Part Six: Irina
The interview with Irina Molova took place the following morning.
She had spent the night in custody and had slept, the custody officer reported, without apparent difficulty, which was itself a kind of character study. She arrived at the interview room with the same quality she had maintained throughout — the specific, self-possessed quality of someone who has been playing a long game and who has not panicked at the exposure of it, because panic is not a quality that fits the role she had spent three years perfecting.
The detective who conducted the interview was a woman named Rosa Navarro, who was forty-four and had been in investigations for twelve years and who had the specific gift of making people feel that conversation with her was not consequential when it was.
Irina Molova sat across the table and answered questions with the economy of someone who had already determined exactly how much to say.
She confirmed her name, her address, her son’s name. She confirmed that she had been selling produce on the street. She confirmed that her son had medical needs and that money was difficult.
When Navarro asked about the substances found in the produce, she said nothing for a moment. Then she said: “You would do anything for your child.”
It was not a confession, exactly. It was not an evasion either. It was a statement that was true on its face and that contained within it a kind of compressed moral argument — the argument that the love of a parent for a child is its own justification, that extreme circumstances produce extreme measures, that the line between what is legal and what is necessary is drawn differently when the person who needs help is the person you love most.
Navarro had heard versions of this argument before. She received it with the expression of someone who understands its emotional logic and is not going to pretend otherwise, and who is also not going to let it do the work it is designed to do.
“Tell me about the operation,” she said.
Irina looked at her.
“My son is intelligent,” she said. “More intelligent than his body allows. He needed something to do with his mind.” She said this without self-pity, which made it harder to receive than self-pity would have been. “We needed money. These were things that intersected.”
“How long?”
“Three years, approximately.”
“The method — the vegetables.”
Irina’s expression shifted very slightly. Something that was not quite pride and not quite satisfaction — the expression of someone who has done something well and cannot fully suppress the recognition of that fact even in circumstances that make the recognition inadvisable.
“It was effective,” she said.
“Who were the customers?”
“People who knew to ask.”
“How did they know?”
She said nothing.
Navarro looked at her. “You understand,” Navarro said, “that your cooperation affects how this proceeds.”
“I understand,” Irina said. “I also understand that I am seventy-six years old.” She looked at the table. “I am not afraid of consequences for myself. I am afraid of what happens to Pavel.”
This was the clearest thing she had said in the interview, and it was the thing that Navarro wrote down with more care than anything else. Not because it was legally significant — it wasn’t, particularly — but because it was true in a way that the rest of the conversation had only approximately been.
“His needs will be assessed,” Navarro said. “Whatever happens in the legal proceeding, his medical situation will be addressed.”
Irina looked at her with the clear pale blue eyes that had looked at Reyes the previous morning across a crate of vegetables.
“Will it?” she said.
Navarro did not answer immediately, because the honest answer was complicated, and she was not someone who gave dishonest answers when the honest ones were complicated.
“I will make sure it is flagged,” she said. “I can do that much.”
Irina nodded once, the nod of someone accepting something less than what they asked for because it is what is available.
