“Have a few bites, at least,” I said.
“I’m not hungry,” she replied without looking up.
“There are other lawyers in America,” I said. “If he says no, you’ll find—”
“I don’t want another lawyer. There’s no way we can put up a real fight against them unless we bring one of the big New York guys. Carlos is our best chance.”
The phone was in her hand even before it finished its first ring. For most of the conversation, she listened. When she hung up, the look on her face was of neither relief nor excitement. Carlos had merely given her more to worry about.
Kosawa’s case against Pexton was weak, the lawyer had told her; based on his preliminary research, Pexton’s agreement with our government was that Pexton would extract the crude and our government would be responsible for all negative externalities. What this meant, he explained, was that if the case ended up in a trial, Pexton wasn’t going to deny that its practices led to spills that famished Kosawa’s soil. Its lawyers wouldn’t try to dispute that the waste on the big river was from their oil field. They wouldn’t even need to argue that the children’s deaths had nothing to do with them. All they would need to show was evidence that our government had relieved them of any responsibility to the land and people in exchange for splitting the oil profits.
“Does that mean he won’t take the case?” I asked her.
“He needs time to think about it.”
“What about his fees?”
“That’s another thing. He doesn’t do contingency fees, and he knows we can’t afford him. He’s going to talk to his partners and see whether someone can do it pro bono. We’ll have to find a way to pay whatever expenses come up.”
A few weeks later, she received a phone call from Carlos saying that he had decided to take the case on a contingency-fee basis. First, though, Kosawa would have to drop the case brought on by the Restoration Movement; Thula would need to talk to the Restoration Movement and inform them of the village’s decision to hire Carlos and start a new lawsuit. Once the old suit was dropped, Carlos would file a new one, accusing Pexton of conspiracy under something called the Alien Tort Statute. His argument would be that Pexton knew, going into a partnership with His Excellency’s government, that it was a government that cared nothing for the welfare of its people. Pexton took advantage of this and violated international laws, causing untold damages to property and lives in Kosawa.
Pexton was certainly going to ask the judge to dismiss a case they’d label frivolous, Carlos said, but he would request that the judge subpoena their internal documents related to Kosawa as far back as when its workers first appeared in the valley. At trial, Carlos would ask the court to impose substantial compensatory and punitive damages. None of this was to suggest that the battle was going to be easy or pretty, the lawyer cautioned—it’d likely take years, suits against powerful corporations were nearly impossible, Kosawa’s chance of victory in an American court was infinitesimal. He didn’t want the village to rest all their hope on it, though he was going to fight hard for them.
* * *
—
My sister had never been someone who jumped for joy at many things, but as she updated me in my living room, she couldn’t stop skipping around and saying, I can’t believe it’s happening, it’s finally happening. She’d lived in America, she knew what its courts were like, yet she put Kosawa’s fate entirely in its hands, because where else could she put it?
When she gathered the village in the square to tell them about their new lawyer, they cheered, and hugged each other, some even shedding jubilant tears, amazed that a mere four years after her return from America, Thula was already on the verge of saving Kosawa. She did not attempt to curb their celebration—their joy was her strength—but she nonetheless told them that the odds were against them, Pexton had armies of lawyers, but Carlos was fearsome too; he’d never lost a big case, and he was in this to win. One of the Five stood up and gave a stirring speech about how Pexton had been cornered at last, by the time this was over they would wish they had never stepped foot on our land.
After the village meeting, Thula informed the elders in a closed-door meeting in Sonni’s hut that, though Carlos would be working on a contingency-fee basis, he’d still need money for expenses, including payment for the experts who would be coming for a reconnaissance trip. Carlos couldn’t file any papers without a large amount of money up-front, so he had referred Thula to someone who could lend the village the money, someone at a place called a hedge fund. The hedge fund would give Carlos the money he needed, and if Kosawa won the lawsuit, they would give the hedge-fund people a percentage of what they got from Pexton. After giving Carlos and the hedge-fund people their percentages, Kosawa would get to keep less than a third of the awarded damages.