The Opium Prince Read online

“The guy who wears too much cologne.”

  “I’m not sure.” It wasn’t entirely untrue. “Ian, you have no idea what I’ve just done.”

  “You did your best.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “But I do, my non-Celtic friend.” Ian patted his arm. “Save the guilt for when it’s yours to own.” Roaming around the apartment, Ian found the whiskey. “I may need this tonight,” he joked, stashing it in his satchel. He gave Daniel an awkward fist bump.

  The door clicked shut, and Daniel waited until Ian was gone. He picked up a flashlight and left his room. He walked through the darkened compound, awed by its silence and stillness. He made his way up an unpaved walkway. Above him, the stars were a tangled necklace of gold. He didn’t encounter a single car or truck, and there were no gadis or other travelers at this hour.

  The Yassaman field was filled with ghosts now. The only living thing was Taj, squatting at its edge, contemplating these shredded flowers and bodies. Daniel nearly grazed him when he stopped the Mercedes at the edge of the road. Taj rose in the beam of Daniel’s flashlight. They stood close, face-to-face. Taj looked older. On the ground beside him was a flask, at his waist a cone-shaped pouch. Taj motioned to the poppies.

  “Do you see them? The finest that have ever been grown.” He wandered into the field. From his pocket, he drew a small blade. “Maybe I can salvage a few.” He moved through the field, scoring the few poppy pods that had not been slashed or crushed. He worked fast, his hands gliding from one flower to the next. Daniel walked with him.

  “Help me,” Taj said. “Grab a blade. They dropped them when they were shot.”

  Sap oozed from the pods Taj could save, milky and white. By morning it would gleam like cloudy, amber-colored glass, crystallized by the sun. Suddenly he straightened, standing by a cluster of bending stalks. Voice breaking, he said, “I’m sorry for what was in the photograph.” Then, in his usual tone, he added, “It’s dangerous to have such a bad habit in the age of the Polaroid.” He turned back to his massacred world, checking for any resin that hadn’t hardened and any pod that hadn’t been scored by a blade, torn open by a bullet, or crushed by a body. Daniel realized that he was lighting the man’s way with his flashlight.

  There was no reason for Daniel to be here, but he felt like he would come unmoored if he left. He looked up at the endless sable sky. The universe was expanding, even as his own world shrank. The opium trade always expanded, too, and would do so despite tonight, despite his life’s work. Taj would plant again in the winter, and the Yassaman field would thrive. Blood was the greatest fertilizer of all.

  Dead Wrong

  The doors to the banquet hall are closed. Taj can hear the sounds of a wedding party. Music is thrumming, and he can picture people dancing the atan, moving in a circle, clapping their hands at intervals as the music picks up speed. They are all in their best clothes, and Taj imagines the sequins and hair spray and mix of perfumes, making the air a heavy syrup. Sometime before this, the young man’s parents must have approached the girl’s family, and everyone agreed they should get married. No one will reach out to a nice girl’s family on behalf of Taj or present him as the suitor they have been looking for.

  He drives away from the hall and leaves the city far behind as he heads to Bala Hissar, where he feels more at home than anywhere except his gardens. The old citadel rises on a hill in curved and jagged lines, a fortress that once kept people safe. He has never seen walls like this anywhere else. Every time he is within them, calm washes over him.

  Back when he was Boy, Socrates showed him pictures of Bala Hissar. Boy dreamed that he planted a vast garden inside those towering walls, a garden no one else could see, and there he lived with a girl who loved him and didn’t care that he’d grown up in the streets. At night the old citadel is the largest, quietest place in the world, and it belongs only to him.

  Tonight he is meeting a girl, but she isn’t the one from his dreams. She is the first woman he was ever with. He leaves his car on the splotchy grass and climbs up the hill, as he has done a hundred times. She is there, crouching by one of the walls, shrouded in a chaderi. She puts a hand on his arm when he sits down beside her. Her limbs are trembling and her pupils are huge, as they always are with someone who very badly needs opium. She cries and tells him her stomach hurts, that she is scared, her noises becoming small and clawing. He prepares the opium for her. She smokes, and when she is calm again, she curls up against him. They talk about nothing for a long time.

  When she pays him with her body, it doesn’t feel like it used to. The first time, Taj felt something he’d felt only a few times before, when accompanying Nazook on an adventure to steal something important, like watches, jewelry, and cartons of cigarettes: that dizzying feeling that power meant ownership, and ownership, power. He had been all that mattered to this woman because he’d brought her opium. He’d owned her completely in those moments, and Nazook used to tell him that’s what women were for. Owning. Tonight, for the first time, Taj feels pity for the woman huddled beside him, naked, using her chaderi as a blanket. She is only here because he brings her opium, and now it feels like the very opposite of power. He helps her put on her clothes, and she insists on staying here alone when he leaves.

  Nazook was right about many things, but not this. Boy didn’t realize Nazook could ever be wrong until the day his mentor made a fatal mistake. Once, when he was talking to young Taj about girls, Nazook told him that Taj’s history wasn’t beautiful at all. There was nothing beautiful about a man coming by with day-old vegetables and planting a seed in his mother inside a tent. Nazook laughed mockingly and told Taj his mother had sold her body for radishes and a bag of lettuce.

  Taj walks through the old citadel and thinks of the other thing Nazook had gotten wrong. He’d believed he would one day reign supreme in Fever Valley. Nazook had been very wrong about that. He’d been the first to see Boy’s potential—and the last to underestimate him.

  22

  In the days following the bloodbath, which the press named the Feverdrops Slaughter, Daniel felt both overly tired and alert. The massacre woke him at night like someone pounding at the door. Thoughts raced through his mind or moved as slowly as the beggars downtown. The newspapers used the event to underscore the dangers of Communism.

  Sherzai stopped by without notice. Daniel was glad to see him. They shook hands and embraced in a quick succession of stiff but earnest gestures. He appeared to be almost in shock.

  “Which faction would do this?” he said. These aren’t normal Communists.” His voice was strained. “Where’s the liquor cart?”

  “I had it removed.”

  “I see.” There was concern in agha’s voice. He squeezed into his usual chair, resting his cane across his legs and accepting a cigarette. “What will you do now? Rebecca won’t want to live here after this.”

  “She’s stronger than you think. But maybe you’re right. I assume you know what Smythe said? You two seem to have a good rapport.”

  Sherzai sought his eyes, but Daniel would not look up from the stack of mail he was sorting. “I would never harm you, batche’m.”

  “You threatened to ruin me.” Daniel tossed pointless letters into a wastepaper bin. “What would you call that?”

  “What would you call lying to someone who took you in as a son?” Sherzai shook his head and changed the topic. “This is no place for your wife or for you.”

  “I don’t see how I can leave.”

  “Please, listen, for once in your life. I’m trying to help you.”

  “I know. But sometimes I wonder if that’s all there is to it. I’m not a child anymore, and I want to ask you something. Man to man.”

  Daniel asked Sherzai to forgive him for what he was about to say. Before, he would never have considered it. But before barely existed in the wake of the Feverdrops Slaughter. And so he said, “Maybe you want the Reform to be yo
ur legacy rather than mine. Maybe you’re tired of it, being in Sayed Sajadi’s shadow?”

  As soon as he’d said it aloud, the idea sounded both absurd and cruel. Grief melted into tears in Sherzai’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry, agha,” Daniel whispered. “I didn’t mean for it to sound like that.”

  Sherzai dabbed at his cheeks with a handkerchief. He stood with difficulty and circled around the desk without his walking stick, then rested his hand on Daniel’s shoulder. In that hand, Daniel felt the weight of a lifetime of promises and duties and love, along with pain.

  Miss Soraya arrived with a steaming pot of tea. After cursing the Darjeeling for burning his tongue, Sherzai said, “Let’s say you manage to turn a few fields into something better. So what? In the end, what will have changed? And what will it have cost you?”

  “Everything worthwhile comes at a cost,” Daniel said.

  “Everything worthwhile has to be worthwhile.”

  “I have to believe it will be.”

  “Believe all you like. That won’t make it so.”

  “I have to stay, Sherzai.”

  “All men are willing to make sacrifices before they understand what those sacrifices are,” Sherzai said. “What if things get worse and USADE shuts down in a few months?”

  “What if it does?”

  “Won’t you wish you had left earlier, instead of putting Rebecca through months of worrying, the two of you sitting an ocean apart, waiting for the inevitable?”

  “USADE won’t back down that easily, especially now. As Smythe likes to say, we can’t let terrorists change us.”

  “He said that because he has to. Of course terrorists change us. They get us to change ourselves. How we act, how we think. And all the while, as we shout that they aren’t changing us, they laugh and watch us become even worse than they hoped.”

  Daniel wished he hadn’t asked Miss Soraya to remove the liquor from his office. Later that day, Rebecca called. She’d heard about the Feverdrops Slaughter from Peter and Laila, who had reached her hours ago. She wasn’t calmed by Daniel’s promises that he was safe. If anything, she grew more anxious when he described the steps taken by USADE and the regime. He tried to change the subject. They talked about Sandy. The gravestone had arrived. Rebecca’s mother was better, but still finding relief in little blue pills.

  Telaya had fallen utterly silent, though he found himself searching for her the morning after the tragedy. It was almost a betrayal, this silence when he expected her to join him in rage. At the State Department, everyone worked overtime, trying to formulate an explanation for how they hadn’t seen this coming. Everyone wondered if USADE would continue its operations at all.

  After a tense waiting period, the agency learned its fate. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s decision was, as Smythe put it, unequivocal.

  “Vance thinks Daoud looks weak if we pull anybody out, and if you ask me, he’s right. Which isn’t an everyday occurrence for Vance. Those Commies are terrorists, and we don’t let terrorists win. The people who did this aren’t regular red, they’re big red.” Smythe made a spitting sound. “That goddamn gum has too much cinnamon for me, but the grandkids like it.”

  Daoud’s regime dispatched soldiers to guard every field slated for reform. It was an irony of sublime proportions, a military presence to help the opium harvest proceed undisturbed. The other great khans harvested quickly, their poppy workers looking over their shoulders. Everyone passing through Fever Valley was warned to bring an ID and an explanation, and no vehicle could bring in more than four men or six women.

  Daniel wondered what Taj might be thinking. Washington and Kabul couldn’t be the only ones talking; the Manticores would be deliberating their own fate.

  At USADE, the focus shifted to smaller fields with farmers happy to hire local villagers. The office was now open only Monday through Wednesday. Guards patrolled the building. Telaya’s commentary started again, but it wasn’t the anger Daniel had expected after the massacre, just more pleas and provocations that he barely heard amid the deafening new silences in his head.

  In the evenings, Daniel worked with Ian on projects in the shed. They barely spoke and never drank. Ian hosted poker nights, which Peter and Laila joined. An easy rhythm had returned to Daniel’s friendships, as if the Feverdrops Slaughter had melted the fences around him. When they played cards, Pamela often sat with them, teasing them about their unimpressive skills, sometimes playing a hand. She made milkshakes and served homemade cakes and wore her hair in a ponytail. She asked if the men were okay, her voice different from before, now that of a woman who was done hiding both her fears and her strengths. Her nail polish was often chipped, but she seemed prettier without the layers of makeup. The stilettos were still present, especially the pink flowery ones, which she wore often. Where they had seemed creepy before with their too-girlish sexiness, they were now an emblem of a whimsical era quickly slipping away. Sometimes Daniel caught her studying her feet as if wondering whether that time had ever really existed.

  “Royal flush,” Peter said, displaying his hand.

  Daniel pushed his tokens toward him. “You’re better at this than I remember.”

  “I’ve been playing with Sherzai a lot.”

  “Really? He never mentioned it.”

  When Peter told him the vice-minister was helping him with research, Daniel was surprised. “I didn’t realize you were writing.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be? It’s what I do.”

  “How much longer are you planning to stay?” Surely it couldn’t be long. “Most foreigners are taking off, and here you are making yourself at home.”

  “A historian doesn’t walk away from history when it’s unfolding before him.”

  Ian reached into his pocket and scattered cigarillos across the card table. “You writing about the Commies, Mr. Prof?”

  Peter shook his head. He said he wasn’t writing about the massacre, either. “I write about the past, remember? I’ve had some ideas since arriving here.”

  Daniel offered to introduce him to other officials, but Peter declined. “Sherzai is enough. Most of what he’s told me I’d already guessed, but it’s good to have him as a source.”

  Afraid Peter would launch into a tedious lecture, Daniel changed the topic to baseball. “Who do you like for the Series?”

  “Yankees,” Ian said.

  “Dodgers,” Peter countered, handing him the deck.

  Ian dealt while Daniel considered his old professor, who’d come here without much of a plan. He realized something else, too. If he and Rebecca were the best friends Peter had, the professor was a lonely man.

  23

  Rebecca returned on a warm afternoon in early October. When Daniel saw her emerge from the gate, he was both relieved and apprehensive. Her smile made him happier than anything, and every time he saw her after a prolonged absence, his stomach did the same somersaults it had when they’d first met. He’d feared she would still be angry at his refusal to come to the funeral, but it seemed his absence was forgiven. He held her hand as he toted her luggage to the car.

  “Wait,” she said as he was about to start the car.

  “How come?”

  She squeezed his hand and climbed onto his lap. “I’m late.”

  He glanced at his watch. “Only by a few minutes.”

  She smiled, then stroked her belly and laid her forehead against his. “No, I’m later than that.”

  They had never loved each other more. Over the next few months, he saw the change in the curve of her belly. Her skin appeared illuminated from within. She slept deeply at night. He found that his love for his unborn child pushed back the colorless rage that swelled inside him when he thought of the Feverdrops Slaughter. He remembered clearly for the first time when he had been part of a family. He’d had a father—and a mother, at least for a time. But it had all been too big som
ehow. His father’s name, his grand history and ambitions, the house, the gardens, Dorothy’s sudden departure, the car that took his father to prison, Sayed’s feud with kings. A happy home required smallness. Families were about indiscernible distances between people who claimed no greater ambition than each other’s happiness. Daniel hoped he would never forget this.

  Rebecca saw friends more frequently than usual, especially Laila, who came and went, often with Peter. Daniel eventually wondered why he had ever been uneasy about Peter’s visit. Laila was the person whose presence grew more difficult with each minute. One day he asked her about the topic she never mentioned. “You’re a doctor. You save lives. You can’t honestly stay with a group that does such monstrous things.”

  “Daniel, this isn’t who they are. It’s just a lunatic fringe.”

  “You know this?”

  “I know they believe in the equality of women.”

  “So do plenty of non-murderers.”

  She shook her head, not in dismissal but as if there was too much to explain.

  “Daniel, do you remember the dog?” she said.

  Yes, he remembered. Laila was breaking the promise they both had made never to speak of it again.

  The dog had trotted into the Woodrow Wilson Academy one morning, ambling across the schoolyard. The children gathered around the animal, stroking its spiny back. But something was wrong with its gait, one leg shorter than the others. Daniel told the other kids to back away, because something else was wrong, too, and he saw it first. Saliva was foaming around the animal’s slack jaw. It lowered its body to the ground, forelegs splayed, baring its teeth at the retreating children. Daniel helped a girl climb into an oak but failed to convince Laila to take refuge. He stayed with her on the ground, refusing to leave her alone. She moved calmly, never taking her eyes off the dog, as the groundskeepers came with jump ropes, bats, and a blanket.

  Teachers corralled kids into the building, and over Laila’s cries of protest, the groundskeepers threw a blanket over the dog while it barked and howled, twisting this way and that. They beat it until it collapsed. Then they dragged the dog to the road and tied it to a post some twenty yards from the school, where the injured creature spent two days winding the rope around the pole, snarling at passersby, some of whom threw stones. At home, Laila begged her father to send for the animal doctor, but it was no use. He was somewhere near Mazar-i-Sharif trying to save a rich man’s goats. There was no one else.