“Are you sure it’s here?” asked Vargas.

Alicia nodded and went in ahead of him. They walked past a locomotive stranded in a large puddle, among wheelbarrows, water pipes, and the shell of a discarded boiler, where a flock of seagulls had made their nest. The birds stood there stock-still, watching them go by with eyes that flashed in the twilight. A row of posts supported a tangle of electrical cables from which a few dangling lamps cast a faint light. The factory bays had been numbered and marked with wooden signs.

“Ours is number three,” said Alicia.

Vargas looked around him. A couple of starving cats meowed from the shadows. The air smelled of charcoal and sulfur. They walked by a deserted guard’s cabin.

“Shouldn’t there be a guard around here?”

“I think Brians is a lawyer with a preference for low-cost solutions,” Alicia suggested.

“The defender of lost causes,” Vargas recalled. “He stays in character . . .”

She approached the entrance to the bay marked with a 3. Recent tracks from the moving van’s tires were still visible on the mud in front of a large wooden door bolted with metal bars. A smaller door cut into the main panel was locked with a chain and a rusty padlock the size of a fist.

“How are we for brute force?” asked Alicia.

“You’re not expecting me to bite it open, are you?”

“I don’t know. Do something manly.”

The policeman pulled out his revolver and inserted the barrel point-blank into the padlock’s hole. “Move away,” he ordered.

Alicia put her hands over her ears. The echo of the shot rippled through the enclosure. Vargas pulled the gun out of the padlock, which fell to his feet, dragging the chain with it. Then he kicked the door open.

A web of shadows spread through the bay, out of which peered the ruins of a thousand and one palaces. From the vaulted ceiling hung a network of cables dotted with bare bulbs. Vargas followed the circuit along the walls until he found an electrical box sticking out of the wall and pressed the main switch. The bulbs lit up in slow succession, just strands of yellowish, flickering lights, as in a ghostly funfair. The current produced a low humming sound, like a cloud of insects fluttering in the dark.

They walked down the corridor that ran through the bay, with enclosures on either side protected by wire fencing. A notice hung at the entrance to each enclosure, bearing the number of the lot, the month and year of the storage expiration, and the owner’s surname or company name. Each of those subdivisions housed a world in itself. In the first enclosure they saw hundreds of old typewriters, adding machines, and cash registers, stacked up like a fortress. The next one contained a huge selection of crucifixes, figures of saints, confessionals, and pulpits.

“One could start a convent with all that,” said Alicia.

“Maybe you’re still in time . . .”