‘Benjam—?’ I start, but his eyes flash back to me with such wild intensity that I clamp my mouth shut and twist in my chair. The agent talking to Chavez seems innocuous enough in his ill-fitting uniform. A middle-aged Mexican, nominally overweight, the soft mushroom of a belly pushing against a standard-issue black leather belt. He’s about the same height as Chavez and stands close to him, arms crossed, and chewing audibly. Later, and long after the possibility of doing anything has passed, I wonder why a number of clues don’t instantly broadcast him as a fake: the trousers, a good inch short of his ankle, the absolutely non-regulation gold chain around his neck. But what should have struck most forcibly was that someone on duty, taking instructions not just from a superior but from his head of sector, should be chewing with quite such gusto. It smacked of . . . well, gross overfamiliarity, I suppose; but in this moment I figure only that he is someone with whom Benjamín has had a run-in on a previous border excursion and I’m about to reassure him when the agent drops his hand. A sweet paper flutters casually to the floor and my brain, as if playing picture dominoes, links this image directly to another. The bowl of nougat squares in the cabin cupboard, the ones Chavez is always giving the children, The ones he keeps in his desk drawer. Stuck to the front of the bowl is one of Emmy’s Spanish ticker tapes printed with El dulce. Next to the bowl stands a can of beans, duly ticker-taped as Los frijoles.

So?

Unable to make the connection it seeks, my brain ricochets round the cabin highlighting one ticker-taped object after another – La mesa, the table, La silla the chair, until finally it’s Jack I’m looking at. Jack dancing around in front of the kitchen table, pressing the thin white strip to his forehead because it won’t adhere properly to skin. El hermano, it reads.

El hermano, the brother.

Now through the smoky haze of the Alubia I see Reuben’s fingertips on the edge of the $20 bill. ‘El Turrón has a brother,’ he is saying. His brother is a man with authority. A powerful man. If you find him, I guarantee you will find El Turrón.’

Back in an office in the US Customs building I look at my friend and protector, Chavez, a powerful man with both authority and contacts, and I think, El hermano? The brother? No. Impossible, absurd. A wild presumption based on what? I look from one to the other – a similar height and a preference for the same sweets? No. No. No. Still impossible.