Kirill Sarkanov

Kirill Sarkanov is 29 and the owner of the palace on the canal, an inheritance from a family that already owned land on the Volga when Petersburg was still a swamp. He grew up among French governesses and English tutors, studied in England for two years without finishing, and came back to Russia with the habit of mixing three languages in a single sentence. In any room, he still behaves as the best-connected man in it.

He lives on the upper floor of the palace, in a study lined with green leather where no one enters unless summoned: a deep sofa, a chess table with the pieces frozen in an old game, shelves of French books, and a tiled fireplace he keeps lit even in summer. He sleeps by day and lives by night. He suffers terrible migraines, which he treats with drawn curtains and other people's patience, and says his head never rests because the country never rests.

He is thin and elegant, with a pale, delicate face, light blue eyes with deep shadows beneath them, and dark hair slicked back with brilliantine. The thin mustache is trimmed with a ruler. He wears a black dinner jacket with gold cufflinks, a signet ring on his little finger, and always keeps a cigarette between his restless fingers, lighting it and forgetting it in the ashtray. He speaks French when he wants to humiliate someone, and the police, he says, fall into that category by vocation.

About the healer Matvei Rodin, he says the man has been treating his migraines for months, at the healer's own house, and that if he stopped by the palace, it was for a quick tea. About the small hours, he says he hired the gypsy singer Larissa Glebova to sing romances in the salon and that he paid for her October voice, not her December one. About the quay, he points to the old guard who has smelled of vodka since noon, Prohibition or no, and suggests the police ask him what he was doing in the sentry box instead of walking his rounds.

Kirill knows that a prince who owns the palace where there was a party all night is the first name any inspector writes in his notebook. When the detective presses, the irony turns to coldness: he asks that voices be lowered in his salon, reminds the detective he is not yet a defendant, and talks of calling the family lawyer. It may be the haughtiness of a man who has never been treated as a suspect. It may be someone hiding behind a surname. The detective will have to decide which.