I sipped my beer, thinking about this, letting it gather weight in my mind, when Pita flicked the cigarette she’d been smoking into the water. She was chatting with Elizaveta, telling her how she and Jesus used to come to these canals at nighttime when they were younger. They’d rent a large gondola with their friends and turn it into a floating nightclub with music, dancing, drinking.

Pita, and Jesus for that matter, were colloquially referred to as “Juniors”—the sons and daughters of Mexico’s elite ruling class, whose wealth was only matched by their sense of entitlement. Pita and Jesus weren’t so bad—they actually worked (Pita was the PR specialist for the family brewery)—but I couldn’t stand some of their friends. They were the type who bragged about having four hundred pairs of shoes, or two hundred suits—and keeping them stashed away in swanky homes abroad.

I considered sliding Pita my beer bottle, telling her to put her cigarettes out in it instead, but that seemed like a jackass thing to do, especially given the fact we were still fighting. She’d think I was starting something, and she’d continue tossing her butts in the water, to make a point. Lately she’d become adept at making much of nothing.

I shifted on my too-small chair to get more comfortable. My headache was returning. Maybe it was the onset of one of my migraines, or maybe it was just the heat, or the beer, but a locust-like thrumming had started in my frontal lobe, beneath the vertical gash that likely required stitches. I massaged the area around the bandage with my fingers.

“Jack, look there,” Pepper said. He was pointing past me to a glade in the trees along the bank, where a twenty-foot Aztec pyramid stood. It appeared to be a stage prop, painted in bright shades of purple, pink, and green. “That’s the set for a show that has been put on there for the past ten years,” he added.

“What kind of show?” I asked.

“It’s called ‘La Llorona.’ It’s based on a famous legend in Mexico of the same name. Basically, a beautiful woman drowns her children to get revenge on her husband, who cheated on her with a younger woman.”

“Hell hath no fury—”

“Yes, yes, Jack,” Pepper said. “Anyway, this woman, she’s so filled with guilt, she ends up killing herself. But she’s held up at the gates of heaven. She’s not allowed to enter until she finds her children. So she ends up trapped between this world and the next, doomed to search for her kids for all eternity.”

“Hence the reason you should never murder your kids to spite someone.” I swatted at a fly buzzing around my head, missed it, and said, “So why’s it called ‘La Macarena’—?”

“‘La Llorona,’ Jack. That’s Spanish for ‘The Weeping Woman.’”