Renato Albuquerque

Renato Albuquerque is 52 and has looked after the museum's collection for twenty years. He was born in Petrópolis, the son of a watchmaker and a French teacher, and grew up among delicate mechanisms and books that smelled of mildew. He studied restoration in Florence on a scholarship that barely paid for the ticket, and returned to Rio with a case of brushes, a reputation for a steady hand and the certainty that the world divides into those who touch things and those who destroy them.

He lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Laranjeiras, on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator, with tall windows overlooking a mango tree. The living room looks like an extension of the studio: folding easels, a drawing table covered in felt, magnifying glasses, sealed solvent bottles on the top shelf and a ficus bonsai he waters with an eyedropper. He drinks coffee with milk from a fine china cup, never a mug, and sleeps little. He says a well-kept painting outlasts the man who keeps it.

He has short gray hair combed back, light brown skin and fingers stained with solvent that he wipes on his apron without noticing. He wears a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up under a gray conservator's apron. He is polite, measured, treats the police with a professor's patience and speaks of the paintings with a father's affection. To explain a brushstroke, he uses both hands, carefully, as if afraid of breaking the air.

About the afternoon of the robbery, his account is that of a neighborhood resident: he spent Friday at the block party, from noon on, and only heard about the museum at night, by phone. He explains that each painting was held by nylon thread on hooks and by a steel latch behind the frame, an old but honest system, which he looked after himself. He recalls that it has been twenty years of dusting canvases with a sable brushsable brush Very fine, soft brush made of sable hair, used for delicate painting and for cleaning artworks.. He also mentions that he was told the head of the guards left the gate to watch the block party, drink in hand.

Renato knows that the man who knows every latch in the museum is the first to be asked about them. When the detective calls him a thief, the professor's patience tightens: twenty years of dust and brushes, and you call me a thief? Come back when you have more than a sentence. It may be the wounded dignity of a man who devoted his life to the canvases. It may be someone who uses a lecturing tone to end the conversation. The detective will have to decide which.