The Opium Prince Read online

  “It won’t exist anymore once we’re done here.”

  “Americans watch too many movies. You think people in poor places dream of fields of rice and wheat. But the poorest people don’t dream about the means to an end. They dream about the end itself: enough money to live and something extra to give to their children. Your crops will never outearn the poppies.”

  On the gentle wind, the flowers whispered in agreement. Or maybe they were mocking the nearby land, visible from Yassaman. The Gulzar field was a naked, barren lot where a handful of poppies struggled to grow. Fever Valley sometimes reminded Daniel of New York, where Tiffany neighborhoods were divided from ghettos by mere blocks.

  They stood at the threshold of the shack, its metal door ajar. The smell of old tea, sweat, and tobacco drifted into the night, but there was another smell, too, pungent and foul. Daniel heard a scraping sound. He turned toward the road, which he could barely see. “I’m going back to the car.”

  “No, you’re not.” The Manticore touched Daniel’s shoulder and added matter-of-factly, “I’m not ready to leave. And you’re my ride.”

  Daniel pulled away. He could not orient himself in the vast darkness. He tried to gauge where the car was, but they hadn’t walked in a straight line.

  “Do you know why this business will always exist?” Taj asked. “Even if the people in these fields stopped being hungry, I could count on a different hunger. The wealthy world’s famine is its craving for drugs. There will never be enough.” He vanished into the shack. “Come in. I want to show you something.”

  Daniel hesitated before following. Inside, the stench was immeasurably worse. Taj lit a candle on a paper plate heavy with hardened wax. Vomit was pooled on the floor beside a metal frame bed Daniel recognized. What he did not recognize was the person in the bed, covered with a blanket. Rodents had chewed holes in the thin fabric. They were lapping at the vomit now.

  “This man is one of my new workers for the season. He has stolen poppy pods from me. My men said he was so heavily drugged when they caught him, he could barely speak.”

  “He overdosed?”

  “He couldn’t even wait a few weeks for the resin to perfect itself. He just tore at the pods.”

  Daniel was unable to look away.

  “I said they should leave him here,” Taj continued. “I had other matters to tend to. Your friends with their machines didn’t seem to notice him collapse. Perhaps noticing is not part of their job.”

  The rats scattered as Daniel sank to his knees and removed the blanket, discovering that beneath was not a man, but a boy in the throes of adolescence, a thin stubble and a sprinkling of blemishes on his face. He was chained by his wrist to the bed. He tried to say something, but managed only a moan.

  “He’s alive,” Daniel said.

  “They usually just fall into a long sleep and never wake up. That must be a pleasant way to die. But this way isn’t bad, either.”

  The crack of a gunshot blew apart the air. Daniel sprung to his feet and he thought he was shouting but could barely hear his own voice. He’d instinctively covered his ears, the room ringing with the aftermath of the shot. His movements were a series of reflexes. He seized Taj’s shoulders, surprised at their slightness. He lost count of how many times he yelled the word no. He was shaking Taj as if trying to force loose a response. None came. Daniel let go and leaned against a wall, overcome by heat and the sense that he was unable to breathe. The boy’s blood was on his skin and his clothes. Taj headed for the door, and Daniel followed. Outside, he shoved Taj hard from behind. The man stumbled but recovered, turning to face him, and dug the gun into his ribs.

  “Don’t do that,” Taj said, cocking the barrel.

  Daniel heard Telaya say, Men who hurt little girls deserve to die. He scrambled backward and lost his footing. The Manticore grabbed his arm, breaking his fall. He returned the weapon to its holster and walked away, an ordinary man on an evening stroll. “You are not useful to me dead.”

  “Stop!”

  “If I stop, how am I supposed to lead you to the car?”

  The wind tickled the flowers. Daniel’s breath, thoughts, and vision were trapped inside his thirst for righteous violence.

  “You’re not going to kill me,” Taj continued. “You know how I know? A man like you doesn’t kill two people in one day.”

  For a moment, Daniel’s desire to harm the man became as blisteringly alive as he was, and he could not distinguish between his life and his desire to end Taj’s. What purpose did this man serve? What did he bring to the world that was not better destroyed? Was killing a man like him not right and honorable?

  Traces of reason returned. It was true; he wouldn’t kill the man, and maybe Taj was right about why. Daniel was no murderer. But there was also the Reform. A man found dead in the Yassaman field, revealed to be an opium khan, might derail everything. Daniel imagined the State Department shutting down the project and maybe even the agency, the Reform set aside amid talk of rising violence in the drug trade. Mere rumors had wrecked initiatives bigger than this.

  Taj pulled away and melded with the night. Alone, Daniel felt something in his body churn. He became violently sick. Again and again, every muscle and organ in his body wrenched involuntarily. Every heave was like reliving the moment of impact, those impossible seconds between his old life and what it was now. He fell onto his hands and knees, and eventually, it stopped.

  The darkness was breathtaking. It was as if the universe had simply switched off the lights above this place. Daniel slowly made his way back to the car, exploiting rare glimpses of moonlight. Taj was waiting in the passenger seat.

  “Good, I was afraid you were lost. City people lack a sense of space. It has to do with perspective.” Taj clicked the seat belt into place, flicked down the visor, and examined his wounds in the mirror, complaining about the blood on his piran. Daniel sat in the driver’s seat doorframe, feet on the ground and back to the khan. He used his shirt to wipe his mouth and the blood from his skin. In his suitcase in the trunk, he’d found clean clothes.

  “I had to kill the boy’s brother a few months ago for the same reason,” Taj said. “Now his mother has no children, unless you count the girls.”

  “Get out of my car.”

  “Really? All by myself here? It’s not a safe area, as you can see.”

  “Get out.” Daniel reached across Taj and shoved open the passenger door.

  The opium khan glanced toward the shed in the field. “That’s what happens to those who don’t understand the rules.”

  “You might as well kill me, too, because I’m not driving you anywhere. I’m sure you would have no qualms about killing twice in one day.”

  “What makes you think it would only be twice? By the time we met, it was late in the day for a humble working man like me. Nevertheless, as you wish. I wouldn’t want us getting off on the wrong foot.” Taj climbed out of the car and raised his hand in farewell. “Until next time, Daniel Sajadi.”

  The tires whined as Daniel spun the car around. The air inside was dense with sweat, sour breath, and the copper-penny smell of blood. He wanted to leave this place far behind and return to the city, to Rebecca. To the normalcy of a room, a shower, and a bed. A bed that had not been the scene of a killing. Daniel looked in the rearview mirror and saw Taj standing alone in the clearing, flooded by the car’s taillights. His robes floated on the gentle wind. As Daniel drove away, the khan called out a warning. “Watch your speed. That’s how you ran over the girl in the first place.”

  I’m fast, Telaya said, clutching her doll. I can do it.

  “No, you can’t,” Daniel said. “You should’ve stayed out of the road.” He slammed his fist into the dash, and his hand and his head throbbed as the car lurched over the rugged roads that led from the poppies to what passed for civilization around here.

  Snowman

  When the
children come outside, it isn’t to play, at least not with Boy. It’s cold, but they have coats that are fat like sheep. Boy has a good coat, too, but it’s his only one and Mother doesn’t want him to get holes in it, so he doesn’t wear it all the time. He hears her say it is the worst winter she can remember. He knows she is telling the gardener or the housekeeper or the lady of the house or the man who comes and goes in his big car. Sometimes those people come to the little tent in the garden to see Boy and Mother. She says thank you, God bless you for your kindness, when they give her a pair of shoes, toothpaste, soap, a towel. Warmer socks. The good oil that burns a little longer. The cook comes by in the evenings and gives them a pot of soup, naan, rice and meat, and chocolate. Boy likes the chocolate and dreams of it.

  His mother tells him the story at night when he cannot sleep. He loves the story. She says that long before this house was built, she used to be very poor, begging from people on this street. This was before Boy existed. He nods when Mother says this, although he does not understand how there could have been such a time. Mother says she lived in the shadows of the big houses then, sleeping beside a tall hedge. On a cold night with quiet snow and a loud wind, a rich man came out of his house and gave her a tent, a mattress, and two blankets.

  That tent changed her life, because she could light a fire and cook, even when it was raining or snowing. But mostly, it changed her life because it’s where Boy was made. A man with a donkey cart used to come to the street every afternoon to sell vegetables to the rich. When the evening came and the light faded, he would stop at her tent and give her what he had left. Onions, lettuce heads, radishes. He told her he’d sold vegetables all over the country, moving from city to city, and told her about the red tulips of Jalalabad, the shimmering mosque in Herat, and the great statues in Bamyan. He had seen so much. One day, she invited him inside and he stayed late. He left her with a wondrous gift: the seed that would become Boy. Then the man stopped coming by, disappearing like a djinn, a magical spirit. When Mother tells this part of the story, she makes a whooshing sound and opens her arms toward the sky.

  When the seed was big in her stomach, a wealthy family arrived on the street and wanted to build a home near the hedge. There was so much room, and so few houses. At first the builders left Mother alone, but after a while, they told her she would have to leave. They were going to pour the foundation for the house and sow seeds for grass. The wife, a beautiful lady with henna hair and a waist like a wasp, stopped them. Let her stay here, she said. And so the house was built around the tent, and the garden, trees, and walls all came up around Mother. When Boy was born, a special doctor came, and the house-dwellers brought candy and clothes. Mother kept some of the candy, although it had turned so hard you couldn’t eat it anymore, and a lock of his baby hair, a single curl in a metal tin. She painted the lid with swirls of green and blue, using watercolors that the rich man’s children had thrown away. She told Boy she envied the people in the house not for what they had, but for what they could give away. They are so generous, she said. She would really never know if she was generous, because she would never have anything she could give away.

  The tent is near the rosebushes in the garden. In the spring and summer, Boy wakes up to the smell of flowers and goes to sleep to the smell of freshly cut grass. He lies on the ground at night and looks at a sky full of golden things. But now it is winter. Boy hates the winter.

  The house-dwellers have two daughters, and they are in the garden tonight, wearing their sheeplike coats. They’re throwing snowballs and chasing each other in circles around the man they made out of snow. Boy’s mother pulls him into the tent and tightens his coat over his chest, and they warm themselves by the small fire. A pot of lentils is cooking on a rack.

  The girls sneak up to the tent. Boy hears the crunch of their steps, their muffled giggles. All of a sudden, chunks of snow come through the opening, one after another. They land on the blankets, his coat, the flames. The fire dies.

  Mother runs outside and shouts after the girls. Boy is five or six years old, old enough to start a new fire by himself. But the snow melts faster than he can remove it. Everything is wet. He leaves the tent and calls after Mother, who comes back crying, and he pulls her back inside. They curl up together. After she stops crying, she tells him to remember that he is lucky to be living in a garden with walls because many people do not have them at all, and Boy thinks of the people he sees living in tents in fields, people called Kochis, and he thinks they must be walking across the whole country looking for a big garden with walls. Yes, Boy is lucky.

  3

  Rebecca must have heard Daniel come in, but she didn’t turn to face him. She was watching the city, which was suspended by lamplight in the hotel window. The sight reminded Daniel of the windshield just before the crash. The way the glass warped the road just a little, making the asphalt ripple in the sun.

  He had brought up their suitcase and lodged it in a corner. When he slipped his arms around his wife, it was like embracing a column of marble.

  “It went fine,” he responded to a question she hadn’t asked.

  She loosened his arms from her waist. “What happened?” she whispered, not turning toward him.

  He told her he had met with the elders and been absolved, the fee accepted as compensation.

  She turned and looked closely at him. “Why did you go? And why did it take so long?”

  “I’m so sorry.” Daniel stroked her hair. “How are you? Have you had anything to eat?”

  She gestured dismissively to a tray full of untouched cakes and cold tea. “The owner sent this up.” She asked again why he’d been gone so long.

  “You know how these things are.”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  “It’s over now.”

  Rebecca nodded slowly. On the other side of the door, a couple in the hallway prattled on about their lovely evening. The woman spoke with the inflection of a girl newly in love, her high heels languidly striking the tiles. This was how Daniel and Rebecca’s anniversary should have been. Dinner on the town. Returning to the room light-headed from illicitly acquired wine, laughter, expectations.

  “I came back as fast as I could,” Daniel said. The couple’s door clicked shut, their honeyed voices fading. Daniel sank to the bed and took off his shoes, arranging them by the nightstand. The softness of the mattress had a surreal quality to it, as if his body had expected to find only hard, inflexible things. The telephone was on the pillow, the receiver slightly off the cradle, its cord tangled. “Did you call someone?”

  “Laila.”

  “What did you do that for?”

  “Because she’s my friend. And your friend. And I wanted to talk to her.”

  Daniel had known Laila all his life, and as a doctor she had helped Rebecca through that terrible time, so why shouldn’t she know what had happened? Rebecca had needed to talk to someone. That he could understand, but it rattled him that anyone else should know what he had done. He asked Rebecca to tell no one else about the accident. When she asked why, he said, “It’s nobody’s business.”

  They held each other’s gaze until her expression softened and she curled up beside him. She touched his face with the back of her hand, her wedding ring cold on his cheek.

  “I canceled the hotel in Herat,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Daniel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you change your clothes?”

  He was prepared for this question. “I spilled something. Tea. They gave me tea.”

  “Tea.” She inhaled sharply. Rising from the bed, she ambled about the room, alternating between nodding and shaking her head. “Tea,” she repeated. “Sounds like a pleasant gathering.”

  She pushed open the window, the city’s sounds invading the room. A frantic bicycle horn. A flock of sheep. The unmistakable laughter of teenagers, carefree yet somehow di
scernibly self-conscious. She inhaled deeply, then came back to the bed and sat beside him, extending her hand. “Daniel,” she whispered, “talk to me.”

  He rose. “I need a shower.”

  She dropped her hand in her lap as he walked away.

  In the bathroom, Daniel undressed and stepped into the blue-tiled stall. He raised his face to the water and pressed his fingers into his temples, desperate to quiet Telaya’s voice.

  Are you going to look up? she said.

  He ignored her. But what sort of man did this make him? Was it not enough that he’d taken her life? Now he was trying to expel her from his head, silence her. A final act of annihilation. He turned the hot-water knob as far as it would go, and steam enveloped him. He thought of the dead Kochi boy in the shack, elegized only by the wind. A boy plucked from a crowd of thousands who could have died in a poppy field just as easily and invisibly as he could have grown old in one.

  When the water went cold, he turned it off and stepped onto the bathroom’s linoleum floor. His fingers were red and wrinkled. He stood naked before the clouded mirror. With the palm of his hand, he wiped away its condensation. Watching his hand move back and forth, he looked like he was waving to himself. He felt as if it were her. The dead girl was inside him, using his hand to wave to him in the mirror.

  Hey, she said.

  “Stop,” he whispered.

  Watch me run, she replied.

  Behind him, small pools of water formed and unformed on the tiles of the shower stall. Every drop looked like one of the tiny mirrors gleaming in the backseat of his car. Daniel still remembered the time he had emptied himself of tears, although it seemed like a century since that summer day when his father had caught him eating a bowl of cherries before dinner and, instead of scolding him, crouched down and told him Dorothy had gone back to America. Before that day, he hadn’t known that tears could turn from liquid to solid, building a wall around your heart so that you couldn’t even cry. For a week, the wall stood rigid in his chest, until one night he fell headlong on the gravel, chasing a wild dog, and it broke apart. He began to cry. He was ashamed to have driven his mother away, ashamed to face the other children at school who still had a mom.