The Darkest Heart

by Dan Smith

  ‘Go with Raul,’ I said to her. ‘Sit with him a while.’

  The old man extended his hand and took Daniella’s, encouraging her to follow him. He led her past the wheelhouse, going to sit at the bow and look out across the river. Rocky sat with them as he spoke to her, his voice a low murmur in the quiet air. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but the sounds were temperate and soothing.

  I watched them a while, sitting together, the old man stooped in sickness, Daniella rigid with shock and revulsion.

  Beneath us, the boat moved gently with the current of the river.

  ‘It’s difficult for some people,’ Leonardo said. ‘They’re not like us. This doesn’t bother us like it bothers them.’

  ‘You don’t know anything about me.’ My words were whispered over a dry throat and formed by a dry tongue. I was filled with concern for Daniella and anger at Leonardo. There was a frustration at the hopelessness of my situation; that I could have done nothing to prevent him from his murderous actions. It was the same feeling that had burned in me when I found Antonio. The same I had felt when I found Sofia.

  ‘I know you’ve killed people,’ he said. ‘I can see it in you.’

  ‘We are not alike.’

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ he prodded. ‘You’ve killed people.’

  ‘I never killed a man who asked me for water.’ My lips hardly moved as I spoke.

  ‘What difference does that make?’ Leonardo shrugged.

  ‘Don’t compare us,’ I said. ‘We’re not alike. These men ... didn’t need to die. They were thirsty, that’s all.’

  They’re not thirsty now,’ Leonardo smirked.

  ‘Don’t joke about the dead.’

  ‘That some country superstition?’

  ‘And don’t try to piss me off more than you already have.’

  Leonardo’s face fell, the smile dropping from his lips like an unwanted annoyance. ‘You sure we’re not going to have a problem about this?’ he said, moving a hand towards his waist.

  ‘No,’ I told him, staying his hand and looking him in the eye. ‘We’re not. There’s money coming our way, so we’re going to get this job done and you’re going to pay us.’

  His smile edged back.

  In his mind, he was in charge now.

  My mind was on other things, though. I was wondering how long Leonardo and I could be together on this boat before one of us killed the other.

  22

  Out there, in the middle of the river, it was like no place on earth. It was an inferno. A place of suffering. There was no sound but the gentle wash of the water against the two boats. The occasional knock as they came together and separated. Came together and separated.

  Without shade, the sun was almost unbearable. Even with the day beginning to wane, it was hot and without mercy. Heat like that could drive a man to insanity. It seared the skin and tortured the mind. No one could survive long in a place like that.

  Already, the insects had come. It was impossible to know how they had sensed it or where they had come from, but they had caught scent of what had happened here and had gathered to take their nutrition from it.

  Flies blackened the patches of blood, as they had in Antonio’s apartment when I found him yesterday. They rose in annoyance when I jumped down into the boat and disturbed them; the lazy buzz of their wings was quiet only when they settled back to their meal.

  Other creatures had come to investigate too, drawn by the spray that had misted across the water. They had taken the few pieces of the driver that had settled on the surface, and now dark shapes drifted, half unseen in the murk of the river. There was an occasional flash of fish close to the boat as they searched and squabbled, and a few metres away something larger broke the surface and slipped back under before I could identify it.

  Waving away the flies once more, I grabbed the dead man by the motor and dragged him towards me, glancing over at the Deus, making sure Daniella was still with Raul.

  ‘You going to come down here and help?’ I said to Leonardo, who had made no attempt to move. ‘This is your mess.’

  ‘You want me to come in there?’ He frowned.

  ‘You got some kind of a problem with that? You scared?’

  ‘No.’ But he hesitated and his face was set like stone when he lifted a leg to climb down. His grip was tight on the gunwale of the Deus when he lowered himself.

  ‘This is going to delay us,’ Leonardo said, trying to keep steady in the smaller boat.

  ‘You should have thought about that before you pulled the trigger.’ I hauled the man further along, rocking the boat and leaving a shining trail of blood as I lay him beside his friend.

  ‘Filho da puta nearly blew my head off.’ Leonardo flicked his chin at the dead man. ‘What do you—’

  As he spoke, something large thumped into the underside of the boat, rocking us to one side in a violent motion. Leonardo flinched, losing his balance and dipping the boat first to one side and then the other as he tried to remain upright.

  ‘Keep still,’ I hissed at him. ‘You’ll turn us over.’

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ He squatted, putting his hands on either side of the boat, snatching them away when he felt how hot the metal had become.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘A fish maybe. Or something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘A boto like before?’ I suggested. ‘Or maybe Anhangá?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a devil,’ I told him. ‘Maybe it saw what you did.’

  ‘Devils don’t swim,’ he said, but he put his hand to the figa around his neck without realising he had done it.

  ‘Anhangá can be anything he wants to be,’ I said.

  Leonardo looked into the water, watching for shapes moving down there, then scanned the distant shore and shook his head. ‘There are no devils.’ He glanced down at the dead men. ‘And these two deserved it anyway.’

  I looked at the man who had asked us for water. His shirt was soaked red and his eyes had rolled back so that only the whites were visible.

  ‘Have you calmed down now?’ I asked.

  Leonardo looked up at me as if he didn’t understand.

  ‘Something got into you,’ I said. ‘What was it?’

  He shrugged. ‘Maybe one of your devils.’

  ‘Well, if we see anyone else, I want you to keep that gun under control. We can’t leave a trail of—’

  ‘Don’t give me orders.’

  ‘I’m not giving you orders, I’m just ... Look,’ I sighed, ‘we need to secure them to the boat. I’ll get a rope.’

  As I climbed aboard the Deus, Leonardo collected the shotgun and set about searching the men’s belongings for spare shells and anything else worth taking.

  When I came back to him, he was loading the shotgun and laying it to one side.

  ‘Give me a hand,’ I said, wrapping the rope around the men, securing it to the slatted seats of the outboard. ‘We need to make sure it’s tight. We’ll sink the boat with them tied to it, but we want them to stay down there. After a few days, there won’t be anything left of them.’

  ‘I knew you’d done this before.’ Leonardo looked at me, our faces just a few inches apart, both of us sweating from the exertion in the afternoon heat. ‘You could be a useful man to know if you weren’t so bad tempered.’

  ‘Just keep tying.’ I lifted the hem of my T-shirt to wipe my brow.

  Behind us the forest had returned to life after the sudden intrusion, the birds settling and feeling safe to sing again. The uirapuru bird began its cheerful lilt and I looked down at the dead men, thinking that if they had heard it, perhaps they would have had better luck today.

  When we were done, I called Raul, waiting for him to come to the side of the Deus and look down. Rocky left Daniella and followed on his heels. She sensed that things were not right on the boat and she was sticking close to her master.

  The old man’s eyes were bloodshot, and perspiration formed beads on hi
s brow.

  ‘How is she?’ I kept my voice low, not wanting Leonardo to hear.

  ‘Fine.’ He took off his hat and fanned himself. ‘She’s strong. We don’t breed weak women out here, there’s no room for them.’

  I took a deep breath and wiped the sweat from my face. ‘She knows this wasn’t me, doesn’t she? You told her ...’

  ‘She knows,’ he said. ‘But she knows your reputation and she knows why you’re here—’

  ‘What?’ For a moment, I wondered how they could know why I was here. How did they know about Sister Beckett?

  ‘To protect the boat.’ Raul looked confused at my reaction. ‘That’s why you’re here, Zico.’

  ‘Yeah. Sure.’

  ‘She’s always known you’ve probably done things, and she’s lived with it and ignored it because it’s a part of life here. You’re not so unusual. But this?’ He shifted his eyes to the bodies in the boat, tied together, face to face, ready for an eternity beneath the silt-laden water. ‘Knowing is one thing, Zico, seeing it is another. It’s ugly.’

  ‘But she’ll be OK.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you?’ I asked. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’ve been sick before, Zico.’

  ‘But not like this, right?’

  The old man lowered his eyes. ‘Maybe not.’

  I wanted to do or say something that would make Daniella better and make Raul’s sickness leave him, but in the past few days I seemed to have lost control of everything. There was nothing I could do to put anything right. ‘We need to sink it,’ I said. ‘Where’s it deepest?’

  Raul looked out across the river. ‘On this stretch? Just exactly where you’d think.’

  ‘No sandbanks under there? Nothing shifting?’

  ‘Do it right in the middle.’ He pointed. ‘If you sink it there, it’ll be gone for ever.’

  I followed the line of his finger and contemplated the terrible blackness below the water.

  There was so much life and death even in the places where light can never reach.

  23

  ‘You really think all this is worth it?’ Leonardo said as I steered the outboard into the centre of the river. ‘You ask me, we should’ve just left them to rot.’

  I looked back through the wisps of smoke from the engine, seeing Daniella with her hands on the gunwale, watching as we moved away from them.

  ‘Leave a boat on the river with bodies in it?’ I said, raising my voice over the sound of the outboard. ‘Men who’ve been shot?’

  ‘Anybody could’ve done it.’

  ‘And if someone comes this way in an hour? They find this and catch us up? If we’re the only boat on the river, they’d know it was us.’

  ‘And if they come round that fork now? They find us like this?’ He indicated the bodies at our feet.

  ‘Then we deal with it. But this way, we may not have to.’

  ‘You worried about the police?’ Leonardo had unbuttoned his shirt so it blew open in the breeze as we moved quickly across the river. His pistol was tucked into the front of his waistband like the boys in the favela used to carry them when they were strutting about the streets, maybe going down to the baile to make some sales. There was a baile most nights, everyone coming out into the square to dance and drink. The air was filled with the smell of frying bolinhos de bacalhao and acarajé and the girls would shake their backsides and the boys would try to chat them up. I used to go with my friends, Sofia with hers, even when I was just twelve years old and she was fourteen. She always found me and dragged me home, though, before the trouble started.

  ‘There’s worse things than police,’ I said. ‘If you kill a man, you have to be worried about more than the police. If someone killed your friend, what would you do?’

  ‘I don’t have any friends.’

  ‘A brother, then. A sister. Mother or father? There’s always someone.’

  Leonardo looked away, his eyes glazing for a moment, becoming unfocused.

  ‘That person,’ I said, pointing at him. ‘The one you’re thinking of right there – what would you do if this happened to them?’

  ‘I’d find the man who did it and I’d kill him.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s why we have to do this.’

  Before reaching the centre of the river, I cut the engine and we drifted the last few metres. A gentle breeze had risen now that the afternoon was growing old, and it rippled the surface of the water, lifting the fumes from the engine and blowing it around us.

  I looked up at the sky so I didn’t have to see the bodies by my feet. There were a few clouds there now. Tendrils of white like the spider webs I’d seen stretched from tree to tree in the forest.

  ‘So who was it?’ I asked.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘The person you were thinking about just then. Who was it?’

  ‘No one you need to know about.’

  Leonardo was a man uncomfortable in his surroundings. He didn’t like where he was and was probably here for money, like I was, and because he didn’t know how to do anything else. Like I didn’t.

  It troubled me to think there might be something of Leonardo in me and, if there was, then it was a part of me I wanted to cut away and throw into the river. It was the shadow I had been unable to leave behind; the darkness that Costa wanted to nurture in me.

  And now I wanted to lose it more than ever before. Sitting in the boat with Leonardo, seeing what kind of person he was, I wanted more than anything to be unlike him.

  I cast my eyes across the river, seeing the ripples in the places where the currents moved, and the eddies caused by the Deus as it caught up with us.

  As soon as it was near enough, I went to the stern of the outboard and reached into the water slopping about in the bottom of the boat. I felt for the bung and unscrewed it. The river immediately began to wash in so we climbed aboard the Deus, Leonardo taking the shotgun with him, stamping his feet at Rocky when she came too close.

  ‘Keep the damn dog away from me.’ Leonardo pointed at her and I exchanged a glance with Raul.

  The old man nodded and took hold of her, going to join Daniella at the bow, out of sight.

  When they were gone, Leonardo and I turned to watch the motor boat fill with water.

  ‘Throw the shotgun overboard,’ I said. ‘If someone sees it, recognises it, they’ll put this together. You don’t want anything to get in the way of your delivery.’

  He looked at the shotgun for a moment then dropped it over the side.

  I shook my head at him, wishing we hadn’t brought him along. Things would have been so much simpler. With just Raul and me on board, everything was uncomplicated. He did his thing and I did mine. A partnership in which each of us knew our standing. With Leonardo and Daniella on board, though, everything was harder, there was more to think about; more that needed attention.

  Raul had moved into the wheelhouse now and was sitting hunched over the wheel. Daniella was at the bow, standing with her back to us, her face lifted to the sky as if she were praying.

  I needed to get her home.

  I glanced at Leonardo, then looked back at the motor boat again, the two of us silent as we watched the river rising up to claim it for its own. We stayed like that until the bodies were covered and the boat skewed and tipped backwards. The heavy motor dragged it down and soon the boat disappeared from view under the murky water.

  There was no sign of it but for a few bubbles.

  ‘You think that’s them?’ Leonardo said.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The bubbles. You think that’s what they had left in them?’

  I shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Not really. I just never saw anyone drown before.’

  ‘They didn’t drown,’ I reminded him. ‘You shot them.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘That’s true.’ He turned to look first at Daniella standing on the bow, then at the old man sitting in the wheelhouse. ‘But maybe that’s something I should see. Som
eone drowning, I mean.’

  24

  The old man throttled the engine and pushed us back downriver with our cargo of death on board and the last of the bubbles from Leonardo’s victims still rising to break the surface of the water.

  I watched our unwanted passenger settle into his seat and turn his face to the wind, and I contemplated his presence for a moment before clearing my mind and going to Daniella’s side.

  When I touched her arm, she drew it away as if from something she was loath to acknowledge, then she softened and allowed her fingers to brush mine.

  For a while we didn’t speak. We stood side by side in silence, only the slightest caress from the callused skin at the very tips of our fingers.

  ‘What he did ...’ I broke the spell, my throat dry, my voice insignificant. ‘What he did—’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I just ... need a moment. I’ve never seen anything like that.’

  ‘It’s ugly.’

  ‘But you have. You’ve seen it.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And done it?’

  My heart shrank and tightened like a dry sponge. I closed my eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know it, Zico. I think I’ve always known it. I just ... I pretend I don’t know it. It’s not you, it’s not who you are, but it is who you are. It’s like you’re good and bad at the same time, does that make sense?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t listen when you told me about him. You’re not like him, though, are you?’