The Lord of Opium

by Nancy Farmer

  “It’s real. My grandma said so, and she never told lies,” Fidelito said.

  The sun was low in the west when servants brought out the dinner. They had tamales and barbecued ribs, chiles rellenos, and moro crabs flown in from Yucatán. These had been El Patrón’s favorite foods, and Matt liked them too. For dessert they had crème caramel custards. Mirasol had been serving meals all day, and Matt made sure she sat down now and ate something. But the food was rich, and both Fidelito and Listen were sick by the time dinner was over. Sor Artemesia offered to put them to bed.

  The last activity of the day was classical guitar music. Both Matt and Chacho were anxious to hear it, and Ton-Ton stayed to be sociable, although his taste ran more to mariachi bands. Celia, Daft Donald, and Cienfuegos went off to perform chores, and Mr. Ortega left to select the guitars that would be given to the musicians as awards. Thus, there were only three spectators to watch the concert.

  The sky was dark by now. The stage was brightly lit and, unlike the other settings of the day, undecorated. There were no garish masks or prancing horses, no brightly colored streamers or circus folk banging drums to increase the excitement. The stage was bare except for six chairs. The backdrop was a simple white curtain. A light breeze blew through the water sprayers that had been installed overhead to cool the air.

  Five men in black suits with stark white shirts filed out along with a woman in a long scarlet dress. The men carried guitars, but she carried panpipes, which she placed on one of the chairs. They began to play, starting with the traditional Portuguese fado, a word that meant “fate.” The woman sang of lost love, of poverty, of being abandoned. Ton-Ton leaned over and said, “It’s p-pretty depressing,” and Chacho told him to shut up.

  The next offering was flamenco music from southern Spain. One of the men sang and the woman danced, swirling her long skirt. Then they both danced with a rhythm that set Matt’s pulse racing. They were like the gentleman and lady on El Patrón’s music box, only much, much better. The man clapped to the beat while the lady danced around him, and Chacho and Matt joined in. Ton-Ton shrank down in his seat.

  This was followed by classical guitar pieces by Villa-Lobos and a version of Rodrigo’s Andalusian Concerto and Fantasy for a Gentleman. These had been El Patrón’s favorites. He’d had them played over and over because he thought he was a gentleman, and maybe even a king.

  Last of all the woman took up the panpipes and, accompanied by one guitarist, played the wild music of the Andes, which sounds so much like wind blowing through icy canyons.

  When it was over, Chacho and Matt clapped wildly and stood up to show their appreciation. “Come with me,” Matt told the musicians. “I have a workshop filled with the finest guitars in the world. I would be pleased if you would accept one for each of yourselves.”

  They thanked him enthusiastically, for who had not heard of the fabulous guitars of Opium? They packed up their instruments and followed, with Matt in the lead. It was a long walk, but by now the air had cooled. The black sky and brilliant stars worked their magic on the musicians. Matt heard them whispering among themselves. They had never seen anything like it. The skies over Portugal were murky, as were those of all of Europe. Even in the high Andes, the air was not so clean.

  Mr. Ortega had thoughtfully lined the walk with candles housed in yellow sleeves to keep the wind from blowing them out. This, too, impressed the musicians. “They’re like Chinese lanterns. So artistic,” said the woman.

  The guitar factory was ablaze with light. The performers were astounded by the wild variety of instruments hanging on racks, but when they reached the guitar room itself, their amazement knew no bounds. There were hundreds of the instruments. They tiptoed inside, almost afraid to approach such a treasure, and so at first they were not aware of Eusebio and Mr. Ortega sitting in the shadows at the far end of the room.

  Mr. Ortega had laid out the six chosen instruments on Eusebio’s work table.

  First the woman turned and whispered, “Isn’t that—”

  And a man said, “I thought he was dead. He walked out one day and never came back.”

  “But it is him.” Then all the musicians approached the two men and reverently bowed.

  “Señor Orozco. Of course no one else could have made such magnificent instruments,” said the woman. “We are so honored to meet you.”

  Eusebio stared straight ahead, not reacting.

  “Are you all right, sir? Oh God! You haven’t gone deaf?”

  “He isn’t deaf. I am,” said Mr. Ortega, who could read lips. “He is as the others are in this godforsaken place. He is an eejit.”

  The woman gasped and fell to her knees. She took Eusebio’s large, work-roughened hands in her own and gazed intently at his face. The other musicians also knelt, as though they were at a shrine.

  “The greatest musician of our age has come to this,” murmured one of the men.

  But his voice was drowned out by Chacho’s cry. The boy pushed past the performers and pulled Eusebio’s hands away from the woman. “¡Por Dios! Look at me!” he said. “Don’t you recognize me? I’m your son.”

  * * *

  “If only I hadn’t brought the musicians here,” Matt said to Cienfuegos, who had been summoned as soon as the emergency happened.

  “Sooner or later Chacho would have found out,” said the jefe. The musicians had fled, taking their trophy guitars with them. Their faces showed clearly the contempt they had for Matt, though they had the good sense to remain silent. In their eyes he had taken the greatest musician of the age and turned him into a zombie.

  “What am I going to do with Chacho?”

  The boy crouched next to his father and refused to be moved. Ton-Ton sat with him. Neither of them looked at Matt.

  “I can have a bed made up next to Eusebio. It won’t be fancy, but I don’t think Chacho is used to better.”

  “No, I mean how can I help Chacho?” asked Matt. “He was already trying to recover from his ordeal in Aztlán. Now he seems completely lost.”

  Cienfuegos looked at the two boys sitting at the guitar master’s feet. They’d been there for an hour, unmoving. “You can’t do anything,” he said. “All he wants is for his father to be normal, and we know that’s impossible.”

  “No, it isn’t!” said Matt.

  The jefe shrugged.

  Mr. Ortega stirred in his chair. He, too, had been silent for an hour. “I remember you, Chacho,” he said. “You were such a lively little boy, and so bright! Your mother had died and you’d been taken to your grandfather’s house. Eusebio and I went there before we left for the United States. We thought we could send for you once we’d made our fortune, but . . . ” His voice trailed off.

  “How could Chacho have recognized his father’s face after all this time?” asked Matt. “I remember things from when I was eight, but not clearly.”

  “He had a picture,” Ton-Ton said, speaking for the first time. “When he came to, uh, the plankton factory, Jorge took it away from him and tore it up. ‘Boys have to be broken and mended before they can become good citizens,’ he said. ‘No personal loyalties are allowed.’ ”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Matt.

  “Chacho, let me show you something.” Mr. Ortega took up one of the guitars. As before, he laid his cheek against the wood to feel the music with his bones. Then he played the flamenco music Eusebio had written, and it was even better than anything performed that night. The guitar maker turned toward the sound. His eyes cleared. He put his hand on Chacho’s shoulder. The boy trembled.

  “Chacho,” said Eusebio, and convulsed violently. Mr. Ortega stopped playing at once.

  “Go on,” pleaded the boy, but Mr. Ortega shook his head.

  “It’s too dangerous. Eejits—men in your father’s condition—can’t be put under too much stress. They break down and die.” By now Eusebio’s eyes had resumed their dull expression. “Believe me, this is better. If Matt is successful in his search for a cure, your father will be h
ealed.”

  “I don’t want to leave him,” the boy said tearfully.

  “Nor shall you,” the music teacher said. “I’ll move in and keep you company. It wouldn’t be good for you to be alone with your father in his condition.”

  “I’ll stay too,” Ton-Ton blurted out.

  “You don’t have to,” said Matt. “We could come back during the day.”

  “He n-needs me,” the big boy said. “I don’t want a fancy mansion with circuses and, uh, soccer matches. I don’t want all that swanky stuff. Besides, maybe my parents are here somewhere, harvesting the d-damn poppies. Maybe Fidelito’s grandma is here. Oh, go away and leave us alone!”

  So Matt left, deeply shocked by the turn of events. All he had wanted was to make his friends happy, and it had gone horribly wrong. He went back along the path lit with candles. Above, the stars twinkled with a remote light and the Scorpion Star, as always, hovered over the southern hills.

  32

  DR. KIM’S EXPERIMENT

  Matt told Sor Artemesia, Listen, and Fidelito what had happened at breakfast. “The poor child,” said the nun. “I’ll take the little ones over to visit him. Why don’t you come with us?”

  But Matt was still smarting from the rejection he’d received. “I have work to do.”

  “Don’t leave it too long,” advised Sor Artemesia. “It’s harder to repair a friendship later.”

  Matt watched as soccer players, circus folk, rodeo riders, wrestlers, and musicians were loaded into hovercrafts to be transported to the departing train. “You don’t look sorry to see them go,” observed Cienfuegos.

  “I’m not. The longer they stayed around, the more they would have found out,” Matt said.

  “I told them it was strictly a children’s party and that the older Alacráns preferred to stay away.”

  “I wonder if they believed that,” said the boy. The last hovercraft, loaded with musicians, took off. They had averted their faces from Matt.

  The jefe flicked out his stiletto with that lightning speed that disturbed Matt and used it to clean his fingernails. “Sooner or later people are going to wonder why no one has seen Senator Mendoza. They will assume, of course, that Glass Eye killed the drug lords when he took over their countries.”

  “What about Fani? Isn’t Glass Eye worried about her?”

  Cienfuegos laughed. “He has more than a hundred daughters. He doesn’t keep track.”

  “What do we do about the doctors and nurses? They surely know by now what happened.”

  “They aren’t going anywhere.” Cienfuegos slid the stiletto into its sheath inside his sleeve.

  Matt remembered with a sick feeling that they had been microchipped during the orientation process. He wondered how Dr. Rivas had done it. Did he knock them out with sleeping medicine first? Or did he pretend that they needed an immunization shot? Thinking of the doctors, Matt decided he should start asking the one in Ajo how he planned to cure the eejits.

  He walked to the hospital with an asthma inhaler in his pocket in case he was affected by the air. But this time he found it clean and fresh-smelling. Obviously, Fiona hadn’t kept up the place when she was in charge. Even the bullhead vines had been uprooted and gravel laid down. It wasn’t attractive, but at least you didn’t wind up with thorns embedded in your shoes.

  A nurse immediately ushered Matt to an office and brought him iced tea. “Dr. Kim will be with you as soon as he’s out of the operating room,” she told him. Matt was surprised, but pleased. It seemed that the doctor was already working on a cure.

  He looked through books on a shelf while he waited and discovered they were in an alphabet he didn’t even recognize. On the desk was a silver vase with a spray of purple orchids. That reminded him of the greenhouses between the hacienda and the deserted church. He hadn’t visited them for a long time. Herbs and vegetables for the kitchen were grown there, but the main attraction for him, as a small child, had been the flowers.

  Perhaps Chacho would like to see the flowers. Someday. Matt shrank from a meeting so soon after last night’s disaster.

  “What a pleasure to see you again, mi patrón,” said Dr. Kim, coming into the office. He was the man who had treated Listen when she had her night terrors. He moved with the grace of an athlete, and when he shook Matt’s hand, the boy felt a restrained power in his grip.

  “The pleasure is mine as well,” Matt said formally. “The nurse said you were in the operating room. Have you found a way to remove microchips?”

  “Only some,” the doctor said. “It’s early days, I’m afraid.”

  “But you’ve had success,” Matt insisted.

  “Not much,” Dr. Kim said. “I used a magnetic probe to take out perhaps two hundred chips from a subject, and yet the remaining number was so great it made no difference. The behavior of the subject before he was sacrificed was unchanged.”

  “Sacrificed?” asked Matt, thinking, What are we talking about here? A pok-a-tok game?

  “It’s a term scientists use when they terminate lab animals. After the operation, I removed the eejit’s brain and homogenized it to estimate the number of microchips.” The doctor might have been sharing a recipe for clam chowder.

  “You’re talking about a human being.”

  “We could use that term,” said Dr. Kim. “But let’s face it, he had the intellect of a lab rat.” The doctor rang a bell, and an eejit appeared with a tea tray and rice crackers. “I see you have a drink, mi patrón, but you might like to try my green tea. It’s imported from Korea and has an exquisite background flavor of ripe cherries.”

  “No, thank you,” Matt said. “Why didn’t you send the eejit back to work when he’d recovered? Why did you have to kill him?”

  Dr. Kim smiled in the same smooth way that Dr. Rivas did when he explained science to a layman. “We have to collect data, mi patrón. Other scientists would find our studies useless without verification of the results. In an ordinary experiment, no less than forty lab animals are necessary before a paper can be published.”

  “I won’t let you kill forty eejits!” exploded Matt. “The whole point of the experiment is to save them. ¡Por Dios! How many have you slaughtered already?”

  “Only five,” the doctor said, and then he seemed to realize he was arguing with the Lord of Opium, not just a teenage boy. “I thought you had given your approval. Dr. Rivas said—”

  “Dr. Rivas is in serious danger of becoming a lab rat himself!” shouted Matt. “Where did you get the eejits? How were they selected?”

  Dr. Kim wiped his face. “Believe me, they were close to their expiry dates. Nurse Fiona checked.”

  “She’s not a damned nurse! She’s a fraud!” Matt promised to get Cienfuegos after her and lock her up, if there was such a thing as a jail in Opium. “I want this clearly understood, Dr. Kim. You are to sacrifice no more eejits. You will study them and you will cure them. I want results as soon as possible.”

  Matt’s voice had changed. There was a power in it and an inflexible will that made Dr. Kim turn pale. It was El Patrón’s voice, full of the potential for extreme violence. “I’ll do anything you say,” bleated the doctor. “I’ll tell the other medical staff.”

  The boy strode out of the office. You certainly showed him, said the old voice in Matt’s mind. Put a burr up his tail, didn’t you? I haven’t had so much fun in years.

  “Go back to where you belong,” said Matt. “You’ve got a tomb full of servants and treasure to play with.”

  They’re boring, complained El Patrón. There’s nothing like the living for entertainment.

  “I refuse to listen to you.” The boy went to the hacienda and played the piano until a shimmering curtain of music stood between him and the voice. Then he went in search of Cienfuegos.

  * * *

  The jefe sent bodyguards to drag Fiona from the hospital. There were no jails in Opium, none being needed in a society where everyone was controlled. Doors had locks, but since theft did not occur, most of th
e keys had gone missing. “I could unperson her,” suggested Cienfuegos, jerking his hands as though snapping a twig.

  “No!” said Matt.

  “How about giving her another job, something so isolated that she can’t muck things up?”

  “What sort of job?” Matt asked suspiciously.

  “Nothing drastic. Something she can easily do.” Cienfuegos held out his hands as if to show he had no weapon concealed in them.

  “I don’t want her tortured or killed, just neutralized.”

  The jefe gave his promise, and although Matt was fairly certain a secret was being kept from him, he agreed. “Another thing, Dr. Kim said he was only using eejits close to their expiry dates,” said the boy. “You used that term once too. What does it mean?”

  “It’s an estimate,” Cienfuegos said. “Now that you’re feeding the eejits better and letting them rest longer, the life expectancy has increased. In the old days, when we could count on a steady supply, we didn’t worry about maintenance. An eejit with the maximum dose of microchips lasted about six months.”

  “That little,” murmured Matt.

  “Otherwise they tended to pile up,” the jefe explained. “No use feeding more than we could use, and neither the United States or Aztlán wanted the overflow. The original treaty between them and the drug lords stated that only a certain number could be allowed to cross the Dope Confederacy.”

  “So some people were successful.”

  “That was part of the plan.” Cienfuegos and Matt were sitting in the kitchen, and in the background the French ex-chef fussed over a hollandaise sauce. An eejit boy was taking the strings off green beans. A dull-eyed woman scrubbed the floor. Her skirt was soaked with soapy water as she dragged a bucket behind her. A man followed with a giant sponge that he rinsed in a second bucket.

  “If no one had succeeded, the flood of Illegals would have dried up,” said Cienfuegos. “We needed a few success stories to whet the appetites of the others. Both of the governments of Aztlán and the United States agreed to this.”

  “It’s so . . . ”