The Lord of Opium Read online

  One thing stood out in Matt’s mind as most important. “The implants have to be taken out of the eejits’ brains,” he said.

  “That’s impossible,” Cienfuegos instantly responded.

  “You don’t know that for sure. If I can cure the eejits, they could be asked to stay on as paid workers.”

  The jefe laughed. “Have you seen what they do, mi patrón? No one could stand that job without an implant.”

  “People have farmed for thousands of years,” argued Matt. “They weren’t zombies. I’d like to see other crops planted—corn, wheat, tomatoes. I’d like cattle as well.” He thought for a moment, carefully gauging the effect of his next suggestion. “I want to end the lockdown. Esperanza Mendoza, the UN representative, wants to negotiate opening the border.”

  Cienfuegos wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “¡Esa víbora! I don’t know where to begin with that snake.”

  “Why don’t you take Matt for a ride?” suggested Celia. “Let him be seen as El Patrón’s heir. You can explain the situation to him on the way.”

  * * *

  “Can you ride a horse?” said Cienfuegos. They were at the stables, and the odor of fresh hay prickled Matt’s nose.

  “Only Safe Horses,” he admitted. He could instantly tell the difference between the animals in the stalls. The Safe Horses stood quietly, tamed by the microchips in their brains. The Real Horses put their noses over the gates and begged for attention. They watched eagerly to see whether they would be taken for a run.

  “Pity. You won’t make a good impression until you know how to ride. When he was young, El Patrón was a fantastic horseman. He could break a wild mustang without even using a saddle.”

  “That must have been a long time ago,” said Matt. El Patrón had been 146 years old when he died.

  “The memory is kept alive in narcocorridos,” said Cienfuegos.

  “Narcocorridos?”

  “It’s an old-fashioned word for personal ballads. Now they call them gritos.”

  “Ah!” Matt understood. He had endured many hours of tuneless yowling from bands hired to celebrate drug deals or spectacular murders. These were politely listened to by El Patrón when drug lords came to visit. The old man had his own praise singers, but they were top-of-the-line guitarists from South America and Portugal.

  “I use the old word because that was the term El Patrón preferred,” Cienfuegos explained. “He had a fine ear for music. He hired the best composers in the world, and his corridos will never die.”

  “You sound like you admire him,” said Matt.

  “I do. I know he was evil, but I’m no cherub myself,” said Cienfuegos. “Well, if you can’t ride, we’d better go by car. You can sit in the back and look menacing.”

  Matt followed the jefe to the garage. Daft Donald was polishing El Patrón’s long, black touring car. It had once been owned by someone called Hitler and had a top that could be folded back. Matt had always admired it but until now had not been allowed inside.

  Daft Donald nodded silently in greeting. Long ago he and Tam Lin had been Scottish terrorists together and had set a bomb to blow up the prime minister of England. Unfortunately, a school bus had pulled up at the last minute. The explosion killed twenty children and left Daft Donald with a wound that almost severed his throat and had destroyed his ability to speak.

  What a fine collection of followers I’ve inherited, Matt thought. Citizens of Opium and not a cherub among them.

  Daft Donald grinned and got into the driver’s seat. He looked as eager as the horses to be taken for a run. Matt reminded himself that the man, in spite of his evil past, had always been kind. And he was a friend of Tam Lin, which counted for a lot.

  Cienfuegos and Matt sat in the back, with Matt on a pillow to make him look taller. “Remember, don’t smile,” the jefe warned him. “You’re here to rule, not make friends.”

  Spring arrived early in Opium, and sand verbenas were already putting out lavender blooms. Desert lilies poked through the warming soil. In the vast gardens of the hacienda, a haze of bees moved over beds of sweet alyssum, and a white-winged dove called who-cooks-for-you? from a paloverde tree.

  In spite of Cienfuegos’s warning, Matt couldn’t help smiling. This was his home and his country. It wasn’t full of clanking machines and noxious air like Aztlán—except for the eejit pens, he quickly reminded himself. They were kept out of sight at the bottom of shallow valleys, and it was all too easy to forget about them.

  Water from the Colorado River was purified for drinking. The residue, a toxic mix that smelled like rotten fish, excrement, and vomit, was pumped into sludge ponds next to the eejit pens. On still nights the air from the ponds overflowed and poisoned whatever it came in contact with. Then the Farm Patrol ordered the eejits to sleep out in the fields.

  The gardeners waved and shouted, “¡Viva el patroncito!” as Hitler’s old car went by. Matt raised his hand to wave back.

  “Don’t encourage them,” hissed Cienfuegos. “If they start calling you ‘the little boss,’ they’ll never show respect.”

  Matt put his hand down.

  They left the green lawns of the estate and came to the first poppy field. Lines of eejits bent and slashed in a mindless rhythm, and a Farm Patrolman monitored them from the back of a horse.

  “¡Hola! Angus!” shouted Cienfuegos. “Come and see the new patrón!”

  Daft Donald stopped the car and Angus rode up, tipping his hat. “It’s a fine day when we have a new drug lord,” he said. “Good fortune to you, sir.” He was a bluff, red-faced Scotsman with the same lilting accent as Tam Lin. The man bent down confidentially and said to Cienfuegos, “You might put a word in his ear about the eejit pellets. We’ve had to cut rations again.”

  “I’m getting to it,” said the jefe.

  Angus shot a quick look at Matt and bent down again. “Begging your pardon, sir, but doesn’t he look like—”

  “It’s hardly surprising. El Patrón was the original model.”

  “You don’t say! I’ll be burning an extra candle tonight.” Angus tipped his hat again and rode off.

  “Eejit pellets?” Matt asked as Daft Donald started the car.

  “We get their food from a plankton factory in Aztlán,” explained Cienfuegos. “With the border closed, we’ve had to depend on reserves.”

  “Can’t you open it?” said Matt.

  “The controls only recognize certain people. The Alacráns activated the lockdown before they went to El Patrón’s funeral, and now they’re all dead. The system is programmed to kill anyone who isn’t authorized. I’m hoping that doesn’t include you.”

  Me too, thought Matt. The old man had booby traps planted all over to keep enemies from gaining control.

  Cienfuegos leaned forward and told Daft Donald to take them to the armory.

  5

  THE DOPE CONFEDERACY

  The poppy fields were beautifully maintained, thought Matt, who had learned much about opium farming. Every third year a field was allowed to rest, and eejits patiently massaged manure into it with their fingers to make the soil soft and fertile. The result looked like fine, Colombian coffee grounds. These resting patches of earth brimmed with life. Birds, bees, and butterflies were everywhere. Lizards sunned themselves on fence posts. A falcon hovered over wild grass, looking for the bow-wave of a mouse underneath. Aztlán to the south had been a wasteland compared to Opium.

  After a while Matt saw a large building looming in the distance. It had a red tile roof and grilles over the windows after the fashion of old Mexican forts. Outside were picnic tables under ramadas. A few Farm Patrolmen, seated at these tables, snapped to attention when the car stopped.

  “At ease,” said Cienfuegos. “This is your new leader, amigos. See that you treat him with respect, or he’ll have you cockroached. You’d do that, wouldn’t you, mi patrón?”

  “In a heartbeat,” said Matt, who didn’t know what the word meant. From the alarmed expressions on the men’s faces
, he guessed that it was a serious threat.

  “Hugh, get the map of the Dope Confederacy,” the jefe told a man with cold, humorless eyes. Matt recognized him. Long ago the boy had passed out from bad air near an eejit pen. The man who rescued him had been Hugh, but it hadn’t been an act of charity. Hugh had thrown him into the back of a truck and almost crushed the life out of him with a boot. Now the man looked slightly stunned to see his new lord. He hurried to obey.

  Cienfuegos ordered everyone away and spread out the map. Matt had seen it before in the Alacrán library. It was a detailed chart of the border between the United States and Aztlán, and over the top was a title printed in gold leaf: THE DOPE CONFEDERACY.

  At the western end was the Land of Cocaine, stretching from the Salton Sea to the Pacific Ocean. This had been ruled by Mr. MacGregor until he drank poisoned wine at El Patrón’s funeral. Matt wondered who controlled it now. At the eastern end of the Dope Confederacy, from the ruins of Ciudad Juárez to the Gulf of Mexico, were the lands of Marijuana, Hash, Tobacco, Meth, Snuff, and LSD. A tiny sliver—Matt had to squint to make it out—was labeled Ecstasy. Far and away the most impressive country was the one in the middle: Opium.

  Matt’s heart swelled with pride.

  “You do know that all the drug lords were poisoned at El Patrón’s funeral,” said the jefe.

  “All?” said Matt. This was news.

  “It left a power vacuum that immediately led to civil wars. Most of the Dope Confederacy was rotten to begin with, and it didn’t take much for law and order to break down.” A breeze lifted the edge of the map, and Cienfuegos pinned it down with a stiletto he flicked out of his sleeve.

  Matt was momentarily distracted by the smooth way the jefe produced this weapon. One instant the man’s hand was empty. The next he had the slim knife poised for attack—fortunately, this time, on the map. But it could have been me, Matt thought.

  “Whatever you might think of El Patrón, he was a genius at maintaining order,” the jefe continued. “If anything threatened Opium, the borders were locked down. Anyone who tried to enter or leave was annihilated by unmanned drones. Even during ordinary times, hovercrafts had to get permission before landing. You may have noticed how quiet the skies are over Opium.”

  “They’ve been quiet for as long as I can remember,” said Matt.

  “El Patrón never allowed jets over his territory. He wanted everything kept as it was a hundred years ago. Once, about fifty years ago, a passenger jet carrying two hundred forty-five people strayed into his airspace.”

  “He didn’t—” said Matt.

  “He did. Remember what I said about random acts of violence,” said Cienfuegos. “That’s how you maintain power. El Patrón only had to make his point once.”

  “But two hundred forty-five innocent people!”

  Cienfuegos signaled to someone Matt couldn’t see in the Armory, and presently a Farm Patrolman came out with lemonade. The jefe poured two glasses and used the jug to pin down another corner of the map. “Mm!” he said, taking a drink. “Not as good as pulque, but I promised Celia not to corrupt you.”

  No, you’re only telling me it’s okay to shoot down two hundred forty-five people, thought Matt.

  “What do you think would have happened if El Patrón had let that aircraft escape?” said Cienfuegos. “Next year another jet would have made a ‘mistake,’ and then another and another. Eventually it would have led to war. Many more people would have died.”

  Matt tried to think of a counterargument and failed. “What about Illegals? Are they still trying to cross the border?”

  The jefe grimaced. “Unfortunately, the border itself is a lethal force field, now that it is in lockdown. It gets them before we do. It’s a pity, because we need new workers. The life expectancy of an eejit isn’t long.”

  Matt looked for signs of compassion in the man and found none. Cienfuegos might have been talking about a shortage of Thanksgiving turkeys.

  “Show me the lockdown system, and I’ll try to open it,” said Matt.

  “Not so fast. I haven’t finished,” the jefe cautioned. “The governments of Marijuana, Hash, Tobacco, Meth, Snuff, LSD, and Ecstasy collapsed. They were wide open for invasion, and the most vicious of the drug lords took control. You have to really shine in that area to stand out from the others. He was an African called Glass Eye Dabengwa.”

  “Glass Eye,” murmured Matt. He recognized the name. One of El Patrón’s homework assignments had been to memorize drug contacts, and Africa was one of the major markets. Matt had to update his information constantly because accidents tended to happen, but Glass Eye had been durable. He’d weathered dozens of assassination attempts. Matt had seen him at Benito and Fani’s wedding, and a couple of times later at El Patrón’s parties.

  He was almost a hundred years old and maintained his health, as did all drug lords, by raising clones. The truly frightening feature of the man was his ability to stare at someone without blinking. His eyes didn’t seem to need moisture, or perhaps his tear ducts had dried up long before. The whites had turned as yellow as an old crocodile’s.

  The rest of the man was a dusty gray, except for his teeth. They were as strong and white as those of a man of twenty. And they really had come from a man of twenty, because you didn’t need a clone to transplant teeth. Glass Eye Dabengwa found himself a new donor every few years.

  Matt looked at the map with dismay. The combined territories of the defeated drug empires were as large as Opium. “What about the Land of Cocaine? Can we ally ourselves with that?”

  “Not anymore,” Cienfuegos said grimly. “When it became clear that Glass Eye planned to invade Cocaine, the United Nations launched a preemptive strike. They called it Operation Cold Turkey. They firebombed the coca plantations and in the process killed the eejits. Thousands of them. The land of Cocaine is now occupied by UN forces under the direction of Esperanza Mendoza.”

  “Esperanza?” Matt was shocked to his very core. She was María’s mother. She was the one who had saved him in Aztlán and who’d promised to help him. This was her idea of help? But he also knew she was a fanatic. She’d abandoned her own children to follow political beliefs and might well consider killing eejits a small price to pay for stopping the drug trade. That’s no different from El Patrón shooting down a jet plane to avoid a war, he thought.

  He heard doves calling in the palo verde trees and smelled dust raised by horses’ hooves in a corral. He heard men laughing as they played cards under the ramadas. It seemed so peaceful and normal, though of course it wasn’t normal. Opium thrived on the blood of Illegals. But if Esperanza had her way, might she not order everyone killed here, too?

  “It isn’t easy being good, is it?” said Cienfuegos, cleaning his fingernails with the stiletto.

  6

  MIRASOL

  You need Cienfuegos’s help,” said Celia. She and Matt were sharing an uneasy lunch in the kitchen. Celia insisted that Matt had to keep up his image. No more lounging around the servants’ quarters or deferring to people like Daft Donald or Mr. Ortega. He needed to act like a proper drug lord.

  Matt, just as insistently, said that drug lords did whatever they wanted. That was the whole point of having power. And so the two of them were eating hamburgers at the old farmhouse table and trying to look comfortable about it.

  “I didn’t want to call Cienfuegos in,” Celia said now, “but there were so few Real People left and thousands and thousands of eejits to control.”

  Matt reached for the plate of hamburger patties, and Celia firmly took it away from his hands. He was not to prepare his own food, she said. She began to assemble the hamburger, adding pickles, onions, and pico de gallo salsa.

  Matt thought that not being allowed to do things for yourself could get old quickly.

  “I hate the Farm Patrol. I despise them. But what was I to do?” Celia said, depositing the hamburger on Matt’s plate. “Tam Lin always said that Cienfuegos was the best of the lot, and we certainly ne
eded help.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Not really. At least he’s not like the other Farm Patrolmen. He wants to end the opium trade.”

  “¡Claro, y los chanchos vuelan! Sure, and pigs fly, too!” said Matt.

  “I think he means it. Cienfuegos wasn’t the usual thug El Patrón hired. He studied agriculture at Chapultepec University. He told me that the soil in Aztlán had been devastated by industrial waste and that he set out for the United States to find a cure. The Farm Patrol tracked him for three days in and out of the mountains. Cienfuegos killed five of them before they cornered him, and then El Patrón was so impressed by his courage that he recruited him. But Cienfuegos never wanted to be a hired gun. He has never forgotten his mission to heal Aztlán.”

  “What does he plan to do with the eejits?” asked Matt.

  Celia sighed. “I don’t know. He says they’re incurable.”

  El Patrón would work them until they died, thought Matt. No one seemed to think they were worth saving.

  Until he had met the boys at the plankton factory, he hadn’t thought much about the zombielike workers. He felt sorry for them, of course, but like everyone else, he believed they were incapable of feeling. Did it matter what kind of life you had if you couldn’t feel pain?

  The boys at the factory had been left behind by parents who had crossed the border. Chacho’s father had been a guitar maker. Imagine creating something that good and then being turned into a zombie. Chacho’s father was probably bending and slashing opium pods along with Ton-Ton’s parents and Fidelito’s grandmother.

  Or, more likely, they were buried under the poppy fields with thousands of other Illegals.

  “Cienfuegos paid a price for his life,” Celia said, breaking into Matt’s thoughts. “He was implanted with a microchip.”

  Matt looked up, startled. “He’s a . . . he’s an eejit?”

  “Don’t even hint that you know about it,” warned Celia, lowering her voice. “It enrages him. All the Farm Patrolmen are chipped to make them more docile. You can’t have murderers and terrorists running around without some kind of control.”