But Professor Fenwich wasn’t even pretending to listen anymore. He returned to his desk, buried his ears under his elbows, and curled into himself like a dying spider, kicking his desk rhythmically, possibly to the beat of an old Peter, Paul, and Mary song. Kick, kick, kick.
“She watches conservative TV,” Diane stammered. “Sean Hannity…The O’Reilly Factor…Mad Money with Jim Cramer…Tucker Carlson…Joe Scarborough…. She reads Charles Krauthammer, George Will…” She gulped dryly and reburied her face in the tissue. “Michelle Malkin!”
Kick, kick, kick.
“Oh Les, Les, Les…”
Kick, kick, kick, kick, kick. “Oh God, God, God…”
Three
HENRI CHARBONNAY, COMMERCE MINISTER OF HAITI, thrust his kisser at his island’s western shoreline three thousand feet below the Cessna and, as if he had never experienced glass before, whacked his face and made his nose bleed.
“You quite all right, there, Mr. Minister?” shouted Alex Gleason, chapter head of the British West Indies Benevolence Club, over the propeller roar. Gleason was convinced that the commerce minister was a cretin and probably a danger to others as well as himself.
“Byen, byen,” the minister, bleeding into an airsickness bag, assured him.
Gleason had let the imbecile talk him into taking the plane to view the country’s catastrophic erosion. As if Gleason’s file folder crammed with UN environmental reports, Red Cross disaster records, UNESCO health, nutritional, and mortality crisis bulletins, and U.S. Geodetic satellite photos—which even more dramatically showed the vast delta of Haitian topsoil dissolving into the leeward sea—were somehow not enough to convince the Benevolences to name Haiti its donee of the year. Gleason strongly suspected that the commerce minister was so bored out of his skull—Haiti having had no real commerce for the last, oh, two hundred years—that almost any diversion, including breaking his nose, was more appealing than sitting in his office swatting flies. Besides, Charbonnay, like his ministerial colleagues, knew graft opportunity when he smelled it—said sense of smell being as highly developed in Haitian olfactory membranes as hearing is to Haitian tympanic bones when voodoo drums thump over hill and dale—and, in order to make damn well sure that Henri Charbonnay and only Henri Charbonnay would be the legitimate beneficiary of any illegitimate remittances, he wished to impress on Gleason his power and importance by pretending that this was his personal airplane at his ministerial beck and call, a charade that would have been hilarious if it hadn’t been so pathetic, because evidently Henri thought you could smash your face against an airplane window and people with money to hand out would not think of you as an incompetent moron.
“I’ve seen quite enough,” Gleason shouted over the din of the engine, which had been sputtering anyhow, so it was probably a good idea to get back to terra firma. “No sense dying before the check clears.”
“Quite so, quite so,” the minister agreed, grinning complicitly. He tapped the pilot on the shoulder, lifted his right headphone, and yelled, “Desann!”
An hour later, in the foothills overlooking Port-au-Prince and the sea, the minister and Gleason sat at a white wicker table on Charbonnay’s fretworked veranda, sipping rum punches and munching conch fritters. Unfurled between them, a satellite map of Hispaniola’s western sea shockingly confirmed the massive, Rasputin-beardlike estuary of topsoil runoff the men had observed from the plane.
The minister’s yard was lush with flowering shrubs, a bougainvillea-woven picket fence, yellow-hibiscus hedges, stands of flaming poinsettia, lavender plumbago, and trumpeting morning glories. Iridescent hummingbirds zipped between clusters of oleander and lantana, yellow bananaquits and red-winged bullfinches flitted from railing to sugar bowl, and a nimbus of bees hovered over a koi-speckled lily pond.
“Look here,” scolded the BWI Benevolence head, “after our frightful experience with your previous great-hope-of-the-common-man president, why the devil shouldn’t we be reluctant? We sent all those fat pink pigs to replace your scrawny black ones to start a pork colony for starving people, and when I came back a year later to see how it’s doing, what do you think I saw on the president’s bloody front lawn?”
“All your bloody pink pigs,” confirmed the commerce minister, jutting his lower lip. “The man was a miscreant. A damned thief.”
“Like the bloody rest of you.”
“True, but look how arrogant he was about it. No humility, that one. When we ran him out, do you think he was even good enough to leave the pigs for our next president? They say his girlfriend accidentally left the gate open, but my own theory is that the spiteful cur deliberately released them into the hills! If he couldn’t have them, no one could!”
“A man of the people,” Gleason snorted.
“Still—decorum, you know.”
“Decorum, my foot. I suppose—” But Gleason stopped talking when the servant girl glided out with another plate of fritters.
“ Pa gen pwoblèm,” the minister assured him, patting the girl’s rump, which pleasantly bulged in pinkish-beige stretch pants. “Cléo has no ears for politics.” He winked at Gleason. “Only a tail for her employer.” He turned again to the young woman. “ Wi, cheri?”
“Only legs for my purse,” she replied.
The minister laughed and spanked her bottom. “Later, you naughty girl,” he called as she slipped back into the house. “For the time being, more drink!”
The sun bumped the crown of a distant hill, spilling shadows across the sprawling city, draining its color. A fretwork outline stretched onto Gleason’s map. He set his drink on the border between Haiti and the D.R. “Look here, Henri, this erosion business has to stop. It’s going to kill you all. There, now my conscience is clear.”
The minister shrugged. “These are a very ignorant people. Perhaps it would be nature’s way of—what’s the expression?—thinning the herd?”
“I don’t doubt you’re right, but in the meantime we can’t very well send you another fifty thousand saplings, only to have the peasants keep cutting them down and burning them for fuel. Good heavens, man, can’t someone teach them the concept of foregoing immediate gratification for longer-term good? It’s not bloody brain surgery.”
The minister pouted. “They care more for having babies and eating.”
“It’s not like the first batch came without training. We bloody well explained it takes ten years to reforest. That’s not so long in the scheme of things.”
“The ungrateful wretches claim it’s a lifetime when you’re starving.”
Gleason tapped the photograph. “Look at this mess. There’s barely an inch of topsoil left on this whole side of the island. You can’t keep cutting down trees and expect to keep your blasted dirt, man. One more hurricane like Oscar, and what’s left of your agriculture will be completely done for. Then all the Benevolence trees in the world won’t save your damn black hides.”
“But I can promise you—”
Gleason gazed around the minister’s lush garden. No shortage of topsoil here. “Promise me?!”
Ignoring the insult, Charbonnay, sipping his punch, went on: “The problem was in giving them trees directly, you see.” He gazed at a deforested range of southern hills, where barren streaks of gray runoff made it look like God had wiped his shoes.
“How the devil are we supposed to save your