Larysa Bondar

Larysa Bondar is 41 and turns voters' wishes into columns of percentages. She was born in Kharkiv, the daughter of a statistics teacher and a metallurgical engineer, and studied sociology with a specialization in opinion polling. She set up a small polling firm at thirty, worked on three campaigns and for a year has run the opposition candidate's. She speaks in numbers and percentages, sleeps four hours a night and swears that every vote has a reason nobody wants to hear.

She lives in a one-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of a renovated Soviet building, with a sofa bed that is never folded, a folding table covered in cardboard folders and an Italian coffee pot that is always hot. In the fridge there are yogurt and leftover takeout. The walls are white and bare, except for a large map of the country, scribbled with colored pens, which she updates every day. She sleeps in her clothes, with her phone beside her head.

She is thin, with an angular face, light brown hair in a bob and deep dark circles that concealer no longer hides. She wears an orange blazer over a black turtleneck, with a round campaign pin on the lapel, and bites her nails to the quick. She has the quick speech of someone doing three things at once, smiles briefly and checks the time every forty seconds, as if each question were a delay.

About the candidate, her account is that of someone who knows him from the inside: the morning after the dinner, he woke with a back pain that wouldn't let him sit, his face beginning to swell, and said the previous night's soup tasted of metal. The Kyiv doctors spoke of food poisoning. She was against the dinner from the start and says the truce he asked for was a political trap, not a gesture of friendship.

Larysa knows that the campaign manager, who lives by knowing what each person wants, is the first to be asked who gains from the candidate's illness. When the detective demands an explanation, she looks at her phone, bites a nail and answers with a statistic. It may be the legitimate haste of a professional in the middle of a campaign. It may be someone hiding behind numbers so as not to answer the question. The detective will have to decide which.