“That will be the day you learn to read and write, Jenaro,” the editor in chief, Mariano Carolo, would always say. “Miracles don’t happen even in Lourdes, and at this rate, unless you go there to mop the floor, they won’t even let you into the box to watch a children’s qualifying round.”

As soon as he saw him come through the door, Jenaro went up to Vilajuana with a serious expression.

“Señor Vilajuana, the censor from the ministry is waiting for you,” he murmured.

“Again? Have these people nothing better to do?”

Vilajuana peered into the newsroom from the doorway and located the unmistakeable silhouette of his favorite censor, a slick-haired individual with a pear-shaped body who was standing guard by his desk.

“Ah, by the way, a parcel came for you,” said Jenaro. “I don’t think it’s a bomb, because it fell on the floor and we’re still in one piece.”

Vilajuana picked up the parcel and decided to do a U-turn and avoid the censor’s visit. The man was a bore. He’d been trying for weeks to corral Vilajuana and tell him off about an article he’d written on the Marx brothers that, the censor argued, constituted an apologia for an international Communist conspiracy.

* * *

He walked over to a bar in the darkest corner of Calle Tallers, nicknamed the Filthy Arms by the journalists, cabaret artistes, and assorted fauna native to the northern tip of the Raval quarter who frequented it. After ordering a coffee, he took cover at a table in the far back, where not a single ray of sunlight had ever penetrated. He sat down and examined the parcel. It was a padded envelope, reinforced with wrapping tape and addressed to him at La Vanguardia. The stamp, half erased by the vagaries of the post, was from the United States of America. The sender’s address simply read:

A.G.

Next to the initials was a design identical to the spiral staircase that appeared on the covers of all Víctor Mataix’s novels in the Labyrinth of the Spirits series.

Vilajuana opened the envelope and pulled out a wad of documents tied together with string. Under the knot he saw a card with the letterhead of the Algonquin Hotel in New York, which read as follows:

A good journalist will know how to find the story

that needs to be told . . .

Vilajuana frowned and untied the knot. After unfolding the bundle of papers on the table, he tried to decipher the resulting confusion of lists, cuttings, photographs, and handwritten notes. It took him a couple of minutes to understand what he was staring at.

“Good God,” he whispered.

* * *

That afternoon, Vilajuana sent a message saying he’d caught a highly infectious virus that turned the entire digestive system into a minefield and would not be able to come in all week for fear of condemning the entire team to a constant pilgrimage to the toilet. By Thursday, Mariano Carolo, who could smell a rat, turned up at Vilajuana’s home carrying a roll of toilet paper.