by Dan Smith
Rocky sensed our tension, and mirrored it, pacing the deck beside me, stopping every now and then to watch the activity. She alternated between whining and barking, pushing against me one moment, then jumping up on the gunwale the next.
Leonardo kept an eye on her while trying to concentrate on the river as the plane’s nose began to lift, the impossible bulk of its bloated belly rising out of the water, the sun glinting on the hull.
Further away, the boat approached.
Nearer and nearer by the second.
‘Pirates?’ he offered.
‘Could be. They would have seen the plane land. There’s always a chance.’
The Catalina lifted into the air, water cascading from its underside, engines droning as it climbed into the sky. It tracked away from us into the blue, rising to safety before banking as it slipped over the trees.
Leonardo pulled a pistol from beneath his shirt, a more sophisticated weapon than the pistola I had taken from him. He racked the slide on the automatic and held it loose in his right hand, obscuring it behind the gunwale, before meeting my eye and shrugging. ‘I felt naked,’ he said. ‘And they had a spare on the plane.’
‘Well, make sure you keep it cold for now,’ I told him, pointing at the pistol. ‘You don’t know how things work out here. They might be anybody. Curious fishermen, locals looking to make a trade. Don’t shoot anybody.’
Leonardo grinned and shrugged. ‘Whatever you say, boss.’
I couldn’t tell if he was excited at the prospect of a fight, or if he was just pleased that he’d had the chance to show me he was armed, but he was more animated than before. And when Rocky came between us, he put his foot on her and pushed her away, making her yelp in pain.
‘Keep the damn dog away from me.’ He pointed the weapon in her direction. ‘I’ll shoot it.’
Rocky turned on him, baring her teeth, so I grabbed her by the scruff and took her back to the wheelhouse, telling the old man to keep hold of her. ‘Something’s got into him,’ I said. ‘He’s different.’
‘Leonardo? Different how?’
‘I don’t know exactly. Excited. Revved up.’
‘He was worried about missing the plane, maybe he’s just pleased to pick up.’
‘Those boxes are full of guns,’ I said. ‘You have any idea why they need eighty assault rifles at Mina dos Santos?’ I couldn’t help wondering whether Sister Beckett was connected to this delivery of weapons. Something was happening along the Rio das Mortes; that much was clear.
The old man shook his head.
‘You look like shit,’ I told him. ‘Feeling any better?’
‘I’II survive.’
‘Sure you will.’ I looked out at the smaller boat. It was two hundred metres away now, the sound of its motor coming to us across the water. Leonardo was waiting, watching with interest. ‘I’d better get over there.’
I jogged back along the deck, reaching the gunwale just as Daniella emerged from the housing. The metal door squealed and she stepped out saying, ‘They gone? Can I come out now?’
‘Not yet. Stay inside.’
‘Why? What now? It stinks in there.’
‘You’ll get—’
‘I haven’t got used to it yet,’ she said.
‘Please.’ I gently pushed her back inside. ‘Please. Just for a while longer.’ I left the door ajar, so that some fresh air might find its way into the hot, dark interior, and turned my attention to the boat which was now almost upon us. I took the revolver from its holster on my hip, and stood beside Leonardo, hiding the weapon behind the gunwale.
The boat wasn’t big, perhaps twice the size of the one secured to the back of the Deus. It was light and low to the water, skipping across the surface as it skimmed around the sandbanks, but it wasn’t a long-range boat. There was a chance it could have come from Piratinga – sometimes the locals used them to come upriver and fish for a couple of days – but it would have to be carrying spare fuel, otherwise it would never make it back.
There were two men on board. One sitting at the stern, operating the tiller, a red cap on his head, and the other at the centre of the boat, a rifle across his knees.
‘That a shotgun?’ Leonardo said without looking at me.
‘Yeah, they look like hunters. Fishermen, maybe.’
‘Only one shot in that thing.’
I looked at him. ‘Stay calm. They’re probably nobody.’
As they came near, the driver slowed the engine and the other man stood up, resting the butt-plate of the shotgun against his hip and raising his left hand as he shouted, ‘Oi!’
I waved back and smiled. ‘Tudo bem?’
‘Bom,’ the man nodded. He had a serious face beneath the straw hat and he shifted his shotgun so he was holding it in both hands. If he wanted to, he could raise it and aim it in just a few seconds.
When the driver cut the engine, the smaller boat drifted towards us, skewing in the current, so that it knocked against the tyres on the hull of the Deus. He threw up a rope which I wrapped around a cleat on the gunwale, then he sat back down and watched us.
For a moment, no one spoke as the smaller boat twisted in the current so that it was at a right angle to the Deus.
‘We saw the plane,’ said the man with the shotgun, breaking the silence. He was skinny, all angles and bone. His T-shirt hung off him like it was still on the hanger.
The bottom of their boat was flooded with four or five inches of water, reels of fishing wire washing from side to side. There were four jerrycans at the back, so I might have been right about them coming from Piratinga, but I didn’t recognise their faces.
There was a catfish in the bottom of the boat, too, a big one.
‘Pirarara,’ I said. ‘Good catch. That was you?’
He shook his head and pointed with his thumb at the man sitting by the motor. ‘Took him close to an hour to bring it in.’ His eyes flicked from me to Leonardo and back again. ‘Thirsty work.’
‘You planning on shooting the next one?’ Leonardo asked, drawing the man’s attention.
‘Eh?’ He looked confused, then glanced down at his shotgun and raised it a touch.
I sensed Leonardo’s tension beside me.
‘It’s for the paca,’ the man said. The large rodent had good meat and it was a treasured prize for hunters. ‘Maybe a boar.’
‘Not many of those on the water,’ Leonardo said.
The man showed us a nervous smile and shrugged. ‘Maybe in the forest.’
‘Well, it was good to meet you.’ I was eager to end the conversation. Leonardo was winding tighter and tighter, becoming twitchy beside me.
‘Water,’ the man said. ‘You have water?’ The sinews in his arms loosened a touch and the shotgun hung a little lower as he showed us an embarrassed grin, full of stained teeth. ‘My brother came past about an hour ago and took our water.’
‘We haven’t seen anyone else on the river,’ Leonardo told him.
‘Maybe he went a different way. There’s channels and ... which way did you come from?’ the man asked.
‘Which way did he go?’ Leonardo replied.
I could feel the tension crackling around him like electricity and when I glanced down, I saw his fingers wrapped around the butt of his automatic. His knuckles were white, as if he were squeezing the handle hard enough to crack the grips.
I had to make him relax. He was starting to feel more dangerous by the second.
‘We have water,’ I said to the man before turning to Leonardo. ‘Why don’t you get them some? There’s bottles in the cooler box.’
I thought it would diffuse the situation, give Leonardo something to do, but instead he stared at me and shook his head. ‘You get the water.’
As we glared at each other, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Leonardo spotted it too, and we turned to the man standing in the boat. But what I saw and what Leonardo saw were two different things. I saw a man stepping forward to come closer to the gunwale of the Deus. I s
aw a man coming to accept our gift of water. Leonardo saw something else.
He saw a man who was preparing to attack us.
‘Stay where you are.’ Leonardo lifted his pistol, gripping it with both hands as he pointed it at the nervous, angular man.
I put out a hand to stop him, reaching over the pistol and pushing it down, but the fisherman flinched back in surprise, lifting both hands in a natural act of self-protection. As he stepped away, though, he caught his left heel on the snout of the catfish lying dead in the bottom of the boat. He slipped backwards, his legs collapsing beneath him, the barrel of the shotgun lifting.
His weapon discharged with a loud, flat boom.
Out there in the silence of the river, it was like thunder.
Both Leonardo and I ducked behind the gunwale and there was a sound of heavy rain as the swarm of shot flew high and wide of us, peppering the treetops on the bank behind the Deus. We stared at each other for a fraction of a second, assessing the situation, then we both popped up, into the cloud of smoke, weapons trained on the boat.
A small group of blue macaws, startled by the commotion, had taken to the sky with harsh calls that faded as they distanced themselves from us, and then everything was mute. Even the insects were dumb.
We looked down at the man lying back in the boat, his partner white eyed and open mouthed. As soon as he recovered from the shock, he dropped the shotgun and held up both hands to show it was an accident. He hadn’t meant for this to happen.
I allowed myself to breathe, lowering my pistol.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to ... Please don’t—’
Leonardo fired four times.
His first two shots struck the man with the shotgun, pushing him against the slatted seat. Holes appeared in his white T-shirt, right over his heart, and blood puffed from the wounds, soaking into the material and spreading as his life evaporated into the scorching afternoon.
The unarmed man operating the outboard hardly even had the chance to begin to stand before Leonardo’s third shot hit him in the face.
The lead caught him at an angle across the bridge of his nose, knocking his head back and to the side as it gouged through the cartilage and collapsed his right eye, shattering the bone around the socket. He screamed once in pain before Leonardo’s fourth shot silenced him.
20
The gunshots didn’t echo. They didn’t linger or call their triumph. They just sank into the water, rose to the heavens and vanished into the hot air around us.
The smell of cartridge propellant hung above the gunwale in the dissipating cloud from the shotgun and the wisps of spectral smoke from Leonardo’s pistol. The blue tendrils twisted in the stillness, breaking up, drifting, and becoming nothing. My ears rang with a high-pitched mosquito whine, and my head was filled with a million thoughts as I looked down into the boat where the men lay dead.
I stared in silence for what felt like a long time before I turned to Leonardo, seeing the way his eyes grew wide and then narrowed again, his pupils dilated, his Adam’s apple rising and falling in his throat.
His mouth opened a touch, the tip of his tongue snaking out to wet his lips then darting back in again, and I knew that he had enjoyed the killing.
The moment had given him a feeling of power and I could see in him the surge of the thrill, the rush of pointing and squeezing. For him, there had been a moment of joy in taking those lives – ending them in a twitch of time so brief it was impossible to measure.
I had seen people before who enjoyed it the way Leonardo did; people who took more from it than just a feeling of power.
Taking a deep breath sucked the gunsmoke into my nostrils, and I tasted it in the back of my throat. ‘He slipped,’ I said. ‘That’s all. He slipped. He slipped and you killed them.’
Raul remained behind the wheel, waiting for the next move. I willed him without words to hold onto Rocky and keep his hands away from the revolver tucked under the dash. I didn’t want this to escalate. No more blood needed to be spilled here.
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ I was controlling my anger. There was nothing I could do now.
‘He nearly killed us.’ Leonardo’s dry mouth clicked. ‘Nearly blew our damn heads off.’
‘He slipped,’ I said again. ‘It was an accident.’
Beside us, the door to the covered section scraped open. The squeal of the rusted hinge was like a scream in the calm. Shrill and sharp.
‘What happened?’ Daniella’s words were tentative and softly spoken.
I held out my left hand, fingers spread wide, signalling for her to stay where she was. ‘You didn’t need to do that,’ I said to Leonardo.
He sniffed, turning his head to look at me. His hands were still raised, the automatic still pointed at the boat on the water below us.
‘There was no reason to kill them.’ I spoke through my teeth, desperate to stay calm. My fingers were tight around the handle of my pistol.
‘Kill who?’ Daniella asked. ‘What—’
‘What’s done is done.’ Leonardo snorted hard and turned towards me. He lowered his weapon, but both hands still gripped it, ready to raise it again in a heartbeat. ‘We going to have a problem about this?’ he asked, not taking his eyes from mine.
‘You’re a liability,’ I said. ‘Those men ... You didn’t need to do that.’ I glanced down at his pistol then looked back at his eyes once more. His pupils were still dilated and he had a crazed appearance. Something about Leonardo felt even more dangerous and unpredictable than before. It wasn’t just that he had shot the men in the boat, it was something else. His movements were more exaggerated; his words were spoken more quickly.
Beside us, Daniella shifted, as if to come and look, but her movement alarmed Leonardo and he jerked in her direction, the pistol raising.
She stopped and flinched away, surprised by his sudden reaction.
‘It’s all right.’ I held up a hand. ‘It’s all right. Daniella’s not going anywhere.’
Daniella took a step back and Leonardo nodded. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath as if trying to collect his thoughts.
‘So,’ he said, looking at me again. ‘Are we going to have a problem about this?’
‘No. What’s done is done.’ I repeated his own words, keen to calm him down. The way he was, I was worried he might try to kill the rest of us.
‘Then it’s time to go, right?’
‘Not yet.’ I swallowed away the bad taste in my mouth. ‘We need to clear this up. We don’t want someone coming past here and finding this.’
‘No time. We need to make our delivery by—’
‘We have to make time,’ I said, keeping my voice steady. ‘Or we deliver late. Either way, we need to clear this up. We don’t want someone following us, looking for murderers.’
‘There’s no one out here. Look at this place.’
‘We don’t know that.’
He thought about it, eyes shifting to look at Daniella, then back at me again.
‘And I’m going to need your weapon,’ I told him. ‘No one carries on this boat but me.’
Leonardo drew in a deep breath, his nostrils flaring. He tilted his head to one side as if he had an itch but didn’t want to take his hands from his weapon in order to scratch it.
‘We’ll clean up,’ he said after a moment. ‘Maybe you’re right about that, but if you want this gun, you’ll have to take it from me. And the only way that’s going to happen is if I’m dead.’
I relaxed my right arm, tightened my finger on the trigger of the pistol. I could try it. I might be quicker. I might be able to raise my weapon high enough to hit him somewhere below the waist. His feet, his knees, maybe his groin. But he might react too quickly. He might see it in my eyes, see the movement of my arm. And then I would be gone and Raul and Daniella would be alone with him.
‘I can see what you’re thinking, Zico. Don’t do it.’
‘OK,’ I nodded. Together.’
‘Together.’
I began to raise my revolver, slowly, turning it to the side, pointing it away from Leonardo. He did the same thing, lifting his pistol until both our weapons were pointing at the sky. Together, we placed our thumbs over the hammer, releasing and easing them back into position.
‘We done with this?’ he asked me.
‘You tell me.’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’re done with this.’ And, as if nothing had happened, he tucked away his pistol and turned to lean on the gunwale. ‘We better get this mess cleared up, then.’
‘Yeah,’ I said, holstering my revolver. ‘Let’s do that.’
21
Daniella was paler than I’d ever seen her. Paler even than the time she’d had food poisoning that kept her in bed a week. The colour of her skin was leached of all its beauty. She had started to shake as she stared down at the boat, but was unable to look away. Human nature is human nature. We subject ourselves to things we know we might not be able to endure. We do it to test ourselves, to scratch an itch, to punish ourselves. Whatever the reason, we can’t help but look at atrocity. Even if it’s only to reassure ourselves that our own life could always be worse.
I pulled her away from the gunwale, away from the tableau of death on the small boat, and buried her face against my shoulder.
‘Don’t look at them,’ I said. ‘Go up there with Raul and help keep Rocky out of the way – I don’t want her making Leonardo angry. The way he is, he might go off again at any moment.’
She stayed like that, breathing against me. Her whole body was trembling, and I tried to imagine what she was feeling. For me, this sight was not new. I had seen all manner of death. Daniella, though, would not be accustomed to it and the image would be burned into her mind. Perhaps she didn’t know what to feel. Revulsion, fear, sadness, anger. Maybe she felt all those things at once.
‘Can you do that for me?’ I asked. ‘Stay with Rocky?’
Daniella leaned back. ‘Did you ... is this what you ... ?’
‘I didn’t do this.’
Daniella nodded, an almost imperceptible movement, and reached up to touch my face. Her fingers paused against my cheek before she snatched them away. It was as if she had connected with my skin and seen what was in my head. I had not done this – what she had seen today – but she knew I must have done things like it. The old man brought me on the boat to protect him. I was armed. There were whispered rumours in Piratinga that linked me to men like Costa and the Branquinos, so Daniella knew this kind of violence was not beyond me. I wanted to reassure her; to tell her I had never done it like this. I wanted to explain that I didn’t gun men down for the enjoyment of it, that I had never killed a man who didn’t deserve it, but there were no words that could diminish the horror she had just witnessed. And there was a newspaper clipping in my shirt pocket, giving presence to a woman whose death would make me just like Leonardo. Perhaps worse.
