Part Seven: Pavel
Pavel Molova was forty-seven.
He had been healthy until his mid-thirties, when the neurological condition that had been slowly developing — the kind of condition that is discovered late because its early manifestations are easy to attribute to other things — had crossed a threshold that made his limitations visible and then, across the subsequent years, progressive.
He had been a chemist. He had worked for a pharmaceutical research company for eleven years, and the investigators who reviewed his background found, in the records of his academic and professional history, the portrait of someone who had been genuinely skilled — the papers he had co-authored, the patents his company had filed with his contribution, the assessment of his work from a supervisor who described him as one of the most naturally precise analytical minds he had encountered in thirty years.
The disability had ended the career. It had not ended the precision.
He had not, he told the investigators when they spoke with him, intended to begin the operation as an operation. He had begun by reading — the academic literature on the substances he eventually produced, the chemistry of them, the synthesis pathways, with the specific academic interest of someone who has a trained mind and has been given too much time to be alone with it. The reading had led to experimentation. The experimentation had led, at some point he could not precisely identify, to something that had a production and a distribution.
His mother had proposed the distribution method.
He had not asked how she proposed to manage it. He had understood, without asking, that she had an idea, and the idea had involved her and her garden. He had found it difficult to look at the specifics of it, which was a form of complicity that he appeared, when he discussed it with the investigators, to understand completely.
“She was protecting me,” he said. “As she has always protected me.”
“By selling drugs from a vegetable crate,” the investigator said.
“By doing what she could with what she had,” he said. “You can characterize it as you need to characterize it. I am telling you what it was.”
He was not combative. He was the specific kind of person who has spent years in a limited space with an excellent mind and has developed, through that combination, a quality of precision in speech that could be mistaken for coldness and was not.
He was asked whether he understood that what they had done was harmful — not to themselves, not to the people who had purchased the substances voluntarily, but as a category of harm that extended beyond the transaction.
He was quiet for a moment.
“I am a chemist,” he said. “I understand the pharmacology. I understand the dependency mechanisms. I understand what happens to people.” He looked at the investigator. “I understood it when I began. I continued anyway.” He paused. “I don’t have an answer for that that doesn’t sound like an excuse.”
The investigator wrote this down.
