The Immortal Collection (A Saga of the Ancient Family Book 1)

  Preliminary observations: the subject presents as very self-assured. One can see that he’s accustomed to dominating social interrelationships, and to accommodating himself to any setting. He always considers the answers to questions, even though he does so quickly and nimbly.

  With growing unease, I leafed through the content of the rest of the notebook so I could have an overall sense of the case, but then I dedicated myself to looking for something more specific. Luckily, although there was a lot of material to read, Dana had had only time to read the first few consultations. I allowed myself to be guided by the dates, until I found the confession.

  I stifled a cry, remembering that Dana was asleep in the room next door. Idiot! I thought in despair. How could he have been such an idiot?

  I tried to calm down a little, but my worst suspicions had lodged themselves in my brain, and I knew perfectly well that they were there now for good, so I weighed up the consequences and made my decision. Despite Dana. Despite what we shared. Despite our recently inaugurated life together, which now might not have the slightest chance of ending well.

  I tore out the pages of that session and any of the following ones that might contain significant information, doing so carefully to ensure that Dana didn’t realize I was harvesting the pages of her notebook, in the same way she had done earlier with my lavender bush. As a precaution I didn’t remove the pages of the last few consultations, as I knew Dana had glanced through them. Then I cleaned the room of any fragments of paper and got rid of them. I hid the pages I’d stolen in the MAC folder I’d brought with me that night, which I knew she would never open. I had to read them all again more calmly, digest what they might imply, and come to terms with what might have happened fifteen years ago.

  I left the notebook under Dana’s pillow and lay down next to her again. Just then my phone vibrated, and I looked questioningly at the number displayed on the screen. The international area code belonged to Denmark, but I didn’t recognize the number. Bewildered, I jumped out of bed and disappeared down the dark old-style corridor of Dana’s apartment.

  62

  IAGO

  Jupiter Day, the nineteenth day of the month of Duir

  Thursday, June 28, 2012

  I apologize for ringing you at his hour. I’m Rebekka Petersen’s mother. My daughter died during the night. We found her in her room this morning. It seems her heart gave out.”

  I squeezed my eyelids and inhaled. “I’m really sorry for your lo—”

  “It’s awful! Awful!” she interrupted between sobs. “We’d barely moved in, poor dear. First my ex-husband and now my daughter.”

  I waited patiently until she’d stopped crying, trying to digest the news. I’d received a call the day before from the moving company, who wanted to fix the delivery date for the contents of the laboratory. It seemed Rebekka had tied up all the loose ends before she died.

  “I’m calling because Rebekka spoke to me about you, and she gave me the impression you were good friends.”

  She was sounding me out, as if she was searching for the appropriate words.

  “Indeed, madam. I held her and her father in great esteem.”

  What exactly was she after? There was something in her tone that was beginning to bother me.

  “You see, after what’s happened, I’ve decided to live here with my current husband and my young son. This tranquil spot will be good for all of us. I’d like to do some renovations, such as altering the cold storage room my daughter used. It’s full of sculptures, and I’m not sure what to do with them. Do you know what Rebekka had planned for them?”

  “Take them out into the garden,” I said curtly. The woman had exhausted my patience in under two minutes. A record!

  “Pardon?”

  “Take them out into the garden. Rebekka liked to watch them melting into the lawn.”

  “What an eccentric young girl,” I think she whispered. Then she realized that I was still on the line and cleared her throat. “Well, Isaac, thank you for your advice. It’s been very useful.”

  I sensed that she hadn’t the slightest intention of carrying out Rebekka’s wishes.

  “They’re toxic,” I hastened to say before she hung up. “The sculptures contain a chemical compound, a derivative of ammonia. The way Rebekka explained it to me, it’s used to achieve greater transparency,” I improvised, lying on the fly. “I’d take them out to the garden today, if I were you. Let them melt. They lose their toxicity in a liquid state.”

  I heard her swallowing at the other end of Europe.

  “Oh well . . . In that case I’ll take them outside right away. I wouldn’t want them contaminating the house.”

  “Yes, do it today,” I urged her. “It’s been a pleasure talking to you, and may I reiterate my deepest condolences.”

  And without any more flourishes, I hung up. I’d recognized her instantly: she was one of us—those of us who belonged to the ranks of bad parents. And yet despite that, nothing obliged me to put up with her a second longer than was absolutely necessary.

  While she was talking, I had, in any case, begun to sketch out a plan. A plan that linked what had just happened in Denmark with the discovery of Sofía Almenara’s notebook. A plan that, with any luck, might finally put an end to all the problems TAF posed for me.

  63

  IAGO

  Mother Moon Day, the second day of the month of Tinne

  Monday, July 9, 2012

  I adjusted my monocle when I saw Lyra appear on the main Sardinero beach. She was protecting her fair skin from the afternoon sun with a lace parasol that matched a starched dress, which still smelled of rose water. The promenade was full of stalls selling lemonade and cones of homemade ice cream to children in short trousers and little hats carrying giant aluminum hoops. My father raised his hat each time he met one of his acquaintances, some of them unashamedly dressed in old-style bathing costumes with blue-and-white stripes that matched the wooden bathing boxes. It was only five o’clock, but with a discreet nod I suggested to Dana we should head for home.

  “Why are you in such a hurry?” she whispered, somewhat annoyed. “I love the annual Wave Baths celebration. It’s like being inside a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

  Lyra had lent her one of her restored garments, and Dana was relishing her flying visit into the past.

  Each year, at the beginning of July, the city of Santander chose to recreate the aristocratic air of the end of the nineteenth century, when royalty and high society had allowed themselves to be seen every summer, following an invariable agenda. In the mornings the wrinkled nobility amused themselves, frolicking about in the miraculous waters of the spa baths on the Castañeda, Concha, and Magdalena beaches. In the afternoons they risked their idle fortunes in the casino. In the evenings they chased English nannies along the carpeted corridors of the Sardinero Gran Hotel.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute,” I whispered in her ear while still gazing with a smile at the nineteenth-century hullabaloo around me.

  An encounter with Salva and Chisca—walking hand in hand in their immaculate tennis outfits—provided the opportunity for us to say good-bye to my family with a hurried excuse. We took a shortcut along Ramón y Cajal while I kept checking my fob watch, which, by some miracle, was still working. Dana and I flew along the streets, and she knew me well enough by now that she didn’t ask me to explain my impatience.

  By the time we reached Paseo de Pereda, I had abandoned all pretense, and I raced up the stairs two at a time to the laboratory I’d installed after Rebekka’s death.

  “What’s the hurry?” Dana asked me finally as she removed her hat.

  “Shhh,” I warned her with a gesture.

  Since receiving all the equipment, I’d repeated step by step the experiments Flemming had explained to me. It was a complicated process I would never have been able to carry out correctly without
his instructions, although I had to make some necessary adjustments. He was investigating a case of progeria; I, four cases of radical longevity. Dana had also provided a tissue sample so that I could compare the fluorescence of our telomeres with those of a normal thirty-year-old.

  I practically tore the white lab coat off the hanger, and as soon as we reached the workbench I sat down on the stool and put the tissue-culture sample under my friend’s powerful microscope. There were my telomeres, shining with exactly the same intensity as Dana’s. We shared the same biological age: just over thirty years old. That was why I hadn’t aged since I turned thirty—because as long as my teleomeres replicated without shortening, they continued to be like the original ones, ten thousand years ago, with no defects.

  So that was it, I thought, running my fingers through my hair. I tried to ignore the churning in my stomach, my dry throat, the shake in my hands, and the faint dizziness that momentarily threw me off balance by the bench.

  So that was it.

  The explanation lay within my cells, in each follicle, in my youthful skin. So that was it. A gift in the form of proteins. Not the Fountain of Eternal Youth; not visits from extraterrestrials; not a diet rich in antioxidants; not jade or ambrosia or gold in the veins . . . That was it: a mutation that kept our telomerase active, repairing the telomeres again and again, ensuring that the tips of the chromosomes never wore out.

  But there was a second part to my theory, a part that was necessary for the theory to work: we longevos had to have other associated mutations, a happy combination of telomerase and a cancer suppressant; otherwise, we would have died like Flemming. That was his legacy: leaving me that certainty.

  If I looked I knew that I’d also find the p53 gene. Or maybe a more potent and definitive mutation that would keep all tumors at bay. A gift from my mother, from Olbia, and from Bryan. They had contributed the cancer suppressants, and my father, the active telomerase mutation. Only by inheriting both mutations had we, their offspring, overcome tumors. That was why we longevos were so rare, even within our own extended family. It could be that we’d transmitted the longevo gene to more descendants than we’d thought, but if we didn’t also pass on the gene that inhibited cancer, they would have died, struck down by any tumor. That was why our offspring died so quickly.

  I’d never considered it in that way before. I’d always attributed their deaths to the high rate of infant mortality that was common even in the First World until the middle of the twentieth century. It had never occurred to me to perform autopsies or look for cancerous cells in their organs, for the claws of the crab described by Galen in the second century, which gave the disease its name. I was certain now that my double hypothesis was correct. The first stage had already been verified. Confirmation of the second stage, I was already certain, would come more quickly, because technically it wasn’t as complicated.

  How do you assume a man will react when, after searching for millennia, he suddenly finds the cause of his longevity and that of his longevo family? I don’t know, but because I was that man and I had my partner beside me, the first thing I decided was I wanted to share it with her. So I stopped staring like an idiot at the microscope and turned my attention to Dana, who was standing silently by my side. She had learned to wait. She was very different from the impatient young woman who had arrived at the MAC seven months earlier.

  “You’ve found it, haven’t you?”

  “It looks like it,” I managed to say.

  And I didn’t feel important, but rather almost the opposite. I felt insignificant when faced with the implications of my findings. They loomed as enormous, even for me.

  “So that’s all you are, then: a guy with long telomeres,” she said jokingly. “You could have told me that right from the start. You’d have saved me a few migraines up until the moment I believed you.”

  I looked at her and realized that she, too, was relieved. My natural state finally had an explanation inside her scientific brain. We were no longer in the realm of fantasy, or the gray zone of speculation. I was now a mutation or two.

  “I already know you don’t want me to ask, but I think I’m the only one in a position to do so: What are you going to do with this discovery? Are you going to tell your family?”

  “I’ll tell my father but not my siblings, just as I’d anticipated.”

  “Are you going to get rid of this lab?”

  “Yes. I want to confirm a few details, but once I’ve done that, it’s the most sensible thing to do. I can’t run the risk of having them find out I’ve been investigating behind their backs. They’d be suspicious.”

  “Suspicious of what?” asked a woman’s voice behind us authoritatively.

  I turned, knowing that I’d find Lyra. It was pointless to ask how she’d got into the lab; I mentally pictured the sequence of events: “Father, give me the keys to Iago’s house. I’m going to drop by to . . .” And she would have improvised any intelligent pretext that Héctor wouldn’t pick up on. Then I imagined her climbing the stairs to the third story only to discover no one was there, and then hearing the sound of a stool being dragged across the floor on the next level up. Then she would have made her way to this top floor, glued her ear to the door, and heard our last few sentences, unfortunately quite damning.

  “Willingly or by force, Iago?” she demanded, a dangerous glint in her eye.

  “Willingly. You already sliced my finger once,” I said to gain time. I had no desire to lose my genitals.

  I glanced around me, looking for any sharp object with which Kyra could menace either me or especially Dana. I had to put Dana out of reach. On the workbench to Lyra’s left was a plastic stand that held a dozen glass test tubes. She’d only to have to grab one of those and break it against the corner of the bench and she’d have a homemade weapon with a sharp cutting edge. So I started to get up slowly, conscious that I had to offer her something to tempt her, because Lyra would intuit my intention to keep Dana away from danger.

  “I’m working on the research of a friend who died, and who asked me to carry on with it. I could show you the will where he leaves me the contents of his laboratory if you like.”

  “Oh, yes, of course I do! What was he studying, and what does it have to do with us?”

  “It has nothing to do with us.”

  “Of course it has to do with us; otherwise, you wouldn’t have kept it secret from me.”

  Lyra shot a quick look over to where Dana was, and that put me on the alert. Then she shifted the weight of her body onto her left foot, leaning toward her in an almost imperceptible way. Almost.

  I slowly moved toward Dana with the intention of acting as a shield between the two of them. As soon as I did so, Lyra, moving more quickly than me, threw herself at the microscope and extracted the Petri dish with my cells, which was still lying under the lens.

  She’d fooled me regarding her intentions. I think I swore in all the languages I could remember.

  “I think your desire to protect your girl cost you,” she said, moving a few steps away and holding the Petri dish in her hands. “Anyway, it wasn’t necessary. I’m not Nagorno, I really like Adriana, and I have no intention of harming her. You’d do well to trust me for once.”

  “That’s difficult when you sneak into my own house without any warning!” I yelled, beside myself.

  Dana squeezed my hand to calm me down. It was good to remember that I wasn’t alone.

  “I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t spent every night these past weeks with the lights blazing on the top floor, which until recently was just four blank walls. I stopped assuming that you were devoting yourselves to making babies when I saw that the lights on the third floor were always turned on, too.”

  Me studying telomeres, and Dana brooding over her mother’s notebook: we were the perfect research couple. Each one caught up in their world of obsessions, chasing their objective abo
ve all else, even keeping each other company. Had we been so stupid, yet again, as to waste our time together? Sometimes, a spotlight has to be shone on your mistakes from the outside, because you’re so caught up in your dark circumstances that you’re incapable of seeing them yourself.

  “Okay,” said Lyra, “I’m going to propose a deal: you tell me what you’ve been investigating, and I won’t tell Nagorno. We’ll pretend we haven’t found it, that we’re continuing to search indefinitely.”

  “And how long do you think our lie will last?” I snapped. “Let’s assume, hypothetically, that what I’ve found is the first step and that you can end up selecting the embryos with the longevo gene mutation. Let’s assume that you start having longevo children. Nagorno will realize that as soon as his exile ends.”

  “Hypothetically.”

  “Hypothetically, but he will end up finding out.”

  “Hypothetically, I could remove myself from the world and disappear, not contact you ever again, and finally have my own family, far from yours.”

  “Is that what you’re seeking, Sister?” I tried to ensure that she wouldn’t notice the bitterness in my voice.

  “It’s the only thing that persuades me not to remove myself once and for all.”

  I already knew that. I had seen it in every one of her gestures and behind every word for years. It wasn’t new to me, but even so it pained me to hear confirmation emerging from her lips.

  “You have no other choice, Iago.” The sound of Dana’s voice behind me brought me back to reality.

  “I know, Dana, I know,” I whispered. Anything else meant uselessly prolonging a situation that had already lasted far too long. “I accept my share of the blame. If I hadn’t insisted on investigating the telomeres, the three of us wouldn’t be in this lab right now, but I would have spent the rest of eternity weighed down by doubt, and I know how unpleasant that heavy burden is. It’s been a poorly judged risk. Very poorly judged.”