“Forewarned is forearmed,” he said.

Vilajuana sighed and let Carolo in. The editor made his way to the sitting room. When he saw the entire wall covered in papers, he got closer and ran his eyes over it. “Is this what I think it is?” he asked after a while.

“I’d say it’s only the beginning.”

“And what is your source?”

“I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“I see. Is it reliable, at least?”

“I believe so.”

“I suppose you’re aware that if we publish something like this, they’ll close down the newspaper, you and I will end up teaching grammar in some forsaken backwater village, and our dear owner and publisher will have to exile himself to some hard-to-get-to mountainous country in central Europe.”

“I’m well aware.”

Carolo looked anxiously at Vilajuana and rubbed his stomach. Since he’d become the paper’s editor, he developed ulcers even in his dreams. “And there was I, so content with being the Catalan Noël Coward,” he murmured.

“The truth is, I don’t know what to do,” said Vilajuana.

“Do you have a lead?”

“Yes, there’s a trail I can follow.”

“OK. This is what we’re going to do. I’ll say you’re preparing a series of features on a relatively unexplored aspect of the Generalissimo: his secret but sublime work as screenwriter.”

“Hollywood’s greatest loss.”

“What a magnificent headline. Keep me informed. I give you two weeks.”

* * *

Vilajuana spent the rest of the week analyzing the documents and organizing them in a tree diagram. When he stared at it, he felt as if the tree was just one among many, and that beyond the four walls of that room a whole forest awaited him. Once he’d digested the documentation and its implications, the question was whether to follow the trail or not.

Alicia had provided him with almost all the pieces of the puzzle. The rest depended on him. After a couple of sleepless nights, he made up his mind. His first stop was the Civil Registry, a cavernous building beached in front of the port, home to a purgatory of archives and bureaucrats that seemed to have blended together in perfect symbiosis. He spent a few days there, delving into a chasm of files without finding anything. He was beginning to think that Alicia’s trail was a false one when, on the fifth day, he bumped into an old doorman on the point of retirement who spent his time stuck to a transistor radio, listening avidly to league matches and phone-in programs in a broom cupboard full of mops and provisions. The new crop of civil servants referred to him as Methuselah because he was the only one to have survived the last administrative purge. The new centurions, more polished and better trained than their predecessors, were doubly hermetic, and none would explain to him why, however hard he tried, he couldn’t find the registry books for death and birth certificates in the city of Barcelona before 1944.

“That’s from before the system change,” was the only answer he ever got.