A Harvest of Thorns Page 13

  “Is it true?” she had asked, holding up the page like an indictment.

  The guilt in his eyes was his judgment.

  “How could you?” she whispered. “After all I gave up.” She shook her head, daggers in her eyes. “All those times you were in Rio, you were with her, weren’t you? You were banging her while I was slaving away at a job I hated so you could follow your dream.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Shut up,” she cried. “I hate you. I hate you!” She crumpled to her knees and buried her face in her hands. “Go away. I don’t want you here. Leave me alone.”

  Now Josh closed his eyes and felt the despair as if for the first time. He pictured Lily’s face, recalled her words. Come home . . . She isn’t happy. He wanted that more than anything—to find a way back into Madison’s good graces. He had a chance with this investigation, the lawsuit he and Rana were building, to prove to her that neither his success nor his sins had fully corrupted him, that he was still the man she had fallen for in law school, the rabble-rouser with an uncompromising compassion for the poor. But therein lay the snare. His compassion was also his downfall. Maria was not exaggerating. He was all she had left.

  He found her number in his contacts and placed the call.

  “Joshua!” she said, sounding relieved yet desperate.

  He hesitated, and the silence dragged.

  “Are you there?” she asked. “Is it you, Joshua?”

  “Hello, Maria,” he said at last.

  “Ah, thank God! It is you.”

  “I thought I was clear. This can’t go on.”

  She was quiet for a moment, her breathing audible above the static on the line. “I know,” she admitted. “But this is not about us. This is about my girls. I have tried everything. I went to all the donors. I spoke to the bishop. I even went to Alejandro. No one would help me.” Her voice trailed off, and she started to cry. “Your last gift was kind. But it was not enough.”

  Josh tried to steel himself, cursing the way her suffering so easily moved him. But he might as well have tried to hold up the sky. It was her comment about Alejandro that pierced his defenses. Alejandro Varela was her erstwhile benefactor and lover, a real estate magnate who had rescued her from the horrors of her childhood, educated her, and inducted her into Brazilian society. It was his seed money that had planted Casa da Amizade, his largesse that had floated her through the early years, and his financial collapse that had sent her back to the streets and into the beds of strange men to care for her girls.

  Then Josh had come along and written her story in the Post—a story of poverty and prosperity set against the backdrop of Brazil’s economic boom. When the Pulitzer committee handed him journalism’s highest honor, everything had changed for her. The world had opened its hand and fed her. The End of Childhood had elevated her further, turning her into a household name in global philanthropy. Until O Globo started digging around in her rubbish bin and found Catarina, and convinced her to talk about Maria’s darkest days. And then the glittering cathedral had come crashing down, and the world had abandoned her. That she had gone back to Alejandro meant that she was beyond all humiliation. If Josh turned her down, he knew where she would end up—back in the nightclubs in Copacabana, trolling for johns to keep the lights on. And she would not be alone. A fresh-faced girl from the Casa, another Catarina, would be with her.

  “I’ll send you some more money,” he said quietly. “I’ll wire it tonight.”

  “Thank you,” Maria said softly. “You are a good man.”

  Josh conjured his wife’s face. What was goodness when fidelity and generosity were at odds? “I have one condition.”

  “Yes?”

  “Keep your girls away from the bars.”

  Though she was on the other side of the world, he saw her shaking her head. “I will never take them back. You have my promise.”

  “Good-bye, Maria,” he said.

  When Josh returned to the living room, Rana was standing by the window, looking out at the night. He turned around and read the dismay on Josh’s face. “Everything okay?”

  “Yeah,” Josh said, trying to sound convincing. “Don’t worry about it.”

  For a moment, Rana did look worried. Then he decided to let it go. “The meeting is set,” he said. “We’re going to the workers’ dormitory. You ready?”

  Josh nodded and grabbed his backpack off the bed, following Rana out the door. “What part of the city?” he asked when they stepped into the elevator.

  “Cheras,” Rana replied. “It’s south of here. But first we have to pick up Ajmal’s friend.” He shook his head. “The kid is incredible—one of the sharpest fixers I’ve ever seen.”

  The kid was Ajmal Alam, and he was a living paradox. He was Bangladeshi, but he knew Kuala Lumpur like he had grown up there. He was barely out of university, yet he spoke with the sagacity of a much older man. And his list of friends in the apparel industry was second to none. In less than twenty-four hours, he had made contact with workers at Rightaway Garments, the Malaysian factory Josh’s source had named at the Lincoln Memorial, and convinced them to talk. The workers knew Jashel Sayed Parveen.

  Leaving the elevator, Josh and Rana crossed the hotel lobby and exited through glass doors, making their way down a stone-paved roundabout to the noisy street. After only seconds, the humid, tropical air, still over eighty degrees Fahrenheit, swelled inside Josh’s lungs and began to prickle the skin beneath his shirt. The sensation took him back to Rio de Janeiro in the early days, when he was a fledgling correspondent searching for a story that would make him a name like his father’s, a byline that would signal to the world that truth was about to be served. I was a fool, he thought with a half smile. But the world was my oyster. Now I’m wiser and trapped inside the shell. He shook his head and watched Rana make another call.

  “We’re on the street,” Rana said. “Do you see us?”

  A moment later, a beige sedan pulled to the curb, and Ajmal jumped out. He was taller than Josh expected and stockier, with the distinctive features of South Asia—deep-set eyes, close-cropped hair, and carefully trimmed beard. But his self-confidence and rapid-fire speech were like that of a hundred other cosmopolitan millennials Josh had encountered in his travels.

  “I’ve read all your work,” he said as Josh settled into the passenger seat and Rana climbed into the back. “Your book is a masterpiece.”

  “Thanks,” Josh replied, no longer impressed by praise.

  Ajmal floored the accelerator and pulled into traffic. “I have a question, though. If you wanted to be a journalist, why’d you go to law school?”

  “It’s what my father did,” Josh said.

  Ajmal swerved around a bus and made a sudden turn down a side street. “Your father was Jimmy Carter’s press secretary, right?”

  “Deputy press secretary,” Josh corrected. The kid reads Wikipedia and thinks he knows my family. “But, yes, he was in the White House. He told me to go to law school to learn how the world works, then go into journalism to change it.”

  Ajmal bobbed his head so vigorously that Josh worried that he had more caffeine than plasma in his bloodstream. “I like that a lot.”

  “So tell me about Rightaway,” Josh said. “What kind of factory is it?”

  “Midsize,” Ajmal replied as they whizzed by a mosque. “About a thousand workers, mostly migrants from Cambodia, Indonesia, and Bangladesh. They make sports apparel for the export market. That’s pretty much all Malaysia has left after the Multi-Fibre Arrangement.”

  Josh nodded. The MFA was a quota system adopted by the United States and Europe in the 1970s to govern garment imports from overseas. Designed to insulate the Western textile industries from third world competition, the MFA had the unintended consequence of offering small countries like Malaysia the chance to compete with large countries like China and India. It also fueled the globalization of the industry, leading manufacturers in countries with maxed-out quotas to partner with underutili
zed countries to keep the orders flowing. When the world, acting through the World Trade Organization, finally retired the MFA in 2004, buyers and brands went on a global quest for greater margins. They found more efficient production in China, Thailand, and Vietnam, faster turnaround times in Mexico and Latin America, and rock-bottom labor costs in the Philippines, the Maldives, and Madagascar. In middle-income countries like Malaysia, the garment sectors adapted but shrank dramatically in size.

  “Who are Rightaway’s buyers?” Josh asked.

  “All the big Western brands,” Ajmal replied. “The only exception is Presto. Rightaway used to make for them, but they don’t anymore. I don’t know why.”

  A few minutes later, Ajmal stopped outside a Chinese restaurant in a neighborhood of low-rise apartments and commercial buildings. A diminutive Bangladeshi man with a moustache and glasses stood on the sidewalk waiting for them. He climbed into the backseat with Rana.

  “This is Sarwar,” Ajmal said, throwing the sedan into a U-turn. “He’s from Dhaka, but he’s been in KL ten years. He knows everyone at Rightaway. He’s been trying to form a union for some time, but the owner isn’t in favor, naturally. The guy usually retaliates by sending the pro-union workers away and replacing them with others who don’t complain.”

  Ajmal drove for a while longer, navigating Kuala Lumpur’s arterial network of freeways before taking an exit ramp into an area dominated by dimly lit storefronts and rambling factories.

  “Welcome to Cheras,” he said. “Garments are all around, though the signs don’t show it. Many are shells for subsidiary factories that employ undocumented migrant workers.”

  “Is Rightaway a subsidiary?” Josh inquired.

  Ajmal shook his head. “It’s one of the model factories—where the brands send buyers and auditors to make sure everything is A-OK in the supply chain. But Rightaway shares orders with the subsidiaries. The subsidiaries are the lean, mean, human-abusing machines.”

  Like Millennium in Dhaka, Josh thought. “What do the brands think of them?”

  Ajmal laughed under his breath. “The brands pretend they don’t know. But they do.”

  Soon, Ajmal pulled the car into a dingy alleyway littered with trash. He drove for twenty feet, then stopped in a courtyard surrounded by unmarked buildings and lit by a single lamp, its halo barely five yards wide.

  A group of men emerged from the shadow of a stairwell and walked toward the car. Ajmal and Sarwar climbed out, and the men formed an arc around them and lit cigarettes. One of them offered Ajmal a drag, which he took. Then he returned to the car.

  “We’re set. They’re going to take us to the dormitory.”

  Josh looked at Rana and saw the question in his eyes. They were in a sketchy quarter of an unfamiliar Asian megacity ninety minutes shy of midnight—not a great place for Americans to make the acquaintance of strangers. “What does your gut tell you?” he asked Rana.

  Rana hesitated, then said, “I think we should trust him.”

  Josh shrugged. “Works for me.”

  They left the car and followed the men into the darkness, stepping around discarded bottles and cans. Somewhere nearby a dog barked, its voice echoing off the walls. Josh kept his hands free and his senses on high alert, scanning the surroundings for danger. The men led them through a breezeway between buildings. Josh tripped over something and almost lost his footing, but he couldn’t make out anything on the ground.

  “How much farther?” he asked Ajmal.

  Ajmal repeated the question in Bengali, and one of the men grunted a reply. “It’s just up ahead,” Ajmal said, showing no hint of concern.

  On the far side of the breezeway stood another courtyard with scattered trash and a lamp emitting grainy light. Around the courtyard they walked, the buildings on all sides as dark as the sky. At last, the men showed them to a stairwell and pointed upward.

  “The dormitory is upstairs,” Ajmal said. “They’re going to stand guard.”

  The men stood in a huddle at the base of the steps and watched them pass. Josh took the stairs two at a time and joined Ajmal, Sarwar, and Rana on the landing. Before them lay an open-air hallway with doors on one side and a railing on the other. The shapes of men were leaning over the railing, their faces limned by the reddish glow of cigarettes.

  Ajmal said a few words in Bengali, and one of the shapes opened a door, allowing light to spill into the hallway. All at once, color returned to the world and the shapes turned into young Bangladeshis. Beyond the door was a room with bunk beds and cabinets along the wall, a kitchen area with a stove, and a small washroom. There were men lounging on the bunks, paging through magazines, and chatting in soft tones. When they saw Sarwar, they greeted him with broad smiles and gathered round, sitting cross-legged on the floor.

  Ajmal left his sandals at the door and sat on a mattress, gesturing for Josh and Rana to do the same. While Sarwar spoke to the men, Josh studied them. There were thirteen of them, between the ages of twenty and thirty. Some were dressed in T-shirts and jeans, others in gym shorts, their chests bare. But all of them wore the same expression of unaffected curiosity.

  When Sarwar deferred to Ajmal, he spoke briefly, then passed the baton to Josh. “They will answer your questions as long as you say nothing to Rightaway or publicize their names.”

  “That’s not a problem,” Josh said. He turned to Rana. “You speak the language. Why don’t you find out what they know about Jashel?”

  Rana nodded and began to ask questions in Bengali. The men replied without resistance, speaking in turn and occasionally correcting one another. As the minutes passed, Josh watched Rana carefully and listened to the timbre of his voice. He saw his friend’s intrigue turn into indignation. Eventually Rana filled him in.

  “Jashel came to Rightaway in 2008. A number of these men were with him. An agency in Dhaka made the arrangements, but a local outsourcing agent named Foysol took over when they arrived. He handles everything for them—documents, accommodations, transportation, work permits, and medical care. The factory pays Foysol, then he pays them. When they got here, they found out that the agency in Dhaka had lied to them. The wage was three hundred ringgits less a month, there was no escalator for overtime, and there were many hidden fees and deductions. Most of them worked three years before they were able to send money to their families.”

  Josh shook his head in disgust. “That’s forced labor.”

  “Yeah, but it gets worse. Their contracts are with Foysol, not Rightaway. They didn’t know this when they signed, but the documents were written in English, which none of them can read. Foysol has their passports and work permits. He has complete control over their lives, and he uses it. A year after they got here, one of them got sick and couldn’t work. Foysol canceled his permit and reported him to the police for deportation. They never saw the guy again.”

  Which means his entire family paid the price, Josh thought bitterly. “So where’s Jashel?”

  “He was here until a year ago. Then one day Foysol showed up at the factory and took him away. They don’t know what happened to him, but they’re worried Foysol turned him over to immigration. Jashel was an outspoken critic of Foysol’s agency. He couldn’t wait for his second contract to expire so he could go home to his family. He has a lady in Bangladesh—Farzana. He was saving money to marry her.”

  Josh gritted his teeth, allowing his anger to show. “Ask them if they recall anything unusual around the time that Jashel disappeared. Did he do anything that might invite reprisal?”

  Rana translated the question for the men while Josh surveyed their faces. Most of their expressions remained blank, but Josh saw a flash of recognition in the eyes of a heavyset young man in the back. His gaze fell to the floor, and he began to rub his hands together. Josh waited, hoping the man would volunteer what he knew, but the man stayed silent.

  Josh pointed him out to Rana. “He’s hiding something.”

  When Rana called him out, the young man shook his head forcefully.

&
nbsp; “Tell him he can talk to us now or later,” Josh said, locking eyes with the young man. “But we’re not going to leave him alone until he helps us.”

  After another exchange, Rana said, “His name is Enam. He knows how Jashel got into trouble, but he’s afraid you will talk to the factory or to Foysol.”

  Josh nodded, understanding. “Tell him that nothing he says in this room will get back to Rightaway or anyone else in Malaysia. I’m a journalist. I protect my sources.”

  Enam pondered this, his face fraught with tension. At last he began to speak.

  Rana listened intently and interpreted. “About this time last year, some auditors came to the factory unannounced. They were American, like you. They had conversations with many workers. Jashel was one of them. Enam was another. He knew what to say. His manager had told them how to handle auditors. But Jashel didn’t follow instructions. The auditors came here to speak to him a second time. It was after work, late in the evening. The others were in the courtyard smoking, but Enam was in the washroom. He overheard the conversation.”

  “Let me guess,” Josh said. “Jashel told them the truth.” When Rana nodded, Josh asked, “Did Enam tell anyone about what he heard?”

  As soon as Rana translated the question, Josh knew the answer. He saw it in the guilt that flashed across Enam’s face, in the way he clasped his hands together as if trying to reassure himself that he had done nothing wrong. It took him a little while to gather the courage to speak. But the words came eventually, and when they did, Rana took a sharp breath.

  “Somehow Foysol found out about the audit,” Rana said. “He took Enam and Jashel aside and asked them about the interview. Enam was scared. He told Foysol everything.”

  Josh felt the mood in the room change, saw the way the other men looked at Enam, the judgment that darkened their eyes. His instinct, too, was to condemn Enam. But he understood the context. As much as their circumstances had bequeathed these men a sense of brotherhood, their camaraderie was paper-thin. They were living on the edges of the law in a foreign land under the control of a man who held their destiny in his hands. When Foysol came to him, Enam fingered Jashel because he wanted to survive. Almost anyone would have done the same.