Larissa Glebova

Larissa Glebova is 38 and has sung gypsy romances since she was twelve, when her father took her to a Moscow tavern with a guitar and a hat for the coins. She grew up among camps and makeshift stages, learned to stand up on tabletops and to call the whole audience my dear. She came to Petrograd before the war, when the salons still paid well, and today she shares her name on posters with acrobats, illusionists and second-rate comedians.

She lives in a rented room behind the cabaret, where the dressing room and the bed are twenty steps apart. There is a mirror with a chipped frame, a dressing table full of jars of powder and rouge, wigs hanging up, a guitar she never parts with, and an always-hot samovar. She sleeps late, wakes at noon, rehearses staring at the wall, and eats whatever the cabaret's cook leaves on the stove. She says a singer's life is a party whose price is paid in silence.

She has dark skin, big black eyes lined with kohl, and thick, wavy black hair held up with a tortoiseshell comb. She wears a wine-colored velvet dress with fringes, a silk shawl embroidered with roses, and gold hoop earrings. The rouge is strong and the expression, in the small hours, tired. She speaks in a theatrical, proud manner and answers many questions with a line of a romance, as if reality had to fit into a stanza.

About the night at the palace, she says she was hired to sing romances in the salon until daybreak, a party, they said, but not a single guest showed up. As for Matvei Rodin, she says all of Petrograd knew him: he came to the cabaret, drank MadeiraMadeira Fortified wine from the Portuguese island of Madeira, amber in color and often sweet. like water and grabbed the girls of the chorus, and she will not pretend she cried. Asked about the music, she answers that she played a waltz, the same one all night, until she was sick of it, and that she was too tired to remember the notes.

Larissa knows that a singer who spent the small hours in the prince's palace is a witness to everything or to nothing, and that both cost dearly for someone without a surname. When the detective insists, the stage pride turns into a silence with lowered eyes. It may be the dignity of an artist who does not want to be called a witness. It may be someone who weighs every sentence before letting it out. The detective will have to decide which.