Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun by Iain Overton Read Free Book Online

asked, and through the tinted windows you could see a chain of cars pass slowly outside. Another cortège. Another profit line reached.
    ‘I’d like a mid-range coffin. I’ve already bought it.’ She flicked though the laminated sheets and pointed to the one she had in mind. It was modest, and beside it was a list of measurements. People are getting fatter, she said, now you have coffins in XXXL. But they only come in a set height, so with a 6ft 2in. man like me they would have to do something to reduce my leg size. She didn’t elaborate, and I imagined someone shortening me with a hacksaw on a metal gurney.
    Daisy seemed the happiest of all the people I had met so far in this city. Perhaps her job was meaningful in a way others were not. She still had contact with the living – even if they were suffused with grief. Other professionals I had met in San Pedro, like Orlin, had jobs that focused on the bodies delivered by the carnage. But Daisy dealt with those with breath still in their lungs. She had to be professional and sympathetic, not least to help families navigate their way through the layered choices presented to them in her laminated folders.
    Later, I sat down with Daisy’s hidden counterparts: three embalmers who were brothers. They were in their fifties and had the same triangular and light-brown features. One had lived in the US for many years, and the good living had bloated him to twice the size of the others, but they all had the same eyes. Eyes that had seen things get steadily worse over the last five years: ‘Once we buried five people from the same family, all dead from guns,’ one said. ‘We prepare far too many teenagers for the ground,’ his brother added, and the three nodded in unison, like priests. ‘Many are just fourteen years old,’ the third said.
    Their skill stretched back to their grandfather, ninety years before. It wasn’t like it was now, not back then. But theirs was the oldest outfit in Honduras, and they were still working hard; on average they prepared thirty bodies a week. The preparation took place out in the back, away from the light of the shop front.
    They led the way. Past a line of neat walnut-coloured coffins,through heavy swinging doors and out to a room that looked like a cheap operating theatre with a metal trolley at its centre. But here there were no machines to monitor life: just things to mimic it.
    To the side was a kitchen tray bearing lines of mascara, rouge, lipstick in neat, ordered rows. In this Catholic country, the casket was often left open at the funeral. People wanted to file past to bid farewell; death was so often sudden and unexpected many things left unsaid had still to be said. So these brothers worked to make sure that the bodies looked peaceful. They erased the look of terror imprinted on lifeless faces. They brought back the illusion of serenity – peaceful resurrection with a make-up bag.
    The eldest, Arnold Mena, a softly spoken man in a crisp white shirt and a lined jacket, was so good at what he did that it wasn’t an issue if you’d been shot in the face. ‘One shot, two shots, three shots – as long as the bullets don’t destroy the face – you can just stitch up the entry hole and cover it with foundation.’
    ‘Here they use smaller-calibre guns, and that doesn’t break the face so much,’ Arnold said. ‘But if the skull is totally destroyed . . . we have to use a small football to keep the shape.’
    He explained how they use small prosthetic eyeballs too, but then they have to keep the eyelids closed and fix small pins to keep it all in place.
    ‘The real challenge,’ he told me, ‘was when we do not have a photo and do not know what the victim looked like. Then you have to be a little creative.’
    They did other things here, too. In that stark room, beside a metal table with an ugly drainage hole for the dripping fluids, stood rows of formaldehyde from ‘The Embalmer’s Supply Company’. Twenty-four bottles