Is Charlemagne dying?

I have a wad of cash now from living badly and working a lot, and have been debating how to reward myself after a long, hard winter, and finally decided, after much waffling, to head to the Pyrenees, walk across them for two months, and then come back to Frowntown until at least Christmas.
That decision puts me in an awkward position vis-a-vis my apartment. Should I leave it, or should I continue paying rent so that I have a place to live when I come back? The question, in th context of the Moscow real estate market, is far more complicated than it sounds. Both choices entail serious risks.
Let me explain how one finds a flat upon arriving in Moscow for the first time. You call a real estate agency which has lists of all the flats up for rent inside the city, and in outlying suburbs. They send out an agent to help you find a place that fits your requirements. You pay the agent for one month's rent as commission, and you pay the first month of rent immediately; then you also of course pay one month, or sometimes two months of deposit to your new landlord. There is a very high probability -exceeding 60 percent in my circle of ex-pat acquaintances- that you are going to get ripped off. In rare cases, the agency, knowing that you speak little or no Russian (which is not true of me), have work permits of dubious value, and that the courts will do nothing to help you, will simply take the commission from and give the flat to another person, and get another month's commission from them. More commonly, you live in the flat and the landlord throws you out on a few days' notice, and steals the one month of deposit. He is also very likely to extort cash large sums from you, threatening to change the locks if you do not pay. Or he may purport damage to the premises: a broken doorknob, a burst pipe, a shelf that is crooked. In a city where most flats are many decades old, things are likely to break, and landlords use this as a way to extract money from the renters.
But the most common tactic is to simply throw the tenant out on two days' notice and steal the deposit, then try to get another foreigner to live in the flat for several months until he is confident in the honesty of the owner. That's exactly when you get thrown out again. The average living arrangement in my experience is around 4 months.
For these reasons, I have been trying to get someone I know to live in my flat during my absence, and pay part of the rent.
Enter Charlemagne. Charlemagne is a colleague of mine that housed me (at market prices) for two weeks after being thrown out of my flat and getting the deposit stolen from the landlord last November. He is a middle-aged homosexual, lonely, long-winded and overweight in equal measures. Although he daily faces a 75-minute commute in crowded buses and subway wagons, wakes up at 4am, and does not return home until 10pm, he is a highly energetic character, walking and riding all over town all day. He purports that the subway cars are jam-packed every day with fags and player-hating Soviet babushkas who envy them; according to Charlemagne, everyone wants to sleep with him, and he is a social and sexual omnivore and dynamo who takes only the choicest mates.
The truth is much more mundane.
Russia is a very homophobic country. I think there are a lot of very repressed, ashamed homosxuals who have never touched a person of their own sex, apart from themselves. Charlemagne, on the other hand, is completely uninhibited, and speaks of his multi-hour kissing parties. I suppose he is able to grab one of these repressed middle-aged men, begin making out with him and make him his own very soon afterwards. I must suppose that his companion, having for the very first time been touched by a man, becomes quite aroused; however, he soon afterwards understands that he can do what he wants with who he wants to do it with, and does not need a multi-hundred pound windbag for companionship.
As a result, Charlemagne's only reliable companion is, or was, his elderly cat, for whom he set out 21 bowls of different types of cat food. However, the cat, which apparently had been suffering from age-induced diarrhea and low blood pressure for many months, soon died, and Charlemagne, dissatisfied with Moscow's pet cemeteries, put the cat in the freezer.
In addition to these eccentricities, he also possesses an unlikely high energy level for a person of his breadth, a fact reflected in his routine of a 10 hour work day often including long walks in freezing rain.
I am unable to continue now on this note because of time constraints, but I will complete this thread in the next 36 hours.