The Lord of Opium(30)

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.