Valdir Rocha

Valdir Rocha is 41 and for sixteen years has looked after the stretch from km 68 to 74 as if the line were his. He was born in Paracambi, the son of a railway track-crew worker, and grew up hearing train whistles before the rooster. He joined the Railway at 25, carrying sleepers, and became a lineman because he was the man who walked the most and complained the least. He knows every marker, every culvert and every embankment that slides down with the rain.

He lives in a little brick house beside the line, near Japeri, with his wife and three children, where the wood stove is lit from five in the morning. On the kitchen wall, the next day's uniform hangs on a nail, beside a saint's calendar and a clay water jug. On Sundays he fixes neighbors' radios for free and says he can't say no to anyone who asks for help.

He is tall and strong, a Black man with short curly hair with white at the temples, a thin mustache and a sun-marked face. He wears the railway's khaki uniform, faded by sun and soap, a small peaked cap and a red kerchief at his neck that his wife washes every night. He speaks slowly, in a calm voice, and always offers help before being asked, like someone who wants to be the most useful man on the line.

About the morning of the robbery, his account is that of a man far from the curve: he was at km 64, far from the curve, with the crew replacing sleepers, heard the blast from afar and came running along the line. He says he arrived when there was no one left to help. He repeats that he looks after rails, not money, and that the railwaymen's payroll never passed through his hands. With the curve in the middle of the brush and the gang vanished in the dust, no one can say for certain where each person was that morning.

Valdir knows that the lineman for the stretch is the one who best knows the curve where the train slows down. When the detective asks if he helped the gang stop the train, the calm hardens: he recalls his sixteen years looking after the line and asks to be asked again when there is a paper in hand. It may be the hurt of an honest worker treated as a bandit. It may be someone too helpful to be only that. The detective will have to decide which.