The Lord of Opium

“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 . . . ”

“Corrupt,” finished the jefe. “Now you know how big governments work. Not so different from El Patrón after all.”

Celia entered with a basket of vegetables she had personally selected from the greenhouses. She laid out lettuces, tomatoes, celery, and spring onions on the table. “Would you like a salad for dinner, mi patrón?” she asked. “Or roasted eggplant with tomatoes?”

“You choose. Everything you cook is wonderful,” responded Matt, wishing she wouldn’t be so formal. Turning to Cienfuegos, he said, “How do you look up an expiry date?”

“It’s tattooed on the bottom of the foot,” said the jefe.

Matt caught his breath. He had writing on the bottom of his foot: PROPERTY OF THE ALACRÁN ESTATE. He’d meant to have it removed, but with one thing and another he’d forgotten.

“I see,” he said.

“A worker with fewer microchips lasts longer and some, like Eusebio, can count on a normal life span. Personally, mi caramelito,” Cienfuegos said to Celia, “I’d like a big beefsteak for dinner and to hell with the vegetables.”

“You’ll get what I cook,” said Celia.

The jefe and Matt went out for a riding lesson. Matt had taken to this with enthusiasm and unmistakable talent, which was to be expected, since El Patrón had been a legendary horseman. They rode to the armory, where Cienfuegos discovered he had work to do. “You can return to the hacienda on your own, mi patrón,” he said. “You don’t need a babysitter anymore. Of course you can stay and watch. We’re disposing of a couple of expired eejits in one of the fields.”

Matt hastily left. He wondered how many bodies were buried out there. If it took one thousand eejits to run an opium farm, and each one lived for six months, and the ranch had existed for a hundred years . . . It was like one of the problems he’d been given when he studied math. The answer was two hundred thousand bodies. That was if only one thousand eejits were needed. The real number was much higher.

He ought to return to the hacienda to work on the books and answer frantic calls from dealers who hadn’t received their shipments. But the weather was too good. He had a bottle of water attached to his saddle—Cienfuegos insisted that he go nowhere without it—and he had a packed lunch. Matt turned the horse toward the Ajo hills.

He skirted the eejit pens, knowing from experience how foul they were. That would be his next project, to construct better, cleaner housing. He could see ponds of fetid waste and a miasma of stinking haze near the water purification plant. An underground canal flowed from where the Colorado River emptied into the Gulf of California, and the water needed extensive cleaning. The river had become so polluted that nothing could live in it except mutated horrors. If you ate one of its fish, your lips blistered.