The House of the Scorpion (21 page)

Matt felt cold. He'd had no idea how much Felicia hated him.

“But I had to be satisfied with . . . that filthy, slavering rat María called a dog. I keep a small amount of laudanum for my nerves.”

She keeps about enough to wipe out a city
, Matt thought.

“So I poured one of . . .
my
bottles on the hamburger that idiot clone left behind. ‘Come here, Furball,' I called. He didn't want to leave his bag, but I . . . dumped him out . . . on the meat. He ate the whole thing.”

“How long did it take him to die?” Tom asked, but Matt didn't hear the answer. María slid to the floor, and he immediately went to her side. She didn't make a sound, but her body
trembled and she turned her head from side to side in an agony of grief.

“He didn't suffer,” Matt whispered as he held her. “He didn't even know what was happening.” María clung to him, her face streaked by a bar of light from the flashlight Matt had propped against the wall. Finally, she calmed down enough for Matt to check up on what Tom and Felicia were doing. But they had gone, and the viewing screen was shrouded in plastic.

He led her back along the passage. María said nothing, and Matt didn't know what to do. They hadn't gone far before he saw a large shape holding a flashlight coming toward them. There was hardly room for the shape to fit between the walls.

“You utter fools,” said Tam Lin in a low voice. “The whole house is buzzing like a ruddy beehive.”

“How did you find us?” asked Matt.

“El Patrón told me about this passage. He guessed you'd somehow found it. Damn it, Matt, María's had enough grief out of you.”

“Felicia poisoned Furball,” María said.

“What are you talking about?” Tam Lin was clearly startled.

“I heard her talking to Tom. She was so—so happy about it. I didn't know people could be that evil.” María looked like a wraith in her black dress. Her face was ashen.

“You need to lie down,” said Tam Lin. “I'll take you out through El Patrón's study. He'll say you were there all the time. He thinks this is pretty amusing, but Senator Mendoza doesn't think it's funny at all.”

“Oh. Dada,” María said, as though she'd just remembered she had a father.

“Matt, you wait here a few minutes. When the coast is clear, come out wherever you went in,” said the bodyguard.

“The music room,” said Matt.

“I should have guessed it. María's hat was there.”

“Matt,” said María, pulling away from Tam Lin for a moment, “you let me forgive you for something you hadn't done.”

“A little extra forgiveness never hurts,” said Matt, quoting one of Celia's favorite sayings.

“You probably
liked
letting me make a perfect idiot of myself,” she said with a flash of her old spirit.

“I'd never think you were an idiot,” said Matt.

“Anyhow, I'm sorry I was unfair to you.”

“We can't stay here,” said Tam Lin.

“I expect you to keep your promise to be good,” she went on, looking at Matt.

“Okay,” he replied.

“And, Brother Wolf, I'll miss you.” This time María let Tam Lin hurry her down the passage. Matt listened to her footsteps die away in the distance.

T
he Mendozas left immediately after María, pale and miserable, emerged from El Patrón's apartment. El Patrón decamped not long afterward with his bodyguards.

Matt was alone again. He couldn't talk to María or Tam Lin, but knowing they still liked him made all the difference. He studied things he thought they would approve of. He read survival manuals for Tam Lin and a long, confusing book about Saint Francis to please María.

Saint Francis loved everyone from murderous bandits to beggars covered with running sores (there was a picture of one of these in the book). He called a cicada to his finger and said, “Welcome, Sister Cicada. Praise God with your joyful music.” Saint Francis spoke to everything—Brother Sun and Sister Moon, Brother Falcon and Sister Lark. It gave Matt the warm feeling that the world was one loving family—
very
unlike the Alacráns.

But would Saint Francis have said,
Brother Clone?

Matt's warm feelings evaporated. He wasn't part of the natural order. He was an
abomination.

No matter where he was, Matt couldn't rid himself of the sensation he was being watched. It was bad enough to know the security guards spied on him, but far worse to think of Felicia. She was as awful as Tom, only no one suspected it because she seemed so meek. She reminded Matt of one of those jellyfish he'd seen on TV. They floated around the ocean like fluffy pillows, trailing enough venom to paralyze a swimmer. Why hadn't he realized Felicia hated him?

Well, to be honest, because most people hated him. It was no big thing. But her malevolence was in a class by itself.

Once a week Matt went to the stables and asked for a Safe Horse. Before going out, though, he tried to have a conversation with Rosa. He didn't like her. He wasn't sure why he wanted to wake her up, only that it seemed horrible to see her so changed. If there was anything left of Rosa, it was locked in an iron box. He imagined her banging on the walls with her fists, but no one came to open the door. He'd read that coma victims hear everything people say and need voices to keep their brains alive. And so Matt talked to her about everything he'd seen and done that week. But all Rosa ever replied was, “Do you wish another horse, Master?”

After an hour or so of this, Matt rode off to the oasis. “Hello, Brother Sun,” he called. “Would you mind cooling down a bit?” Brother Sun ignored him. “Good morning, Sister Poppies,” Matt called to the sea of blinding white flowers. “Hello, Brother and Sister Eejits,” he greeted a row of brown-clad workers bending over the fields.

One of the most amazing things about Saint Francis and his
followers was how they gave away their possessions. Saint Francis couldn't wait to strip off his shirt and sandals whenever he saw a poor person without them. Brother Juniper, one of Saint Francis's friends, even went home naked a lot of the time. Matt thought El Patrón would have a heart attack if anyone told him to give away his belongings.

Once Matt passed through the hole in the rock, it was as though he'd arrived in another world. The hawks circled lazily in a bright, blue sky, the jackrabbits crouched in the shade of the creosotes. Fish nibbled bread from Matt's fingers, and coyotes darted forward to gobble down chunks of his sandwiches. None of them cared whether he was a human or a clone.

Matt laid out a sleeping bag under the grape arbor and used a rolled-up blanket for a pillow. He placed a thermos of orange juice within reach and selected a book. This was living! The air smelled faintly of creosote and the yellow sweetness of locust flowers. A large black wasp with scarlet wings ran over the sand, searching for the spiders that were its prey.

“Hello, Brother Wasp,” Matt said lazily. The insect dug furiously in the sand, found nothing, and scurried on.

Matt opened
A History of Opium
, one of the books Tam Lin had left him in the chest. He expected it to be a manual about farming, but it was something quite different and exciting. Opium, Matt read, was a whole country. It was a long, thin strip of land lying between the United States and Aztlán.

One hundred years ago there had been trouble between the United States and Aztlán, which was called Mexico in those days. Matt vaguely remembered Celia saying something about it. Many thousands of Mexicans had flooded across the border in search of work.
A drug dealer named Matteo Alacrán—

Matt sat up straight. That was El Patrón's name! One hundred
years ago he would have been a strong and active man.

This person, the book went on to say, was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world, even though his business was illegal.

Drugs illegal?
thought Matt.
What a strange idea.

Matteo Alacrán formed an alliance with the other dealers and approached the leaders of the United States and Mexico.
“You have two problems,” he said. “First, you cannot control your borders, and second, you cannot control us.”

He advised them to combine the problems. If both countries set aside land along their common border, the dealers would establish Farms and stop the flow of Illegals. In return, the dealers would promise not to sell drugs to the citizens of the United States and Mexico. They would peddle their wares in Europe, Asia, and Africa instead.

It was a pact made in hell
, said the book.

Matt put it down. He couldn't see anything wrong with the plan. It seemed to have done everything it promised. He looked at the title page. The author was Esperanza Mendoza, and the Anti-Slavery Society of California was the publisher. Now that he looked more closely, he saw the book was printed on cheap, yellow paper. It didn't look like something you could take seriously. Matt read on.

At first, the book explained, Opium was simply a no-man's-land, but through the years it had prospered. Different areas were ruled by different families, much like the kingdoms of medieval Europe. A council of Farmers was established, which dealt with international problems and kept peace between the various Farms. Most families controlled small areas, but two were large enough to dictate policy. The MacGregors ruled the land near San Diego, and the Alacráns had a vast empire
stretching from central California all across Arizona and into New Mexico.

Gradually, Opium changed from a no-man's-land to a real country. And its supreme leader, dictator, and führer was Matteo Alacrán.

Matt stopped reading so he could savor the words. His heart swelled with pride. He didn't know what a führer was, but it was obviously something very good.

A more evil, vicious, and self-serving man could hardly be imagined
, wrote Esperanza on the next line.

Matt threw the book away as hard as he could. It landed in the water with its pages open. How dare she insult El Patrón! He was a genius. How many people could build a country out of nothing, especially someone as poor as El Patrón had been? Esperanza was simply jealous.

But Matt sprang up to rescue the book before it was entirely ruined. Tam Lin had given it to him, and that made it valuable. He dried it out carefully and packed it away in the metal chest.

•   •   •

On the way back Matt stopped at the water purification plant and talked to the foreman. Since Tam Lin's departure, Matt had thought long and hard about the excellent education he'd been given. It didn't make sense for him to spend the rest of his life as an exotic pet. El Patrón didn't waste money like that.

No, Matt realized, the old man meant him to have a higher destiny. He could never reach the status of Benito or Steven, not being human, but he could help them. And so Matt had begun to study how the enterprise of running an opium empire worked. He saw how opium was planted, processed, and marketed. He watched how the eejits were moved from field to field, how often they were watered, and how many food pellets they were allowed.

When I'm in charge
—Matt quickly adjusted his thought:
When I'm
helping
the person in charge, I'll free the eejits.
Surely opium could be grown by normal people. They might not be as efficient, but anything was better than a mindless army of slaves. Now that Matt had observed Rosa, he understood that.

He asked the plant foreman about the underground river that flowed from the Gulf of California hundreds of miles away. It was used to supply water to the Alacrán estate, but it smelled—before it was purified—terrifyingly bad.

The plant foreman refused to meet Matt's eyes. Like most humans, he didn't like talking to clones, but he also didn't want to anger El Patrón. “Why does the water smell like that?” Matt asked.

“Dead fish. Chemicals,” the foreman replied, not looking up.

“But you take those out.”

“Yes.”

“Where do you put them?”

“Wastelands,” the man said, pointing north. He kept his answers as brief as possible.

Matt shaded his eyes as he looked to the north. A heat haze shimmered over the desert, and he saw a series of ridges that might be buildings. “There?” he asked doubtfully.

“Yes,” the foreman replied.

Matt turned the horse and started heading northward to get a clearer view. The smell was so vile, he feared he might have an asthma attack. He felt for his inhaler.

They
were
buildings. They stretched in long rows with doors and dark little windows every so often. The roofs were so low, Matt wondered whether a person could stand up inside. The windows were covered with iron bars. Could this be where the eejits lived? The idea was appalling.