Kyril
Who they are
One of Arkady Pashkin’s two advance men, and the one who does the pretending: he speaks no English in C04 when it suits him, and fluent English in C15 when it does not. He is big, he smokes stubby filterless cigarettes, and he spends his evenings in London on a hookah outside a Marble Arch restaurant, making friends — which is what lets Min Harper pick him out of a crowd and follow him.
He is professional muscle rather than a believer: he carries a gun he denies carrying, eats and drinks with the slow horse who is tailing him, and by the end is the person who explains, without being asked twice, why Min had to die.
What they want
To get his principal through a fortnight in London and go home. What he does not want is to be the one holding the gun when it goes wrong — and in C06 the sequence of who approaches whom is deliberately ambiguous: Kyril puts a key to Min’s neck, then takes him drinking, and neither gesture is a threat the other can be separated from.
Book 2 — Dead Lions
- C04 — Meets Min and Louisa Guy with Piotr, denies the guns both men are visibly carrying, and lies about the hotel they are staying in.
- C06 — Spots Min tailing him from the start, puts a key to his neck, then takes him drinking with Piotr — and a third man comes and goes from the flat without meeting him.
- C15 — Wounded in the leg by Marcus Longridge’s first shot; later tells Louisa that Min died because he had seen Pashkin when Pashkin was supposed to be in Moscow, and is left on the stairwell as the others go on.
Tells
The laugh like a bag of marbles, the hookah, the cigarettes he offers like a test, and the false monolingualism — he understands everything said in front of him and answers only when it costs him nothing.
Open questions
Whether he survives the leg wound, and whether he knew what was waiting on the sixty-fifth floor — his surprise at the blast reads as genuine, but the book never asks him.