A Harvest of Thorns

by Corban Addison

  Rana pushed his sunglasses onto his forehead, giving Josh a glimpse into his eyes. They were fairer than Josh expected—somewhere between hazel and topaz. “You want to bring a lawsuit?” he inquired, openly intrigued. “I figured you were after a story.”

  Josh nodded, recalling his own surprise when his source told him what to do with the names. “I have my reasons,” he said.

  “Who’s the collaborator?” Rana asked.

  “CJA. Lewis Ames.” Josh spoke the words with confidence, though neither Madison nor her father knew anything about it—yet.

  A smile spread across Rana’s face. “A family connection.” When Josh didn’t reply, he began to nod. “Where are the plaintiffs?”

  “Bangladesh. Malaysia. Jordan.”

  Rana’s intrigue turned into fascination. “An international case.”

  “Against a global retailer. One of America’s favorite companies.” Josh took a breath, then spoke the word in sotto voce. “Presto.”

  “I’m riveted,” Rana admitted. “But I’m also dubious. Now that the Supreme Court has gutted the Alien Tort Statute, all we have left is the federal trafficking act and a quagmire of foreign and state law claims. The trafficking act is good, but to prove liability, we’d not only have to show forced labor in the factories, we’d have to show that Presto knew or should have known that they were benefiting from it. That’s a hell of a high bar, especially with a defendant as powerful as Presto. Global corporations don’t just play to win. They play for keeps.”

  Josh shrugged. “Does that mean you’re out? Or are you willing to roll the dice?”

  Rana grinned and picked up a menu. “I bet you’re famished. Everything’s good here.”

  “So you’re in then.”

  “I’m in,” Rana said. “Tell me your plan.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE WESTIN

  DHAKA, BANGLADESH

  FEBRUARY 20, 2015

  10:22 A.M.

  Even in his glory days as a reporter, Josh hadn’t traveled like this. It was ironic that he could afford it now, after everything that had happened. When his father had been at the Post, in the heyday of newsprint, foreign correspondents lived like ambassadors, flying first class, dining at the best restaurants, and leasing flats in expat neighborhoods. Then the Internet arrived, shattering the old ad-and-subscription business model and sending newspaper executives into a frenzy of budget cutting and buyouts. By the time Josh took an overseas post in Tokyo, his expense account looked more like a piggy bank. He’d thought his per diem might get an epinephrine shot after he won his first Pulitzer, but he was wrong. Even in London, when he was deputy bureau chief, his travel budget was so lean that he had usually skipped lunch.

  All that had changed, virtually overnight, when he hit the speaking circuit with The End of Childhood. His hosts—mostly foundations and universities—treated him like a dignitary, reimbursing his expenses without a glance. At first the red-carpet treatment came as a shock, but over time he grew accustomed to it, as if the music would never stop. And it might not have, had it not been for the Brazilian paper O Globo and the story it broke about Maria and Catarina, one of her girls. These days Josh couldn’t afford to fly business class, especially not with Rana in tow. But old habits died hard. He had booked them at the Westin, Dhaka’s flagship hotel.

  He stood at the window and looked out at the city fifteen floors down. Nestled between finger lakes, the neighborhood of Gulshan was a concrete jungle of glittering high-rises, decrepit warehouses, and half-built buildings filigreed with rebar. A chorus of horns drifted up from below. Even at ten in the morning, the traffic was nearly impassable.

  Josh’s iPhone vibrated. It was a text from Rana—“Anis is here. The meeting is set.”

  “Coming,” Josh typed back and grabbed his backpack off the bed.

  After an elevator ride to the lobby—an exotic mélange of marble, wood, and club lighting—he met Rana outside the revolving door. His driver, Anis, was waiting for them on the street beside a vintage burgundy Toyota Corolla. Before they could reach him, however, a swarm of beggars descended on Josh. Barely clothed children, skin caked with dirt, made hunger signs with their hands. Careworn women in saris and headscarves clucked at him. And men, old and young, jostled him, touching his forearms and shoulders.

  “English,” said an elderly man in a skullcap. “You English. Need help. No job.”

  “I’m sorry,” Josh replied, gently making a path with his arms. “I can’t help you.”

  He hated saying it, hated the pretense, the lie. He could buy the man food. He could buy all of them food. But it wouldn’t change their circumstances. He’d seen it a thousand times. Poverty like this was crushing and sometimes criminal, orchestrated by begging rings.

  He followed Rana into the Corolla. “How far to the Millennium factory?” he asked Anis, trying not to think about the palms on his window, hands pawing at the door.

  “Two hours,” the driver said, then grinned widely. “I will make it less.”

  In most places in the world, the rules of the road left margins for error—the space between lanes, the delay between red and green lights, speed limits that encouraged caution and care. On the streets of Dhaka, there were neither rules nor restraint. Anis used his horn more frequently than his brake pedal, and slowed only to avoid an imminent collision—an occasion that repeated itself with stomach-churning regularity. Judging by the scars on every vehicle in sight, collisions were inevitable. Indeed, on the drive to Ashulia, an industrial district north of the city, Josh witnessed a truck burning on the side of the road, a bus sideswiping a car in the quest to turn a corner, and a motorcyclist ditching his bike to avoid a street vendor. Anis, however, didn’t seem to notice.

  After an hour of demolition derby, they left the teeming city and crossed the floodplain of the Turag River, its banks littered with brick factories. Before long, Anis turned off the road and took them into a warren of dirt lanes thronged with shops and stalls. Here the traffic was mostly pedestrian—women buying vegetables and cloth, men browsing for cell phones, young children scampering about. A few paused to stare at Josh. Most paid them no heed.

  “Millennium is there,” Anis grunted, pointing out the windshield.

  The factory rose up before them like an elephant resting on his haunches, its mottled concrete walls draining light from the sky. Josh had watched footage of the fire, seen columns of flames shooting out the windows, the building’s innards completely ablaze. Fifteen months later, the only visible remnants of the holocaust were halos of soot around broken glass and twisted iron bars. The place had the forlorn look of abandonment.

  Anis pulled the Corolla to the side of the road, allowing a middle-aged man to join them in the front seat. He shook Rana’s hand over his shoulder and gave Josh a thin smile. He and Rana exchanged a few words in Bengali. Then Rana translated for Josh.

  “This is Mohammad,” Rana explained. “He is a labor activist. He was able to arrange interviews with some of the survivors.”

  Josh was immediately curious. “Tony Sharif said his people couldn’t get them to talk.”

  Again, Rana and Mohammad chatted in Bengali. Then Rana said, “That was the owner’s doing. He promised to pay the workers’ medical expenses if they kept quiet. By the time they figured out he was lying, the media was gone.”

  “What happened to him?” Josh asked.

  “He went to jail for a little while,” Rana said. “But his friends in the government bailed him out. Now he’s asking them for a loan to reopen the factory.”

  Josh grimaced. “Did the survivors get any compensation?”

  Rana shook his head. “The BGMEA—that’s the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association—gave them a little money, but not nearly enough to cover their hospital bills. The brands ran for the hills. All of them said the same thing: ‘Our clothes weren’t supposed to be there.’ Even Presto didn’t pay a dime.”

  Anis parked in an alleyway beside a medi
cine stand, and Mohammad led them to the factory gates on foot. The lanes here were narrow and badly rutted. A cluster of young men sauntered by, their eyes fixed on Josh. Mohammad spoke a string of sharp words in Bengali, but the posse didn’t disperse. Instead, the men lit cigarettes and lingered in the shadows nearby.

  “We should go,” Rana said, looking unsettled. “The owner doesn’t like attention.”

  He took Josh by the arm and guided him quickly down a footpath between cinderblock dwellings, Mohammad in the lead and Anis behind them. At six foot three, Josh had to duck his head to avoid clothes drying on lines and shuffle his feet to avoid sandals scattered around doorways. A few heads peeked out of windows, but no one spoke. The footpath led to another, and that one intersected with a third. Soon, Josh lost all sense of direction in the maze, his only landmarks sky and earth and Mohammad’s red shirt.

  At last, the labor activist slowed and knocked on a doorframe. The curtain parted and a young woman invited them in, covering her head with a scarf. Her home was a single room with a bed, a dresser, a kitchenette, and an old-fashioned Singer sewing machine. The unfinished concrete walls were decorated with newspaper clippings. On the bed sat three other women and a man, all in their twenties, and two children, a girl and a boy about six or seven.

  “This is Ishana,” Rana said, translating for Mohammad and gesturing toward their host. “She worked at Millennium. They all did, except for the children.”

  Ishana placed a plastic chair on the floor in front of the bed and pointed at Josh.

  “She wants you to sit down,” Rana explained.

  Josh glanced around the cramped space. “Where will she sit?”

  Before Rana could answer, Ishana wedged herself between the women on the mattress.

  “Please,” Rana said, gesturing with his hand. “You are her guest.”

  To Josh, the honor felt wrong in every way, but he accepted it out of respect. He took a seat and retrieved his notebook from his backpack. Rana squatted beside him, and Anis and Mohammad stood outside the door. Rana made introductions in Bengali, and then Ishana began to speak. While Josh waited for the translation, he studied the woman. Her face was a kind of contradiction—round and cherubic, yet fraught with sorrow. Her hands were small, her fingers and wrists free of jewelry. Beyond her dress and headscarf, her only adornment was a nose stud.

  “She’s twenty-eight years old,” Rana began. “She worked on the fourth floor. The day of the fire was her daughter’s birthday, but she couldn’t leave because of the last-minute order. Around nine o’clock they heard shouting, then two explosions. The lights went out. The stairwell was blocked. The fire came quickly.”

  Rana listened awhile longer, then went on. “Some men broke a window and made space between the bars. The woman beside her tried to jump, but the bars stopped her. Ishana felt something dripping on her. She thought it was water, but it was blood. She was terrified, but she knew she had to jump. When she was on the sill, someone bumped into her and she fell sideways. She would have died if she had hit the ground directly. Instead, she fell through a roof, and it cushioned the impact. It was hours before her uncle found her.”

  Josh closed his eyes, the horror of it washing over him. He saw her standing on the ledge, the growl of flames behind her, saw her shadow falling through the air, heard the shriek of metal as the roof gave way, then the thump of her body landing on the cold floor of someone’s home.

  Before long, Rana spoke again. “She woke up twelve days later in a trauma center. Her back was broken. The pain was unbearable. Eventually she was discharged, but her back never healed. She doesn’t have money for treatment. She is in pain and exhausted. Her husband—who is the man on the bed behind her—worked in the cutting room. When he jumped, a piece of metal pierced his skull. He has terrible headaches now, two or three a day. Neither of them can work. They asked a charity for money to help with treatment. But the charity only gave them a sewing machine.” Rana pointed at the Singer. “Unfortunately, she is in too much pain to use it. They have no money for rent. The landlord is about to evict them. They don’t know what to do.”

  Josh stared at the floor, his eyes welling with tears. His first instinct—as always in moments like this—was to drive his fist through a wall and then shake it at the heavens. But he didn’t do that. He absorbed the anger, buried it down deep with all the stories that had shattered his heart. He had a library of them now, tales of war and rape, beatings and stonings, even a crucifixion. But Ishana’s story was among the worst. His second instinct was to embrace her, but he suppressed that too. She was Muslim; he was a man. It would only aggravate her pain.

  He looked back at her and wiped his eyes. “Please tell her . . . ,” he began, searching for words that would matter. “Please tell her I’m sorry. It’s an awful thing they suffered.”

  Rana interpreted, his voice almost a whisper now, and Ishana nodded.

  Josh waited a moment, then spoke the first two names his source had given him. “I’m looking for a man, Ashik Hassan. He has a daughter named Sonia.” Josh took out his iPhone and showed Ishana the photo of Sonia from the night of the fire.

  Ishana glanced at the screen, and her eyes fell to the floor. When she spoke, her tone was laced with pain. “She knew them,” Rana translated. “Ashik and his wife, Joya, lived close by. They had six children—four boys and two girls. Joya died in the fire, as did their other daughter, Nasima. Sonia was badly injured. The hospital bills were too much. Ashik couldn’t afford to stay in Dhaka. He took Sonia and his sons back to his village.”

  “Does she know where they went?” Josh asked gently.

  “Kalma,” Rana said. “It’s on the Padma River south of here.”

  Josh nodded and thought back to the stories he had read from the media’s coverage of the fire. “The last order Millennium handled was the Piccola pants. Does she remember making any other clothes for Presto around that time?”

  When Ishana heard the question, her eyes brightened and she spoke with surprising animation. Josh watched Rana’s face as he listened, saw his brows arch, his eyelids expand, and knew that they had stumbled upon something significant.

  “You’re not going to believe this, but Presto was one of their biggest buyers,” Rana said. “Millennium was making clothes for them up to the time of the fire.”

  “What?” Josh was thunderstruck. “She’s certain of this?”

  “She saw the labels. Piccola, Burano, Porto Bari, all of the company’s lines.”

  Suddenly Ishana spoke again. “There’s more,” Rana continued. “On the day of the fire, Presto’s quality-control people were in the factory.”

  A shiver coursed down Josh’s spine. He remembered something then, from the night he met his source at the Lincoln Memorial. There had been a moment when the man let down his guard, and Josh saw a trace of grief in his eyes. Now Josh was beginning to understand. The story Presto had delivered to the world, a story about authorized suppliers and color-coded lists and the company’s un-wavering commitment to worker safety, was not merely a half-truth packaged for public consumption.

  It was a bald-faced lie.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MAWA-MUNSHIGANJ HIGHWAY

  SOUTH OF DHAKA, BANGLADESH

  FEBRUARY 21, 2015

  11:35 A.M.

  The road to the village of Kalma, fifty kilometers south of Dhaka, was less a highway than a dirt track worn down by thousands of vehicles and runoff from the monsoon rains that fell in the summertime, replenishing the Himalayan snowpack and making the rivers of Bangladesh run swollen into the sea. The land between the rivers was flat and verdant, with wild grass, leafy trees, and cultivated fields. Josh was in the backseat of Anis’s battered Corolla, struggling to tap out an e-mail to Lily on his iPhone between bumps in the road. She had sent him a message the night before, updating him about school and her friends and, of course, the horses. Priscilla, one of the mares, had equine distemper, which meant she had to be quarantined and treated with penicillin.
Josh found the dramas of stable management about as interesting as the Internal Revenue Code, but for Lily’s sake, he forced himself to care.

  “How much longer?” he asked Rana, who was in the front passenger seat.

  Rana chatted with Anis. “Ten minutes,” he replied. “We’re close.”

  “Thank God,” Josh said, putting the finishing touches on his message.

  On the Internet, the trip to Kalma had looked like a pleasant jaunt—ninety minutes at most. But the wizards at Google seemed blithely unaware of Dhaka’s insane congestion. The traffic anaconda had snared them at the hotel, throttled them for two hours, and only released them south of the bridge at the Buriganga River. They had been in transit since eight a.m.

  After sending the e-mail, Josh looked out the window and watched as they approached the village. He saw low-slung buildings in the distance shaded by trees and surrounded by fields of waist-high jute. There were pedestrians on the roadway, men riding bicycles and women carrying babies in slings. Anis slowed behind two hand-pulled carts piled high with sacks of rice. He honked twice, and the carts made space for him to pass on the shoulder.

  Soon they drove into a square with thatched-roof stalls and squat houses with stick fences. Some of the dwellings were constructed of mud bricks. Others were made of logs lashed together and enclosed by sheet metal.

  “Wait here,” Rana said. “I’ll get directions.”

  He climbed out of the car and struck up a conversation with an old man resting languidly outside a fruit stall. “They live down by the river,” he said when he returned. “Ashik has a new wife. The oldest boy has a job in Dhaka. The others live here.”

  On the far side of the square, they followed a cart path through groves of trees and planted fields. Everywhere, children were at play—swinging from limbs, splashing in a pond, chasing each other in a game of tag. It was a Saturday, and school was not in session.

  At the end of the road, they came upon a trio of mud huts standing beneath a date palm tree. A scrawny goat and three lean chickens were wandering about, nibbling at clumps of grass. Behind the huts, Josh saw the sparkle of water. A wispy girl was seated on a plastic chair outside the doorway of the center hut. Her eyes were open, but her body was motionless, as if frozen in time. Is that Sonia? Josh thought. In the photo, the girl’s features had been obscured. But she was the right age, and her face had a similar shape.