The attention of every single person crammed into the dark basement was fixed on the man slouching in the centre of the makeshift stage. Thirty pairs of eyes and ears were all waiting for what he was going to say next.

His hair was messy and matted, his beard thick. He wore two jackets over his shirt, and held his glass of vodka in hands wrapped in fingerless gloves. The man looked like a homeless streetwalker. But he wasn’t.

He took a breath and downed his drink. His audience mirrored him, tipping their heads back as one and letting their eighth glass of cheap alcohol slide down their throats.

‘I ride the lines,’ he said, finally breaking the silence. His voice was as rough as the vodka. ‘I am the city’s but it is not mine. I am everywhere and nowhere. Everyone but no one. A great emblem and a terrible shame. Your warning. The fear that sustains you, and the balm that you crave.’

He gestured at one of the young women kneeling at his feet at the edge of the stacked pallets he was raised up on, and the acolyte magicked a bottle out of air to refill his glass.

‘You feed me your scraps,’ he continued. ‘But your plates stay full. You quench my thirst but your glass never empties. You share your bed, but you don’t feel me lie next to you.’

He raised his vodka, ready for his finale.

‘We are comrades!’

The crowd scrambled to fill their own glasses so they could all salute together and cheer the man’s latest, scathing commentary on the Russian condition.

Vadim Rykov stood at the back of the room, leaning against a wooden pillar. The room was warm, but the earth that surrounded it was still cool and its walls were damp with condensation from all the breathing bodies.

Rykov looked like he didn’t belong in the basement. He looked like a poster boy for the modern Soviet Union. And that’s precisely what he was.

His hair was short and neat, held in place with pomade. His face was made up of the kind of angles sculptors cut into granite—a strong, aquiline nose and a sharp, beardless jaw. And his suit was immaculately tailored, cut perfectly to his body without looking like it had been fitted at all.

He’d enjoyed the performance. It wasn’t one of the poet’s best pieces, and its metaphors were a little forced, but the audience had lapped it up, like they always did. And Rykov couldn’t fault the man’s commitment to his act. He really did spend days and nights on the Moscow metro, bundled under thick layers of clothes and stinking of vodka and filth, glaring back at all the people who stared at him. Rykov knew that because he’d had him followed on several occasions.