The Opium Prince

by Jasmine Aimaq

  2

  Daniel rubbed his aching brow and opened the wound, blood dripping onto his lashes. Offering his handkerchief, Taj said, “You must return to the camp with me and the parents.” He could have been issuing an invitation to lunch.

  “Then why did you bring me to the police?” Daniel said, wondering what kind of trick the man was playing. He refused the handkerchief, blotting the blood with his sleeve. “There’s nothing more I can do. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Honor requires it, saheb. You know this.” Taj lowered his head and his voice. “I assure you, you will not die.”

  Daniel understood why some locals called the great opium khans Manticores, after the mythical creature with the body of a lion and rows of razor-sharp teeth like a shark’s. The Manticore’s dragon tail was filled with poison, and when it attacked a man, it left no part of him behind.

  Rebecca stood by the car door, which she held open, watching Daniel. In her eyes, he could see it. She wanted to leave not only the station but the road, the desert, probably the country.

  “They know where you work,” Taj said.

  Daniel wondered if the Kochi tribe would send men after him to extract revenge months or even years from now. Rebecca. What if they avenged the girl by harming Rebecca?

  “I’m not afraid of them,” he told Taj.

  Taj smiled, revealing a hairline crack in one of his incisors, a single flaw in an even row of teeth. “A man who says he is not afraid is afraid. So why not come now, while I am here to protect you?”

  From the station, an Indian chanteuse whined out a song that Daniel had heard a thousand times. Sergeant Najib sat in a chair visible through the open door, uninterested in his lingering Kochi guests.

  “I hope you understand my point, Daniel Sajadi,” Taj said. He ran his sleeve over the gun one last time before returning the weapon to its holster.

  Rebecca approached them with quick steps. “Let’s go,” she whispered.

  Taj drifted back into the station, the end of his turban floating in the wind. Once alone, Daniel and Rebecca argued. When she learned that he planned to return to the desert, she swayed as if the things holding her together were escaping. He held her by the shoulders. He didn’t say that he had no choice. He only told her he would be safe.

  And he believed it. An opium khan would not kill an American official. This was not Burma or Colombia, with their turf wars and drug killings. There was no such violence here. The khans were not cartels, but a scattering of powerful and mysterious men who ruled more because people needed them than because people feared them, though no one wanted to cross a Manticore. Nor would Taj allow the elders to execute Daniel. What then would have been the point of bringing him to the station? All they would want were ceremonial apologies, perhaps more money. Daniel’s confidence slowly returned. He would manage. He was the son of Sayed Sajadi.

  Rebecca’s eyes were red, and her breath was faint and light. She was watching Taj, who stepped back inside the station and asked Sergeant Najib a question they could not hear.

  “We need to leave,” she insisted, pulling Daniel toward the car. Her hair had come loose from its ponytail, golden strands clinging to her brow. Daniel took her hand and promised he would return quickly. That it was just a formality. Tradition.

  “You’re crazy,” she said. “Don’t do this.”

  “Madam,” Taj called out. “I’m sure the young constable would be honored to escort you to a hotel of your choice in Ghazni.”

  She crossed her arms tightly and lowered her head, her lips trembling.

  “But it is the closest city,” Taj said, as if her resistance were due to apprehension about geography.

  The rumble of an engine was followed by the appearance of Mir, who had brought a car around from behind the station—a Moskvitch, the Soviet answer to Datsun. It had three hubcaps and a bent fender.

  “He’s harmless,” Daniel told Rebecca. It was true. There had been men like Mir in Sayed’s every warehouse and factory.

  “If you think that’s the guy I’m afraid of, you’ve had a different day than me.”

  Taj held the back door of the Moskvitch open, but she took the passenger seat and slammed down the lock, shutting out Taj, her husband, and the day itself. Daniel told Mir to drive to the Ariana Hotel in Ghazni, whispering the directions, aware of Taj lurking. The young constable steered Rebecca onto the highway.

  The drive back to the Kochi camp was aggressively silent, like the aftermath of an explosion. Daniel resisted the urge to turn over the wheel to Taj. He would have let anybody drive the car, if only he could avoid passing the place where it happened. He could control the car, he told himself. More difficult were his thoughts. Those childhood memories returned. Dorothy’s stories of the violence of the Kochis. The paintings that hung in his father’s offices and factories, depicting nomads heading into battle with zeal. His foot was rigid on the gas pedal, hands tight on the wheel.

  Baseer and his wife had known all along what Taj was. Of that, Daniel was sure. In a month, the great opium harvest would begin, so, like the other khans, Taj was likely searching for workers in the nomads’ sprawling camps. Daniel should have known the moment he’d seen the man, so out of place there with his onyx and silk. But Daniel had always assumed that Manticores sent their underlings to choose workers. Maybe the khans didn’t trust anyone they hadn’t seen with their own eyes. Maybe they wanted fear and love from those in the fields, and these sentiments were best engendered face-to-face.

  A convoy of tanks rolled past them toward Kabul. The last one stood out, though Daniel could not say how. The tanks shrank in the rearview mirror, where Daniel also found Baseer’s eyes. The old man’s weathered features softened into a smile, a look of pity mixed with something inscrutable.

  At the Kochi camp, Taj assisted the parents with the body, declining Daniel’s help. The day was ending, the sun burnishing the silver-plated sky.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Would you prefer to come and face the elders?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  Taj said goodbye to the parents and watched them cross the road. Daniel’s pulse was unsteady. The Kochi couple was soon out of sight.

  “What is this?” Daniel said. “You told me you were bringing me to stand trial with the elders.”

  Taj gestured to the driver’s seat, but Daniel hesitated. He looked toward the Kochi camp, wondering if he could seek safety there, then realizing that he was trapped between two forces he knew little about. Somewhere deep inside, he had the answer, but all he could hear was Telaya’s voice. I’m faster than you, she whispered. Do you see me?

  The khan bowed slightly and waved his hand toward the car again.

  “If you have something to tell me, you can call my office. Most of your colleagues have agreed to work with us,” Daniel lied.

  The khan laughed as if he’d just heard a long-anticipated punchline. “My colleagues! The small farmers you work with are not my colleagues.” He said “small” the way people in Rebecca’s Los Angeles neighborhood said “southern.” He pointed to the car again, this time with the barrel of his gun, and it was like he had never laughed at all. “Drive,” he said. “If you behave yourself, everyone lives.”

  I didn’t get to live, the girl hissed. The man who took my life should die, too.

  Daniel tightened his grip and engaged the gears too hard, heaving the car onto the road. The Kochi camp fled behind them, the desert stretched taut like a colorless canvas, and in the side mirror, Daniel could still see that small boy from long ago with his wild smile and flying feet and sunshine that caught his mirrored cap like a halo. He drove faster.

  In Fever Valley, poppies bloomed red, purple, and white, a Technicolor maze inviting you to lose yourself. These were not the cheerful blossom
s of California. To Daniel, these flowers signaled death. But for others, they signaled life. Since childhood, he had heard about the rhythm of the opium harvest. Every fall, the poor came to collect on the hopes of a year. Their wages were so small, they counted them in fractions. A destitute man could proudly call himself a farmer because he helped reap a field. In the spring, he would help sow seeds. His wives, his daughters and sons, everyone came with a small blade, same as last year, working alongside the professionals. The old uncle who never found a wife, who aged alone in something that looked like a town but had no name, he came, too, though he moved slower than the others. He might earn enough to buy a box of potatoes, a jug of oil, and save a little money to someday buy a goat of his own. Every summer, those who knew him asked, Did you buy the goat? Not this year, he replied. Next year, inshallah. God willing.

  Daniel grew up on these stories, told to him by his father and Sherzai, the man who had become his guardian after Sayed died and the Iranian woman Sayed was married to decamped to Tehran with her relatives. Even today, Sherzai would tell Daniel stories about a time he recalled only vaguely. The days when there was no Fever Valley, just vast fields in the northeastern corners of the country and lesser-known plots hundreds of miles south of here in Helmand Province. Tucked away in the south were hidden swaths few people could find, beyond the flat deserts where only camel thorn grew.

  He wondered how much Taj knew about Sayed Sajadi. He spoke like someone who wanted others to think he’d had an education, but something in his inflection, the way he seemed to strain to articulate longer words instead of swallowing the middle syllable, told Daniel that the khan had been born someone else. His name sounded impossible, too, chosen by a person who had come into the world without one.

  That the Sajadis were rich was no secret. Schoolchildren learned about Sayed the war hero, but depending on the teacher’s leanings, Sayed either became the republican who bravely challenged the king or the traitor who insulted the monarchy. He had gained followers after helping to drive out the English and eventually challenged the king’s candidate for the governorship of Helmand, promising he would rid the province of the small but growing opium farms. Daniel was only eight when the royal army arrested his father. Sherzai explained that no king could abide a man who was more popular than he was.

  Maybe Taj only planned to extort money, demanding cash in return for not broadcasting the accident within the better circles of Kabul. Drug lords understood money, never content with what they had, spending their lives like magpies hoarding shiny things. Daniel wondered if they also understood the shame that decent people felt when they harmed the less fortunate.

  “Turn here,” Taj said after more than an hour on the desolate road.

  Daniel found himself on an unpaved path, surrounded by a night so black he never knew what was ahead. And yet he knew Taj was leading him to the Yassaman field. He had been here four times in six months. How different it was at night, empty of USADE’s crews, who came and went each day with their notebooks, shovels, and bright, shining hopes. How much more alive it seemed in this darkness with the wind and the flowers in a whispered dialogue.

  The car lurched along like a skiff on stormy waters. Daniel skirted a curve in the road, his headlights gilding over stunted trees dying of thirst on the margins of a great opium field, the well-watered poppies a cruel taunt.

  “I know who you are,” Daniel said at last.

  “You know what I am. You do not know who I am.”

  “Why did you tell me we were going back to the elders?”

  “I wanted to talk to you, man to man. I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Forgive me. It was presumptuous to think a man of your lineage should be frightened by anything a humble servant like me might come up with.” Taj signaled for Daniel to stop in a clearing and follow him into the field, gesturing again with his gun. They passed the equipment that stood along the edge, the power plows that USADE had brought to the field. A cloud slipped away from the moon, and the Dannaco-Hastings logo was briefly visible on the machines, which looked like reconstructed dinosaurs in a museum. Daniel’s crew had already begun digging channels that would bring water from the thin river nearby. Though they would not be used for several more weeks, Daniel had made sure tillers and cultivators were brought to the field, too, warning the khans of what was to come. Pressuring them to abandon these poppies, this life. Judging by the man beside him, Daniel had failed.

  They walked into the night, crossing what should have been a stream but was a dry ditch. The poppies rose up before them, a fragile truce between beauty and poison. They rustled, protesting Daniel’s clumsy advance, while Taj nipped forward with ease and purpose. A small breeze lifted, scattering lost petals and leaves. Along the eastern margin of the field were boulders and shrubs Daniel had never noticed before. The rest was familiar.

  “Every year, I need more workers,” Taj said. “The nomads are good. They’re used to sleeping outside, and they’ll take scraps of food as payment. They are not so different from animals.”

  Something violent bloomed in Daniel’s mind, and it was the color of Telaya’s dress. “There are animals that compare favorably to you,” he said.

  “I did once know a cat who displayed an enviable talent for strategic planning. And I’ll admit to a fondness for llamas.”

  “Llamas?”

  “They command a certain respect. It takes great insight and spirit to spit at human beings.”

  “They rarely spit at human beings. They spit to remind lower-ranking llamas of their place.”

  The khan stopped and faced him. “Is that so?”

  Not far ahead, a flicker of white light danced above the poppies, the moon reflected in a window. It was the shack Daniel had entered a few months ago, hoping to find a place to leave his jacket and briefcase. He’d turned back around at the sight of rats gnawing on an old mattress. They were heading straight toward it now.

  “How long have you had this field?” Daniel said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t like time.”

  “That’s understandable. Time isn’t working in your favor. Your days here are numbered.”

  “Everybody’s days are numbered.”

  “Some of us have more favorable numbers than others. You’re up against men who are smarter than you, with much more money. This will become farmland.”

  “It’s already farmland,” Taj said.

  Daniel wished this pointless tour would end. He had essentially been brought at gunpoint and couldn’t decide if he was supposed to behave as if the gun was there or not. Part of him thought the khan meant to end his life, but he was strangely unafraid. It was as if the accident had snuffed out some capacity for perspective or feeling. Some events were so immense, they could drain someone of a lifetime of emotions.

  “Make this disappear.” Taj spoke as if reiterating something they had already agreed upon. The gun was still in his hand. “Leave my field.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Did I not take you away from the elders when you begged for someone to save your life?”

  “I didn’t beg. And it’s not the same thing.”

  “Indeed it isn’t. Some would say the favor I’m asking for is small in comparison.”

  Daniel began to wonder if his faith in the region’s safety was misplaced. He thought again about the war on drugs in other countries. USADE had lasted just four weeks in Burma, its director gunned down on an open road. The violence had to start at some point, before which people said, Those things don’t happen here.

  Daniel turned and walked toward the car.

  “Not yet,” the khan said. “Give me an answer.”

  Daniel kept walking. “I’m only one man.”

  “You’re a Sajadi, and the director of your agency. They’ll do what you say.”

  “You d
on’t know what you’re talking about. It’s my government, not me, that’s taking your field.”

  “Men like us don’t have governments.”

  “Men like us?”

  “Whenever a man has a government, then the government has the man. If you are wise, which of course you are, you will aim your loyalties elsewhere.” Taj pointed to the shapes at the eastern edge of the field. “Look closely,” he said. “Do you see?”

  Daniel’s eyes fell on the lumpy bundles beside the machines. They looked like large, grotesque weeds sprung from the earth without order or design. He walked toward them. One of them stirred. They were not weeds; they were human beings. Dozens, maybe more, with threadbare clothes and provisions bundled into sacks. A pageantry of want.

  “Without an opium harvest, they will be paid nothing,” Taj said. “Don’t you care?”

  “Your fake concern isn’t any more convincing now than it was—”

  “When you killed the girl?”

  Daniel didn’t reply. He looked at the poppy pickers. Seth and Iggy, USADE’s best engineers, came to Yassaman two days a week, sometimes more, and had told him the channels were coming along, the crews working diligently. But there were other crews, too, the poppy workers, mainly villagers and Kochis, whom Daniel saw each time he came to observe. They worked from sunrise to sunset, serving the khans, whom no one ever saw. This year, the poppy workers kept to one edge of the field to avoid the machines and crews on the opposite side.

  “Leave our land alone,” Taj said. “It isn’t yours. It belongs to the poppies and those who pick them.”

  “The people who want you out have more resources than you could dream of.”

  “You have no idea what I dream of. And I have a resource they cannot match.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Hunger,” Taj said. “It is the greatest resource of all, because it is infinite.”