The Lord of Opium by Nancy Farmer Page A

wouldn’t rather be dead,” said Mr. Ortega, understanding the gesture. “You’ve got nerve taking a high moral tone with me after all the murders you’ve committed.”
    Daft Donald made a circular motion with his finger: You’re completely nuts.
    “On the contrary, I’m extremely clever,” argued the music teacher. “Where else would a drug addict want to be except where there are piles and piles of lovely opium?”
    Daft Donald shook with silent laughter.
    Their conversation continued, with the bodyguard making gestures and the music teacher replying aloud.
    Matt wandered off. The foreman was courteous to him, a change from the old days when the man had treated him like a roach. The boy told him that supplies had arrived from Aztlán. The eejits could go back to full rations. “Very good, mi patrón ,” said the foreman. “We lost a couple of them yesterday and production is down, not”—the man gestured at the overflowing hallways—“that we don’t have more dope than we know what to do with.”
    Matt felt depressed. The eejits—thousands of them—wereprogrammed to plant poppies, slash pods, and make laudanum, and they didn’t know how to do anything else. If they were prevented from working, they jittered . Cienfuegos said that after a while these eejits simply keeled over and died. The tension was too great for them. Thus, they had to go on working day after day, while the opium had to keep piling up. It was like a well-oiled machine without an off button.
    Matt’s choices were to supply the dealers and keep the machine going with fresh Illegals, or to stop exporting drugs and let the current eejits work themselves to death. It was his decision.
    “You look tired, sir. Would you like to meditate in our chapel?” said the foreman.
    Matt looked up, pleased by the word sir . “I thought the chapel was in the church.”
    “This isn’t official.” The man seemed slightly embarrassed. “It’s just a place to rest for the foremen and Farm Patrol. No one else is allowed in, but as you’re the new patrón  . . . ”
    Matt followed him, intrigued. The foreman unlocked a small room, hardly bigger than a pantry. It was decorated with flowers and holy candles, and sitting in a chair was a life-size statue of a man. Matt flinched. It was El Patrón. Or at least what he had looked like at age thirty. The statue was made of plaster and was slightly chipped, as saints’ images tended to be. Its eyes were jet-black. It was dressed in a white shirt with black trousers and wore a black bandanna around its neck.
    On a small altar were offerings: plastic flowers, silver charms, pictures. A drawing of a little girl with braids caught Matt’s attention. It was hardly more than a stick figure, and the artist had written the name Alicia with an arrow, to identify the portrait. “What’s this for?” Matt asked.
    The foreman hesitated. “Some of the men left family behindwhen they came here. They don’t have photographs, so they draw pictures.”
    “Why?”
    “To ask the saint for help. That one, if you look on the back, wants his wife to have enough money to raise his daughter. A silver charm means that someone wants a cure—an eye for blindness, an arm for a broken bone. The ear was left by Mr. Ortega.”
    A cone-shaped lump of copal incense filled the little chapel with fumes. Matt felt for his inhaler, just in case. “What’s the saint’s name?” he asked, and braced for the answer. But it wasn’t El Patrón. The old man hadn’t made it that far into heaven.
    “That is Jesús Malverde, the guardian of drug dealers,” said the foreman. “He was a bandit from Culiacán, with the difference that he didn’t keep what he stole. He took from the rich and gave to the poor. They say he was betrayed by a friend, who cut off his feet and dragged his body for miles to get a reward. Malverde’s body was hung from a mesquite tree by the local governor, but the poor people cut it down and buried him in a