The Lord of Opium Read online

  12

  THE LONG-DISTANCE PICNIC

  Celia brought Matt’s breakfast and said that Waitress had been kept in bed to allow her hands to heal. Matt didn’t mind, because he was going to visit his friends. He’d seen them five days before, but it seemed more like five weeks, so much had happened. He made a selection of things from El Patrón’s apartment—a crystal goblet, the golden deer, a walking stick carved in the shape of a striking cobra—and then put them away. The boys might think he was showing off. In the end he took only the music box with the Mexican gentleman and lady.

  Alone in the instrument room, Matt suffered a moment of doubt. María was capable of crying for a dead goldfish. How was she reacting to the deaths of her father and sister? He decided to ask Sor Artemesia’s advice before summoning her.

  Matt held on to a table leg with one hand while activating the screen with the other. He didn’t want to be lured into the holoport while it was opening. The room at the Convent of Santa Clara was empty, but a bell summoned a UN official.

  “Great regrets, mi patrón, but Doña Esperanza is away,” the official informed him. “She said to tell you that the doctors you requested are being sought. It might take weeks.”

  “Very well. I would like to speak with Sor Artemesia instead,” said Matt.

  “Sister Artemesia?” the man asked, clearly surprised. “But she’s only a teacher.”

  “I like talking to teachers. Please call her.”

  The man went away, and soon Sor Artemesia hurried into the room, smoothing the wrinkles out of her dress and straightening the veil she wore over her hair. “I hope you aren’t angry because I was here yesterday,” she began. “It’s such a quiet place, and the light is so good for doing embroidery—”

  “I’m not angry at all,” said Matt. “Please tell me how María is doing. Is she very upset? I don’t want to bother her if she’s in mourning.”

  “Mourning for what?” asked Sor Artemesia.

  Matt was astounded. Hadn’t Esperanza told María anything? “There was some trouble concerning her father and sister,” he said cautiously.

  “They can’t come home yet. Of course her mother told her—not that María would worry about that. Emilia is always picking on her, and her father continually tries to push her into marriage. She’s too young, of course, but he doesn’t want her to be a nun.” Sor Artemesia, once she discovered she wasn’t going to be scolded, settled comfortably in front of the holoport.

  “Could you call her?” asked Matt, hardly daring to hope.

  “I’m afraid her mother took her on a trip to Nueva York. It was a real surprise, because Doña Esperanza never takes her anywhere. But she says that María has become a little backward where social graces are concerned. She’s going to buy her pretty clothes and give her dancing lessons.”

  And keep her away from me. Clever Esperanza, thought Matt. “Do you know where my friends Fidelito, Chacho, and Ton-Ton are?” he asked.

  “Everyone knows where they are,” said Sor Artemesia, laughing. “When they’re not raiding the kitchen, they’re picking flowers and digging holes in the garden. Chacho is still recovering from his ordeal, but he follows along readily enough. Ton-Ton is the leader. And Fidelito! Why, he stuck his bottom out a window last night and mooned a night watchman. The watchman threw a stone at him and gave him a bruise to remember. Would you like to see your friends?”

  “Yes, I would,” said Matt. Sor Artemesia, away from Esperanza’s critical eye, had turned out to be very likable. He could see the nun letting María shirk her lessons to do the good works she preferred. “Could they bring a picnic lunch? I wish I could send them something, but I don’t know how.”

  Sor Artemesia smiled. “Don’t worry about it, mi patrón. We’ve practically got an assembly line feeding those boys.” She hurried off and Matt waited, wondering how long the holoport could stay open and how he could get Esperanza to release his friends.

  Chacho arrived first. Then Fidelito burst through the door, to be yanked to a halt by Ton-Ton. “D-don’t you listen to anything, y-you turkey!” shouted the older boy. “Sister Artemesia says, uh, to stay away from that s-screen!”

  “Matteo! Matteo! Matteo!” shrieked Fidelito at the end of Ton-Ton’s arm.

  “I’ll b-beat the stuffing out of you!”

  “You’re alive! My big brother!” sang Fidelito, not the least worried by Ton-Ton’s threat.

  Matt had to swallow hard to keep tears from forming. Fidelito had called him brother! No one had ever done that. He was so moved he could barely speak.

  “Are you all right?” said Chacho.

  “Yes,” said Matt, struggling to gain control of his emotions. Chacho had lost weight in the few days since Matt had seen him, and his face looked haunted. “Are you okay?”

  “No tengo chiste. So-so.”

  “Me too,” said Matt.

  “Are you living in a castle?” said Fidelito. “Sor Artemesia says you’re living in a castle and have thousands of zombie slaves.”

  “If I had one, I’d tell it to eat your b-brain,” growled Ton-Ton. “Now sit!” He shoved Fidelito onto a floor cushion.

  “Do your zombies eat brains?” the little boy asked excitedly. “Are they horrible and scary?”

  “They’re only sad,” said Matt.

  “Use your head, Fidelito. How could he find enough brains to feed thousands of zombies?” said Chacho. “Do you think he can put in an order to a company in Argentina?”

  “As a matter of fact, they eat plankton,” said Matt.

  “The same crap we, uh, had at the factory?” cried Ton-Ton.

  “The same. Here they call it eejit pellets.”

  “ ‘Plankton is the eighth wonder of the world,’ ” said Chacho, quoting the guards at the factory. “ ‘It’s full of protein, vitamins, and roughage.’ ”

  “Especially roughage. It’ll take m-months to get rid of my zits,” mourned Ton-Ton. Sor Artemesia arrived with a large picnic basket, and Matt was grateful for the interruption. He had his own basket from Celia. The nun also brought a bird in a cage to amuse Fidelito.

  “This is María’s latest patient,” she told the little boy. “It’s a finch. See? It has only one leg. María took it away from a cat, but by that time the damage was done.”

  “Will the leg grow back?” Fidelito put his face close to the cage, and the bird fluttered away.

  “Don’t scare it, chiquito. I’m afraid this one is going to be a permanent guest, like the turtle with a cracked shell, the blind rabbit, and the toothless dog. Sometimes,” Sor Artemesia said, sighing, “I think God means for creatures to be called to heaven and that we shouldn’t interfere.”

  “But this one is muy bravo to be hopping around on one leg,” said Fidelito.

  “I suppose so,” said the nun. “Now you must be very, very careful around the holoport. Stay at least six feet away from it. I have to teach a class in math, but I’ll come back in half an hour to check up on you. Ton-Ton, you’re in charge.”

  “Yes, Sister,” said Ton-Ton.

  Once the woman was gone, the boys fell upon the picnic basket, and Ton-Ton divided up the food. They had ham, chicken, and cheese sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, celery sticks, and cupcakes. Fidelito poked one of the celery sticks into the birdcage, but the finch only cowered. “Give it cake crumbs,” said Chacho, so the little boy broke off a chunk and dropped it inside.

  Matt had beef tamales, slices of papaya, and chocolate cake. The tamales were still hot, and a delicious odor wafted out when he unwrapped them.

  “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 G
od 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

  Matt 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.”