Heat by Bill Buford

nine guys in all. After Miguel found work at Babbo, he began taking English lessons in a class taught by a Puerto Rican named Mirabella, and the two of them began seeing each other.
    Elisa remembers her. “They had problems, and she was always phoning. She was older, and you could hear the age in her voice, but I didn’t know how much older until I saw her at the funeral. Miguel was twenty-two. She was forty-two. Why would a forty-two-year-old woman go out with a twenty-two-year-old?”
    Around Christmas last year, Miguel came to Jesus for advice. The relationship had been openly tempestuous, but, according to Miguel, they had sorted out their difficulties. Mirabella wanted Miguel to move in. She had an apartment in Brooklyn. They planned to marry in June.
    “I’d never met her,” Jesus told me. “Miguel had never brought her to the house. This puzzled me. There were other things. She always needed money. She had a heart problem and had to see a specialist. Miguel didn’t have much money. He didn’t have enough to be giving it to an older woman with a heart problem. Miguel asked me for my advice. I said he shouldn’t move in.” Miguel asked the others in the apartment. They said he shouldn’t move in.
    In the new year, Miguel moved in.
    The fights continued. Mirabella was now calling the kitchen every day. There was an insistence in the woman’s tone, Elisa felt, an imperiousness. “The others in the kitchen told me she dealt in some sort of I.D. thing—she bought and sold identities.” At the time, the going rate for a Social Security number was sixty-five dollars. A green card was a little more. A passport varied: a good one could cost several hundred dollars. “None of these kids have papers,” Elisa said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if she gave Miguel a fright about his immigration status. And he feared that if he got in trouble the whole family would be in trouble.”
    The relationship didn’t work out, Jesus said. “But because Miguel had asked for our advice and we’d told him not to marry this woman, he felt he couldn’t come back to us. He was embarrassed. He had no place to go.”
    On May 18th, Miguel’s last day in the kitchen, he finished an enormous amount of work, Elisa recalls. He did the prep for the entire week. “Then he put his fish knives in a plastic container and gave them to me. I didn’t know what he was doing. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘These are very nice.’” That night he hanged himself from a shower fixture in the Brooklyn apartment. Jesus rushed over on getting the news. It was his first time in the apartment. The police wouldn’t let him see the body.
    Jesus was thirty-three but looked older. He has thick black hair, which is stiff like tarred straw, a strong angular nose, and a heavy, scarred face. He has a serious air and an appealing toughness. He phoned his uncle, Miguel’s father. “His grief was unbelievable. Nothing I said made sense to him.”
    Jesus paused. The two of us were still sitting on the park bench, surrounded by his cousins and brother, in no apparent hurry, watching us patiently. Jesus was staring fixedly, avoiding me. It seemed he didn’t want me to see the tears welling up like a heavy oil along the rim of his eyes. He took a breath. After a church service, Jesus continued, he arranged for the body to be returned to Mexico. Andy wrote a letter, describing “what a hero Miguel was, because the parents don’t understand what has happened. We didn’t understand. We still don’t.”
    Jesus stood up. His household stood up. “We are now very close,” he said, gesturing to the others. “We don’t want this to happen again. We talk. We make sure no one is alone.” He walked off in the direction of the subway, the gang following behind, subdued, everyone with sad, sloping shoulders.
    I phoned the police. Jesus carried the name and number of a detective who had been in charge, a Detective Lamposone. I got one of his colleagues.
    “Oh, yeah, I