Baltasar Garzon, the man who may yet pull off the astonishing coup of bringing Gen Pinochet to justice, is no stranger to extraordinary situations, inside and outside his chambers.
There is probably no one in Spain who attracts such virulent hatred, from such diverse sources, as this charismatic investigating magistrate. He is admired, even loved, in equal measure. Nobody feels lukewarm about him.
Mr Garzon (43) is often compared to Elliot Ness. Those who dismiss him as a "superstar judge" say his vanity makes him closer to Kevin Costner, who played Ness in The Untouchables. Both comparisons are inadequate.
We remember Ness for outwitting gangsters like Al Capone, but Mr Garzon brings in gangsters before breakfast, quite literally on occasions. He led a massive dawn police raid against Galician drug barons in 1990, complete with helicopter back-up, and a TV crew to record it. The cases he likes for lunch and dinner involve terrorism, and not just the revolutionary variety. If Mr Garzon appears vain - his hair is always suavely gelled, his elegant clothes immaculately cut - his egotism is of the kind that gets results, at least in the short term.
His investigations have helped put away some of the most powerful members of ETA, the Basque separatist group, but he has also brought some of ETA's worst enemies to the dock. It was his tenacious work which led to the jailing, only last July, of a former Spanish interior minister, and most of the 1980s anti-terrorist high command, for involvement in anti-ETA death squads.
He has always been an innovator, and an active legal internationalist. In 1989, fed up with his French counterparts' tendency to regard ETA as freedom fighters, he flew to Paris with a dossier detailing 400 of their killings. It was a gesture which helped change the attitude of the French courts.
There can be a high price for such boldness. His friend and colleague on that trip, the prosecutor Carmen Tagle, was shot dead by an ETA hit squad a few months later.
Mr Garzon's home is now protected by state-of-the-art security systems. Yet he has found a peeled banana on his pillow, which was not left there by his wife or children. Their dog was poisoned in the safe haven of their garden. There have been attempts to entrap him with call girls, and to frame him for corruption. He dismisses such incidents as minor irritations.
He has real cause for paranoia, however: he knows that these threats are as likely to have come from within the Spanish state security and intelligence services as from ETA or the drug lords (or, these days, from friends of the Chilean general). To date, no one has been able to breach the wall of his personal rectitude. Married to his college sweetheart, with whom he has three children, he comes from a small-town background in Andalusia. His father, who ran a petrol station, taught him the values of "progress and democracy". Unlike many like-minded 1960s students, however, he did not join a political party, and worked his way through college. He got an excellent degree, but still found time to indulge such extrovert hobbies as amateur bull-fighting and flamenco dancing, to which he probably owes his theatrical sense of legal timing.
He rose rapidly through his profession, and became one of the youngest magistrates in the Audiencia Nacional, Spain's special court for the investigation of organised crime, drugs and terrorism, in 1988. One of the first documents on his desk concerned a Bilbao police inspector. Though Mr Garzon has always claimed it was "just one more case" he must have known it could make history, if he was prepared to push it hard enough.
Jose Amedo was accused of organising shootings by the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion (GAL), who had murdered 27 people during a "dirty war" against ETA. It was widely suspected that Felipe Gonzalez's Socialist government had set up the death squads, but no one could prove it.
Just as with Capone, so Mr Garzon saw that funding was the trail which would lead to the headquarters of the GAL. Amedo's boss admitted that his activities had been financed out of "reserved funds", slush money to pay informers. Mr Garzon demanded a broader account of how such funds were spent, but the judiciary, under enormous political pressure, blocked him on the grounds of state security.
"Perhaps what is happening is that the State and its security is being confused with the security of certain persons and their possible penal responsibilities," was Mr Garzon's laconic response. Amedo, who kept his mouth buttoned, went down for 106 years in 1991, but his superiors were not charged. Mr Garzon seemed to have been thwarted.
Two years later he shocked both his critics and admirers by accepting Mr Gonzalez's offer of the second slot on the Socialist electoral lists. In justification, he said he could not refuse a chance to clean up corruption from within. Ten months after he was elected, however, he caused another sensation by resigning. His friends said that Mr Gonzalez had used him "like a condom". His enemies said he was miffed because he was not given a ministry.
Back in his chambers, he found that Amedo had decided to sing like a canary. He reopened a string of GAL cases, and laid the ground for a series of spectacular convictions which may yet implicate Mr Gonzalez himself.
Some legal experts have pointed to serious flaws in his modus operandi. His readiness to cut corners has indeed led to the overturning of major convictions, including those of several of the Galician drug barons. Others say that he "creates" new law in the best sense, and that this is what he is doing in the Pinochet case.
Using the international operations of Gen Pinochet's secret police as the key to bringing an extraterritorial case against the former dictator, Mr Garzon is determined to forge strong legal weapons out of well-meaning declarations like the International Convention against Torture.
This week, he appeared unperturbed by the law lords' decision to hear Pinochet's case for immunity a second time. It is a setback, but the man who worked for 10 years to put a Spanish interior minister behind bars can wait a little longer for a Chilean dictator.