“One day you must let me play with that contraption,” said Alicia.

“If you behave yourself,” said Vargas as he opened the drawer.

They both looked expectantly inside. It was empty.

“Don’t tell me I’ve forced open a minister’s desk for nothing.”

Alicia didn’t reply. She knelt down next to Vargas and felt the inside of the drawer, rapping on the base and sides with her knuckles.

“Solid oak,” said the policeman. “They don’t make furniture like this anymore.”

Alicia frowned, puzzled.

Vargas got to his feet. “We’re not going to find anything here. We’d do better going to headquarters to inspect Salgado’s letters.”

Alicia, who was still feeling the inside of the drawer and the base of the one above it, ignored him. There was a space of about three centimeters between the bottom of the second drawer and the end of the side panels of the one below.

“Help me get it out,” she said.

“Not content with breaking the lock, you now want to pull the whole desk to pieces,” Vargas muttered, signaling her to move out of the way and pulling out the drawer. “You see? Nothing.”

Alicia grabbed the drawer and turned it over. Stuck to the back panel of the base with a cross formed of two pieces of insulating tape was what looked like a book. Carefully pulling off the tape, she lifted out the volume.

Vargas felt the adhesive side of the tape. “It’s recent.”

Alicia set the book on the desk, sat down again, and pulled it toward the lamp. Vargas knelt beside her and looked at her with interest.

The volume contained roughly two hundred pages and was bound in black leather. There was no title on the cover or the spine. The only distinctive mark was a golden spiral embossed on the cover, creating a sort of optical illusion: when you held the book, you felt as if you were looking down a spiral staircase descending into the deep.

Alicia opened the book. The first three pages each bore an ink drawing of a chess piece with vaguely human features: a bishop, a pawn, and a queen with black eyes and vertical pupils, like those of a reptile. On the next page was the title of the book:

The Labyrinth of the Spirits VII

Ariadna and the Scarlet Prince

Text and illustrations by Víctor Mataix

Beneath the title, and spilling over the page to its left, was an illustration in black ink, the image of an eerie city with buildings that had faces. Clouds slid through the rooftops like snakes. Bonfires and pyres of smoke rose from the streets, and a large blazing cross presided over the city from a mountaintop. Alicia could make out the landmarks of Barcelona—but it was a different Barcelona, a city that seemed to sketch out a nightmare seen through the eyes of a child. She turned over a few more pages, pausing at an illustration of what was undoubtedly the Temple of the Sagrada Familia. In the drawing the structure seemed to have come to life; the unfinished cathedral crept like a dragon, the four towers of the Nativity door rippling against sulfur-colored skies, ending in heads that spewed out fire.