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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 – justshy 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