I scanned it. “Beginning tomorrow.”

“Yes. So there’s no need for you to stay here today.”

“I wonder . . .” I got to my feet. “Perhaps I could go around and meet some of the people in the Law Department?” There were a dozen other in-house lawyers I knew of, specializing in such fields as real estate transactions, securities compliance, trademark enforcement, and labor law. It was like its own mini law firm.

“Oh, there’s no need for that. Since you’ll be working directly with Mr. Barrett on the Palmer case. So feel free to go home. Start fresh tomorrow.” With a parting smile, the woman glided away.

I stayed at my desk. I didn’t like the idea of a false start. It made me nervous, as if the job might disappear if I didn’t get my hooks solidly into it today. I read the employee manual from cover to cover, then cast about for something productive to do. I recalled seeing copies of the company’s annual reports in the reception area, and even though I’d already studied the public filings online, I went out and fetched the glossy publications from the coffee table and brought them back to my office to read again.

Lunch was an apple, sliced, spread with peanut butter I carried in a little tub. The cover of the latest report showed a white dove swooping over Planet Earth. Inside was a photo of the chairman of the board, Claudine de Martineau. It wasn’t one of her flashback modeling photos, but it wasn’t recent, either. Her hair was black, and her lips were full and red, and she stood next to a dressmaker’s dummy with a tape measure around her neck.

Page after page showed glossy photos of beautiful people in beautiful clothes, interspersed with glossy photos of clean and modern manufacturing facilities. Then came the matte pages with no photos, only numbers and charts with lines moving in the wrong direction. There’d been some losses over the last several quarters, the board acknowledged in its letter to shareholders, but significant steps had been taken to cut costs, and management was confident the losses had been stemmed. Principal among the cost-cutting moves was the recent closing of Paradis sur Terre, the company’s manufacturing facility in Myanmar. Not only would that slash expenses dramatically, but they’d been enormously successful in selling off the equipment and inventory and other capital items from that facility, realizing much more than the original cost. The printed materials included a press release to that effect, in which Madame de Martineau was quoted as saying, “We’ve turned the proverbial sow’s ear into a silk purse. Which is nothing less than you’d expect from a fashion giant like CDMI.”

The Paradis sur Terre facility was much ballyhooed in the three annual reports preceding that one. The standard business model in the garment industry was to sub out production to independent contractors, most of them small sewing factories in Southeast Asia. Many of them were notorious sweatshops. CDMI was determined to break that mold and to end the abhorrent conditions by eventually moving all its production in-house.