the benefits of sobriety and how the twelve steps could get you there.

It had already started.

A dozen men sat quietly, drinking coffee from plastic mugs and listening to the speaker as he told his story. Milton took an empty seat near the back and listened. When the man had finished, the floor was opened for people to share their own stories.