The Lord of Opium(11)

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 needed 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.”

“They don’t act like eejits.”

“There’s more than one type of microchip. This kind doesn’t blunt intelligence, but there are certain things a Farm Patrolman can’t do. He can’t harm the patrón, for example, or cross the border. If he tries, he’s struck by pain so severe that he’ll die of shock. Even thinking about it makes him sick.”

Matt let out his breath slowly. El Patrón had been a genius at maintaining order, and he did have more secrets than fleas on a coyote. There were the hidden underground treasure chambers and the secret passages throughout the hacienda where the old man could spy on people. There were the emergency escape routes and now the invisible chain that encircled the necks of his trained dogs, the Farm Patrol. It was a beautifully constructed system to bring power into one man’s hands. El Patrón’s hands. And now Matt’s.