“I’d like you to have a quick look at something.”

Alicia pulled out the book she’d found hidden in Valls’s desk and handed it to him. Virgilio took it and switched on the flashlight. As soon as he saw the design of the coiled staircase on the cover, he looked Alicia straight in the eyes. “But have you even the remotest idea of what this is?”

“I was hoping you’d be able to enlighten me.”

Virgilio looked over his shoulder, as if he feared there might be someone else in the passageway, and motioned with his head toward a door. “We’d better go to my office.”

Virgilio’s office was a cubicle squeezed into the end of a corridor on the lowest floor. One got the feeling that the room had grown out of the walls as a result of the pressure of those millions of volumes stacked floor upon floor, a sort of cabin formed of books, lever-arch files, and all sorts of peculiar objects, from glasses full of paintbrushes and sewing needles to spectacles, magnifying glasses, and tubes of pigments. Alicia guessed that this was where Virgilio undertook the occasional emergency surgery on damaged volumes. The cubicle’s pièce de resistance was a small fridge, full of orange Fanta. Virgilio pulled a couple bottles out and served them. Then, armed with his special magnifying glasses, he placed the book on a piece of red velvet and slipped on a pair of silk gloves.

“From all this ceremonial, I deduce the volume is a rare one—”

“Shhh,” said Virgilio. For the next few minutes he examined the Víctor Mataix book with fascination, licking his lips at every page, stroking each illustration, and savoring every engraving as if it were some fiendishly choice dish.

“Virgilio, you’re making me nervous. Say something, for God’s sake!”

The man turned around, his ice-blue eyes amplified by the magnifier of those watchmaker’s lenses. “I suppose you can’t tell me where you found it,” he began.

“That’s right.”

“This is a collector’s piece. If you like, I can tell you who you could sell it to for a very good price, although you’d have to be careful because this is a censored book, not only by the government but also by the Holy Mother Church.”

“This one and hundreds of others. What can you tell me about it that I can’t imagine?”

Virgilio removed his magnifier glasses and drank half a Fanta in one gulp. “I’m sorry, I got all emotional,” he confessed. “I haven’t seen one of these treats for at least twenty years . . .”

He leaned back in his moth-eaten armchair, his eyes shining. Alicia knew that the day prophesied by Bermeo Pumares had arrived.

14

“As far as I know,” Virgilio explained, “eight books of the series The Labyrinth of the Spirits were published in Barcelona between 1931 and 1938. I can’t tell you much about the author, Víctor Mataix. I know he worked occasionally as an illustrator of children’s books and that he published a few novels under a pseudonym in a third-rate publishing house called Barrido & Escobillas. It was rumored that he was the illegitimate son of an industrialist from Barcelona who had made his fortune in South America and disowned both Víctor and his mother—a relatively popular actress at the time in the theaters of the Paralelo district. Mataix also worked as a set designer and produced catalogs for a toy manufacturer in Igualada. In 1931 he published the first installment of The Labyrinth of the Spirits, under the title Ariadna and the Underwater Cathedral. Published by Orbe, if I’m not mistaken.”