SAINT PETERSBURG
One day Mrs. Hudson announced the visit of a woman named Boris, from whose name Holmes deduced that he was a Russian disguised as a woman. And indeed it was. He had come expressly from Saint Petersburg to hire the services of Sherlock Holmes, so my friend could not refuse to accept his case even if it meant moving for a time to the Russian capital. Language would not be an obstacle: Holmes spoke fifteen languages (although he dispensed with pronouns, prepositions, adverbs and words of more than one syllable). In St. Petersburg we stayed with our client in what he called "my hideout", which was accessed through a sewer cover. It turned out that our client belonged to the Russian nobility, which was subject to the dictates of a guy called "the Tsar," who had arranged for our client to spend a long vacation at a site called Siberia. However, our client did not want to take a vacation because he was dealing with a certain plot to overthrow the regime and couldn't l...