Gleb Alexandrovich Gekko

An acquaintance of both the narrator and V. who has also emigrated to the United States, Gekko supplies the narrator with V.'s address.

Holmes

Holmes is the "plain-clothes man" from the Nice police who assists the narrator in the search for his wife. Unlike his namesake, the infallible detective Sherlock Holmes, he fails in his attempt to solve the mystery at hand and leads the narrator to a seedy hotel, where he insists that a stranger he produces is the narrator's wife.

The Narrator

"That in Aleppo Once . . ." takes the form of a letter written by an unnamed narrator to V., a fellow Russian expatriate living in New York City. A harmless, earnest, and innocent man, the narrator is reduced to despair over his wife's probable infidelity. Her seeming naiveté is what first attracted him to her. He met her several times "without experiencing...