Timofei Bragin

Timofei Bragin is 56 and has guarded the same stretch of the canal quay for twenty-two years. He was born in a village in Tver, the son of peasants who lost their land to a count, and came to the capital still a boy, with a priest's recommendation. He was a doorman, then a warehouse watchman, until the municipal guard gave him a cap and a truncheon. He says he knows every window on the canal and every dog that barks in them, and no one on the street doubts it.

He lives in a wooden room at the back of a tenement on the outskirts, with a wood stove, a narrow bed, a table with a frayed linen cloth and, in the corner, a small icon of Saint Nicholas with a little lamp he never lets go out. He crosses himself on entering and on leaving. His wife died of typhus ten years ago. He keeps his pension money in a tea tin and never complains about the cold, because the cold, he says, is part of the job.

He has a broad face reddened by the frost, a reddish nose, a thick gray beard that carries ice at the tips, and eyes that water all winter long. He wears a fur cap with the municipal guard's badge, a long gray coat of thick wool with brass buttons and, at his belt, the truncheon. He carries a kerosene lantern that he lights as the afternoon falls. He speaks slowly, with suspicion, and is afraid of any paper that mentions the word pension.

About the night on the canal, he says he heard shots, three of them, between 2:30 and 2:40, in the courtyard of the Sarkanov palace, because with the canal frozen the sound travels far. For twenty-two years, since the old tsar's time, he has watched that stretch, and he knows the canal like the palm of his hand. When someone suggests he slept on duty, he answers curtly that he did not sleep, and that they should ask properly, and he will answer properly. He speaks of the quay the way one speaks of home.

Timofei knows that a guard who spent the whole night in front of a canal where a body turned up is a witness when it suits and a culprit when it does not. When the detective presses, the slowness turns to hardness, and he recalls his twenty-two years of service. It may be the pride of a simple man wounded in the only thing he has. It may be someone who weighs the fear in every word. The detective will have to decide which.