by Dan Smith
The people.
I was starting to see how everything tied together – Sister Beckett, the gold mine, the guns. In a place where big business was encroaching on small lives, local people needed whatever help they could get, and it seemed likely to me that a woman like Sister Beckett would come here to offer that help. I wasn’t aware that the Branquinos had operations this far out, but perhaps they owned the mine, and this was why they wanted the nun to disappear – not because she deserved it, as Costa had said, but so they could manage their land war without her interference.
The guns might be here for either side of such a dispute, but it was more likely that the mine owners would have the resources to buy them, and Leonardo’s comments led me to believe that was the case. The Branquinos hadn’t asked me to collect them, but that didn’t mean they weren’t the mine owners; perhaps even Costa knew nothing about them. They might want to keep the guns and Sister Beckett separate, to give them some deniability, and would never have imagined that Leonardo and I would end up travelling on the same boat.
In the bow, Leonardo had turned to lean against the gunwale. His head was back and his mouth open. The pistol was still in his hand, the rifle propped beside him. I considered asking who he was working for, but knew he wouldn’t tell me. And I was afraid to give away my own purpose. No one could know I had another reason to visit the mine. No one could know about my intent for Sister Beckett if I were to keep my friends safe.
Costa had been clear about that.
I collapsed onto the seat beside Daniella and watched her concentrating on the river ahead. ‘I’d take you with me on the boat anytime,’ I said to her.
She turned to look at me, her eyes burning red, her skin streaked with dirt and sweat. ‘I don’t ever want to do that again.’
Before I could answer, though, I heard the sound I had been waiting to hear all morning.
Over the chugging engine of the Deus came another noise, a virtual echo from somewhere in the terrible inferno we had just endured. Another boat was pushing through the nightmare.
One that might be carrying my destiny.
Leonardo had heard the engines too, and he came to stand a few metres away from me. ‘Another boat,’ he said. ‘Ahead or behind?’
‘Behind, I think.’
‘How far?’
‘It’s hard to tell.’ Sound travelled well out there, funnelling up and down the river like cattle herded along a corral.
So we watched and we waited.
And, just after midday, we saw it.
39
A shimmer of white and silver appeared round a distant bend in the river. It nudged out from beyond the line of trees, and within a few minutes I knew it was the Estrella do Araguaia.
‘The old man,’ Leonardo sneered and came close to touch the muzzle of his pistol to the back of my head. ‘He sent someone after us.’
‘No.’
He pushed the pistol into the soft place at the base of my skull with enough force to make me lean over the edge of the gunwale. I gripped the wood to stop myself from toppling over.
I would be nothing and Daniella would be alone.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘It’s not the old man. They’re not after us. They’re going to ...’ I stopped myself. I wasn’t supposed to know where the boat was going, nor who was on board.
‘Going to do what?’ Leonardo asked keeping the pistol tight against me. ‘Going where?’
‘I don’t know. West. That’s all I was going to say. There’s a few places on the river. They could be going to any one of them. That boat, it’s always up and down this river.’
‘You know that boat?’ Leonardo leaned in so his mouth was close to my ear. He was sweating hard, his skin slick with it, and his face was streaked black from the smoke. His breath was stinking and hot.
‘I know it.’
‘It’s Santiago,’ Daniella said. ‘Please. Leave him alone. Haven’t we done everything you wanted?’
‘Not everything.’ He stood back and jammed the muzzle harder, as if he wanted to push it right through me.
I stared at the water and waited, wondering how Daniella must feel to see me like this, so close to death. The murky river slipped by, the ripples washing out towards the bank as the Deus cut through it, and all it would take was one small movement – one quick twitch of the finger – and my life would empty into it.
‘Please,’ Daniella said again. ‘Don’t’
The pistol remained in place.
‘If you kill him we’ll be lost. I ... I don’t know where to go. I don’t know where the mine is. Without Zico, we’ll be lost.’
The pressure on the back of my neck eased a touch. Leonardo took a deep breath, and then the pistol was gone. He grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me around to face him, then stood away, out of reach.
His eyes were livid. There was almost no white visible they were so bloodshot from the fire and the drugs and the lack of sleep. But they were wide with anger and frustration.
Behind us, the Estrella came closer and closer every moment, the sound of her engines growing until they overpowered our own.
‘If they stop, get rid of them.’ Leonardo left me and went to Daniella. He sat close behind the wheel, pushing himself against her and tucking his pistol into her ribs.
The Estrella slowed as it came up the river behind us and cut into our wake. The boat was smaller than the Deus, a good ten metres shorter, and its lines were sharper, but its condition wasn’t that much better. It wasn’t a sophisticated boat, and in a few years it would look as dilapidated as the Deus if Santiago didn’t do something to tidy her up.
There was a small section at the bow of the Estrella where passengers could sit at the railing and enjoy the fresh air, but other than that, the entire boat was enclosed. The window at the front of the wheelhouse was cracked, and had been that way for as long as I could remember, but the windows on either side, running back to the stern, were intact.
As the Estrella pulled alongside us and slowed to our speed, I could see Santiago sitting behind the wheel, his bare chest matted with thick hair.
I stayed at the gunwale and lifted a lazy hand, watching him return the gesture before he spoke to Matteus, the man beside him. For a moment, I thought Santiago was going to stop, but instead the two men laughed and ran their hands down their faces, reminding me how dirty we must look. Inside their boat, the smoke would not have affected them the way it did us.
When they finished laughing, Santiago raised his middle finger to me and throttled his engines.
As the Estrella picked up pace and slipped past us, I looked into the windows, seeing a number of faces turned in our direction. I didn’t have time to count how many passengers were on board, but I had my first glimpse of the presence I had felt since leaving Piratinga.
Sister Dolores Beckett.
There was little to see of her other than her head and shoulders just above the line of the window, but I knew it was her. I saw the same curly hair, the same glasses she was wearing in the photograph. No longer just in grainy shades of grey, an image on a piece of folded paper, but a real person, flesh and blood.
Just one more life.
She was sitting by the window, face angled towards me, and I caught her eyes as they passed. Our gaze locked and I felt, for one moment, as if she knew my intention; as if my dark purpose betrayed itself in the muddy brown iris of my eyes, visible only to those who knew how to read such design.
It was only distance that broke the contact, and I watched the Estrella gather speed and pass beyond us, its stern low in the water, a Brasilian flag flapping in the breeze the boat created for itself.
So now I had seen her. She was real.
Sister Dolores Beckett; the woman I was going to murder.
I went to the bow and watched the Estrella move away from us, leaving a wake of white water behind it, and I pulled the newspaper cutting from my pocket and opened it out so I could look into Sister Beckett’s eyes once more. On the p
aper, they were already dead. Lifeless. The photograph captured nothing of the woman I had just seen. Small and not outstanding to look at, but her eyes had seen right through me.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that settled at the back of my mind like a cancer. I knew of nothing that Sister Beckett had done; nothing to warrant the bloody death that was planned for her. If I had something to latch on to, something that turned her from a saint to a sinner, perhaps I would have better reason to kill her.
I stared at the picture a moment longer then folded it away and turned to look at Daniella behind the wheel of the Deus. My life was taking a different course and I needed to find a way to fund it, but this wasn’t the way to pay for it. Sister Beckett’s life for my own. For Daniella’s and Raul’s. I couldn’t help feeling it was going to be a bad deal for all of us.
But maybe everything was going to change because Santiago had passed us and was already moving out of sight, heading towards the next turn in the river. For us, Mina dos Santos was still several hours away, and we wouldn’t be there until nightfall, but the Estrella would be there in half that.
By the time we arrived at the small mining town, Sister Beckett might be long gone, heading deeper into the country, making for the reservations along the Rio das Mortes.
For a while, we watched the Estrella hurry ahead, but soon the boat was gone and we were alone on the river once more.
Within an hour the course narrowed further and the banks closed in on us from either side. This stretch of water was in sharp contrast to the wide expanse of the river we had travelled yesterday. Here, the trees leaned out to touch the Deus, trapping the heat. The air was still and scorching, keeping us ever reaching for the water bottles and bringing beads of sweat from every pore. Beneath us, the water ran faster and clearer, and in the thick vegetation along the banks, tucunaré and piranha flashed back and forth, startled by our progress.
‘Maybe you should take the wheel,’ Daniella said as we brushed past the overhanging branches, showering leaves and insects onto the canvas over our heads.
‘You’re doing fine.’ I glanced up at the holes burned by the embers. This felt like a different world from the inferno we had endured a few hours ago, but it was equally dangerous. ‘I’ll watch the water.’
Daniella bit her lower lip and nodded, so I showed her a smile and moved up to the bow. ‘We don’t want to get lost out here,’ I said.
‘We could get lost?’ Leonardo asked.
‘It’s possible. There are turns you don’t want to take. Some of them lead round and round and you’d never know it because everything looks the same. People have come in here and never come out. That’s worse than not delivering your guns on time, eh?’
As if to prove my point, Daniella steered us past the remnants of a wreck protruding from the water by the bank. The boat must have gone down backwards, perhaps dragged by the weight of its outboard, because it was two metres of the bow that broke the surface of the water while the stern was sunk deep into the bed of silt. Any paint was long gone, and the wood was bleached white by the sun. A colony of ants had made it their home, lines of them hurried in and out of holes.
I lifted my eyes to the bank, where the undergrowth grew dense. ‘There are things out there I reckon no one has ever seen before,’ I said.
‘Like what?’
I looked at Leonardo and shook my head. ‘If I knew that, then someone would have seen them.’
‘Corpo Seco,’ Daniella said. ‘Mãe used to tell me he lives in the trees.’
The dry corpse. A man who beat his mother and whose heart was so black he was rejected by both God and the Devil. Even the ground spat him out, so he was left to wander as a corpse, hiding in trees which eventually died from his touch.
‘Cuca,’ Leonardo said, making us both look at him. ‘My mother used to tell me Cuca would get me in the night if I didn’t go to sleep. Said the old hag would take me away.’
‘Where is she now?’ I asked without looking at him. ‘Your mãe?’
He didn’t reply. Instead, we lapsed into silence as we slipped through the afternoon, feeling a sense of relief when we reached a more open channel and the course widened to give us a little more space. The forest still grew dense and forbidding, but at least there were a few metres on either side of the Deus and Daniella was able to push us a little faster upriver.
‘That woman on the boat.’ Leonardo said after some time. ‘You know who she was?’
I shook my head.
He narrowed his eyes and stared at me. ‘I’ve seen her somewhere before.’
He looked like a man returning from battle. His shirt, open almost to his navel, was black with soot, the bandage around his calf was dirty, and his skin was streaked from the fire. As he watched me, he lifted his hand and wiped his forearm across his brow, the pistol coming close to his face.
‘How much longer?’ he said.
‘Four or five hours. We’ll be there just before dark unless ...’ I shook my head and glanced back at Daniella.
‘Unless what?’ Leonardo asked.
‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘Unless we have to get through another fire, I suppose.’
Daniella took her eyes off the river to watch me and, in that brief moment, Leonardo was forgotten. Sister Beckett was forgotten.
I was so afraid for Daniella, and yet I was so proud of her. She had been strong for me, shown me a determination I would never have expected from her – perhaps that she would never have expected from herself. There was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to be with her until I was old like Raul.
‘I should have taken that other boat,’ Leonardo said. The one that just passed us. Or something else. Why didn’t the old man say this boat was so damn slow?’
‘I guess he wouldn’t make too much money if he told everyone that. Anyway, Santiago wouldn’t let a man like you on board. He wouldn’t carry the things the old man does. You want to carry guns, you get a man like Raul to do it. You want to carry something more respectable, you get Santiago. Who are these guns for, anyway? What’s happening out here?’
Leonardo shook his head and closed his eyes in exasperation. ‘Five hours?’
‘Maybe four. Maybe more. Depends on the river.’
‘And for them? For the other boat?’
‘Less.’
‘How much less?’
‘A lot less. An hour maybe. They’re much faster.’ I shrugged and turned back to watch the river snaking around yet another bend. ‘Keep it straight coming into the curve,’ I said to Daniella. ‘Slow her down, too. See how the water changes colour on this side? It’s shallow here.’
Her face was a mask of concentration as she slowed the Deus, sitting further up in her seat to better see the shade of the river. Despite the reflection of the sun shimmering on the surface, the contrast of light and dark beneath was just visible as we approached the bend.
‘You hear engines?’ she asked.
I tried to shut out the sound of the Deus and listen to the river. Something ahead. Engines, perhaps, or some kind of echo. ‘Maybe.’
The sound became clearer as we moved on and I felt a prickle of nervousness. ‘Could be the Estrella,’ I suggested. ‘Sound carries well out here.’
‘Isn’t it too loud?’
Daniella was right; it was too loud. The engines sounded as if they were just around the next bend in the river, but the Estrella should have been well ahead of us now. There had to be another boat on the water. I wondered if someone knew we were here, carrying a valuable cargo.
40
Rounding the bend, keeping in the deepest channel, we saw the boat a hundred metres ahead. Its engines were revving and the water was churning behind it, but it remained motionless in the river.
‘Is that Santiago?’ Daniella asked.
Seeing the Estrella perched on the sandbank, struggling like a turtle flipped on its back, brought a relief of tension and I couldn’t help a smile coming to my lips. ‘Still wish you were on that boat?’
I said to Leonardo as I took the wheel from Daniella and slowed the Deus to a near standstill.
Leonardo came forward and to the left side of the boat, looking out at the beached Estrella. ’What happened?’ he asked.
‘Took the bend too fast, I reckon. Didn’t see the shallow water until it was too late.’ I thought about Santiago and Matt sitting in their wheelhouse when they sped past us, Santiago raising a finger at me.
I thought about her, too. Sister Dolores Beckett. Our eyes had met across the dark water of the River of Deaths and I had felt as if she were looking right into my soul. From the light that shrouded her, she had seen the shadow that clung to me.
And now she was close again.
‘The Estrella has a deep draught,’ I said, trying not to think of the nun. ‘Her hull is like a knife. She must’ve cut right through and wedged herself in there. She’ll never get off on her own.’ I kept the engine slow as we approached, seeing Matt lean out of the window, spot us and then disappear again. Almost at once, the Estrella’s engines stopped churning and Santiago came through the door on this side. He walked back to the stern to wait for us.
‘Can we tow them?’ Leonardo asked. ‘Pull them off the sand?’
‘Maybe, but why would you want to do that? I thought you were desperate to get to Mina dos Santos. We stop now, it’ll take us even longer.’ On another day, I would have tried to persuade Leonardo to let us help them, but today was different. Today I had a job to do and, with Sister Beckett delayed, I could get to Mina dos Santos before her.
‘How long would it take to pull them out?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Half an hour? An hour? It’s hard to say.’
Leonardo grabbed Daniella’s arm and pulled her close, reminding me that he still had the pistol. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to drive and she’s going to stay close to me. We’re going to pull that boat from the sand, then we’re going to move the crates and finish this journey in half the time it’s taking right now.’