Baltasar Iglesias

Baltasar Iglesias is 61 and has been the night concierge at the Hotel Miramonte for fourteen years. Born in a village in Galicia, the son of a carpenter, he studied until fifteen and worked in Vigo hotels before the war. A Republican, he left Spain in 1939, at 37, spent ten years in France and reached Caracas in 1949 with a single suit. He still speaks with the Galician accent he hasn't lost in 24 years of exile, and says he never will.

He lives in a rented room in a family house in San Bernardino, five minutes' walk from the hotel, with a narrow bed, a dark wooden wardrobe, a table with an aluminum kettle and a tube radio he listens to low, when he gets back in the morning. On the wall, a faded photograph of a village by the estuary. He sleeps by day, with the shutters closed, and wakes in time to polish his shoes before his shift.

He wears the navy concierge uniform, with gold buttons and an embroidered lapel, a black bow tie and white hair combed back with brilliantine. He is short, thin, with a thin gray mustache, and speaks softly, with the formality of another time. He calls guests sir and madam, even those who address him informally. He is proud of never forgetting a name, and the house knows it.

About the false policemen, he recounts what he remembers with a watchmaker's precision. They asked for room 218 by number, at 5:50, and not the guest's name. In his book, the club's delegation is a single block, fourteen rooms on the second floor. He checked the gold badge under the lamp, number and portrait, and everything was in order. Asked how much they paid him to let the men go up, he answers not a cent, and that his salary is the only thing that goes into that pocket.

It could be the wounded pride of a man who did the same job his whole life without a failure. It could be the formality of someone who learned that, in exile, it is better to say little. The detective will have to decide which.