The Darkest Heart

by Dan Smith

  ‘No.’ She couldn’t think that. I was nothing like Leonardo. Nothing at all.

  ‘What is it that makes you different?’ She looked at me now, her eyes narrowed against the falling sun. ‘I need to know.’

  ‘He enjoys it.’

  ‘Then why do you ... How can you—’

  ‘Because I feel nothing.’

  She swallowed as tears glistened in her eyes. ‘Not ever?’

  ‘Only for this. Not other things. Not you, Daniella.’

  She watched my face, then looked away to the breeze. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Nor do I.’ I didn’t want to talk about it with her. I didn’t want to talk about the fact that I had killed other men. I didn’t want her to know the anger I felt at them when I pulled the trigger. I didn’t want to talk about what happened to Sofia. ‘Maybe it’s because I’ve always seen it,’ I said. ‘Because it’s always been there.’

  ‘Always?’

  I nodded. ‘Maybe something switched off inside. Maybe it switched off a little bit each time I saw something that stayed in my head and wouldn’t come out. Maybe it’s how my soul decided to deal with my life.’ I put out my hand and wiped a tear from her cheek. ‘This is the first time you’ve seen something like this. It’ll stay in your mind, if you let it. You’ll see it in your sleep, in each face you look at, in every dark moment. You have to push it away.’

  ‘That’s what you did?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I took her hand and encouraged her to sit beside me. ‘Maybe.’ But I hadn’t done that with the image I still carried of the last time I had seen Sofia. I had let it haunt me.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The first time you saw ...’

  I shook my head. ‘You don’t want to hear it.’

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  I ran my tongue over my teeth and wondered if this could ever be a good idea, but Daniella put her arm through mine and waited.

  I sighed. ‘I was nine years old. Sitting on a step with a girl I knew, called Alicia. I remember her face. It’s still right here.’ I tapped my forehead. ‘Except maybe it isn’t her I remember at all. Maybe it’s just my mind making it up. I remember her dark brown eyes, the way her hair came forward onto her cheeks, the light brown tinted with ginger streaks from the sun or from not eating properly, I don’t know which. She was always dirty, but we all were.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘Just another kid. Eleven or twelve years old. She was a lookout for a bunch of boys selling drugs, but I knew she made money in other ways, doing things for people who liked children.’

  Daniella looked up at me, but I didn’t meet her eyes.

  ‘We talked about kid’s stuff, mostly; sitting on the step drinking from a Coke can we’d stolen. Always the same place, my spot. It’s where I set up every day, calling to people as they passed, hardly even looking down at me sitting there.’

  ‘You asked them for money?’

  ‘I polished their shoes. Pai didn’t earn much, so I polished shoes and Sofia helped in the bakery. Things changed after Pai started to drink, though.’

  Daniella waited for me to go on.

  ‘One time, sitting there, not working, she went quiet and looked down the street at a man who was coming towards us. He was wearing a suit, which wasn’t so unusual, all kinds of people lived in the favela, not just people without jobs, but I remember it, that’s all. A brown suit. And as he came towards us, I thought I recognised him. I might have cleaned his shoes sometime, and found myself looking down at his feet to see if they needed a polish. He had his eyes on us, as if he was coming over, and I thought he was going to ask for a shoe clean, but the girl beside me started to stand and I realised he was looking at her, not me. They seemed to know each other so maybe she’d done things for him. The kind of things that happen in narrow alleys, where the houses are close together and the roofs almost join. Dark places.’

  Daniella’s expression was a mix of sadness and horror, but she didn’t say anything. She just shook her head and waited for me to go on.

  ‘My friend knew how to take their money. She knew how to give them what they wanted. I saw her smile at him, drop her hip like a puta, flick her hair. And the man? He came closer, pulled a gun from his pocket and pointed it at her, almost touching her. He fired just once.

  ‘She fell onto me, sitting in my lap, her head dropping back onto my shoulder, blood coming out of her, and I stared up at the man and he stopped to look at what he’d done, then he spat on us and walked away. I never knew why he did it.’

  Daniella puffed her cheeks and breathed hard, shaking her head. ‘And you were nine years old?’

  ‘Maybe ten.’ I shrugged and looked away, remembering that Sofia was the only other person I had told about this.

  Daniella put her hand on the side of my head, her smallest finger brushing my ear, then she pulled me towards her. She kissed me with lips still damp from tears and eased my face into her shoulder. ‘You poor thing,’ she whispered.

  ‘I survived.’ My words were muffled.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You survived.’

  25

  ‘How you feeling, old man?’ I was coming back from the bow, raising my voice over the sound of the engine. ‘Still bad?’

  He lifted a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. ‘It’s like someone stuck their fingers in my brain and twisted them around.’

  The whites of his eyes were shot through with tiny rivers of burst vessels, and he was having trouble focusing on me. His skin was pale and his shirt was soaked with perspiration. His breathing was heavy.

  He forced a smile, as if to reassure me, but I was afraid for him. His fever was worsening.

  ‘You want me to take the wheel?’ I asked.

  ‘No. You need to watch Leonardo.’

  ‘You’re a stubborn old man.’

  ‘And you’re a cheeky boy.’

  I let his comment rest and watched the way he scanned the vastness of river. Where we were now, the water stretched as far as I could see and the banks were a blurred dark line, shimmering in the heat haze.

  The muscles in the old man’s face twitched and contracted as if he were in pain. I wanted to do something for him, but I knew he wouldn’t let me. The best I could do was let him keep his dignity.

  ‘You know what’s in those crates, right?’ I said, trying to think about something else. ‘All those guns back there? All that ammuition? What do you think they’re for?’

  ‘Not my business.’

  ‘Looks to me like someone’s starting a war.’ A nun who fights for Indian rights and a payload of guns both heading to the same place? It had to mean something and I was desperate to ask the old man’s opinion but I couldn’t tell him about Sister Beckett. I would have to explain how I knew about her and he would connect it to Costa. ‘Why do they need weapons like that at a mine if it’s not to make some kind of trouble?’

  ‘It’s better not to know.’

  I nodded and took the cap from my head. I held it by the peak and slapped it against my leg. ‘How long d’you think you can keep doing this?’

  ‘This?’

  ‘Working like this.’

  ‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘As long as it takes, I suppose.’

  ‘And then Imperatriz. Be with your son.’ I pulled the cap back onto my head.

  ‘Sim. And then Imperatriz.’

  Looking at him now, though, it occurred to me that maybe too much of a man’s life is taken up looking for something else, something better, and too little is passed with the understanding of what he has, and what he really wants.

  I looked up at Daniella sitting on the bow and wondered if this was how it was meant to be. Maybe I didn’t need more money, more work, more of anything. Maybe I already had everything, right here on this boat.

  ‘We’ve got about an hour of sunlight left,’ the old man said. ‘We should find somewhere to stop.’ Already, he was nudging the Deus towards th
e western bank.

  ‘No, we should keep going. We need to get you home.’ The thought of the old man spending the night out here was a worrying one.

  ‘We’ll never get there before sundown,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to be on the river then.’ Daylight ended with suddenness out here, and once the night came, the darkness was total.

  ‘We’ve done it before. We’ll take it slow and—’

  ‘I’m tired, Zico. We all are. We’ve got no business being on the river at night in this state. If we hit something and go down in the dark, there’s no escaping it. No one will even know we were there.’

  ‘We won’t hit anything, we’ll—’

  ‘Please.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘I need to rest. Let me rest. I’ll be stronger in the morning.’ His chest wheezed with each breath as the fever spread through him and when he looked at me, the desperation was clear in his eyes. He was exhausted and he needed me to support him. He was right to think he was in no state to be on the river at night, and I didn’t want to navigate the darkness on my own.

  ‘All right.’ I nodded.

  He showed me a weak smile of relief. ‘We can land over there.’ He pointed to a gentle inlet on the river, a place where the bank had fallen away into a beach of white sand dotted with bleached driftwood and tufts of dry grass. A pair of caiman was there, lying with their mouths open to catch the last of the day’s sun.

  The old man moved the wheel with the palm of his hand and allowed us to drift towards the shore, aiming the bow towards the white sand that lounged at the water’s edge.

  The caiman on the beach snatched their jaws shut and darted away as we approached. They disappeared beneath the water with little more than a ripple.

  Raul cut the noisy engine, so the propeller would be motionless if it made contact with the riverbed, and he let the momentum of the boat take us forward. The gentle vee bottom had a shallow draught and allowed us to move close to the bank.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Leonardo came up from the stern, where he’d been sitting with the cargo. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘We have to stop.’ Raul’s voice was weak. ‘It’ll be dark soon.’

  ‘What is it with you? We haven’t got time to rest. I need to get this delivered by—’

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ I said. ‘What are the guns for, Leonardo?’

  ‘Not your concern. All you need to know is that if they’re not delivered on time, you won’t get paid.’

  ‘Well, we can’t travel at night,’ Raul told him. ‘It’s just how it is.’

  Leonardo came right to the wheelhouse and looked down at the old man. ‘Then we’ll stop when it gets dark.’

  Sensing the threat in his voice, Rocky growled and jumped to her feet, making Leonardo step back. His hand dropped towards his waistband, where the pistol was tucked away.

  I moved between him and the old man and saw Leonardo think about it. He slipped his hand closer to his waist. His finger and thumb rubbed together as he considered drawing the weapon.

  I kept my eyes on his and shook my head. ‘Don’t’

  He bit his lower lip and held my stare.

  ‘This is a good place to stop.’ I tried to break the tension. ‘There might not be others.’

  Leonardo swallowed. ‘When it gets dark,’ he insisted and I understood that he didn’t want to back down. I had to give him a good enough reason.

  ‘I know you want to keep going,’ I said, ‘and so do I, but it gets dark quick here. It takes you by surprise. You don’t want to be on the river in the dark.’

  He took a deep breath and clenched his teeth. His mind was working hard, trying to decide if we were tricking him somehow. He was determined not to look weak.

  ‘If we touch the wrong part of the river, we could end up on a sandbank and be stuck out here,’ I said. ‘There’d be no chance of getting your guns to Mina dos Santos then.’

  Leonardo blinked and I saw the first hint that he was trying to relax. He dropped his hand a touch.

  ‘It’s the best thing,’ I said. ‘We can set off again at first light.’

  He dropped his hand further and slapped it on his thigh. He nodded and looked at Daniella who came to stand on the other side of the wheelhouse.

  ‘There’s logs, too,’ she said, putting a hand on Rocky’s head.

  ‘Logs?’ Leonardo looked her up and down in a way I didn’t like. ‘What are you talking about? What logs?’

  ‘The loggers use this river,’ Daniella said. ‘Cut down in other areas, float the logs on the smaller rivers until they come here. Load them onto boats and take them to the sawmills.’

  ‘I never saw that.’ Leonardo watched her.

  ‘You’re not from around here.’ she replied. ‘Why would you have seen it?’

  ‘I’ve been on this river enough hours today to see there’s no logs on it.’

  Daniella shrugged like she’d said enough, and asked the old man for a cigarette, but she had hit a nerve. Leonardo was afraid of the water, I was sure of that, and I wondered if Daniella had noticed it too.

  ‘Just last year a boat hit a log further north of here,’ I told him. ‘It cracked right through the hull and the people were standing in water over their ankles in just a couple of minutes.’

  ‘That’s just a story.’

  ‘No, it’s true. Most of them managed to get to shore but the captain had to break the window of his wheelhouse to get out. He cut himself on the glass and the blood attracted the piranhas. When they pulled him out, one arm was stripped clean and his face was eaten right down to his skull. And that was during the day. Imagine what it would be like in the dark.’

  Daniella accepted a cigarette from Raul, took a light and dragged on it. She held the smoke for a long time before she let it drift from her nose, the smell of it coming to me in the hot, still air. I didn’t smoke, but I liked the smell of it in the air like that.

  Leonardo watched us, suspecting a conspiracy, then shook his head and took the cigarette from behind his ear. He put it in the corner of his mouth and popped a match alight with his thumbnail. He flicked the match into the river and lifted his hand, forming the finger and thumb into a make-believe pistol.

  ‘We leave at first light,’ he said, pointing at Raul. ‘And keep that fucking dog away from me.’ He moved his arm so he was aiming at Rocky, and he pulled the trigger.

  26

  ‘He’s getting worse,’ Daniella said. ‘I’m worried about him.’

  The old man was asleep on the sand, with nothing more than a thin sheet to cover him. The night was cold and there was a light wind blowing in over the water, carrying the scent of the river. Somewhere in the darkness, a boto surfaced to take a breath. The way it sounded, it was as if someone was out there. It was no wonder people believed the river dolphins could take human shape.

  Beside us, the fire crackled, sawing in the breeze. Raul had come close to it because it kept the insects away, but it also added to the heat of his fever. His body was damp with perspiration and he turned and fretted as he slept.

  Rocky was anxious, as if she knew something was wrong with her friend. She wouldn’t settle and had sulked when we moved her away from him. She tried to curl up beside him, but we were worried her heat would make him worse, so had chased her away. Now she was lying against a piece of driftwood with her chin on her paws, watching.

  I put a hand to the old man’s neck and he shifted and moaned as if it caused him pain.

  ‘He’s so hot.’ I looked at Daniella, seeing how kind the firelight was to her. The orange glow reflected on her skin and the shadows danced around her cheekbones. Her eyes glittered. Strands of her hair had come loose and framed her face, twisting in the breeze.

  ‘He’s going to die,’ Leonardo said. He hadn’t wanted to leave his cargo unguarded, but when he saw the rest of us coming ashore, he followed. I guessed he was afraid the boat would break its mooring and float away into the darkness.

  He had sat apart from us, doing nothing
while Daniella and I gathered firewood, but when we cooked rice and beans over the fire he was happy to share it while the day fell behind the trees. Red and orange ripples had streaked the sky above the forest, glowing in the wisps of cloud that hung there.

  ‘He’s not going to die,’ I said. ‘He just needs to rest.’

  Leonardo was standing behind me now, poking the fire with a long stick. ‘You want me to make it quick for him?’ he asked. ‘You can have the money for yourself that way.’

  ‘Don’t be such an animal,’ Daniella told him, but it only made him smirk.

  ‘This man is my friend,’ I said, looking back at him. ‘Keep your gun tucked away and your mouth shut.’

  ‘Doesn’t have to be my gun. I could hold him under the water if you—’

  ‘You won’t touch him,’ I said, getting to my feet and facing him. ‘You don’t even need to come near him.’

  Leonardo threw the stick down in a shower of sparks and turned to face me. He held up both hands. ‘I’m joking,’ he said. ‘Just joking, that’s all.’

  I shook my head at him. ‘Just keep away from him.’

  Leonardo thought about it, then shrugged. He moved to the other side of the fire and sat down facing the river. He took the pistol from his waistband and turned it over in his hands, removing the magazine and checking the load.

  ‘I need to get that weapon off him,’ I whispered once I had sat down again. ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ Daniella asked. ‘I could try to—’

  ‘No.’ Just the thought of it made my stomach turn to ice. ‘Don’t do anything. He’s even more dangerous than you think. Promise you won’t do anything.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I won’t.’

  I hoped she meant it. Daniella was fiery and headstrong, two things I most liked about her, but also two things that could get her into trouble. I was afraid that if she saw an opportunity to do something, she might take it. I would have to keep her and Leonardo apart.

  ‘We need to get the old man home,’ I said, keeping my voice quiet. ‘When we get back on the river, we have to head for Piratinga first.’