The Lord of Opium (11 page)

“I can smell that,” said Chacho. “Isn’t it strange that sounds and odors can pass through the holoport? I wonder what else can?”

Fidelito threw a celery stick at the screen, and Ton-Ton caught it in midair. “You’re going to b-break that machine,” he said. “We don’t know how it w-works.”

“Oh! I didn’t think of that,” said Fidelito.

“I just remembered,” Matt said. “
Sor
Artemesia said that God calls animals to heaven. I thought Catholics believed they didn’t have souls.”

“
Sor
Artemesia isn’t like most of the nuns. She’s awesome!” said Chacho. “She read to me for hours when I was in the hospital. She’s a follower of Saint Francis and thinks that animals are just as good as people.”

“So that’s where María got her ideas,” said Matt.

“She practically raised M-María,” said Ton-Ton. “When Esperanza dumped her kids, S-Senator Mendoza sent them to the Convent of Santa Clara. If I had a mother like, uh, Esperanza, I’d pray to get d-dumped. Not that she hasn’t been good to us, but I don’t think she likes kids.”

“You think zombies are scary, Fidelito, you should see Esperanza in a bad mood,” said Chacho. “Speaking of kids, how’s Emilia doing? María asked
Sor
Artemesia, but she didn’t know.”

Matt was dumbfounded. For some reason Esperanza wanted to hide the truth, and until he knew why, he couldn’t reveal it. “I haven’t seen her,” he said evasively.

“I guess Opium’s a big place. I mean, you have room for thousands of zombies,” said Chacho. To change the subject, Matt brought out the music box, and as he’d expected, they were all enchanted with it.

“It’s so clever!” exclaimed Ton-Ton. “I wonder if I could m-make something like that.”

“You’re good with machinery. I’m sure you could,” said
Matt. He wound it up again, and they watched the gentleman and lady dance. Out of the corner of his eye, Matt saw Fidelito fiddling with the birdcage, and the next minute the little boy had the finch clinging to his finger by one claw. “Ton-Ton! Watch Fidelito!” he cried.

The older boy turned and shouted, “Put that back!” The little boy jumped. The bird fell off his hand and flew straight at the holoport. Ton-Ton tried to grab it out of the air, but he was too late. The finch hung in midflight as the opening began to swirl with fog. It had seemed to be only a few inches away, but it moved with painful slowness. Its wings were outspread and its beak was open in a silent cry. Then it fell out the other end and shattered on the floor.

Matt touched it. Ice dampened his finger. The bird had broken into three parts but was melting rapidly into pathetic little heaps. Matt looked up to see the portal trying to re-form. He closed it down before anything else could happen. After a while he wrapped the dead bird in a napkin.

13

THE OPIUM FACTORY

M
att returned the music box to El Patrón’s apartment and sat staring out the windows of the bedroom. Celia’s picnic basket was on the bed, and in a corner of it was the napkin containing the dead finch. He didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to make decisions.

How simple it had been at the plankton factory, though of course it had been terrible, too. There he hadn’t been responsible for anything. The Keepers could be blamed for problems. He hoped that Fidelito wouldn’t get into trouble for losing María’s bird. No one knew, after all, that it was dead. Matt could say that it was living happily in Opium, but no, he’d have to tell the truth. Otherwise Fidelito might throw something else into the portal.

He thought about contacting the convent again and was strangely reluctant. The boys were on one side of the portal, having a high old time raiding kitchens and destroying flower
beds. He was trapped on the other, with a wall of death in between. It was like watching TV when he was very small and had never seen other children. It was worse than being alone.

After a while Matt went outside and buried the finch, still in its napkin, under an orange tree.

He drifted to the music room, where he’d spent so many happy hours, and played Mozart’s “Turkish March.” He went faster and louder until it sounded more like noise than music. He crashed both fists down on the keys and stopped. Once, he’d been satisfied by the music alone. Now he had learned about friendship, and it was no longer enough to play without an audience.

Finally, out of boredom, Matt asked Daft Donald and Mr. Ortega to take him to the opium factory. He’d been there many times in the days when he thought El Patrón was preparing him to run the country. He had watched how the dried poppy sap was rolled into black balls the size of coconuts and then pressed into a disk stamped with the scorpion emblem. An eejit assembly line wrapped the disks in waxed paper and stored them in metal cookie cans.

Another assembly line measured laudanum, or opium dissolved in alcohol, into bottles. This was marketed in orange, lemon, cinnamon, and clove flavors. A rose-petal variation was manufactured for the Middle East market. More intelligent eejits processed the raw poppy sap into morphine, codeine, and heroin.

All the storerooms and most of the halls were full of cookie cans and bottles, and the overflow was stacked outside under makeshift ramadas. Matt remembered the lights blinking at various addresses on the holoport. The dealers wanted their shipments, and very soon he would have to deal with the situation.

A fume of dust filled the building. The foreman quickly found respirators to protect the visitors from being overcome, but Mr. Ortega waved his aside. “You know me,” he told the foreman. “I’m here to smell the roses.” He breathed in deeply with an ecstatic look on his face. “Aaahhh,” he said with a sigh. “Don’t look so surprised,
mi patrón
. I’m a drug addict. Didn’t you ever wonder why my hands sometimes shake?”

Matt hadn’t really thought about it. He’d assumed the music teacher was ill.

Daft Donald put a finger to his temple, like a man pretending to shoot himself.

“No, I wouldn’t rather be dead,” said Mr. Ortega, understanding the gesture. “You’ve got nerve taking a high moral tone with me after all the murders you’ve committed.”

Daft Donald made a circular motion with his finger:
You’re completely nuts.

“On the contrary, I’m extremely clever,” argued the music teacher. “Where else would a drug addict want to be except where there are piles and piles of lovely opium?”

Daft Donald shook with silent laughter.

Their conversation continued, with the bodyguard making gestures and the music teacher replying aloud.

Matt wandered off. The foreman was courteous to him, a change from the old days when the man had treated him like a roach. The boy told him that supplies had arrived from Aztlán. The eejits could go back to full rations. “Very good,
mi patrón
,” said the foreman. “We lost a couple of them yesterday and production is down, not”—the man gestured at the overflowing hallways—“that we don’t have more dope than we know what to do with.”

Matt felt depressed. The eejits—thousands of them—were
programmed to plant poppies, slash pods, and make laudanum, and they didn’t know how to do anything else. If they were prevented from working, they
jittered
. Cienfuegos said that after a while these eejits simply keeled over and died. The tension was too great for them. Thus, they had to go on working day after day, while the opium had to keep piling up. It was like a well-oiled machine without an off button.

Matt’s choices were to supply the dealers and keep the machine going with fresh Illegals, or to stop exporting drugs and let the current eejits work themselves to death. It was his decision.

“You look tired, sir. Would you like to meditate in our chapel?” said the foreman.

Matt looked up, pleased by the word
sir
. “I thought the chapel was in the church.”

“This isn’t official.” The man seemed slightly embarrassed. “It’s just a place to rest for the foremen and Farm Patrol. No one else is allowed in, but as you’re the new
patrón
 . . . ”

Matt followed him, intrigued. The foreman unlocked a small room, hardly bigger than a pantry. It was decorated with flowers and holy candles, and sitting in a chair was a life-size statue of a man. Matt flinched.
It was El Patrón.
Or at least what he had looked like at age thirty. The statue was made of plaster and was slightly chipped, as saints’ images tended to be. Its eyes were jet-black. It was dressed in a white shirt with black trousers and wore a black bandanna around its neck.

On a small altar were offerings: plastic flowers, silver charms, pictures. A drawing of a little girl with braids caught Matt’s attention. It was hardly more than a stick figure, and the artist had written the name
Alicia
with an arrow, to identify the portrait. “What’s this for?” Matt asked.

The foreman hesitated. “Some of the men left family behind
when they came here. They don’t have photographs, so they draw pictures.”

“Why?”

“To ask the saint for help. That one, if you look on the back, wants his wife to have enough money to raise his daughter. A silver charm means that someone wants a cure—an eye for blindness, an arm for a broken bone. The ear was left by Mr. Ortega.”

A cone-shaped lump of copal incense filled the little chapel with fumes. Matt felt for his inhaler, just in case. “What’s the saint’s name?” he asked, and braced for the answer. But it wasn’t El Patrón. The old man hadn’t made it that far into heaven.

“That is Jesús Malverde, the guardian of drug dealers,” said the foreman. “He was a bandit from Culiacán, with the difference that he didn’t keep what he stole. He took from the rich and gave to the poor. They say he was betrayed by a friend, who cut off his feet and dragged his body for miles to get a reward. Malverde’s body was hung from a mesquite tree by the local governor, but the poor people cut it down and buried him in a secret place. He has done many miracles.”

“Have you ever seen a picture of El Patrón as a young man?” asked Matt, looking at the statue.

The foreman laughed. “No, but I know what you’re talking about. You see, there was never a photograph of the original Malverde. When the artist wanted a model for the saint, he asked El Patrón to sit for him. The old man was young then and was flattered to be compared with a saint. In later years no one could see the resemblance, but some of the men have noticed the likeness between Malverde and you.”

Matt remembered that first day when Cienfuegos had introduced him to a Farm Patrolman called Angus. Angus had
bent down and said,
Begging your pardon, sir, but doesn’t he look like—

And Cienfuegos had replied,
It’s hardly surprising. El Patrón was the original model.

Matt was delighted. Wait till he told María! Brother Wolf had not only become human, he’d turned into a saint. “I’d like to sit here alone for a while, if you don’t mind,” he said.

“You don’t need to ask my permission,” the foreman said, almost reprovingly. “You’re the
patrón
.”

After the man had gone, Matt looked through the offerings. There were various body parts crafted out of silver, even a stomach. Perhaps someone had ulcers. The drawings were mostly of children. Some appeared several times, as though the artist wanted to be sure that the saint noticed them. One was of an old woman. As Matt looked, he felt the ghostly presence of family members who would never know the fate of their men. He assumed that the drawings were by men because women, except for Celia, were turned into eejits.

He read the pleas for help. Most wanted money. Some asked for a dream telling them how their relatives were doing. Some wrote messages that they hoped the saint would pass on.

Toward the bottom of the heap, Matt came across a real photograph. It was of a little girl with black hair cut in the same style as María. She had a serious face, and her hands lay loosely in her lap as though she had been waiting for a long time. He turned it over.

Dear holy and miraculous Malverde,
the note said.
My daughter begged me to stay, but I did not listen. I left her with her mother. She was so good. She was so young. I can never see her again, and now my heart is frozen. Please! Please! Please! Out of your mercy, take care of her. I will do anything for you, if only you tell me what it is. Eligio Cienfuegos.

14

MADNESS

M
att was in an irritable mood that evening, and he had a persistent, dull headache. He ordered Celia to serve him dinner in the kitchen. “I’m a drug lord. I do what I like,” he snapped when she tried to argue. Everyone eyed him nervously. Cienfuegos arrived late, slinking into a chair in his usual noiseless way.

“I distributed the eejit pellets,” he announced. “There’s enough for three months with our current population. Of course, we’ll need more eejits as the workers die off.” He helped himself to potato salad and turkey. Celia poured him a mug of
pulque
, and he settled back with a satisfied sigh. “How was the convent?” he asked Matt.

“Don’t ask,” the boy said.

“Ah! The visit went badly. Did Esperanza throw sand in your eyes?” asked Cienfuegos.

“She wasn’t there. She’d taken María to New York for
dancing lessons. I talked to my friends from the plankton factory.”

The
jefe
raised his eyebrows, and Celia shrugged. “He didn’t tell me what happened,” she said.

“I had a picnic, okay? I ate on one side of the portal and the boys ate on the other.”

“So far, so good,” said Cienfuegos. “What went wrong?”

“Fidelito let María’s bird out of a cage. It flew through the portal and shattered like a piece of glass.”

The
jefe
nodded and took another drink of
pulque
. “The holoport is a wormhole connecting one place to another. Inside, I’m told, it’s as cold as outer space. I don’t understand the science and neither did El Patrón, but he always had brainy people working for him. It’s no great loss. There are lots of birds.”