The Opium Prince Page 6

  “It’s Leland. How many times do I have to tell you?”

  “What’s going to be filmed, Leland?”

  “What do you think? The whole Reform. From the time you pull those poppies out by the head to the moment the wheat grows in nice and tall. They’ll try to put it on the air next year with Cronkite. We need to see a lot of happy locals. Is that clear?”

  Daniel squeezed his eyes shut. “You’re going to let them film the Reform?”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m not sure the Ministry of Planning will be on board with that.”

  “They already are. It’s going to be broadcast there, too, for whoever’s got a TV, although I guess that’s about the same number of people as a curling team in Cuba.”

  “Sir, if we needed to postpone the Reform, how would we go about that?”

  After a prolonged silence, it seemed like a different man was on the phone. A measured, somber voice sliced through the receiver. “Was that supposed to be a joke?”

  “It’s just that—”

  “Tell me I wasn’t wrong when I convinced everybody you knew what you were doing. A lot of them were pushing for smaller fields. Telling me you weren’t ready. That you were too green, and that having a last name the locals could pronounce wasn’t a qualification.”

  “I remember.”

  “Changing course is not an option.”

  Daniel apologized. “I was just thinking out loud.”

  “Well, don’t. If you’re thinking stupid, think silent. That’s a basic rule of politics. Hell, it’s a basic rule of life.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Whatever’s going on over there, take care of it and see your project through. That’s how it works. If you can’t, pack your suitcase and stop wasting the government’s time and dime. You’ve got Greenwood to help you.”

  “Who?”

  “Dannaco-Hastings’s new boy, Bob Greenwood. Christ, haven’t you met him yet?”

  Daniel had never heard of him.

  “You’ve got a consultant coming your way,” Smythe said, exasperated. “Dannaco insisted, after the whole bit with Kauffman. And all this filming means there’s a lot at stake for them. Get to it. He’s already there. How did you miss that in the report?”

  “We don’t need a consultant from Dannaco. They provide the equipment, that’s it.”

  Another pause. “They need to know what’s going on. They have a lot of money riding on this. Are you with me?” Smythe went on to say the new consultant would be easy to manage, since he lacked experience. He’d worked in Latin America in far lesser posts. “Besides, it’s mostly about Agent Ruby for Dannaco. They don’t care too much about the rest.”

  “Sir?”

  Across the line, Daniel heard Leland chew. “This donut’s dry. Fuck it. Anyway, don’t you read any of the stuff I keep telexing? I’m not writing these reports for my personal enjoyment.”

  Daniel retrieved the Yassaman file from his desk. Flipping through the pages, he found the telex. It was dated yesterday. “I’m just getting caught up, Mr. Smythe.”

  “It’s Leland.” He made a slurping sound. “Damn, this coffee’s weak. But what else is new. Okay, catch up quick and let me know. Agent Ruby’s a great thing. The committee likes it. Get those godforsaken poppies out, plant something else, and feed those folks. I’ll tell you something, Daniel. A good piece of land is like a young woman: with the right touch, it can really be turned into something.” Before abruptly ending the call, he added, “Follow your orders.”

  In the report, Agent Ruby was described in two pages authored by Robert Greenwood, whose photo was stapled at the top. Peering out was a frat boy with antiseptic eyes and a formaldehyde smile. Daniel read over the appraisal. It was typed on paper so bright, it was an affront to his mood. He had managed to silence the dead girl’s voice, so she resorted to trickeries of sight. On one page, the word Telex blurred and became Telaya. The p in prove flipped itself, transforming the word into drove. Danger dropped its d, the word anger blooming in his vision instead.

  Her game was not the only sinister thing in his files. It seemed everything had to do with Vietnam, and Agent Ruby was no exception. The war had given the DEA an idea for how to choke the growing supply of heroin coming into America, and the stakes were higher than ever because thousands of GIs had come home with more than missing limbs. Heroin had been cheap in Saigon, flowing through the city and soldiers’ veins. Demand soon soared in Los Angeles, New York, and everywhere in between. In Mexico, growers stepped in to fill the void, quickly turning out what everyone called Mexican Mud, less pure than the China White of the Asian refineries. At first, Mexican Mud trickled into California. Then it poured.

  Daniel had heard a lot about Mexican Mud, less because of his job and more because Rebecca’s sister was mired in its murky depths, as addicted as any GI. No one had heard from Sandy in months, and the family worried night and day. Some absences made the heart grow fonder; others just made it break.

  If the report was right, Sandy would soon run out of Mexican Mud. The effectiveness of Agent Orange in Vietnam had led the DEA to spray it over Mexico’s poppies. The report described the operation in detail. Washington had declared a drug victory only days ago, after the Mexican fields were drenched with the defoliant. The heroin supply was about to fall dramatically. Demand might not, but the report left that out. Nor did it state that for farmers big and small in Fever Valley, for Manticores and hungry villagers and nomads, the existence of eight hundred thousand American heroin users looking for a fix was a gold mine.

  Agent Orange was quickly making a bad name for itself. In Vietnam, the report said, children were being born with eyes missing and lungs that were too small. Young women developed rare cancers. Nothing would grow where Orange had been sprayed. Not soy, not beans, not even rice. Agent Ruby was Dannaco-Hastings’s alternative. It had been tested in controlled environments but had yet to be used on a real field. The corporation promised its defoliant was safer, sparing human life and leaving the soil ready for new seeds within months.

  This was the first time Daniel had read about Agent Ruby. On any other day, he would immediately have asked his staff to gather information, make calls, and set up appointments. Instead, he focused on the last few sentences of the report: Kochis are cheap labor. Too cheap. Need farmers to hire local villagers, or land reform will fail.

  At least this was something the State Department had in common with both the Communists and the rising National Islamic Movement that had been quarreling for years. The Communists talked of settling the nomads in cities and towns, calling it a “civilizing mission.” But everyone knew they wanted to register and settle them because they drove down wages, weakening the swelling working class, and because many would never belong to a state. The clerics didn’t like them because they practiced religion the wrong way, Islam mixed with superstition. Daniel told his secretary to call the Ministry of Planning. “Ask Mr. Sherzai to come see me. Please tell him I’m sorry for the short notice, but it’s urgent.”

  Twenty minutes later, Kabir Sherzai walked through the door. He’d been given an office in the Ministry of Finance nearby, specifically because it was convenient to USADE, and the agency now took up most of his time.

  “Agha,” Daniel said, addressing him with the honorific he’d used since childhood. They embraced, but Daniel let go more quickly than usual. Sherzai fell heavily into the chair across from Daniel, leaning his satchel and cane against the desk. His sleeves were too short and his trousers a little too long, accentuating his bad leg. Daniel felt the old man’s eyes bore through him, and he was sure Sherzai knew about the accident, Telaya, about Taj, all the things Daniel didn’t say.

  “You’re back early,” Sherzai said.

  “Something came up.”

  “You call me like this without explanation and expect me to drop everything?” The Vic
e-Minister of Planning folded his arms over his ill-fitting belt. His caterpillar brows looked like they wanted to crawl off his face. He tucked his chin and narrowed his eyes, which betrayed his ancestry. They were his mother’s eyes, the same Hazara eyes Daniel saw on the faces of housekeepers, gardeners, and cooks all over Kabul. His gaze made him look serious even when he wasn’t, which was seldom.

  “Even you need a good reason for this.” He reached for Daniel’s Marlboros, tapped out a cigarette, and snatched a solid-gold lighter from the desk. “I always forget how much this weighs,” he said, turning the Davidoff over in his palm. His words were tinged with admiration. Long ago, someone had told Daniel that admiration was just a manifestation of resentment. It was hard to assign such a petty trait to Sherzai, but treating him as a colleague felt unnatural, too. To say Sherzai had raised Daniel wouldn’t be entirely true, because Daniel had been fourteen when his father died. But Sherzai had been his guardian, and old patterns did not die easily.

  “I wanted to know what you thought of this report, agha,” Daniel said. “Who is Bob Greenwood, and why does he get to poison our fields?”

  “This couldn’t have waited?” Sherzai tapped the report. “It seems self-explanatory to me. We’ll find out more about Greenwood on Saturday.” Sherzai must have sensed Daniel’s confusion, because he added, “At your party.”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve invited Elias, too, yes? He’s a good boy.” On another day, it might have been funny to hear Sherzai refer to his Communist half-nephew as a “good boy,” but laughing seemed indecent.

  “Mr. Greenwood will be my personal guest,” Sherzai continued.

  “Does he have to be?”

  “Do you want to call him yourself to rescind the invitation? Or do you want Smythe to tell him he can’t come? He wants you to make the man feel welcome.”

  “Then I suppose I will.”

  “What’s wrong with you today?”

  “I just have a lot of work to do.” Daniel was on his feet.

  “Are you throwing me out, after summoning me here like a servant?” Sherzai rose as well, so they stood face-to-face with the desk between them. His face was a mask of creases, and Daniel felt, as he often did when Sherzai was before him, that he was shorter than the man, though he was taller by two inches. They had been enough like father and son to maintain affection and tension at once, but not enough to know what they really were to each other. The question always hung there, unasked.

  “What’s the matter with you, batche’m?”

  “The trip didn’t go as we planned.” Daniel had spoken so quietly that Sherzai, who had just addressed him as a son, asked him to repeat himself.

  “I keep thinking about Kauffman,” Daniel said, louder.

  “The old director?”

  “They fired him because he did what everybody told him to, even when he knew they were wrong. I don’t want to make the same mistake. That’s all.”

  “That’s what you’re worried about? Kauffman did his best and was loyal to his government.”

  “Sometimes, laziness can look like loyalty. Being obedient can just mean you’re a coward.”

  The vice-minister looked at the ceiling and opened his arms as if releasing a bushel of balloons. “No one would mistake you for a lazy coward. What has one day of vacation done to you?” He leaned in closer and studied Daniel’s face. “Whatever hit you on the head has affected your mind.”

  Daniel remembered the gash, which had swollen overnight. “An accident in the tool shed.”

  “Given the state of your last woodworking project,” Sherzai said gently, “I wasn’t sure you were spending much time in the shed these days.” He placed a hand on Daniel’s shoulder. “What happened?”

  “I think I wasn’t paying attention, and I bumped into something.” Daniel pulled away and dropped into his chair, the leather squishing under his body, wheels chattering along the floor. He pushed aside the thought of that last woodworking project, a half-finished crib meant as a surprise for Rebecca.

  By the window stood a caddy stacked with bottles, most of them full. Sherzai limped to the makeshift bar, leaving behind his cane, which fell to the floor. His damaged leg rejected his attempts to walk faster. He poured whiskey, the neck of the bottle rattling against the edge of the glass. He steadied his hand and brought Daniel the drink, repeating his usual mantra. “Just medicinal. Never more than one. And never for fun.”

  The whiskey slowed Daniel’s racing mind. Sherzai stood across from him again. “If they want to use this Agent Ruby”—he made a twirling gesture with his wrist—“you will have little say in the matter. And why be against it? Perhaps it will work.” In his eyes was concern, perhaps even love, but Daniel could bear neither right now.

  “Work for who?”

  “Do you remember the Scale of Sages?”

  It had been years since Daniel had thought of his father’s illusory device. As a boy, Daniel would sit on his bed and mimic Sayed using the invisible scale, calibrating nonexistent pieces in his hands. He was in no mood for deciphering one of his father’s many opaque notions, so he said, “Vaguely.” He gestured to the piles on his desk. “I really should get back to all this.”

  Sherzai raised his eyebrows, which seemed closer than ever to managing their escape. “I am not finished,” he said, and Daniel fell quiet. “Your father thought everyone was born with a sacred scale, a gift they didn’t bother to use. If you had to choose between two principles, all you had to do was determine how much each one weighed.” Sherzai made a scale with his hands. “The heavier one won out. Your father said it was easy, like riding a bicycle.” Sherzai shook his head at the carpet. “But he was wrong. It’s never easy.”

  “What happens when you put Agent Ruby on the Scale of Sages?” Daniel said.

  “I hate the poppies, and that hatred outweighs my love of almost anything else. Let our friends at Dannaco bring their poison.”

  Over the years, after Daniel had gone to America and tried to put his childhood behind him, he’d sometimes wondered if those who criticized Sherzai had been right: maybe the vice-minister’s war against the poppies was driven not by loyalty to his old friend Sayed, but by the desire to outshine him. But the people who whispered such things—neighbors, cousins, even classmates who thought everyone who looked like Sherzai had to be jealous—did not know the man. They did not know that Sherzai sat on the floor despite his aching body as he played with Daniel’s electric train and told him his father would be back from prison before he knew it. They had never seen Sherzai wearing an apron, covered in flour and sweat, his sausage fingers doing their best with the sticky dough so he could make Daniel fresh naan when the cook left to tend to his sick brother. There were so many things they had never seen.

  Daniel thought about the poison the government wanted to spray indiscriminately on the poppies, armed with studies and hopes and, most of all, the power that came from not caring too much what happened afterward. “There must be a better way to deal with the poppies,” he said.

  “Better ways don’t matter when this is what Dannaco-Hastings wants. And the State Department. Mr. Smythe has made his decision.”

  “He’s only one man.”

  “Some men’s words weigh more than others.”

  Daniel had heard that phrase before, too. Sherzai had said it when the king’s men came to arrest Sayed twenty years ago. Daniel had tried to free himself from Sherzai’s grip, desperate to chase the car that was taking his father away. He’d insisted it was unfair, but Sherzai had reminded him that the king’s words weighed more than fairness, more than anyone else’s words.

  “What do you think my father would have done about Agent Ruby?” Daniel asked.

  “Your father would have done what was necessary to defeat an enemy.”

  As the silence between them grew, Sherzai gathered a sheath of bound papers from
his satchel. “Since I’m here,” he said, handing it to Daniel. “Read this, please.”

  “Where do I sign?”

  “You should at least look at it. It’s your company, after all.”

  “I didn’t earn it.”

  “And yet it’s yours.” A quiet bitterness stained the vice-minister’s words. Daniel had to stop himself from reminding Sherzai of the thing neither of them ever brought up. Sherzai had almost bankrupted the gemstone company after Sayed’s death, righting the ship only by violating Sayed’s wish that the firm conduct business only in local currencies and not take payment in pounds or dollars. To Sayed, the English were the enemy and the Americans their allies, Europe as a whole was too fickle to trust with its shifting alliances, and the Russians were worse than anyone with their false ideologies and true brutalities.

  As Daniel signed his name where Sherzai indicated, he wondered if the anger he felt showed on his face. How could Sherzai make remarks about the Sajadis’ wealth? If it wasn’t for Daniel’s father, Sherzai would have died at the age of three, the year he was struck by a nameless virus. The elder Sajadi brought in the best doctors from abroad to save little Sherzai, his gardener’s son, because Sajadi’s own child, Sayed, loved the boy despite a ten-year age gap and a much larger gap of a different kind. Sherzai was left with only a limp, which he cursed as a malediction and his family praised as a miracle. He had been lucky, but Daniel would never dare tell him so.

  Perhaps he was being unfair. Sherzai’s decision to finally let the gemstone company accept foreign currency had not only saved it, but brought its profits to new heights. There were no diamonds or fine rubies in the country, no stones that could make a nation wealthy, but there were enough semiprecious gems to make a few men rich. The only trouble was that being rich in afghanis was not like being rich in dollars. Not even close, as Daniel had found when he moved to Los Angeles for university, where he was suddenly nothing more than “comfortable” rather than rich. By his senior year, that had changed, thanks to Sherzai. Daniel had been lucky, too, but Sherzai never told him so.