The Darkest Heart (44 page)

‘I'll be right here. Right behind you.'

‘Then I'll come.' She got to her feet, bringing the bottle with her, and followed me to the stern of the boat, where Leonardo's crates were stacked.

Daniella sat and watched as I threw the anchor overboard then opened the first of Leonardo's crates, prising out the nails with a hammer from the old man's tool box.

I peeled away the packing and looked at the dark shapes nestled
inside. The storm was behind us now, the sky clear above, and the pale light from the narrow slice of moon glowed on the weapons.

‘What are you going to do?' Daniella asked.

I'm going to put them overboard,' I told her as I took one of the rifles. ‘Just like I promised.'

‘Promised?' Daniella asked, sitting on the deck beside me. ‘Promised who?'

Holding the rifle in my hands, feeling its weight, I remembered how the boys in the
favela
had carried such weapons. How
I
had carried such weapons. I had seen what they could do.

‘Dolores,' I said, going to the side of the Deus and dropping the weapon into the water. ‘She asked me to do this.'

‘Why would she ask you to do that? How did she even know about them? Is that why Leonardo ...' She stopped and let her words hang. ‘Is that why Leonardo did what he did?'

‘You ever heard of Sister Beckett? Dolores Beckett?'

Daniella shook her head. ‘No.'

I took two more of the rifles, dropped them overboard and listened to the sound they made as they hit the water and went under. ‘She was a pretty brave woman. Brave or stupid, anyway, I don't know which. She fights
... fought
landowners. Fought them with words. Taught Indians their rights, helped
sem terras
to occupy land.'

‘Sister?
She was a nun?'

‘Yes.' I dropped another two rifles into the river.

‘So why did Leonardo want to kill her?'

I shrugged and looked down at Daniella. ‘I don't think he did. He didn't even know who she was.'

‘But you did?'

I went to the crate and took another pair of rifles, lifting them out and going to the side of the boat. The rifles splashed into the water and slipped away, then I sat down beside Daniella and took the bottle from her.

I drank and pulled the newspaper clipping from my pocket, unfolding it and passing it to her.

She took the piece of soft paper and studied it, turning it to see
it better in the moonlight. She looked more awake now, more alive. The
cachaça
was doing the job I'd hoped, numbing her mind to the shock.

‘It's her,' she said, looking up at me. ‘Why do you have this?'

‘Costa wanted me to ...'

‘Kill her? For money?'

I nodded.

‘And you were going to?'

‘It was a lot of money. Enough for ... Well, it was a lot.' I didn't tell her the rest – that Costa had threatened her life and Raul's, and that even with Sister Beckett gone, probably none of us was safe. And I couldn't tell her that I no longer knew what to do.

‘I couldn't do it.' I shook my head and stared at the decking. ‘I think I always knew that – it just took me too long to realise. Too long to make a decision.' A gust of wind cut across the surface of the river, raising my skin and sending a shiver through me. ‘That's why I wanted to see her. I wanted to warn her. Tell her she was in danger.'

Daniella sighed and took the bottle from me. ‘It was the right thing.'

‘But too late.' I had persuaded myself that I needed the money, that I could do what needed to be done to get it, but really I had never intended to kill Sister Dolores Beckett. I could no more kill her than I could have killed Father Tomás that day he found me hiding in his backroom with a gun in my hand.

I stood and returned to the task of dumping the rifles in silence, leaving the opened crates on the deck. I moved backwards and forwards dropping the guns into the river with a hollow sound, listening to them sink, their bubbles rising and bursting on the surface.

I kept the last one on board, though, loading it with ammunition from the final crate. I stored a few boxes of spare cartridges, a couple of magazines, and poured the rest into the water like heavy rain.

‘You think someone might come?' Daniella asked, looking at the rifle as I slipped a magazine into its underside.

‘Maybe.'

I tried not to think about Sister Beckett, but all I could see was the way she lay back in the chair, life draining out of her, and the only thing I could be glad for was that it hadn't been me who had killed her.

Staring into the darkness, I felt an overwhelming surge of emotion that tightened my throat and brought tears to my eyes. I took a deep breath and knew that despite everything, Sister Beckett's blood was still on my hands.

56

Navigating at night was dangerous and required all my concentration, but we pushed on. With Daniella at the wheel and me at the bow, we crawled east along the river, stopping only to rest, but neither of us slept. The events we had just survived were enough to keep us awake, but there was the added fear that there might be other men looking for their guns. Perhaps they were even on the river now, chasing us through the night.

I knew that every time Daniella closed her eyes, she would see Sister Dolores Beckett and Kássia lying dead in the bar. She would see herself shooting Leonardo. I saw those things too, but I also saw Costa's face, grinning at me from the shadow.

We stopped sometime after midnight, in a place where the River of Deaths was at its widest. The storm was long gone, but the river swelled under the weight of its payload. The rainy season had begun in earnest now, and soon the river would burst its banks and flood out into the forest. For now, the water moved faster, rushing against the stern of the
Deus
as it hurried on towards the Araguaia. It swept us onwards as I dropped the anchor to keep us from being washed into the bank.

The
Deus
shifted and tugged the rope taut before twisting with the current. The river washed about us, regardless of what had happened. The River of Deaths had no concern for the events played out on its edges or on its waters, and it poured eastwards as it rose to claim the white beaches and meet the sun-baked banks.

Exhausted from the intense concentration of piloting the boat in almost complete darkness, plagued by the perpetual dread of running aground or taking the wrong course, we tried to rest.
More than once, though, we thought we heard noises coming from behind us, the buzz of another engine on the river somewhere in the night, and I took a position at the gunwale, pointing the rifle in the direction of the sound.

The weak moon gave only enough light to see three or four metres from the
Deus
before the world disappeared into oblivion. There might have been a whole fleet of boats out there, bristling with guns, but we saw nothing. Not even a flicker of light. Each time I waited with my head cocked towards the sounds, my ear straining to hear engines or voices, but each time the night just settled to the natural rhythm of the forest and the river.

We were alone.

Daniella came to sit with me on the deck close to the stern, leaning back against the gunwale. She lit a cigarette, keeping the brief flare of the match out of sight of the bank. In that fleeting flash of orange light, I saw how tired and worn she looked and I felt a rush of sentiment. There was a huge burden of ugly emotions because I had allowed her to come with me, muddled with the dread of Costa's intentions, and I knew that life would have been easier for her if she had never met me. I felt a degree of guilt for loving her and for being loved by her. If not for me, Daniella would still be in the store, reading her magazines and arguing with her mother. Perhaps the right thing was for me to leave her; that way I couldn't affect her life any more than I already had. But there were other things, too; warm sentiments to combat the colder ones. My love for Daniella made me weak in Costa's eyes, and it magnified my guilt and fear, but it was also good and it gave me strength.

I understood now that I didn't need money, I just needed my friends. I needed
Daniella;
and in her own way, she needed me. As long as we could feed ourselves and put a roof over our heads, out here, that was enough.

‘How did you feel the first time?' Daniella asked.

The first time?'

‘Yeah. The first time you ...'

As her words faded, I put the tip of my finger in a small puddle
of water that reflected the moon on the deck, and traced a dark circle on the boards. A hint of silver light caught in the pattern like a shard of precious metal.

I thought back to the first time I had taken a life. I had lived in the midst of the shadow, but had never been the perpetrator of such unchained bloodletting as I now saw myself committing.

I remembered the chase through the
favela
, running the boy down like an animal. I was consumed by the wrong he had done and my blood raged with an overwhelming need not just to kill him but to destroy him; to wipe him from existence. There was no other thought in my head, and he knew it. He saw the fury in me and he knew fear like he had never known before.

Unarmed, alone and afraid, he had run for his life, but my desire to take it was stronger than his ability to keep it. A single shot to the back of his thigh brought him down by a rubbish heap that smelled of decaying food and human excrement, and he crawled and he crawled, raking through the waste, trying to burrow into it, to escape, to save himself.

The rifle I borrowed from my friend Ratinho held thirty cartridges. Thirty pieces of lead; each one capable of killing a man.

I put all thirty into that boy.

‘I didn't feel much of anything,' I said, still tracing the shape on the deck. ‘I thought it would make me feel good. I
hoped
it would make me feel good, but it didn't make me feel much at all.' It hadn't satisfied the anger of the shadow in which I had been living.

‘You hoped to feel good? I don't understand. Why would you ...'

‘He wasn't even a man. Just a boy really. I was seventeen when I shot him.'

‘Why? What did he do?'

‘He raped and killed my sister.'

‘Zico.'

‘And if I had never been involved with people like that, boys who sold drugs and murdered one another, maybe it would never have happened. They would never have noticed her.'

‘You don't know that. You can't blame yourself for that.'

The patch of water was drying now, so I took my finger away and wiped it on my trousers. ‘I came home one evening to find my friend sitting on the step. The door was open and when I went in, Sofia was lying on the floor. My friend told me that one of the boys had taken a liking to her but when she turned him down he took her anyway. And then he killed her.'

I had never spoken about it to anyone before, not even the old man, yet it followed me everywhere. I still felt the pain of it now, the horror at what I had found in my home.

Sofia was no saint, but she had been a good person; probably the best I knew. She was good like the old man was good; like Daniella was good. She kept away from the dark stain that blossomed in parts of the
favela
, and she always tried to make me do the same. She worked hard and she did her best for us. When the
pinga
suffocated our father's mind, she took care of him while I resented him and left him to pity himself.

All that was taken away, though, and she ended up lying twisted on the floor in the centre of the small living room, her face beaten so she was barely recognisable. She had been shot, too, but it was impossible to know how many times.

I knelt in her blood and held her and put my face to her hair while the tears came. I would never again hear her laugh, or feel the back of her hand given in chastisement, or beat her at cards, or listen to the stories she had learned about the Gods she had turned to.

Sofia had been my sister, my friend and my mother, but now she was nothing.

I stared at the deck as the memory of that evening played out in my mind – as it had done so many times before.

Eventually, I wiped my eyes and looked up at Daniella.

‘I didn't know what to do. The police, they did nothing. For them it's just how life was. I was less than nothing to them. So I took a gun and I found him and I killed him.' He deserved every bullet I had shot into him, and if I could have given him back his life, I would have done it, over and over, so I could keep on killing him. And now I realised that was exactly what I had been doing
ever since. I had told myself I did it for the money and because I could do it without remorse, but the truth was that every time I killed a man, I was looking for the vengeance and justice I had hoped to feel that first time. I had been killing that same boy over and over again.

‘After that it was like someone had cut a part of me away. Or maybe pressed a switch that let me ... do things for money. It never felt good, though. It never made me feel better. I didn't ever do it to save a life, like you did. Not until today, anyway.'

Daniella said nothing. She put back her head and stared at the sky through a hole in the canopy, letting the cigarette smoulder in her hand.

‘I left the
favela
a couple of years later. Sofia and I always talked about leaving, but not like that. I was paid to shoot a boy called Gato. A
dono da boca.
That's what we called the ones who led the dealers. He'd killed and raped and beaten and deserved to die, so when someone offered me money, I took it. I just wasn't smart enough to see it would start a war, and I ended up hiding in a room in a church when his people came after me. Can you imagine that? Me protected by a priest.'

The boat moved in the swell of the river, waves slopping at the hull. Somewhere close by, a
boto
surfaced to take a breath. It blew into the night before filling its lungs and diving into the abyss.