Orlov's father

A "well-known statesman" of about sixty, whom the narrator regarded as a serious political enemy and whose activities he had hoped to learn about by spying on his son Georgy Orlov. A single unexpected face-to-face encounter -- the old man calls at Orlov's flat and, alone with the narrator for several minutes, is momentarily entirely in the narrator's power -- leaves the narrator unable to recover his former political hatred, precipitating his abandonment of the whole spying scheme.