Fashionably Late (59 page)

Looking out the window, she saw the same shacks and down-at-heel housing that she would see in the Caribbean or any of the poorer Asian countries. But the massive factory that they drove by was modern and clean. It even had an American flag waving over the huge building.

She wondered if Bill sanitized these tours for people. Well, he wouldn’t have time to do it now. “Let’s stop,” she said.

“Don’t you want to go to the hotel and clean up?” he asked. “You need to rest. I have the tour set for tomorrow morning.”

“Let’s just stop now,” she said. “Get it over with.” Perhaps they’d spend tomorrow in bed. Bill shrugged, leaned forward, and knocked on the glass that separated them from the driver. They had already passed the entrance to the plant, but when Bill explained what he wanted, they pulled a U-turn. If he was uncomfortable with the change of plans, he didn’t show it.

They pulled up to the entrance of the huge corrugated iron building.

There were no windows, but it was painted a neat blue. Big as an airplane hangar, the building had a front door that seemed tiny in proportion.

But as they stepped out of the car, a line of men filed out the door and lined up before them. There was a lot of bowing as the NormCo rep introduced the staff to both Bill and Karen. Introductions took so long that Karen couldn’t help wondering if they were stalling while everyone inside cleaned up their room. But at last they were ushered through the portals.

The noise was shocking. Hundreds of machines were lined up, with workers at each one and runners moving up and down the aisles carrying cut fabric and finished garments. It was very hot, but despite the din and the heat, the place was well-lit and no dirtier than her own workrooms back on Seventh Avenue. A supervisor was shouting something in Chinese to an assistant, who was bowing and gesturing them toward a glassed-in office. Karen smiled but shook her head. She didn’t need tea in some offlce. She wanted to see what was what. She began to walk down one of the aisles. There was much shouting behind her but she kept on walking and it must have been all right because Bill followed her.

On this aisle most of the operators seemed to be women, although Karen could see men’s heads bowed over other machines several rows away.

Several of the girls looked up curiously, but quickly dropped their eyes.

One or two of them looked young, perhaps teenagers. “Is there a minimum age?” she asked. Bill couldn’t hear her and she had to shout.

“I’m sure there is,” he told her. He turned to his rep and asked.

After a discussion with the supervisor they waited for the rep to answer.

“Minimum age eighteen,” the supervisor said. “Some lie to get this job, but we must have papers. Remember that girls look very young but not be very young.” Karen nodded. She wandered along, not knowing what she was looking for but simply observing. She left the huge machine room and came to a cutting room behind it, where immense tables were laid out, fabric spread upon them. Here, the workers were all men.

It was odd to think that these small, dark Asians were busy cutting stonewashed denim that would be bought in WalMarts in Nebraska. The Northern Mananas were a speck on the globe and a loophole in the import quotas. They accounted for only a small portion of the enormous offshore production of American clothes, and though the “Made in U.S.A.” labels being sewn into each garment seemed to Karen to be a lie, they were legal and it looked to her as if there was nothing wrong here. She’d lost her baby, and she didn’t have the strength to look for another.

Now, at least, she could give her firrn to Bill and concentrate on expanding her business with a clear conscience. She turned to Bill.

He would be her new partner. “I’m tired,” she said. “Do you think we can go to the hotel now?”

* They had dinner together, in a restaurant that featured a wall of dripping water and a koi pool. She told Bill that she would sign the contract and she did, with a flourish, right at the dinner table. He put it in the pouch that the rep would have back to Robertthe-lawyer in New York within twenty-four hours. Exhausted with the travel and the decision, Karen went up to bed alone.

She had been sleeping for some time when the phone rang. A voice with a heavy accent was on the line. “I think you have the wrong room,” she said, but the man repeated himself.

“Mrs. Kahn?” he asked. “Please, Mrs. Kahn, I must see you. My name is Lars Dagsvarr.”

Oh God, she thought. What was this? Some crazy Swedish designer who was looking for a job? Some rep of a textile house who wouldn’t know how to take no for an answer? Or maybe some reporter, from the trades or from the local papers who wanted an interview? How did he get her room number? She was supposed to be protected from this kind of stuff and she was in no mood for jokes. “Do I know you, Mr. Dagsvarr?”

“No, Mrs but I must talk to you. Please Mrs.”

“What is this about?” she sighed.

“People’s lifes,” he said, but despite the mispronunciation, the drama of his words, and the tenseness of his voice, Karen didn’t hear hysteria. The voice seemed grounded. For some reason, she believed him, although there was no reason to. Then he said, “Your father, Mr. Arnold Lipsky, said for me to call.”

“I’ll come down to the lobby,” she sighed. She trusted her instincts and her father but she certainly wasn’t going to let this stranger come up to her room.

“That won’t do,” he said. He paused. “I am with two ladies. One is much older. May we please come up? It is of upmost importance.”

Karen was tempted to smile at the “upmost,” but wasn’t it a logical mistake? How could this be some kind of confidence scam? She paused, and wondered if she should call Bill Wolper. “Let me speak to her,” Karen said.

“Certainly, Mrs but she doesn’t have much English.” There was a moment that the phone was jostled about and then an older woman’s voice came on.

“Yah? Halloo?” The voice said with the unmistakable quaver of age and the lilt of the Scandinavian.

“You want to see me?” Karen asked. There was some talk at the other end of the line.

“Yah. Please. For the children. Tak,” the voice said, and the man, Mr. Dagsvarr, was back on the line.

“We can see you?” he asked.

“Yes,” she agreed.

* They were missionaries. Karen had kept the chain on the door when they had arrived in the hallway, but Mr. Dagsvarr was indeed accompanied by a large-boned, white-haired elderly woman and a tiny young Asian girl who looked as if she were barely out of her teens.

Karen had invited them in and settled them into the living room area of her suite. She offered them drinks, but they declined.

“You see, we are here on a matter of upmost urgency,” Mr. Dagsvarr explained. “We have been working with the people of Saipan for three years. Mrs. Lemmon has been here even much longer,” he said, deferring to the old woman, whose bright blue-eyed gaze never left Karen’s face.

“Your father knows of our mission. He has sometimes helped. Mrs. Lemmon started the work but we carry it on, my wife and I.” Here he nodded at the Asian woman. He leaned forward, putting both of his big hands on his bony knees. All three of them wore white. Karen wondered if it had something to do with their religion. If she had known they were missionaries she would never had let them up. Arnold and missiorlaries?

Arnold hated organized religion. He worshiped organized labor. Yet these people had mentioned chiidren. She sensed something important.

“Mrs you must not send work here. We know you are most famous and very respecting. So it is important for you to know what happens here.

Here in Saipan people are slaves. Many people, Chinese and Philippine people, come here for work. Some are sold here.”

Karen sat up. “What do you mean, slaves’?” she asked. “What do you mean, sold’?”

“It is so. In China, people are told there are jobs for them in America. They must pay a broker, an agent, very much money, sometimes thousands, in dollars, Mrs to be brought here. It is not America, but the broker will not send them back to China. He delivers them to the factories. But the pay here is very bad. Pennies an hour. And people must work many, many hours. They think they will be in America but they are five thousand miles from America, and they do not make enough money even to live. They cannot pay back their families the money spent to send them here. They are shamed. They are poor. They are alone. And the agents or the factories give them holes to live in.”

Mrs. Dagsvarrţfor the young Asian girl was his wifeţleaned forward and spoke for the first time. “Live like pigs,” she said. “Live worse than pigs.”

“We are trying to change this system,” said Mr. Dagsvarr. “We are hoping people in America will know about this crime. Girls are sent here, young, and they must work and work with no hope to go home or to move on. It is like an island of slaves,” Mr. Dagsvarr said.

“Of lost souls,” the older lady, Mrs. Lemmon, said. She stood up.

“Come,” she said. “See.” It wasn’t an invitation. It was a command.

And Karen stood up in answer to it. After all, this was exactly what she had been afraid of. Somehow, she’d known it all along. She could not turn her back. She was Arnold’s daughter. She felt a sinking feeling in her stomach, but turned and got her jacket. Quickly, she picked up her room key, passport, and some money. Without a purse, she stuffed the small handful into her pocket.

“Let’s go,” she said.

The dormitories were unspeakable. There were some, like barracks, where fifty or sixty women, most of them very young, were housed with only two or three toilets, a sink at each end of the building, and no kitchen at all. The floor was bare, cracked cement. Some women had strung up tattered sheets for a bit of privacy but the place was bedlam. The heat was almost unendurable. The girls, the women, sat solemnly on beds that were little more than cots, or lay immobile on lumpy, fetid mattresses or piles of rags on the floor. Some ignored the group of four foreigners. Others ran to Mrs. Lemmon or to Mrs. Dagsvarr and chattered at them in Chinese. The smell was indescribable: a combination of dirty clothes, rancid oil, and mildew.

Near the toilets the smell of sewage was overpowering. Karen thought of her suite at the Oriental, and the two air-conditioned rooms she had here, just a few miles away.

“But this isn’t a NormCo dorm, is it?” she asked. Had Bill fooled her so completely?

“NormCo doesn’t have housing,” Mr. Dagsvarr explained. “They only contract for workers with Mr. Tang. Mr. Tang is the biggest man on the island. He owns factories, owns these barracks. He brings in thousands of workers. All think they will be in America, that they will become rich and send home money to save their families. Instead, they are paid almost nothing and are charged very much for this house and for food.”

“But can’t they protest? Can’t they organize?”

“If they complain they will be thrown out. Then they have nothing.”

He looked around at the filth and the gloom. “Very little is a lot more than nothing.” He paused. “Shall I show you the ones who protest? The ones who have nothing?” he asked.

In the gloom, Karen nodded. “Show me,” she said.

The house was more accurately a shack. There was no plumbing, no running water at all. The floor was dirt. Fourteen women lived in the two rooms. All had been fired, either for making trouble or for producing too slowly. Some had worked eighty-hour weeks until their vision went.

Mrs. Dagsvarr explained, haltingly, that several had been asked to sleep with factory supervisors. If they refused, they were fired. If they agreed and got pregnant, they were also fired. Whatever they did, the result was the same: they wound up as prostitutes, servicing the equally impoverished men who could spare a few cents. Karen wondered if Mrs. Dagsvarr herself had been rescued from that.

Mrs. Dagsvarr silently unpacked clothes and food from the trunk of their battered Toyota. The women gathered silently around the car.

They were eager, but all turned their eyes away from Karen. “They are shy,” Mr. Dagsvarr explained.

“They are shamed,” his wife corrected.

Then, from out of the darkness, a woman began to yell. She came running toward the car and for a moment Karen thought she meant them harm. But Mrs. Lemmon listened to the girl as she shouted, breathing hard and standing before them, her legs spread as if she were ready to run again, back into the darkness she had come from. All three of the missionaries stiffened. Mr. Dagsvarr turned to Karen. “One of the girls has been taken to the hospital. She is having her baby, but there is a problem.

We must go right away. The hospital won’t take her in.”

“I’ll come too,” Karen said.

The girl’s name was something like Mei Ling. She sat, hunched on the floor, leaning against the cinderblock wall of the emergency room.

Mrs. Lemmon knelt beside her. So did Mrs. Dagsvarr, while Mr. Dagsvarr stepped over other bodies that littered the corridor. He made his way to the desk. A fat, dark woman in a green hospital jacket sat behind the desk, blocking the mayhem before her with a sliding glass partition. Mr. Dagsvarr pushed it open. The woman, a nurse or an administrator, looked up with a bored expression.

“You must help Mrs. Ling,” Mr. Dagsvarr said. “She’s in labor.”

“She is a citizen?” the woman asked.

“No,” Mr. Dagsvarr admitted.

“She have insurance?” the woman asked.

“No. But we will pay. You must see her.”

The woman slowly reached down into a drawer and took out a form. “You the father?” she asked.

Karen tbought she saw Mr. Dagsvarr blush, but if it was with embarrassment or anger, she could not tell. “No,” he said. Then, “You must hurry,” he said.

“It’s four hundred dollars for delivery,” she said. “You have that?”

Karen reached into her pocket and pulled out five hundreddollar bills.

“Here,” she said, handing the woman four. She took the last hundred and put it on the desk. “This is for you. Now, get a stretcher and bring that girl in to a doctor. Now.”

Mei Ling had left a trail of blood and a baby behind her when she died two hours later. The girl was thirteen or perhaps fourteen: maybe the exact same age as Tiffany. Mr. Dagsvarr explained that children often lied about their age to be eligible for work. Mei Ling had hemorrhaged before the breech birth had even begun and didn’t live to see the baby, who was, it appeared, a healthy daughter. Karen stood in the bloody hallway and wept. Mr. Dagsvarr said a prayer and then christened the little girl. Karen stepped into the room for a moment and looked down at the baby in his arms. Its hair was a halo of black feathers, and, despite the difficult birth, her skin was a beautiful soft gold color.