The Darkest Heart (28 page)

Leonardo smiled at me in a way that told me he knew something about those guns we were carrying, but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction. I pretended not to notice.

‘Another story,' I said, Is that it's because of all the piranhas in the water.' I watched the flames dancing in the barbecue.

‘Well, we know that's true. Plenty of
jacaré
too.' He reached down to touch his bandaged leg.

When the barbecue was hot enough, I filled a pan with clear water from a five litre plastic bottle and put it on the heat to boil.

I looked over at Daniella. She was awake in the hammock, lying on her side, watching the two of us talking in the early morning light. I went to her and ran my hand across her forehead, showing her my smile. ‘Did you sleep OK?'

‘Not much. You?'

‘Not at all.' I left Daniella alone and she used the waterproof for privacy again, Leonardo taking too much interest when she re-emerged, and came to sit with me.

The way he watched her made me feel like tiny spiders were crawling over every part of me, and each time he slipped his eyes over her, I wanted to twist them out.

I poured coffee into three small cups, filled it with sugar and we drank in silence, chewing dry bread and washing it down with sips of hot coffee. On another day, in other circumstances, it would have been a perfect morning. The gentle sound of the water slopping against the hull, the soporific sway of the boat as she moved in the eddies of the river.

‘We need to refuel,' I said aloud, shaking myself awake and throwing the dregs of my coffee overboard. ‘Then we can get going again. You'll have to help me.'

‘Help how?'

‘Lift the barrel ...' I shrugged.

He thought about it, knowing he'd have to get close to me. Leonardo always kept a safe distance – the kind of distance that a bullet could cross much faster than a man – but this would bring me close enough to be a threat.

‘You try to screw me around,' he said, ‘I'll kill you and make her suffer long and hard.'

‘I understand.'

Together, Leonardo and I hauled a barrel from the store, him trying to hold it with both hands while keeping the pistol close.

‘Where does it need to go?' he asked, panting with the exertion of it. Neither of us had slept, and we were both exhausted. He was limping a little on the bandaged leg.

I stopped and pointed to the hatch where I accessed the fuel lines, so Leonardo waited while I pulled it open and looked in to see the opening to the boat's fuel tank.

‘How d'you get it in there?' he said. ‘The hole's at the side.'

I held up a coil of clear plastic hosepipe. ‘No pumps out here. Just a pipe and gravity.'

‘What the fuck is gravity?'

I shook my head at him and mimicked putting the pipe in my mouth.

‘You siphon it in?'

‘We used to do it to cars back in Rio. Use the petrol for ... Well, you know. Sometimes it went into bottles, sometimes we used to sell it.'

‘You're from Rio? I always wanted to go to Rio. Carnival and Copacabana.'

Sofia and I used to go down to Copacabana with Pai and play in the surf when we were little. By the time I was ten years old, though, he didn't do much other than drink and lie in bed so we used to go down there on our own. We would buy a few warm
pão de quiejo
from the bakery, made fresh that morning, and eat them on the sand. There were always boys hanging around Sofia, but she was too busy looking after me and Pai to take much notice.

Another two years, though, and we didn't go to the beach any more. By then, Sofia gave all her time to cleaning and Candomblé and I had my responsibilities to the gang.

‘You didn't say where you're really from,' I said to Leonardo. ‘It's not Vila Rica.'

‘Belém.' He sniffed and took off his cap, scratching the top of his head with the butt of his pistol. His features were drawn and bags had formed under his eyes. He still had the soft looks, but the stress and lack of sleep was taking them away.

‘You're a long way from home,' I said.

‘You, too,
Carioca.
So, what are you doing out here? Why would a man from Rio want to live in this shit-hole?'

‘Looking for something better. You?'

‘And this is better?' Leonardo looked around us. Water and trees and land so scorched by the sun it was red and baked hard.

‘Yes.' A kind of realisation for me. ‘Yes, it is.'

Leonardo sighed and shook his head. ‘No. This is a shit hole.'

‘So why are you here?'

‘For the money. I do this job and then—'

‘And then you'll have enough? It'll be the last one?'

Leonardo looked at me as if I'd seen right through him. As if, in that moment, I understood everything there was to know about him.

‘Then you'll go back to whoever it was you were thinking about, right?' I said.

He didn't speak.

‘So who is it? A girl? Mother? Father? Brother?'

Leonardo's eyes flickered and he looked away for a fraction of a second before coming back to stare at me.

‘You have a brother?' I asked.

‘It's none of your business.'

‘In Belem? Older or younger?'

‘We going to fuel this thing or not?' he said. ‘I want to get moving.'

He put his cap back on, shifting the weight of the gun in his hand, reminding me who was in charge.

*

I was rolling the empty barrel back to the store when I heard a grumble somewhere in the sky. I stowed the barrel, then went out to the bow of the
Deus
, where I'd get the best view of a sky that was as brilliant as I had ever seen it. Pale and with no hint of cloud to sully it. There was no indication that it had rained so much yesterday, except for a freshness in the air and a sweetness in the scent of the river.

I held a hand to my brow and squinted into the clear expanse of blue, as the grumble grew louder.

‘What is it?' Daniella came to my side. She sounded groggy, her voice still lazy from sleep.

‘A plane,' I said. ‘Right there.' I pointed to the sky, where the tiny smudge of a plane moved north-east of our position.

‘It looks low,' Daniella said.

‘It's going to land.'

She looked at me. ‘At Piratinga?'

‘Mm-hm.'

‘It's too early for the
Bandeirante.'
She was talking about the small passenger plane that hopped from town to town twice a week.

I nodded and watched it descending, the sound of its engines becoming louder, and then it was out of sight behind the trees.

I stared at the empty sky for a while longer, then turned and sat down, taking off my cap and running a hand over my short hair.

‘Something wrong?' Daniella asked.

‘No, I'm just tired, that's all.' The plane bothered me, though. It had to be Sister Dolores Beckett, and that meant I didn't have as much time as I needed to get ahead of her on the river. Piratinga was only twenty or thirty kilometres away and if her meeting with the bishop was short, she could be on the river soon. Santiago's boat would catch us quickly, I had no doubt about that, and if they passed us, Sister Dolores Beckett could get to Mina dos Santos and leave before we even reached there. If she left the main river and headed deeper inland, finding her might be impossible.

‘We should go,' I said. ‘We have to leave now.'

I couldn't think of any circumstances under which Costa would be pleased to see me return, knowing that the nun was still breathing.

37

The course narrowed as we pushed deeper up the River of Deaths. In places, it was as wide as five hundred metres, but in others it closed around us like the shadow that always followed me. The trees drew in, the branches reaching over the water, and the world was filled with the warm, damp smell of the forest.

‘It's strange here,' Daniella whispered, scanning the jungle that pulsed just a few metres from the boat. ‘It's like ... we're in a different world.' She shifted in her seat. ‘I can imagine the
mapinguari
out there, right now, hoping we'll get off the boat.'

‘There's no such thing,' I told her. Two metres tall, ferocious, clawed and impervious to bullets and arrows, the
mapinguari
was one of those forest legends that sounded incredible during the hours of daylight. Once the sun was down, though, and the haunting cries of the wild began, almost anything seemed possible. ‘And we're not getting off,' I told her. ‘You don't get out of the boat here.'

I took my eyes off the river and scanned the forest before looking at Daniella sitting beside me. Her hair was not combed and cleaned like when she was working or ready to go out. It was not tied back in the usual careful fashion, and she wore no make-up to hide her true face.

‘You look beautiful,' I told her. ‘Natural.'

‘Really? I thought I'd look like shit.'

‘No.'

‘I have a mirror in my bag,' she told me. ‘I could—'

‘You don't need it. Not here. Not on the river.'

I could see every pore on her face. The shine on her nose. There
were tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip. Her skin glowed with the sun and the air and the reflection of the water, and I studied her as never before. I noticed the faint hairs on her forearms, the tiny half moons on her fingernails, the veins in the back of her hands. I liked it that she had no make-up. It was like a mask that hid what she really was.

‘It suits you.' I said. ‘This place makes you even more beautiful.'

She smiled, a hesitant look, uncertain if I were teasing her or not.

‘I mean it.'

She put her hand on my knee. ‘Ask me. Ask me now.'

‘Ask you what?'

‘What you almost asked me yesterday.'

‘It's not the right time.'

‘It's the perfect time.'

‘Not yet.'

Daniella sighed and looked away to hide her disappointment.

‘Take the wheel,' I said to her.

‘What?'

‘It's important for you to know how to control the boat. It makes sense if something happens to me.'

‘Like what?' she asked. ‘What's going to happen to you?'

‘I don't know,' I shrugged. ‘Anything. Nothing. I was just saying it. Come on, this will help to pass the time, that's all.'

She nodded slowly, narrowing her eyes in wariness before taking the wheel in both hands, and I set about showing Daniella the rudiments of how the
Deus
worked. How she sat in the water, where she was able to go, how deep the water needed to be. I pointed out the signs of the river and how to read them best.

Giving my attention to teaching Daniella took my mind off what I was really here to do, but a festering nervousness grew with every metre of river we left behind us. My future was clouded and I couldn't see anything there other than Sister Dolores Beckett. Her face was beginning to haunt me, the black and grey dots swimming in my mind, swirling like smoke, forming an image of her face. Never before had such a thing affected me and deep down,
deeper than all the murder and the sadness and the darkness that lay in the furthest corner of my soul, there was a light that had been crushed and hardened like a diamond. And in that place of light, I knew this was wrong; that no amount of money or threats could make it right.

I glanced back, as if I might see my future creeping up on me, and I didn't know if I was ready to meet it.

After an hour or so, Daniella was able to take control of the
Deus.
Leonardo hovered about with an uneasy expression because someone inexperienced was controlling the boat.

He was growing more agitated with the passing of every minute, and I felt his tension like electricity charging the close and humid air around us. He moved about the boat, pistol in hand. His limp was more pronounced and he winced in pain from time to time, so I guessed the
cocaína
had run out and he was missing the effect it had on him.

‘We haven't got time for this.' He waved the pistol in Daniella's direction. ‘She's too slow. If we're not in—'

‘It makes no difference,' I told him. ‘We couldn't go any faster if we wanted to.
All
we have is time.'

Eventually he moved up to the bow so he could spot the river and warn of any possible danger. He was a nuisance, calling out the slightest ripple, and I tried to ignore him, glad that he at least had something to do.

‘It's getting hotter,' he called back. ‘Does it feel like it's getting hotter?' His face glistened with sweat, and dark patches had formed on his shirt.

‘It's hot,' I agreed.

‘If I've caught that old man's sickness ...'

I watched Leonardo and swallowed my anger and frustration. ‘Dengue isn't contagious,' I said.

‘Maybe it wasn't—' He stopped and leaned over the bow, squinting at the bank to our left.

‘You see something?' I asked, standing and trying to see what he was looking at.

‘There.' He pointed. ‘Is that
jacaré?'

About fifty metres upriver, on a narrow bank, three or four objects lay stretched out on the blazing white sand. As we approached and the shapes came into focus, Leonardo straightened and set his face firm. ‘Fucking monsters,' he said, then turned and hurried along the side of the boat, limping on the bandaged leg. He kept one hand on the gunwale to steady himself as he went to the box seat. His movements were quick and agitated as he unfastened the padlock and yanked it from the fixture, throwing open the lid and grabbing the old man's rifle. He stuffed a handful of cartridges into his pocket before looking back at me and snapping the lock shut again, then he hurried to the gunwale and checked that the weapon was loaded.

I'm going to kill the bastards.' He raised the rifle to his shoulder, took aim and fired.

The sound of the small-calibre rifle was like the crack of a whip. Anywhere else, it might not have sounded so loud, but here it was intrusive and out of place. A scattering of birds broke from the trees and came out over the water, fluttering in confusion before returning to the darkness. Others made a break across the river, heading for the other side.