Odete Saraiva

Odete Saraiva is 44 and has paid railwaymen for nineteen years. She was born in Barra do Piraí, the daughter of a telegraph operator and a seamstress, learned to count money at the counter of an uncle's general store and joined the Railway at 25, as a clerical assistant. She rose to paymaster by examination and by stubbornness, in an office that was almost all men, and still corrects anyone who calls her the girl at the register.

She lives with her husband in a row house in Cascadura, with a green door and louvered shutters, in a small living room where her mother's sewing machine shares space with a china cabinet of glasses nobody uses. Everything there has its set day: the market on Thursday, Mass on Sunday, the radio tuned to the eight o'clock soap opera. At the end of the month, she checks the household accounts with the same wooden ruler she uses to check the payroll, and signs the receipts with a fountain pen she lends to no one.

She has wavy black hair pinned in a bun full of hairpins, discreet red lipstick and tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses that she pushes up her nose before answering. She wears a starched white high-collared blouse and the railway's metal badge on her chest. Since Tuesday, her left arm has been in a cloth sling. She is formal, speaks of banknotes and receipts with an accountant's precision and takes offense when anyone doubts a number she has given.

About this month's payroll, she corrects the detective right away: it did not come double, it came triple, with a two-month bonus, and the circular was posted only at the stations and posts along the line, where only railway people read it. About the trip, she says they left on schedule, with two guards in the car, that at the curve the train slows down as always and that is where the ground blew up. When she came to, she was lying on top of other people's banknotes. She saw five men with women's stockings over their faces, a big one in black gloves giving orders and a skinny one who trembled and pointed his gun at everyone. With the curve in the middle of the brush and the gang vanished in the dust, no one can say for certain what each person saw that morning.

Odete knows that the paymaster of a robbed train is the first person suspected. When the detective asks if she handed the payroll to the gang, she recalls her nineteen years paying railwaymen to the last cent and the broken arm in the sling, and her tone turns cold at once. It may be the wounded pride of an employee who never got a sum wrong. It may be someone clinging to numbers so as not to speak of something else. The detective will have to decide which.