Neusa Prado

Neusa Prado is 54 and has been head guard of the museum's night shift for eighteen years. She was born in Governador Valadares, in Minas Gerais, the daughter of a washerwoman and a truck driver, and came to São Paulo at 19, on a night bus, with a canvas bag and a cousin's address. She was a cleaner, a boarding-house cook and a school doorkeeper until a security guard opening came up. She passed the test on the first try and never changed trades again.

She lives in an exposed-brick house in Guaianases, in the east side, with a packed-earth yard where she keeps three chickens and a pepper plant. The kitchen is the liveliest part of the house: a four-burner stove, a cloth coffee strainer hanging from a nail and a thermos always full of strong filtered coffee. She takes the crowded bus back, sleeps little and always wakes before the alarm. People who know her say she works even on her days off.

She has graying curly hair pulled into a short ponytail, brown skin and the deep dark circles of someone who spends her nights on her feet. She wears the navy-blue guard uniform with the embroidered badge and carries a two-way radio on her shoulder. She walks with a thermos of coffee in her hand, even in summer. She speaks little and curtly, protects her colleagues as if they were her children and distrusts everyone who arrives in a suit.

About the museum, her account is that of someone who knows every corner. She says there are four guards for three floors and an open atriumatrium Large open central space in a building, often several floors high, usually with a skylight., no weapon, no dog, only a flashlight and a radio, and that the rooms have no alarm: there are people walking and a camera that records in black and white. She explains that the shift change is at five, that for a few minutes nobody watches the monitors, and that she stays until twenty past. She says that is all there is to know about the hour of the robbery.

Neusa knows that the night chief is the first name the police look for when the door gives way at shift change. When the detective asks if she opened the door for the thieves, the weariness turns to steel: eighteen years of rounds, she says, and now she hears this from a boy in a tie, and from here on she only talks to the union lawyer. It may be the honor of a woman who carries the building on her back. It may be someone hiding behind her own service record. The detective will have to decide which.