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Fred Saberhagen - Séance for a Vampire included a small top hat of a peculiar
shape, making the wearer look, as I thought, like some fanciful creature from
the pen of Lewis
Carroll. The cabs, strangely, in a place where winters were so severe, were
not tightly enclosed, and only leather hoods protected their passengers from
rain.
Fortunately I could manage tolerable French, which most of the
Russian nobility preferred to their native tongue; to my relief, that proved
adequate to see me through most encounters in my pose of casual traveler.
Holmes, endeavoring to ascertain whether either of Rebecca's parents might
have recovered sufficiently to be informed of the latest news about their
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surviving daughter, exchanged cables with
Mycroft almost on a daily basis. The name of an intermediary in
London was used, since it was judged desirable for several reasons to keep
Mycroft's name out of the public eye as much as possible.
Had our situation in St. Petersburg not been so tragic and so desperate, I
believe that Holmes would have thoroughly enjoyed his visit. He was now able
to meet personally with men whom he had heretofore communicated with only by
letter and by cable, and to exchange with the Petersburg police important
information on a number of professional matters.
To an Englishman, the main streets of this city are startlingly wide and
straight (the elegant Bolshaya Morskaya has signs in French and some in
English over the windows of its shops), and many of the buildings which line
them have imposing stone façades. The dampness and fog tend to make the
English feel at home. Cathedrals and smaller churches abound.
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Fred Saberhagen - Séance for a Vampire
The Bronze Horseman, a monumental statue of Peter the Great, celebrated by
Pushkin in a famous poem, stands just east of the
English Embankment, near the Admiralty. The equestrian statue, commissioned by
Catherine the Great to honor her illustrious predecessor, shows Peter in Roman
wreath and toga, right arm outstretched toward the west, making his bronze
horse rear on a huge rock, trampling under its hooves the serpent of sedition.
With renewed determination, we pressed our search for our quarry and his
prisoner relentlessly through the city, and even through the suburbs.
It was only after a nerve-racking delay, following several days of fruitless
search and investigation, that we succeeded in locating
Kulakov's townhouse in St. Petersburg. Our task had been rendered more
difficult by the fact that the legal documents of ownership were in another
name.
Carefully we approached the house, and observed it from front and rear.
Wherever the master might currently be, at the moment he was clearly not in
residence, no more than he had been in his rented country house in England. In
fact, the Petersburg house and its small garden had the look of having been
long unoccupied. Shortly after our discovery of the place, and even while we
still had it under observation, a small squad of servants appeared and hastily
plunged into the task of airing the building and evidently preparing it for
occupation. Holmes, through his official and unofficial contacts, soon managed
to learn that the count, while en route from England, had sent his housekeeper
a cable from Copenhagen.
That night we four men approached the building stealthily, managed
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Fred Saberhagen - Séance for a Vampire to enter without disturbing any of the
servants in their sleep, and subjected the premises to a thorough search. It
did not take long to convince ourselves that the prisoner we sought could not
be here, and that therefore Kulakov himself was almost certainly still taking
his daytime slumber elsewhere.
The terrible thought haunted us that the Russian pirate's hostage might
already have been dispatched to some remote Siberian province, and was being
borne hourly, by carriage or by rail, farther and farther out of our reach.
Prince Dracula and Sarah Kirkaldy were still conducting their daily hypnotic
sessions, and the evidence from these was against Rebecca's having been
carried out of the city
 Kulakov was still in the city, and there were times when he seemed to be
looking directly at his captive. But still, the horrible possibility loomed.
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Then, just when all prospects seemed dark, encouraging news came to us by [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]