The Opium Prince Read online

  13

  Daniel wouldn’t wait until Monday to ask Smythe whether Greenwood was really right about Agent Ruby definitively being used, with no room left to negotiate. When everyone was gone, he called Smythe at home in Washington. The consultant hadn’t been bluffing. When Daniel tried to convince Smythe not to proceed, Smythe reminded him that Kabul was still too close to Moscow.

  “Daoud is letting the Communists have their way with him,” the undersecretary barked. “When has that ever ended well? If you think it can, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you. And it’s not in Brooklyn, it’s in fucking Siberia.” Smythe coughed. “We’ve got to get Daoud to see Uncle Sam as his buddy so he can wash off all that pink and put on his star-spangled boxers. You follow?”

  “And if nothing ever grows on those fields again, then what?”

  “Something’s bound to.”

  Daniel tried to answer, but Smythe cut him off. His speech slower, he repeated, “Something is bound to.”

  “I’m telling you that if we poison all these—”

  “Poison? Who said anything about any poison?”

  Daniel tried a different tack, insisting that the Ministry of Planning wouldn’t comply, but Smythe told him Sherzai’s office had already signed off. “This is a great thing. A very great thing. And if I were you, I’d get on board, unless you want to be selling Chiclets in Yugoslavia.”

  “Chiclets?”

  “What can I say, I hear they like gum out there. It’s the sugar and the constant chewing, I guess. Ha!” The hacking sound reminded Daniel of that James Brown song.

  He argued, but it was no use. Smythe had heard enough. “Son, most people don’t even know where this goddamn country is. Let Dannaco do its thing with Agent Ruby. If it works, it could be big. Now, go to sleep or do whatever people do at whatever hour it is out there.” He hung up.

  Outside, leaves floated aimlessly on the surface of the swimming pool. Daniel stripped off his clothes and dove, and in the water he found much-needed solitude and silence. The pressure of the water against his temples provided him a kind of peace. He liked to imagine it was squeezing out what he didn’t need, leaving behind only the essential truths.

  He thought about the Yassaman poppies and wondered at the miracle of such flowers growing in the desert, eruptions of color and life rebelling against this fallow land. It was tragic that such beauty and resilience had to be destroyed. He swam laps beneath the surface until his arms ached. One. Two. Five. His chest grew tight. He pushed to the top and gasped as he swallowed air.

  The blackmail churned in his mind. The answer came to him as he tried to catch his breath. Daniel was the one bluffing. Not Bob Greenwood or Leland Smythe. Not Taj Maleki. If they used Agent Ruby on Yassaman, Taj might slaughter dozens of people, their blood making the poison seem meaningless. He thought of his promises at USADE. Of his father’s fight against the English, then the poppy growers. Of Telaya and the importance of being counted.

  Daniel was no longer afraid. He knew what to do about the blackmail. He had promised to reform the Yassaman field. And yet, a person’s character was not determined by which promises they kept, but by which promises they broke. The Scale of Sages had yielded an answer. Some things simply weighed more than others.

  Upstairs, the bedroom was chilly. He rarely thought about the revolver he kept locked in his nightstand. He was hardly alone in keeping one. But tonight he unlocked the drawer. He suspected Rebecca was awake, but when he whispered her name, she said nothing. Her breath was the rhythm he normally fell asleep to, although these past months that rhythm rarely came as she lay silently awake. Instead he listened to the rhythm of the nightstand clock, an antique his father had brought back from India. Even as a boy, Daniel had loved the clock because he’d noticed it was irregular, pausing between the tick and the tock longer than it should. His father insisted they were spaced perfectly evenly, but they weren’t, and Daniel’s solitary knowledge of the clock’s flaw made him feel like he had a special relationship to time. He had brought it with him to college. The first time Rebecca spent the night, she asked Daniel if the ticking was supposed to be off like that. He knew then that he was in love. One day, he and this piano-playing girl would navigate time together with that synchronized understanding behind all great romances. They would form their own irregular rhythm, a cadence that belonged to no one but them.

  He thought about what had happened at the end of the party. After Taj left, Laila had approached Daniel. “Rebecca doesn’t get migraines,” she’d said. “That’s something I would know.”

  “She doesn’t tell you everything.”

  “She doesn’t tell you everything.” Laila asked Daniel to fetch her medical bag from her car. When he found it in the trunk, it wasn’t shut all the way. His eyes fell on a small mass of brown resin wrapped loosely in cloth. He took the bag upstairs and found Laila outside the bedroom waiting for him. The door was closed. She told him Rebecca was fine, just tired. He dropped the bag to the floor and held out the small brick. “So she won’t need any of this?”

  She took it from him and said, not without pride, “I buy it on the street sometimes. There are never enough pain pills for my patients. A piece like this goes a long way.” She continued with her justifications, although he hadn’t asked for any.

  “It’s against the law,” he said.

  She crossed her arms. “Sometimes you don’t get a series of choices, but a lack of options. Speaking of which, Peter is here because he lost his job. He didn’t get tenure. His stuff wasn’t serious enough, apparently. Too journalistic.”

  Despite himself, Daniel felt a pang of sympathy for his old friend. “He didn’t say anything.”

  Laila raised her eyebrows in a look that suggested he was stupid. It had never occurred to Daniel that Rebecca had told Laila about her affair, but now it was obvious she knew. “He’s just traveling now, trying to think about what to do,” she continued. “Visiting friends around the world.”

  Softly, she added, “Rebecca told me what happened.” He thought she meant the affair, but then she said, “It’s horrible, to have an accident like that.” She took his hand and squeezed his fingers. “Don’t feel too bad.”

  The tears came so abruptly it shocked Daniel as he fought them back. “I just didn’t see her.”

  Laila said, “I mean, it’s possible her parents didn’t even care that much. You know how those people are about girls.”

  Yes, Daniel thought, I know how they are. He remembered Telaya’s weeping father and crying mother. He was afraid Laila’s words would provoke the girl, and that she would chastise him for the cruel company he kept. “What?” he said.

  “They don’t belong in the world we’re trying to build.”

  Daniel wondered if he had heard her correctly. “Who’s ‘we’?” he asked. “The inspired crew I saw you with downtown?”

  For a moment, she looked like she wanted to take up the fight, but then her shoulders slumped and she shook her head slowly. “It’s the only way forward, Daniel.”

  “So it’s either Russian puppets or a future of backward superstition? Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Daniel, no one knows what they’re doing. We can’t predict the future—we can only turn our backs to the past.”

  14

  In the early morning, before Rebecca was awake, Daniel went out to his woodworking shed. He looked at the abandoned, half-finished crib. It was as he’d left it, his tools still on the floor like he’d just gone out for a break. He moved it to a corner. Today he would begin a new project, a table for Sherzai’s sandali. He would try to make it with an overlay. He hoped he was good enough to make at least a simple geometric design. He gathered the pieces and lost track of time as he began to assemble and cut. He attached the joiners to the legs. He screwed in the side aprons. The rhythmic movements, and watching something form from nothing, still brought an eleme
nt of calm but did not bring him the usual enjoyment. What was the point of creating things when they would eventually be ruined by time, if something else didn’t ruin them first? He kept working perfunctorily as he thought about what to tell Rebecca about Taj’s appearance. Hours passed. He almost expected her to come into the shed, but she never did. It was nearly ten o’clock when he went back inside. She had left.

  “Where is Mrs. Sajadi?” he asked Firooz, who was tidying up from last night.

  “Somebody picked her up, but I don’t know who. Mrs. Sajadi wanted her tea brewed even stronger than usual this morning, sir. She drank three cups.”

  Rebecca went shopping some Sunday mornings. Perhaps she had needed time alone, and Daniel vowed to put her mind at ease when she came home. Daniel went to his study. From his briefcase, he retrieved the folder on the Yassaman field, which included reports on the neighboring Gulzar field. During his short tenure, Kauffman had created files on every plot of poppies in the valley, even the useless ones like the Gulzar field. Daniel’s staff had added a few updates, but little had changed in this unremarkable patch of land.

  He began to create a story on his Olivetti. It was a sweeping lie, but each piece of it felt small, and a collection of small lies was something he could do without feeling dishonest. In less than two hours, the new Gulzar file was complete. It was believable. He’d added graphs and notes by hand, made a diagram of the poppy pods’ composition and growth patterns, expressed the anticipated yield with numbers and charts, and compared the potency of different breeds, complete with an analysis of the various shades that opium resin took, from translucent amber to opaque brown.

  Daniel was surprised at the thoroughness of his own deceit. How had it come so easily? It was as Laila had said: sometimes you were faced not with a series of choices but with a lack of options. An iron curtain had descended over Daniel’s life, the accident dividing it into a time he was free and a time he was not. He called Sherzai, who agreed to meet later in the day, apologizing for missing the party.

  It was past noon. Where was Rebecca? As he waited, he thought of Peter. Lonely, jobless Peter, in his hotel without hot water. It had been petty not to offer him one of their two spare bedrooms. Daniel decided to call and issue an invitation, if not outright, in a way they would both understand. He dialed the hotel and requested Peter’s room. The clerk connected him. The line rang twice, three times, four. At last, someone answered. It was not Peter.

  “Hello, Dr. Whitbourn’s room,” Rebecca said with comically exaggerated formality. A beat passed.

  “Hello?” she repeated.

  Daniel hung up. He wasn’t sure how long he stood there, but it was until a bruising ache in his hands forced him to look down. He had dug his palms into the corners of his desk. He began to tidy the study. He worked slowly and methodically, organizing documents into neat stacks, stowing pencils and pens in a leather case, gathering a mess of erasers, sharpeners, and paper clips.

  When there was nothing left to tidy, he went to the parlor. He walked to the fireplace, picked up the snow globe from the mantel, and sailed it across the room. It shattered against the wall. Liquid seeped from the cracked Bakelite, spilling snowflakes onto the carpet, gold-foil particles settling into the silk. The skater’s ankle had snapped, her foot still bonded to the base. She gaped at Daniel, her eyes eternally open, mouth frozen in a waxy smile.

  Come with me, Telaya said from the skater’s mouth. I want to show you something.

  “You’re a ghost.”

  Then look through me at my world. She swirled in the water that continued to drain from the snow globe.

  Daniel thought about Rebecca in Peter’s room. He wondered what to do. He wouldn’t go and confront them like a presumptuous fool. It was likely harmless, although she could have told him she was going out. Maybe she had tried to find him, not thinking to look for him in the shed. He was scheduled to meet Sherzai in four hours at the Gardens of Babur, where the old man walked nearly every Sunday. Daniel looked at the broken snow globe and set off to buy Rebecca something new. Somewhere on Chicken Street, there had to be another, or something she’d like better than the earrings.

  He walked to the main road and waited for a bus to pass. The driver stopped wherever someone needed him to, and soon Daniel wedged his way onto a step, where he joined others. It was packed, and some were holding on precariously, doors open. He jumped off when he was near Shahr-i-Nau.

  Crowds choked the sidewalks in this new part of town. Along Chicken Street, Daniel passed tie-dyes looking for and finding cheap hashish; shops that sold rugs, lapis, trinkets, yarn, karakul skins, and the garlands of paper flowers people used to decorate cars for weddings. In front of a kebab shop, the sound of sizzling meat provided a background rhythm for a monkey wearing a gold vest and dancing while its owner played a small crank-powered organ. Daniel walked in and out of shops, ignoring the invitations to haggle over marble ashtrays and vases, impossibly fragile blue glassware from Herat, and carpets from every corner of the country. No snow globes.

  “Sir! Carpets! The best carpets for you!”

  He turned to the familiar voice.

  “It’s you!” the owner said, smiling and putting his hand on his heart and bowing. Daniel did the same. Humayun Carpets looked like a hole in the wall, but far in the back was a staircase that led to a room filled with stack upon stack of rugs. Daniel had bought his finest Bukhara carpet here, an intricate pattern of flowers and leaves, all in shades of red with fine accents in black. The place smelled of strong tea and rose incense. As Humayun asked him about Rebecca, about work, and about when he’d start having sons, Daniel’s eyes fell on a tray set with two cups and a teapot. They were made of white jade, delicate green vines climbing up the sides. It looked almost exactly like his mother’s favorite tea set, which had been lost or broken at some point. When he asked if he could buy it, Humayun said, “That isn’t for sale. How about a small rug for the entrance hall?” Daniel couldn’t take his eyes off the set. At last, Humayun said, “It isn’t for sale, because it’s a gift.” He refused to take money, and his young son carefully wrapped the tea set in fabric and gave it to Daniel in a thick bag with handles.

  “You’re too kind,” Daniel said, bowing his head. “My wife will love this.” He left the shop. He thought about the carpets he’d just seen. Their makers understood humility. Because only God was perfect, every Afghan carpet contained a small but deliberate flaw. It might be hard to find, but the flaw was always there, known to its maker, and visible to the discerning eye.

  Outside, Daniel stopped dead in his tracks. From amid the throngs, a little girl in tattered clothes had emerged, nearly slamming into him. She watched him with wide, focused eyes. There were no coins in Daniel’s pocket, so he offered to buy her food, but she shook her head and ran across the road, darting past cars that almost grazed her. “Be careful!” he yelled. She stopped on the opposite sidewalk and turned. Standing still, she watched him. Except it wasn’t her anymore. She had turned into a child covered in mirrors and shades of red. She hooked her thumb toward a side street, then took off.

  Daniel ran after her. It was like chasing his friends down the nameless alleys of their childhood as they fled their governesses and cooks, ducking into shops where merchants hid them behind counters. He clutched the bag tightly and flew down a narrow street where cars weren’t allowed. The girl vanished, and Daniel spun around, trying to find her. There she was again, not ten feet away, and he reached for her, but she fled like a cat. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “I promise I won’t hurt you,” he called out. “Please.” The chase continued. Deeper into the labyrinth they ran, away from the boulevards and shops, into quieter streets.

  The crowds thinned, and soon there was no one but Daniel and the girl, who came in and out of view as she darted between walls and parked cars and shot through one doorway only to emerge from another. Her mirrored red dress was like a shiny bouncing tar
get. He picked up his pace. She swung to the right down a curving path, and he followed. The alley was a dead end. He stood still, looking around. Where was she?

  “Hey!” he called out. “What do you want?”

  Go back the way you came, Telaya said, and Daniel wanted to tell her that he wished he could, that he had dreamed every night that he’d turned the car around just before she ran into the road. He caught a flash of red in a doorway and ran toward it, but the door was boarded up. He looked in every direction. She had evaporated, absorbed into the air. Daniel heard the rhythmic sound of dripping water; a small puddle was forming on the ground. He looked up and saw that the drops were trickling from a chaderi drying on a balcony. A few doors down, a sign was nailed to a house advertising teachers and books of a nondescript kind. Farther along stood a shop the size of Sergeant Najib’s station. Daniel asked the clerk if he’d seen the girl.

  “No,” the teenager said, gesturing to his goods. “But maybe you need a new watch!” Half his teeth were missing. Cigarettes, cassette tapes, toiletries, and food were on display alongside Timex watches. Next to a shelf of Lux soap and Nivea cream, artificial beards were stacked tidily in a bin, for men who wanted to look more pious when they attended mosque. Firooz owned one. They were on sale.

  Daniel overpaid for a pack of Kents and retraced his steps, walking back up the cul-de-sac toward the main road. The distant hum of traffic grew louder. He walked up the side street, which was deserted save for two men slipping into a low-slung dwelling on the corner. It was one of the city’s few houses of ill repute, walls of cement and heavy drapes hiding its activities. President Daoud swore such places didn’t exist, especially in the midst of the new buildings and good houses nearby.