Marina. Part 14

'I'm all right, really,' she said, guessing at my fears. 'Go on. Knock. You haven't brought me all the way here just to show me round the district, I hope.'

I rapped on the door. The wood was old, solid and as thick as a wall. I knocked again. We heard slow steps approaching. The door opened and Lluis Claret, the man who had saved my life, greeted us with an inscrutable stare.

'Come in,' was all he said, turning back into the flat.

We closed the door behind us. The apartment was dark and cold. Paint peeled off the ceiling in yellowish flakes. Lampshades with no light bulbs were festooned with spider's nests and patterned tiles under our feet were cracked.

'This way,' Claret called out from inside the flat.

We followed his voice to a room whose only source of light came from a small brazier. Claret was sitting by the burning coals, staring silently at them. The walls were covered with old portraits: people and faces from a bygone age. Claret looked up at us. His eyes were pale and penetrating, his hair silvery and his complexion like parchment. Dozens of lines marked the pa.s.sing of time on his face, but despite his advanced age he exuded an air of strength that many men thirty years younger would have envied. He looked like a music-hall star who had grown old in the sun with dignity and style.

'I didn't get the chance to thank you. For saving my life.'

'It's not me you have to thank. Can I ask how you found me?'

'Inspector Florian told us about you,' Marina b.u.t.ted in. 'He explained that you and Dr Sh.e.l.ley were the only two people who remained close to Mijail Kolvenik and Eva Irinova to the very end. He said you never abandoned them. How did you meet Mijail Kolvenik?'

A faint smile crossed Claret's lips.

'Senor Kolvenik came to this town during one of the worst cold spells of the century,' he explained. 'Alone, hungry and beset by the icy weather, he sheltered for a night in the doorway of an old building. All he had was a few coins to buy a bit of bread and some hot coffee. Nothing else. While he was considering what to do, he discovered that there was someone else in the doorway. A boy of about five, wrapped in rags, a beggar who had taken shelter there just as he had. Kolvenik and the boy didn't speak the same language so they could barely understand one another. But Kolvenik smiled at him and gave him all the money he had, making gestures to indicate that he should use it to buy food. Not quite believing his good luck, the child ran off to buy a large loaf of bread from a bakery that was open all night, next to Plaza Real. He returned to the doorway to share the bread with the stranger but saw the police leading him away. In prison Kolvenik's cellmates beat him up savagely. During the days when he was in the prison hospital the boy waited by the door like a dog that had lost its master. When Kolvenik emerged into the streets two weeks later, he was limping. The boy was there to hold him up. He became his guide and swore he would never abandon the man who, on the worst night of his life, had given him all his worldly possessions . . . I was that boy.'

Claret stood up and told us to follow him to a door at the end of a narrow pa.s.sage. He pulled out a key and opened it. On the other side was an identical door and between the two a small chamber.

To mitigate the darkness Claret lit a candle. Then, with another key, he opened the second door. A sudden draught invaded the pa.s.sageway, making the candle hiss. I felt Marina clutch my hand as we stepped through. There we stopped. A fabulous vision opened up before us: the interior of the Gran Teatro Real.

Tier upon tier rose towards the huge dome. Velvet curtains hung from the boxes, fluttering in the void. Above a vast expanse of empty stalls, large gla.s.s chandeliers still awaited the electricity connection that had never materialised. We were standing in a side entrance to the stage. Above us the stage machinery seemed to rise to infinity, a universe of curtains, scaffolding, pulleys and walkways lost in the heights.

'This way,' said Claret, leading us.

We crossed the stage. A few musical instruments languished in the orchestra pit. On the conductor's podium a score lay open at the first page, buried under cobwebs. Further back, the long carpet covering the central aisle looked like a road to nowhere. Claret walked on ahead of us, towards a door with a light s.h.i.+ning behind it, and signalled to us to wait there a moment. Marina and I looked at one another.

It was the door to a dressing room. Hundreds of dazzling costumes hung from metal rails. One wall was covered in mirrors framed with lights. The other was taken up by dozens of old photographs of an extraordinarily beautiful woman: Eva Irinova, the woman who had entranced her audiences, the woman for whom Mijail Kolvenik had built this sanctuary.

And then I saw her.

The lady in black was gazing at herself in silence, her veiled face looking into the mirror. When she heard our footsteps, she turned slowly and nodded her head. At this signal Claret allowed us to come closer. We walked towards her as if we were approaching an apparition, with a mixture of fear and fascination. We stopped a couple of metres away. Claret stayed in the doorway, on the alert. The woman faced the mirror again, studying her image.

Suddenly, with the utmost care, she lifted her veil. The few light bulbs that were working showed us her face in the mirror, or what the acid had left of it. Naked bone and wrinkled skin. Shapeless lips, just a slit on the blurry features. Eyes that could no longer cry. For an endless moment she let us see the horror that was usually covered by her veil. Afterwards, just as gently as she had revealed her face and her ident.i.ty, she covered it up again and motioned for us to sit down. A long silence ensued.

Eva Irinova stretched out a hand towards Marina's face and stroked it, moving over her cheeks, her lips and her neck, reading her beauty and her perfection with trembling, yearning fingers. Marina swallowed hard. The lady drew away her hand and I could see her lidless eyes flas.h.i.+ng behind the veil. Only then did she start to speak and tell us the story she had been hiding for over thirty years.

CHAPTER 22.

'I'VE NEVER SEEN MY COUNTRY EXCEPT IN PHOTOGRAPHS. All I know about Russia comes from stories, gossip and other people's memories. I was born on a barge crossing the Rhine in a Europe devastated by war. Years later I learned that my mother was already pregnant with me when, alone and ill, she crossed the Russo-Polish border fleeing from the revolution. She died giving birth to me. I've never known her name or who my father was. She was buried on the banks of the river in an unmarked grave, lost for ever. A couple of actors from Saint Petersburg who were travelling on that barge, Sergei Glazunow and his twin sister Tatiana, took care of me out of pity and because, according to what Sergei told me many years later, the fact that I was born with different-coloured eyes was a sign of good luck.

'Thanks to Sergei's machinations we joined a circus company in Warsaw on its way to Vienna. My first memories are of those people and their animals: the circus big top, the jugglers, and a deaf and mute fakir called Vladimir who swallowed gla.s.s, was a fire breather and always gave me paper birds he made as if by magic. Sergei ended up becoming the manager of the company and we established ourselves in Vienna. The circus was both my school and the home in which I grew up. By then we already knew, however, that it was doomed. Reality was becoming more grotesque than the pantomimes of clowns and dancing bears. Soon n.o.body would need us. The twentieth century had become the dark circus of history.

'When I was only seven or eight, Sergei said it was time I started earning my own living. That is how I became part of the show, first as an a.s.sistant for Vladimir's tricks and later with my own act, in which I sang a lullaby to a bear and made it fall asleep. The act, which had been planned as a filler to allow time for the trapeze artists to get ready, turned out to be a success. n.o.body was more surprised than me. Sergei decided to extend my performance. I ended up standing on a floodlit platform singing ditties to some poor old lions, all of them starving and unwell. The animals and the audience listened to me, mesmerised. In Vienna people talked about the girl whose voice could tame beasts. And they paid to see her. I was nine years old.

'It didn't take Sergei long to realise that he no longer needed the circus. The girl with the different-coloured eyes had lived up to her promise of good fortune. He completed all the formalities required to become my legal guardian and announced to the rest of the company that we were going to set ourselves up independently. He explained that a circus was not a suitable place in which to bring up a young girl. When it was discovered that for years someone had been stealing part of the box-office takings, Sergei and Tatiana accused Vladimir, adding that he had behaved improperly towards me. Vladimir was arrested by the authorities and imprisoned, even though the money was never found.

'To celebrate his independence, Sergei bought a luxury car, a dandy's wardrobe and jewels for Tatiana. We moved into a villa Sergei had rented in the woods of Vienna. It was never clear where he'd got the funds for so much extravagance. I sang every afternoon and evening in a theatre next to the Opera House, in a show called "The Angel from Moscow" the first of many similar performances. It was Tatiana's idea to call me Eva Irinova, a name she'd taken from a popular newspaper serial of the time. At Tatiana's suggestion I was provided with a singing teacher, a dance teacher and an acting coach. When I wasn't on stage, I was rehearsing. Sergei didn't allow me to have friends or go out for walks; I couldn't even be on my own or read books. It's for your own good, he would say. When my body began to develop, Tatiana demanded that I have a room to myself. Sergei agreed reluctantly, but insisted on keeping the key. He would often return home in the middle of the night, drunk, and try to get into my room. Most times he was so intoxicated he couldn't put the key in the keyhole. Other nights he wasn't. The applause of an anonymous audience was my only satisfaction during those years. As time went by, I needed it more than the air I breathed.

'We travelled frequently. My success in Vienna had reached the ears of impresarios in Paris, Milan and Barcelona. Sergei and Tatiana always came with me. Naturally, I never saw a penny of the takings from all those concerts, nor do I know where the money went. Sergei always had debts and creditors. It was my fault, he told me bitterly. All his money was spent on my care and my keep, yet I was incapable of thanking him and Tatiana for everything they had done for me. Sergei taught me to see myself as a dirty, lazy, ignorant and stupid girl. A miserable wretch who would never do anything of any value, and whom n.o.body would ever love or respect. But none of that mattered, he whispered in my ear, his breath stinking of cheap spirits, because he and Tatiana would always be there to take care of me and protect me from the world.

'On my sixteenth birthday I realised that I hated myself and could barely look at my reflection in the mirror. I stopped eating. My body disgusted me and I tried to hide it under dirty ragged clothes. One day I found one of Sergei's old razor blades in the rubbish bin. I took it to my room and got into the habit of cutting my hands and arms with it. To punish myself. Every night Tatiana would dress my wounds without saying a word.

'Two years later, in Venice, a count who had seen me perform asked me to marry him. That night, when Sergei found out, he gave me a savage beating. He split open my lips and broke two of my ribs. Tatiana and the police restrained him. I left Venice in an ambulance. We returned to Vienna, but Sergei's financial problems were very serious. We received threats. One night someone set fire to our house while we slept. A few weeks earlier Sergei had received an offer from a Barcelona impresario for whom I'd already performed successfully in the past. Daniel Mestres that was his name had become the main shareholder in Barcelona's old Teatro Real and wanted to open the season with me. And so, packing our cases at dawn, we fled to Barcelona with little more than the clothes we were wearing. I was about to turn nineteen and I kept praying that I wouldn't live to be twenty. For some time I'd been thinking about taking my own life. Nothing could make me cling to this world. I'd been dead for ages, without knowing it. It was then that I met Mijail Kolvenik . . .

'We'd been working at the Teatro Real for a few weeks. It was rumoured in the company that a gentleman sat in the same box every night to hear me sing. At the time all sorts of stories concerning Mijail Kolvenik were circulating around Barcelona: how he'd made his fortune . . . tales about his personal life and ident.i.ty, packed with mysteries and secrecy . . . His legend preceded him. One night, intrigued by this strange character, I decided to send him an invitation to visit me in my dressing room after the show. It was almost midnight when Mijail Kolvenik knocked on my door. After all the gossip I was expecting someone arrogant and threatening. But my first impression of Mijail was of someone shy and reserved. He wore dark simple clothes, with no other adornment than a small brooch on his lapel: a b.u.t.terfly with open wings. He thanked me for my invitation and told me how much he admired me and what an honour it was to make my acquaintance. I replied that, after everything I'd heard about him, the honour was mine. He smiled and suggested that I forget the rumours. Mijail had the loveliest smile I have ever known. When he smiled, you could believe anything that came from his lips. Someone once said and he was right that Mijail could have convinced Christopher Columbus that the world was as flat as a pancake. That night he convinced me to take a stroll through the streets of Barcelona. He told me that he often walked through the sleeping city after midnight. I'd barely left the theatre since we'd arrived, so I agreed. I knew that Sergei and Tatiana were going to be furious when they found out, but I didn't care. We slipped out incognito through the proscenium door. Mijail offered me his arm and we walked around until dawn. He showed me the captivating city through his eyes. He spoke to me about its mysteries, its enchanted corners and the spirit that lived in those streets. He told me hundreds of legends. We walked through the secret alleyways of the Gothic quarter and the old town. Mijail seemed to know everything. He knew who had lived in every building, what crimes or romances had taken place behind every wall and every window. He knew the names of all the architects, craftsmen and the countless invisible men responsible for creating that stage set. As I listened, I had the feeling that Mijail had never shared those stories with anyone. I was overwhelmed by the loneliness that seemed to possess him and at the same time I thought I could discern, inside him, a dark abyss into which I couldn't help peering. Morning was breaking as we sat on a bench in the port. I gazed at the stranger with whom I'd been walking for hours and felt as if I'd always known him. I told him so. He laughed, and at that moment, with that rare certainty we only experience a couple of times in our lives, I knew I was going to spend the rest of my life with him.

'That night Mijail said he believed each one of us is only granted brief moments of pure happiness. Sometimes only days or weeks. Other times years. It all depends on our luck. The remembrance of such moments stays with us for ever and becomes a land of memories to which we vainly attempt to return during the rest of our existence. For me, those moments will always be found in that first night, walking through the city . . .

'It didn't take long for Sergei and Tatiana to react. Especially Sergei. He forbade me to see Mijail or speak to him. He said that if I ever left the theatre again without his permission, he'd kill me. For the first time in my life I discovered that he no longer frightened me. All I felt was disdain. To infuriate him even further I told him that Mijail had asked me to marry him and that I'd accepted. Sergei reminded me that he was my legal guardian: not only was he not going to authorise this marriage, but we were leaving for Lisbon. I sent a desperate message to Mijail through one of the dancers in the company. That night, before the performance, Mijail came to the theatre with two of his lawyers and held a meeting with Sergei. He announced that he'd signed an agreement that very afternoon with Mestres, the Teatro Real impresario, whereby he had become its new owner. Sergei and Tatiana were instantly fired.

'Soon Mijail presented Sergei with an entire file of doc.u.ments, proof of the illegal activities he'd carried out in Vienna, Warsaw and Barcelona. More than enough material to put him behind bars for fifteen or twenty years. To that Mijail added a cheque for an amount that exceeded anything Sergei could have obtained in his entire life through his mean and shady deals. He was given two options: if within forty-eight hours he and Tatiana abandoned Barcelona for ever and promised not to get in touch with me again in any way, they could take the file and the cheque; if they refused to cooperate, the file would end up with the police, together with the cheque as an incentive to oil the wheels of justice. Sergei flew into a rage. He shouted like a madman that he was never going to let me go, that Mijail would have to step over his dead body to get his own way.

'Mijail smiled and left. That night Tatiana and Sergei arranged to meet a strange individual who offered his services as a hit man. On their way out of that meeting they were almost killed by shots fired anonymously from a pa.s.sing carriage. The papers published the news item, venturing various hypotheses to account for the attack. The next day Sergei accepted Mijail's cheque and vanished from Barcelona with Tatiana, without saying goodbye . . .

'When I found out what had happened, I demanded the truth from Mijail. I wanted to know whether he was responsible for the attack. I desperately wanted him to say he wasn't. He fixed his eyes on mine and asked me why I doubted him. I felt like dying. All that happiness and hope seemed about to collapse like a pack of cards. I asked him again. Mijail said no, he wasn't responsible for the attack.

'"Had I been, neither of them would be alive," he replied coldly.

'Soon afterwards he hired one of the best architects in town to build the house next to Guell Park, following his detailed instructions. The cost wasn't an issue; no expense was to be spared to realise his vision. While the house was being built, Mijail rented an entire floor in the great Hotel Colon, in Plaza Cataluna, the most luxurious hotel in Barcelona at the time. We moved there temporarily. For the first time in my life I discovered it was possible to have so many servants you couldn't remember all their names. Mijail had only one helper, his chauffeur, Lluis.

'Bagues, the jewellers, called on me in my rooms. The best couturiers took my measurements to create a wardrobe fit for an empress. Mijail opened unlimited accounts for me in the best shops in Barcelona. People I'd never seen in my life would bow to me in the streets or in the hotel lobby. I was invited to b.a.l.l.s in palaces belonging to families whose names I'd only ever seen in the society pages of the press. I wasn't even twenty. I'd never had enough money in my hands for a tram ride. It was like a dream, but I began to feel overwhelmed by all the lavishness and waste surrounding me. When I told Mijail, he would say that money was unimportant, unless one didn't have any.

'We would spend the day together, strolling through the city, visiting the Tibidabo casino (although I never saw Mijail bet a single coin) or at the Liceo. In the evening we'd go back to the Hotel Colon and Mijail would retire to his rooms. I began to notice that, quite often, Mijail would go out in the middle of the night and not return until dawn. According to him, he had business matters to deal with.

'But tongues were wagging. I felt as if I was going to marry a man everyone knew better than I did myself. I could hear the maids talk behind my back. In the street people would look me up and down after a hypocritical smile. Slowly I became a prisoner of my own suspicions. And an idea began to torment me. All that luxury, the extravagance that surrounded me, made me feel like one more piece of furniture. One more of Mijail's whims. He could buy anything: the Teatro Real, Sergei, cars, jewels, palaces. And me. I burned with anxiety when I saw him leave every night, in the small hours, convinced that he was running to the arms of another woman. One night I decided to follow him and put an end to the charade.

'I trailed him to the old workshop of Velo-Granell Industries, next to the Borne Market. Mijail had gone there alone. I had to creep in through a tiny window in an alleyway. The inside of the factory looked to me like the scene of a nightmare. Hundreds of feet, hands, arms, legs and gla.s.s eyes were scattered about the premises . . . replacement parts for a broken and miserable humanity. I walked through the plant until I came to a large dark room where shapeless figures were visible floating inside enormous gla.s.s tanks. In the middle of the room, in the half-light, Mijail was staring at me from a chair, smoking a cigar.

'"You shouldn't have followed me," he said. There was no anger in his voice.

'I argued that I couldn't marry a man of whom I'd only seen one half, a man whose days I knew, but not his nights.

'"You might not like what you find," he hinted.

'I said I didn't care what or why. I didn't care what he did or whether the rumours about him were true. I only wanted to share his life, completely. Without shadows. Without secrets. He nodded and I knew what that meant: it meant going through a door from which there was no turning back. When Mijail switched on the lights in that room, I awoke from the dream I'd been living in for the last few weeks. I was in h.e.l.l.

'The formaldehyde tanks contained corpses that gyrated in a macabre dance. On a metal table was the naked body of a woman that had been dissected from the belly to the throat. The arms were stretched out wide and I noticed that the joints in her arms and hands were made of pieces of metal and wood. Tubes went down her throat and bronze cables were sunk into her extremities and hips. Her skin was translucent and bluish, like the skin of a fish. Speechless, I watched Mijail as he approached the body, gazing sadly at it.

'"This is what nature does with its children. There is no evil in men's hearts, just a simple struggle to survive the inevitable. The only devil is Mother Nature . . . My work, all my efforts, are just an attempt to outdo the great sacrilege of creation . . ."

'I saw him take a syringe and fill it with an emerald-coloured liquid he kept in a bottle. Our eyes met briefly and then Mijail plunged the needle into the corpse's skull and emptied the contents. He pulled out the needle and waited, motionless, for a moment, observing the inert body. Seconds later I felt my blood curdle. The eyelashes on one of the eyelids were fluttering. I heard the sound of the mechanism in the wood-and-metal joints. The fingers flapped. Suddenly the woman's body sat up with a violent jerk. A deafening animal scream filled the room. Threads of white froth ran down her black swollen lips. The woman pulled off the cables perforating her skin and fell to the floor like a broken puppet. She howled like a wounded wolf, then raised her head and fixed her eyes on mine. I found it impossible to look away from the horror I saw in them, from the spine-chilling animal force they gave off. She wanted to live.

'I was paralysed. A few seconds later the body lay once again inert, lifeless. Mijail, who had watched the whole event impa.s.sively, picked up a sheet and covered the corpse.

'He drew close to me and took my trembling hands. He looked at me as if he was trying to discover whether I would be able to remain by his side after what I'd witnessed. I tried to find words to express my fear, to tell him how wrong he was . . . All I managed to stammer was "Get me out of here." He did. We returned to the Hotel Colon. He accompanied me to my bedroom, asked for a bowl of hot broth to be brought to me and wrapped me in blankets while I drank it.

'"The woman you saw tonight died six weeks ago under the wheels of a tram. She leaped forward to save a boy who was playing on the line and couldn't avoid the impact. The wheels severed her arms at the elbows. She died in the street. n.o.body knows her name. n.o.body claimed her. There are dozens like her. Every day . . ."

'"Mijail, you don't understand . . . You can't do G.o.d's work . . ."

'He caressed my forehead and smiled sadly, nodding as he did so.

'"Goodnight,"' he said.

'He walked over to the door and paused before leaving.

'"If you're not here tomorrow," he said, "I'll understand."

'Two weeks later we were married in Barcelona Cathedral.'

CHAPTER 23.

'MIJAIL HAD WANTED THAT DAY TO BE SPECIAL FOR me. He went out of his way to deck out the entire city so that it looked like the backdrop for a fairy tale. But my reign as queen of that dreamworld was to come to a sudden end on the steps of the cathedral. I didn't even hear the screams of the crowd. Like a feral beast leaping out of the undergrowth, Sergei emerged from the mult.i.tude and before we could react or even realise what was happening he threw the bottle of acid on my face. The acid devoured my skin, my eyelids and burned deeply into my hands. It ripped my throat and severed my vocal cords. I didn't speak again for two years, until Mijail started to rebuild me as if I were a broken doll. It was the start of the horror.

'Construction on the house was discontinued and we moved into an unfinished palace on the top of a hill, which was to become our prison. It was a dark, cold place with a jumble of towers and arches, vaults and spiral staircases leading nowhere. I hated it. The attack had left me severely impaired and I was confined in a room at the top of the main tower to live like a recluse. n.o.body had access to it except for Mijail and, sometimes, Dr Sh.e.l.ley. I spent the first year under the drowsy effects of morphine, barely able to tell reality from the terrible nightmares plaguing me. I would dream that Mijail was experimenting on me just as he had been doing with the unclaimed bodies he purchased from hospitals and morgues. Reconstructing me and outsmarting nature. I just wanted to die or to have the strength to end my own life before it was too late. When I finally recovered consciousness, I realised that my nightmares had been real. He had given me back my voice. He had rebuilt my face, my lips and my throat so that I could feed myself and speak. He had altered my nerve endings so that I didn't feel the pain of the extensive damage caused by the acid I had lost my sense of touch and couldn't feel anything any more, neither heat nor cold. I was a ghost in my own body. Yes, in a way I had mocked death, but I ended up becoming one more of Mijail's accursed creatures.

'By then, of course, Mijail had lost his influence and position in society. n.o.body supported him any more. His old allies, all of them a load of hypocrites, had turned their backs on him and abandoned him to the wolves. The police and the local authorities began to hound him. His partner, Sentis, who had never been more than an envious mediocrity, volunteered false information to implicate Mijail in matters that had nothing to do with him. He was trying to remove him from control of the firm. Sentis was just another of the pack. Everyone wanted to see Mijail fall so they could devour his remains. As is usually the case, the army of sycophants now changed into a horde of hungry hyenas. None of this surprised Mijail. He'd seen it coming. From the very start he had only relied on his friend Sh.e.l.ley and on Lluis Claret. "Man's meanness," he used to say, "is a fuse in search of a flame." But, much as Mijail had antic.i.p.ated all of this, I believe this betrayal finally broke the fragile link he had with the outside world. He took refuge in his own labyrinth of solitude. His behaviour became increasingly bizarre. Down in the cellars he started breeding dozens of specimens of an insect that obsessed him, a black b.u.t.terfly known as a teufel. Soon the black b.u.t.terflies were flying around the house. They alighted on mirrors, pictures and furniture like silent sentries. Mijail forbade the servants to kill them, ward them off or get close to them. A swarm of black-winged insects flew through the halls and corridors. Sometimes they would land on Mijail and cover him while he stood there without moving. When I saw him like that I thought I was going to lose him for ever.

'Around that time I befriended Lluis Claret, and our friends.h.i.+p has lasted until today. It was Lluis who kept me informed of what was going on beyond the walls of that fortress. Mijail had been feeding me fantasies about the Teatro Real and my return to the stage. He spoke about repairing the damage the acid had caused, about singing with a voice that no longer belonged to me . . . Dreams. Lluis explained that the works at the Teatro Real had also stopped. The funds had run out months earlier. The building was now an immense carca.s.s falling apart . . . Mijail's outer calm was just a front. He would spend weeks, even months, without leaving the house. Entire days locked up in his studio, barely eating or sleeping. Joan Sh.e.l.ley, as the doctor admitted to me later, worried about his health but even more about his sanity. He probably knew him better than anyone else and had helped him with his experiments from the start. It was he who spoke openly to me about Mijail's obsession with degenerative diseases and his desperate attempts to discover the mechanisms by which nature allowed the human body to atrophy and decay. To him, nature was a merciless beast that fed on its young without caring about the fate of the beings it harboured. He collected photographs of strange cases of degeneration and medical freaks. What Mijail searched for in the misfortunes of those poor souls was an answer to his question: how to outwit his inner demons.

'It was then that the first symptoms of his own illness became apparent. Mijail knew that he carried it inside him, like a ticking time bomb. He had always known it, ever since he watched his brother die in Prague. It all happened very fast. His body began to destroy itself. His bones were crumbling. Mijail covered his hands with gloves. He hid his face and his body. He avoided my company. I pretended not to notice, but it was obvious: his shape was changing. One winter's day, at dawn, I was woken by his cries. Mijail was shouting at the servants, sending them away. n.o.body challenged him; in the last few months they had all grown afraid of him. Only Lluis refused to abandon us. Weeping with anger, Mijail broke all the mirrors in the house and ran to lock himself in his studio.

'One night I asked Lluis to fetch Dr Sh.e.l.ley. For two weeks Mijail hadn't come out of his room or replied to my calls. I could hear him sobbing on the other side of the wall of his studio, talking to himself . . . I no longer knew what to do. I was losing him. With Sh.e.l.ley and Lluis's help, I broke the door down and we managed to get him out of there. We discovered to our horror that Mijail had been operating on his own body, trying to rebuild his left hand, which was turning into a grotesque useless claw. Sh.e.l.ley gave him a sedative and we spent the night at his bedside while he slept. During that long night, as he watched his old friend in the throes of death, Sh.e.l.ley vented his despair and broke his promise never to reveal the story Mijail had confided in him years earlier. As I listened to his words, I realised that neither the police nor Inspector Florian ever suspected they were pursuing a ghost. Mijail was never a criminal or a fraudster. Mijail was simply a man who thought his destiny was to cheat death before death cheated him.'

'Mijail Kolvenik was born in the tunnels of Prague's sewage system on the last day of the nineteenth century.

'His mother was a seventeen-year-old maid who served a family of the high aristocracy. Her beauty and naivety had turned her into her master's plaything, one among many. When she revealed she was pregnant, she was thrown out like a mangy dog into the dirty snow-covered streets, branded for life. In those days, when winter draped the streets in a mantle of death, they say the dest.i.tute would take shelter in the tunnels of the old sewers. Legend had it that an entire city of darkness spread beneath the streets of Prague and that thousands of dispossessed spent their lives there without ever seeing the sun again. Beggars, sick people, orphans and fugitives. These people followed the cult of an enigmatic character they called the Prince of Beggars, who was said to be ageless, with the face of an angel and blazing eyes. It was also said that his body was cloaked in black b.u.t.terflies and that he welcomed into his kingdom all those whom the cruel world had denied a possibility of survival above ground. Searching for that world of shadows, the young girl entered the underground network hoping to survive. Soon she discovered that the local legend was true. The people in the tunnels lived in the dark and created their own world. They had their own laws. And their own G.o.d: the Prince of Beggars. n.o.body had ever seen him, but they all believed in him and left offerings in his honour. Using red-hot irons, they all branded their skin with the emblem of the b.u.t.terfly. It was prophesied that a messiah sent by the Prince of Beggars would come to the tunnels one day and give his life to deliver its inhabitants from their suffering. The messiah's downfall would come from his own hands.

'That is where the young mother gave birth to twins: Andrej and Mijail. Andrej was born with a cruel, terrible illness. His bones would not solidify and his body grew with no shape or structure. One of the inhabitants of the tunnels, a doctor who was being pursued by the law, told her that Andrej's condition was incurable. The end was just a question of time. But his brother Mijail was a bright boy who, though timid by nature, dreamed of leaving the tunnels one day and emerging into the world above ground. He often fantasised that he was the long-awaited messiah. He never knew who his father was, so in his mind he awarded that role to the Prince of Beggars, whom he thought he could hear in his dreams. Mijail seemed to have none of the signs of the terrible disease that would end his brother's life. Sure enough, Andrej died when he was seven without ever having left the sewers, and his body was laid to rest in the underground currents, following the rituals of the sewer world. Mijail asked his mother why this had happened.

'"It's G.o.d's will, Mijail," his mother replied.

'Mijail would never forget those words. But the blow of little Andrej's death was too much for his mother to bear. The following winter she caught pneumonia. Mijail remained by her side until the last moment, holding her trembling hand. She was twenty-six but had the face of an old woman.

'"Is this G.o.d's will, Mother?" he asked her lifeless body.

'He was never given an answer. A few days later young Mijail emerged into the streets. Nothing tied him any longer to the underground world. Starving and frozen, he took shelter in a doorway. By chance, a doctor called Antonin Kolvenik, who was returning from a home visit, discovered him there. The doctor took him to a nearby tavern, where he bought him a warm meal.

'"What's your name, son?"

'"Mijail, sir."

'Antonin Kolvenik paled.

'"I once had a son with your name. He died. Where is your family?"

'"I have no family."

'"Where's your mother?"

'"G.o.d has taken her."

'The doctor nodded gravely. He picked up his bag and pulled out a contraption that left Mijail speechless. Mijail glimpsed other instruments inside the bag. s.h.i.+ning, wondrous instruments.

'The doctor placed the strange object on the boy's chest and put the two ends in his ears.

'"What's that?"

'"It's for listening to what your lungs are saying . . . Take a deep breath."

'"Are you a magician?" asked Mijail in astonishment.

'The doctor smiled.

'"No, I'm not a magician. I'm only a doctor."

'"What's the difference?"

'Antonin Kolvenik had lost his wife and son during an outbreak of cholera some years earlier. Now he lived alone, had a modest surgery and a pa.s.sion for the works of Dvorak. He looked at the ragged boy with curiosity and pity. He reminded him of his own lost son. Mijail brandished a winning smile.

'Dr Kolvenik decided to take the boy home with him. Mijail spent the next ten years there. The kind doctor gave him an education, a home and a name. Mijail was only a teenager when he began to a.s.sist his adoptive father in his surgery and learn about the mysteries of the human body. G.o.d's mysterious will was revealed through that complex framework of flesh and bone, driven by a mysterious spark of magic. Mijail soaked up the lessons avidly, convinced that in all that science there was a message waiting to be deciphered.

'He wasn't even twenty when death paid him another visit. The old doctor's health had been deteriorating for some time. A cardiac arrest destroyed half his heart one Christmas Eve while they were planning a trip to show Mijail southern Europe. Antonin Kolvenik was dying. Mijail swore to himself that this time death would not s.n.a.t.c.h anyone away from him.

'"My heart is weary, Mijail," said the old doctor. "It's time for me to go and rejoin my Frida and my other Mijail . . ."

'"I'll give you another heart, Father."