Paradis sur Terre was the first step in that plan. It was designed to be a world-class manufacturing facility carved out of the jungles of Myanmar, incorporating the latest technological advances in equipment. It was also designed to be a model for the best practices in employee well-being. Because the factory was so remote from any town or village, the company built on-site dining halls and dormitories for the workers that were so clean and modern—and air-conditioned!—that they almost rivaled some of the seaside resorts in the region. When the job postings went up, the company was flooded with applicants. As a result it was able to hire the best, most skilled workers, two thousand of them, who all happily relocated to Paradise on Earth. They even brought their families with them; many of the photos showed young children sitting with their parents at the long communal dining tables.

I thought it sounded wonderful. It was grand and experimental and could have become a paragon of manufacturing for the future. It should have been allowed more time to get established and eventually turn a profit. But the stockholders were a shortsighted bunch. Many of their grievances in the Palmer lawsuit focused on the losses at Paradis sur Terre. The shareholders attacked management for green-lighting the factory, complaining that it was nothing but a vanity project for Madame de Martineau. That it was a drain on company resources. They wanted quick returns, not long-term advancements, and their greed had doomed this little piece of paradise.

I had to laugh at the thoughts in my head. Already I was living up to my interview hype and believing whatever I needed to believe for my client to prevail. But I was fine with that. If it meant I could work again, I was more than happy to drink the CDMI Kool-Aid.

Some of the file boxes I’d wheeled next door had been shipped from Myanmar and labeled PsT. Now I realized that referred to Paradis sur Terre. If so, those files might be relevant to my work on the Palmer case. I could get started right away.

I went next door and unsealed the boxes. Inside the first several boxes were expense reports—invoices and payroll records and utility bills and the like. Another set of boxes held capital cost documentation reflecting the purchase and installation of factory equipment such as pressing machines, robotic cutting machines, and many hundreds of industrial sewing machines. Heavy equipment was in there, too—conveyor systems and speed rails, generators, forklifts, trucks. There were also thick binders of the closing documents for a number of real estate transactions. It seemed that CDMI had purchased the tracts of land for the PsT site from the local military establishment.

A third set of boxes held reports titled “Liquidation Proceeds 2013,” and the attached backup included bills of sale for the factory equipment and more closing documents for the various parcels of real estate, including all improvements and fixtures thereon. The documents in another box reflected the sale of raw materials and of inventory, finished and unfinished.