The Darkest Heart

by Dan Smith

  ‘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.

  ‘They killed him for it,’ I said. ‘When they found out where I was, Gato’s boys came and killed the priest. I heard it from where I was hiding so I climbed through a window and never looked back.’

  Daniella sighed and took a drag on the cigarette. She didn’t tell me if I was right or wrong because there was no right or wrong about it. It just was.

  ‘His name was Father Tomás. He had this old church falling apart in the favela, built right on the hillside. From the front, you could look out and see the statue of Cristo Redentor, standing up there on Corcovado. When he was hiding me, Father Tomás told me that it sees all and blesses all and loves all. It was the same thing my sister Sofia had said and I told him it was bullshit, but maybe, though, maybe it did bless me. Maybe it chased me out of the favela and gave me you and the old man. Not at first. Not right away. But now.’

  I thought about Sofia and Father Tomás and Sister Beckett; about how everything seemed to slip beyond my control. I had chosen to turn away from Costa’s demands, to warn the nun, but none of it really mattered. Now she was lying on the dirty floor in Mina dos Santos anyway, and I felt a great sadness for her and for the priest and for my sister.

  ‘It’s my fault Sister Beckett is dead.’

  ‘You didn’t kill her,’ Daniella said.

  ‘But I brought Leonardo here. I should’ve let him drown. When she told me to help him, I should have let him drown.’

  ‘How much?’ she asked. ‘How much money were they going to give you?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘How much?’

  The words didn’t want to come out. They tasted dirty. ‘Five thousand American dollars. There was land, too. A small place.’ But it now occurred to me that Sister Beckett was right: the money and the land were a lie. Costa probably hadn’t even contacted the Branquinos after our first meeting. He hadn’t gone back to them with my terms. He had simply made something up to sweeten his manipulation. There had never been any money, just an order passed down to assassinate the nun and leave no connection.

  ‘And now she’s dead,’ Daniella said. ‘And the man who was going to pay you doesn’t know who did it. Maybe something good can come from it.’

  ‘We can’t profit from it.’

  ‘Can’t profit from it? Why not? Maybe it’s the only thing we can do.’

  ‘No.’ I thought about telling her that the money wasn’t real and that Costa would probably be waiting to kill us anyway, but she’d had enough. ‘The only good I can take from this is how it’s made me feel. What it’s made me understand.’

  ‘What it’s made you feel?’

  ‘Yeah. About you. About us. About what’s really important.’ Costa’s money didn’t matter to me any more. I already had the things that mattered. Daniella and the old man. They were my family, and if I could live the rest of my life with Daniella, like the old man did with Caroli
na, I would be happy. I didn’t need to be always waiting for the next thing. I already had everything I wanted.

  ‘What about me?’ Daniella asked. ‘What about how it’s made me feel?’

  Something was rising to the surface. Daniella’s shock had subsided and something else was coming. I could sense it building like a storm, her voice rising in pitch and volume.

  ‘This hasn’t just happened to you,’ she said. ‘All this shit these last few days has happened to me too. You think I wasn’t worried about Raul? That I wasn’t scared having that gun pointed at me the whole time? That I wasn’t afraid Leonardo was going to shoot your brains all over the boat? How do you think I feel?’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’ I reached out to touch her but she pushed my hand away.

  ‘I killed a man, Zico, and there’s nothing good in that. What about me?’

  ‘You saved my life,’ I said. ‘You did what you had to do.’

  ‘Saved your life? It was your fault I was there in the first place.’ She hit me on the shoulder with her balled fist. ‘It was your fault, Zico.’ She hit me again, the cachaça bottle tipping, spilling its contents onto the deck and rolling away. ‘You took me there.’ And she punched me again and again, turning now so she could use both hands to beat me. ‘It was your fault.’

  She was letting out her anger and her frustration and guilt and sorrow. All that emotion was boiling inside her like a poisonous broth, and she was pouring it on me and that was good. I raised my hands to protect myself but did nothing to stop her. I let her continue to punish me until she had vented her anger, and then she fell against me, wrapping her arms around me.

  I responded in the same way, pulling her tight, telling her that I loved her, that everything was going to be all right.

  ‘Show me,’ she said. ‘Show me you love me.’ She looked up and held my face in her hands as she kissed me. Soft at first, then harder. She took my lip between her teeth for a moment, biting hard enough to make me wince, but she held me to her and opened her mouth as a different kind of passion overcame her. ‘Show me,’ she said again as she ran her hands down my back, dragging her nails, before pushing the shirt over my head and then standing back to remove her own. She didn’t take her eyes off me as she unfastened her trousers and kicked them away, reaching out to loosen my belt.