To throw off the scent, or perhaps to amuse himself, Nabokov assigned details of La Salle to other characters. Dolores’s eventual husband and the father of her child, Dick Schiller, is a mechanic. Meanwhile, Vivian Darkbloom—an anagram for Vladimir Nabokov—has a “hawk face,” a phrase akin to the description of La Salle as a “hawk-faced man” in the March 1950 coverage of Sally’s rescue.
