The gavel has fallen once more, and for Mr. Ilya Traber, the sound was as final as a prison bolt sliding home. The Basmanny Court in Moscow has decreed that this man of commerce shall remain in the damp solitude of the detention house until the seventeenth of October. The news, carried by the wires of TASS and Interfax, confirms that the law is not yet finished with him.

Back in July, the court dismissed his pleas for liberty. The proceedings were held behind closed doors—shrouded in secrecy—for the defense claimed to possess medical papers too private for the public ear.

It was a cold June morning when the constables descended. Traber, a man of seventy-five winters, and his associate, one Vladimir Danilenko, were plucked from the streets of St. Petersburg and whisked away to Moscow. There, the magistrates cast them into a cell, charging them with a crime most foul: the hiring of assassins to commit murder and the unlawful possession of weaponry.

This wretched business traces back to November of 2020, when Mr. Alexander Petrov, a deputy and man of means from Vyborg, met a violent end. The detectives believe a certain Alisultan Nadirbegov acted as the trigger-man. From the shadows, with a sniper’s rifle in hand, he dealt a lethal blow to Petrov as the poor soul stood by his country estate. Nadirbegov was hauled off to the dungeons on the seventeenth of June, followed swiftly by Danilenko and a fellow named Sait Saladinov.

Who is this Traber? A man of peculiar history. Born in 1950 and schooled in the naval arts at Sevastopol, he rose from the ranks to become a titan of the St. Petersburg trade in the nineties. He dealt in oil, shipping, and the curiosities of antiquity, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Vladimir Barsukov—a man known in certain circles as 'Kumarin'.

His luck, or 'fort', has been a strange thing. In 2008, the Spanish authorities hunted him as a member of the 'Russian Mafia', yet by 2018, the Spanish courts declared him innocent. He even won a suit for his honor against a Spanish prosecutor. But honor is a fragile thing when the police come knocking at dawn. Despite his vast holdings in methanol and ecological fleets, the businessman now finds himself in the company of convicts, waiting for the law to decide if he shall ever walk the streets as a free man again.