The Darkest Heart (43 page)

I kept my head lowered so my face would be less memorable.

‘This is the man who killed them.' I pointed to Leonardo's body. ‘You saw that. Please. Let us go.'

‘I can't just let you leave,' Fernanda said.

From somewhere outside, mingled with the sound of the rain hammering the land, came the pounding of feet on the boards. Men running. Two or three, it was hard to tell, but I knew who they were. They had heard the shots and come for Leonardo. They had come for their cargo of weapons.

‘They're coming to kill us,' I said, though I knew they would wait until they had their guns before murdering me and violating Daniella. ‘Probably kill anyone who gets in their way. And they scare me more than you do.' I kept hold of Daniella's hand and stepped towards Fernanda. ‘If you're not going to shoot us, then let us past.'

Fernanda hesitated before lowering the shotgun. She nodded to her men, and then stepped aside.

In the night beyond the bar, the footsteps grew louder and there was a heavy bang as someone slammed against the door, pushing it in. The crowd shifted and men shouted complaints as Leonardo's contacts forced their way into the large room.

‘There's a way out behind the bar,' Fernanda said. ‘Good luck.'

54

Daniella and I pushed through the crowd, keeping low. My back tingled in anticipation of the first shot as we ducked behind the bar and burst into the room beyond. The space was cluttered with bottles and boxes that we stepped over to reach the door in the far wall and hurry out into the night.

As Leonardo's contacts pushed through the bar, we slipped around the back, past the rear of the store and down onto the wooden walkways.

The boards were slick and the warm rain was pounding them with a thunderous beat. The worst of the storm had passed, but the last of it was still here as it chased itself out over the forest. In the distance, the sky grumbled and lightning flickered in the clouds.

‘Don't stop.' I slipped both arms through the straps on my pack to secure it, and we jogged through the mine, trying to lose ourselves in the warren of shanty houses. Our progress was slow, but the mud-caked, rain-soaked boards were insecure and slippery underfoot. ‘Keep going!'

We made our way down the hillside, leaving the lights behind us, heading for the darkness below. Once there, we would be hidden and could make our way to the small boat we'd left on the bank. I was confident we would be able to cross the river and find the
Deus
in the dark, but we had to make it to the boat first.

One or two people were still outside their homes, under the awnings, and they watched us race past, following our progress with a turn of the head, but none spoke to us. They could sense the danger that surrounded us. Daniella and I were marked, that much was clear to them.

We were two hundred metres from Fernanda's when we heard the men shouting. It hadn't taken them long to guess what had happened and they had come out to pursue us. They would know that our intention was to escape the mine and they would follow us down to the river.

We didn't have long.

‘Faster!'

Risking a glance back, I saw the figures, silhouetted against the lights. It was a long way, and the rain blurred my vision, but it looked like three men were following.

‘They're going to catch us.' Daniella's voice was filled with panic. Her breath was coming in heavy gasps, her heart thumping hard from both the exercise and the fear.

‘They won't,' I said as we reached the edge of the forest and hurried into the path that led towards the jetty.

My own breathing was laboured, too, my chest bursting from the strain of running all this way in the rain, but we were still half a kilometre or so from the jetty. There was a long way to go and almost anything could happen between here and there. I had to make sure that whatever it was, it was in my favour.

The boarded walkway had come to an end now, and the ground was muddy but easier to run on. I didn't know anything about the men following us – whether they were fit or fast or whether they could shoot straight – but I did know that they were coming straight down the walkway at us. I also knew that the light from Fernanda's and the rest of the mine was at their backs.

‘Get into the trees,' I told Daniella as I came to a stop. ‘Right here. And keep low.'

Together we stepped off the track and into the line of the undergrowth. I pushed Daniella ahead of me and told her to go deeper, to stay inside the forest.

‘What about you?' Her tense words came between breaths.

‘I'm going to be close,' I said as I crouched in the darkness and then lay down in the mud with my arms outstretched, revolver ready.

I looked along the path through the trees to the place where it
opened out into the mine. With the lights from Fernanda's and the glittering lamps from the shacks and shanty houses, there was a fuzzy oblong of hazy yellow.

I sighted along the barrel as the three silhouettes entered the cutting a hundred metres away and stopped.

Three dark smudges.

I aimed at the one in the centre and fired.

The muzzle flash lit the ground just in front of me, killing my night sight for a fraction of a second, but not so long that I didn't see the man in the centre collapse as my bullet struck him.

Before I could fire a second shot, the two remaining men realised their mistake and parted, slipping into the darkness on either side of the path.

‘Stay here,' I said. ‘Don't move. Don't make a sound.'

‘Where are?—'

‘Not a sound.'

They would have seen the flash of my shot and they would expect me to move, perhaps even run, but they wouldn't expect me to move
closer.
I crawled through the mud, keeping as low and silent as possible, inching back in the direction we had come from.

Ten metres from Daniella, I stopped and shuffled closer to the trees.

Keeping the revolver in front of me, I calmed my breathing and waited.

The rain continued to fall, pattering on the leaves. The insects continued to hum.

I watched the darkness, wondering if these were the kind of men who would lie down in the mud like I had, or if they were the kind who wanted to keep their shirts clean. I stared into the blackness until it seemed to shimmer, and it occurred to me that I had left Rio under similar circumstances.

Movement.

It was almost imperceptible, but something had moved in the darkness at the edge of the trees. Upright.

So this was the kind of man who wanted to keep his shirt clean.

I raised the revolver to point a little higher and aimed at the shadow within the shadow.

When it moved once more, the faint squelch of mud reaching my ears, I squeezed the trigger.

The shot cracked into the rain and the muzzle flash illuminated the man standing no more than a few metres from my position. Even though I had only seen him for a fraction of a second, I knew my bullet had struck him in the chest. I knew he would have stumbled backwards and fallen to his knees.

I heard the slap of his body collapsing into the mud, and then the opposite side of the path erupted in a storm of gunshots and flashes.

I scrambled forwards, snaking through the thick mud, hearing the bullets thumping into the ground and trees behind me. When I reached the body of the fallen man, I turned to aim my revolver in the direction of the shooting.

One more shot gave away the third man's position. For less than a heartbeat, he lit up in the darkness and I fired on him.

‘Daniella! Daniella!' I hissed her name as I crept back along the path towards the place where she had entered the forest. It was difficult to know exactly where it had been. I thought I knew how far I had crawled, but it was so dark and, though the canopy protected us from the worst of the rain, the water still came down in heavy drops, breaking through the leaves.

When Daniella didn't reply, I began to worry that a stray bullet had struck her, and I called her name louder, moving more quickly, feeling the panic rising. If she was in there, dying from a bullet wound, I would never find her. She could be just a few metres inside the trees and be lost for ever.

I alternated between peering into the dense obscurity of the tangled forest and looking back at the entrance to the path, towards the haze of lights from the mine, checking for more attackers. I moved further along the trail, calling Daniella's name, hoping she was all right.

‘Daniella? Where are you?'

Thunder grumbled again in the distance and the sky flickered. The rain hardened for a moment, a sudden flurry, then faded to a gentle patter on the leaves.

‘Daniella!'

‘Here.'

‘Thank God.' I hurried towards her voice and groped for her in the dark, our hands touching.

I'm so scared.' She wrapped her arms around me, squeezing hard.

‘We need to get away from here.' I told her as I broke away. ‘We're not safe yet.'

55

We ran as if the Devil were on our heels. Despite the mud and the darkness and the tightness in our chests, we ran and ran.

We burst from the trees and onto the jetty, not pausing but dropping down onto the beach and hurrying to the place where we had dragged the boat into the tree line.

I grabbed it with both hands and hauled it into the shallows, holding it steady while Daniella climbed in. The small boat slipped through the water when I shoved it out into the river and jumped in, snatching up the paddle.

With the clouds still thick above us, it was darker now than it had been when we left the
Deus
, but I took us further out into the river, heading for the far bank. If I could keep us in a more or less straight line, we would soon see the shape of her settled in the deeper water.

Daniella was silent. The only sound was our breathing and that of the rain meeting the river and the paddle pushing through it.

Behind us, the lights of Mina dos Santos were nothing more than
boitatá
eyes smouldering in the dark now. There was no sign of anyone following us, but I didn't allow myself to believe we were safe yet.

When we finally reached the
Deus
, we climbed aboard and tied the smaller boat off to the stern. We couldn't waste time securing it as usual, so it drifted and buffeted in the current.

I settled Daniella on the seat in the wheelhouse and left her holding a cigarette with shaking fingers while I reconnected the fuel line, then grabbed the bottle of
cachaça
the old man kept in the store for emergencies.

It was dangerous to take the boat out at night, but it might be more dangerous to stay here. We needed to get some distance between us and the mine, so I started the engine and took us away from Mina dos Santos, moving slowly, squinting into the darkness and hoping the clouds would dissipate before too long. At least with a clear sky there would be a touch of light from the moon.

The engine sounded loud, but it was reassuring to hear it working well, and I spun the wheel, turning the
Deus
east and heading home, leaving the rain behind us.

Once we were on the straight, I removed the cap from the
cachaça
and handed the bottle to Daniella. ‘Drink some of this.'

She looked at me as if to refuse, then conceded, taking the spirit and lifting it to her lips. She drank, swallowed and coughed.

‘Some more,' I told her, so she drank again, then put the bottle between her knees, keeping one hand on its neck, while the other lifted a cigarette to her lips.

I watched her smoking and staring ahead into the night, her eyes fixed on an invisible point in the darkness. I'd seen a similar look before; in the eyes of young boys in a past I cared not to remember. It was the vacant stare of those who had made their first kill at the request of a gang leader. Boys who had passed their initiation.

‘You did the right thing,' I told her.

She didn't move.

‘He would have killed me. And then he would have seen you and he would have killed you, too.'

She blinked. Lifted the bottle to her lips.

‘You need to think about
that.
That's the only thing you need to think about.'

‘I had to,' she said.

‘That's right. You had to.'

‘I had no choice.'

‘You did what I would have done. What
anyone
would have done.'

She turned her head in my direction, her eyes following at a
different rate, as if they didn't want to be torn from the invisible point in the night. ‘What you would have done,' she said. ‘For me.'

‘Exactly. All this time I thought I had to protect you, but it was you who protected me. I would be dead if you hadn't ...'

Now she saw me. Her eyes glistened, but they were not filled with tears. This was not an emotion that brought tears. This was an emotion that brought horror and fear.

‘It's not an easy thing, what you did.'

‘No.' Her voice was quiet. ‘It was
too
easy.'

I waited.

‘You think he has—'

‘Don't think about that,' I said, knowing that she was trying to think beyond the man; see family, children he might have left behind. ‘There's no good to come from that. You did what you did. What you
had
to do, and you have to accept it. You can't take it back. He made you do it. Blame him. Blame Leonardo.'

‘How?' she said, looking me in the eye. ‘How do you live like this?'

I wasn't sure she was expecting an answer, so I stayed quiet, watching as she took another drink then turned away and looked into the night again.

Difficult though it was to judge the distance in the dark, I reckoned we were two or three kilometres from Mina dos Santos now, so I cut the engine and let the
Deus
drift. ‘You rest here a while,' I said as I stood. ‘There's something I need to do. It won't take long.'

‘Don't leave me.' She put out her hand and grabbed my shirt.