Victor Ivanovich Shapliapin liked to take long strolls along the banks of the river. He could be very easily spottet doing just that every afternoon. It was not very hard to recognize him, as he was quite an unusual individual, with many ideas hidden under his winter hat. Some of his contemporaries suggested that some of his inventions might be of incredible use for the military, others, more worried, were very afraid they could possibly fall into the hands of terrorists. The thing with Shapliapin was though, that nobody really knew what he did, how he did it, or even why he would never do anything about it.
All that was visible to the public were his long walks with his hat suspended in the air just a few centimeters ahead of Victor Ivanovich's nose, floating, somehow attached to him, and yet clearly separated from his slowly moving body.
Shapliapin rarely spoke a word with others, he did not seem to care too much about the papers and the other ways of spreading news...
He apparently wrote many letters to some distant friends and relatives. And even though those were all intercepted and checked for any dangerous information, they did not seem to contain anything, not just a trace of any unusual thought.
Some brave citizens asked why such an individual were not imprisoned or at least called in for some serious questioning. There was a really obvious threat to all of them, a ticking time bomb... but for some reason, no order to arrest Shapliapin ever made it into the right hands, or maybe the address was somehow mixed up, leading to slightly scandalous raids on the apartments of his neighbors. Yes, there were some injuries, some apparently accidental deaths.
So years later, Shapliapin still made his rounds, the hat floating softly in front of him, his look quite focused on something nobody else seemed to see.
It was on that afternoon in December that somebody finally had the courage to point their rifle from a distance and to liberate the city of this really dangerous man... the rest is of course history, but it is not history we shall care about here, and not now.