A Walk Across the Sun (9 page)

They followed the young man to a large wooden bookcase at the end of the hallway. The man felt along the left frame of the bookcase and tugged. The bookcase moved quietly on oiled hinges, revealing a hidden staircase. The young man slid through the opening and beckoned the girls to follow. Ahalya clutched her sister's trembling arm but didn't move.

“I will not go any further until you tell me where we are,” she said in Hindi, giving her words what strength she had left.

The young man frowned. “You are in no position to make demands.”

Ahalya's heart raced, but she delivered a stinging rebuke. “You can't do whatever you want with us. We are your guests. Where are your manners?”

The young man spat out a curse that shocked her.
“Kutti!”
Bitch! He stepped into the hallway again and slapped her across the face. The blow threw her against the wall and blood trickled from her lip.

“If you rebel, there will be consequences,” he hissed. “You are ours now. Suchir paid sixty thousand rupees for you. You will do what we say and you will repay your debt.”

Sita looked imploringly at Ahalya. “Don't fight. Do what they ask.”

Ahalya touched her throbbing cheek. Taking Sita's hand, she followed the man into the shadows of the stairwell. The walls were nearly black with soot and mold stains. The man led them into a small room furnished with a bed, a dresser, a toilet, and a sink. He turned on an overhead bulb hanging from wooden rafters.

“This is where you will live until Suchir decides otherwise. Food will be served on a regular schedule. If there is an emergency, you may pound on the floor. Someone will hear you.”

“How will we repay the debt?” Ahalya asked softly.

The young man smirked.
“Bajaana
. You will sleep with men, of course.” He laughed. “You didn't think this was a hotel, did you? This is Kamathipura.”

With that, he turned and closed the door behind him.

Sita slumped to the floor and wept silently. Ahalya wrapped her arms around her sister, reeling from the man's words. After all they had suffered, it was simply unthinkable that the white-haired man, Suchir, intended to sell them for sex. Sita was a child. Neither of them had ever slept with a man. The horror of it was beyond imagining.

Ahalya heard a knock at the door. She looked up when a woman of middle age appeared. Her large frame was wrapped in a purple sari, and her black hair was tied in a bun. She was carrying a pot of water in one hand and garlands of delicate
malati
flowers in the other.

“Do you speak Hindi?” she began.

Ahalya nodded.

“Good. I am Sumeera, but the other girls call me
Badi ma
.”

Sumeera sat before them and took a cloth from the water bowl. Wringing it out, she offered it to Ahalya. “You must be tired from the journey.”

Ahalya took the cloth, her eyes clouded with mistrust. She handed it to her sister and watched as Sita wiped her face and pressed it against her forehead.

“I brought you garlands for your hair,” Sumeera said, looking at Ahalya. “May I?”

Ahalya didn't reply. A torrent of conflicting emotions raged within her. Every year on her birthday, her mother had garlanded her hair with jasmine and marigold. She had done the same for Sita. A garland was a symbol of festivity and well-wishing. This was a house of sin. How could this strange woman be asking to do the same?

Sumeera nodded and fixed Ahalya with a look of resignation. “I once was like you,” she said. “I was taken from my home and brought here by strange men. Life in the
adda
is hard, but you must accept it. There is no use fighting your karma. Accept the discipline of God and perhaps you will be reborn in a better place.”

Draping the garland over the edge of the pot of water, she stood heavily and disappeared down the stairs.

When they were alone again, Sita dipped the cloth in the water and handed it to Ahalya. “Is she right?” Sita asked in a whisper. “Is this our karma?”

Ahalya took the cloth and stared at the floor, tears forming in her eyes.

“I don't know,” she said.

It was the truth.

Chapter 4

The highest moral law is that we should work unremittingly for the good of mankind.
—M
AHATMA
G
ANDHI

Washington, D.C.

Thomas Clarke sat in the tenth-floor conference room at Clayton|Swift, staring out the window at the law firm of Marquise & LeClair across the street. The dark-wood conference table in front of him had room to accommodate twenty-four. There were eighteen people at the present meeting—twelve lawyers, four paralegals, and two interns. The Wharton Group, as it was called, was the largest litigation team in the firm's history.

The topic of discussion today was the Wharton appeal. Of the dozen lawyers present, five did most of the talking. The rest, including Thomas, stayed silent, their BlackBerrys keeping track of the seconds that passed on sophisticated billing software that would be automatically synchronized with their firm-issued laptops at day's end. The meeting was critical. The coal company executives were outraged at the jury's verdict and were calling for blood.

No one wanted to believe it had come to this. Clayton's lawyers had played marionette with the judicial system for more than three years, searching for a way to kick the $1 billion wrongful death case out of court or to settle for pennies on the dollar. At all points, the evidence had been against the defense. The blowout at the coal company's mountaintop removal facility in West Virginia had been predicted by activists. The contractor who had pronounced the slurry safely contained in the mining tunnels was under review by the government. And then there was the problem of the kids. Ninety-one of them drowned at their lunch tables by fifty million gallons of blackwater that erupted from the mountainside upslope of their elementary school. The Wharton Group had only one strategy to defeat the families of the dead, and that was to prevent them from ever telling their story to a jury.

The strategy had almost worked. The pressure of litigating against a firm and a coal company with near-infinite resources had driven the plaintiffs to the brink of civil war, and they almost bought Wharton's last-minute offer of settlement. In the end, however, they had stayed the course, and the jury trial when it came was a fait accompli. The only question was how high the verdict would go.

After three grueling weeks, Judge Hirschel sent the jurors out to deliberate. They returned an hour later with a verdict that shocked even the thickest-skinned courtroom veterans: $300 million in compensatory damages and $600 million in punitives. Nine tenths of a billion dollars. It was not simply a message. It was a bombshell.

The fallout had been immediate and devastating. Overnight, Wharton's stock lost half its value. But Clayton's strategy was not yet complete. Standing on the courthouse steps, Wharton's chief executive proclaimed his company's innocence and vowed to fight the verdict all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In reality, he wanted nothing more than to kick the can down the road. Even if the verdict was ultimately affirmed, the plaintiffs would spend five years waiting for the money to come. By then, who knew how many of them would settle for a song?

Despite the meeting's importance, Thomas had struggled to keep his mind on the appeal. His thoughts had drifted from the kidnapping he'd witnessed in Fayetteville, to Tera Atwood sitting across the table from him, to the school pictures the plaintiffs' attorneys had showed the jury. What he had told his father last night was true: it was hard to like a company that had killed a schoolhouse full of children. On the other hand, liking Wharton was irrelevant to the representation. A lawyer's job was to fight for his client and let others decide what was right and what was wrong.

He tuned in to the conversation when Maximillian Junger stood from his seat at the head of the table. Junger was the managing partner of the litigation division and the leader of the Wharton Group. He was also a personal friend of Thomas's father.

“The appeals team will be led by Mark Blake,” Junger said in the oracular voice that had charmed juries for more than thirty years. “He'll be assisted on the briefs by Hans Kristof and a core group of associates.”

Junger used a remote control to access a flat-screen television mounted in the wall behind two retracting wood panels. He powered on the unit, and the names of those on the appeals team were displayed. Thomas's heart sank; he was not on the list. He glanced at Tera. Unlike him, she had been selected for the assignment. She smiled at him, but her eyes were sad. Their days of working closely together on the case were over.

Thomas looked back at Junger. “To the rest of you,” he was saying, “allow me to extend the firm's thanks for your efforts over the past forty months. The verdict was a disappointment, but as we've discussed, there are many grounds for appeal. If you're not on the appeals team, talk to your supervising partner. We have a number of pending cases that need attention.”

Junger glanced at the clock on the wall. The thirty minutes blocked out for the meeting were over. “Thanks for your attendance,” he said. “This meeting is adjourned.”

Thomas stood up quickly and headed for the door, hoping to escape before he had to face any of the other associates, especially Tera. Max Junger met him in the hallway and walked with him to the elevator. When they were inside, Junger pressed the button for the twelfth floor. Thomas reached for the seventh-floor button, but Junger stopped him.

“It's been a while since we visited,” he said. “Why don't we chat in my office?”

Thomas nodded, but his mind raced with the implications of the invitation. A private meeting with Junger was not a propitious sign. Good news was always channeled through the chain of command.

“How is your father?” Junger asked, making conversation.

“He's well,” Thomas said, trying to calm his nerves. “He talks about you all the time.”

“And uses me as a point of humor, I'm sure,” Junger said with a selfdeprecating smile. “He's been doing that since law school.”

Before he was elevated to the bench, the Judge had been one of Clayton's star litigators and a colleague of Junger's. Years before that, they were classmates at Virginia Law.

The elevator door opened, and Junger led the way through the ornate twelfth-floor lobby and into his office. The room had enough space to accommodate at least fifteen of the cubicles in which associates like Thomas had to work. The walls were cherry-paneled and studded with bookcases and original artwork. It was an intimidating setting in the best of times. In the worst of times, it was suffocating.

“Make yourself comfortable,” Junger said, gesturing to a sitting area with an overstuffed couch and wingback chairs. Thomas sat in one of the chairs, and Junger took a seat on the sofa. He crossed his legs and tented his hands, looking at Thomas with his piercing hazel eyes.

“How are you?” he asked. “It was September, wasn't it, when you lost your little girl?”

Thomas took a deep breath and nodded. “I have good days and bad days. It's about what you would expect.”

“Hmm.” Junger paused reflectively. “When Margie and I lost Morgan, I felt like I was underwater. I had no idea where the surface was.”

Thomas had heard the story from his father. Junger's sixteen-yearold daughter had been killed in a head-on collision with a logging truck a decade ago.

“An apt description,” Thomas replied, wishing Junger would get on with it.

“Do you know what brought me back, what gave me a sense of purpose again?”

Thomas shook his head.

“It was Margie's idea. She told me I needed to take a break from the firm. I remember laughing at her. When you're a partner, you'll understand: there is never a good time to get away. In the end, though, she didn't leave me much choice. So I called up Bobby Patterson, who was then dean at Virginia, and asked if he could use an old warhorse in the classroom for a year. Teaching was the best decision I could have made. It gave me new life.”

Junger fell silent, and Thomas waited for the axe to fall. A clock ticked nearby. It was the only sound in the office, other than the hammering of his heart.

“I spoke to Mark Blake,” Junger said, confirming Thomas's suspicions. “He told me about the Samuelson case.”

Thomas pursed his lips but made no preemptive defense.

“My sense is that Mark overreacted, but you have to understand the pressure he's been under, leading the effort in the courtroom. Wharton Coal has paid this firm over twenty million dollars in the course of our representation—a huge fee. Jack Barrows, Wharton's chief, desperately wanted us to keep the jury from seeing that morbid simulation of the blowout. All those computer-generated children running for their lives. The sludge catching up to them. The little markers where the bodies lay, red for boys, blue for girls. It was inflammatory, prejudicial, and predicated on any number of unprovable assumptions. You know the argument. You wrote the brief.”

Thomas nodded.

“The Samuelson case was the linchpin of Mark's argument. Who can blame him? The judge who wrote the opinion was a friend of Judge Hirschel's. It had all that beautiful language about the dangers of unscientific evidence designed to exploit the jury's passions. As you can imagine, Mark was humiliated when Judge Hirschel told him the Third Circuit had overturned the decision. And Jack Barrows was apoplectic. I think Jack overreacted too. My guess is that the judge would have let the plaintiffs show the simulation to the jury anyway. But Barrows blamed Mark for the fact that the simulation came into evidence.”

Junger eyed him closely. “None of this is surprising to you, I imagine.”

Thomas shook his head.

“But there's more, and this is confidential. After the verdict was handed down, Barrows threatened to sue the firm for malpractice. The threat is still on the table. Only a few people know that at this stage. We're hopeful the appeal will sort things out.”