Free God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) by Dimitry Elias Leger

airport for what the President’s public relations people billed as the new first couple’s first foreign tour, featuring a first stop in Florence, Italy, to support Haitian artists featured at a biennale in the Uffizi. To be fair, crowds lined the streets of Port-au-Prince all the time.Sidewalks were too narrow or nonexistent throughout the city. The streets contained more adults, children, dogs, pigs, sometimes cats, bikes, puddles, and garbage piles at all hours than the overcrowded and lightly governed city could handle. Still, in a disturbingly short amount of time, Natasha had grown attached to the cheers, the approval of strangers. They had the livening effect of a good new drug. The first pangs of withdrawal pain already loomed in her spirit’s outer edges. On good days, or during good moments on uneven days, the flush of mass approval justified Natasha’s choice of husband and nursed her shattered and shamed heart. Life was golden, her entourage told her. You’re so beautiful, they said. You’re so lucky.
    Damn right, she thought.
    Natasha was only two days removed from a walk down the aisle with the most eligible bachelor in town, the president of the republic. Since their first date at the opening of the Orphan Art Gallery in Carrefour, he’d repeatedly told her that for the rest of his natural life his business would be the business of securing her health, wealth, and happiness. To love her to death. Everyone told Natasha that the President went to great lengths to impress her, shocking lengths in fact. Even now, during her ill-timed fit of buyer’s remorse, her husband was too busy being good to her to notice. He was multitasking, executing a slight of hand that would soon allow them to escape his duties to Haiti and hand her a posh life in Tuscany. On the other end of his cell phone was his longtime right-handman, Reginald Leglise. Reginald was a source of good humor and as reliable as the sunrise. The President had charged him with securing the final details from US Embassy officials on everything from the President’s retirement cash flow in his Swiss bank accounts to hotel reservations to the day’s flight schedule. Port-au-Prince to Florence. Nonstop. Sweet.
    Stay on them, the President said. Don’t let them out of your sight until you hear from me and I tell you we landed safely in Italy. All that is mine here will then be yours, old friend, as promised. No, not the National Palace. Very funny, Reginald. Thanks, I needed that. You’re right. I have been through a lot in recent weeks. This deal took a lot out of me. It’s a beauty though, isn’t it? My best ever. What can I say? It’s not like we had a pension system here to take care of me after my last term ended. Our people hate to pay taxes. They miss out on so much, the poor fools.
    Natasha generally admired her husband’s ability to make people feel sorry for him when they shouldn’t. Not today. Today, the absence of scruples in his charm made her feel ordinary, small. A silver-tongued coward’s plaything. Marie Antoinette with a melanin overdose. Natasha never felt ordinary with . . . she still dared not speak her ex-lover’s name. His smirking ghost stood by her side, staring. Seeping courage from her. Natasha felt her grip on the world crumple in shades of bright green and yellow like a cubist painting. If . . . he . . . was unmuted,Natasha knew, her ex-lover would tell her the old man was unworthy of her, that he was a lousy president who had barely scratched the surface of possibilities of carrying out his great responsibilities as leader and protector of the dignity of their people, even in tasks as easy as rebuilding an airport with American Airlines’ money. He’d describe to Natasha the myriad ways the airport could and should have been better than it had been. And she would see the possibilities for transformation and