Puro, he says, and winks at you.

Muy puro, adds Xavier.

After another hour in the gazebo, laughing and chatting, Trine grows quiet and visibly tired, and Elisabeth whispers straight into your ear.

We need to get going. It’s the middle of the night, she says. Our hostel might not even let us in.

Soon, says Xavier, when you nuzzle his neck and ask him if he can take you to Carúpano.

The three of you confer quickly in Norwegian and agree that you need to be a little more forceful with Xavier, it really is time to go.

Let’s play a game first, says Xavier’s friend. He’s a scrawny guy with a blandly handsome face, and although he’s quite a bit older than the rest of them, Trine had seemed quite taken with him on the dancefloor, though nothing seems to have happened between them. Xavier pulls you down gently next to him on the dirt floor and you let yourself be drawn close. Xavier laughs and pokes you playfully in the soft hollow between your breasts, so you laugh, too. But then the man pulls out a gun and places it on the stone slab with a loud clang.

Let’s go, says Elisabeth and stands up, but you tug gently at the hem of her dress and she sits back down.

None of you have ever seen a gun before. And why would you have? Naïve, spoilt, sheltered little girls from average families in the richest and safest country in the world usually haven’t and never will. Later, much later, you’ll be asked to identify the weapon. They’ll show you image after image of handguns; small ones, big ones, black, bronze, silver, guns with wooden details, guns with silencers and guns without. You won’t be able to take more than a single glance at them without starting to sweat and shake. Which one? They’ll ask, and you’ll close your eyes and shake your head lightly. Your mind will be blank, entirely empty, like the still surface of a lake.

The man, who will never resurface after this night, and whose name you’ll never recover, removes something from the back pocket of his low-slung, mud-splattered jeans and holds his palm out for you to see. The bullet glints in the incandescent light of the full moon. A single golden cylinder, an object of beauty, like an amulet. He flicks the hand holding the gun, and the weapon splits open to reveal the chamber with six empty holes. You can’t help a sharp, audible intake of breath at the sight.

Hey, chill out, Xavier says. He’ll go first.