Nestor Guimarães

Nestor Guimarães is 53 and for fifteen years has been the man who handles everything at the agency that isn't creative: cars, accounts, insurance, security. Born in Belo Horizonte, the son of a bank clerk and a boarding house keeper, he studied business administration at night and joined the agency as an office assistant. He speaks with the cordiality of someone receiving guests at home, opens almost every sentence with look here and carries numbers on his fingertips.

He lives with his wife in a three-bedroom apartment in Santana, in a doorman building with velvet curtains, a living room of dark furniture, a glass sideboard with company porcelain and a small study where he keeps payment booklets, policies and receipts in cardboard folders, each with a rubber band. He wakes at 7, reads the newspaper section by section and keeps his gold watch always two minutes fast. He dislikes surprises and dislikes silence.

He is tall and potbellied, with a flabby, sweaty face, gray hair combed back with gel and gold-rimmed bifocalsbifocals Eyeglasses with two lens zones, one for seeing far away and one for seeing up close.. He wears a brown suit of shiny fabric, a patterned tie and a loose gold watch on his wrist, which he adjusts whenever the conversation tightens. In his shirt pocket he has a pack of cigarettes that he shows more than smokes. He is far too cordial, full of numbers, and smiles with closed lips.

About the agency, he says he handles the cars, the accounts, the insurance and the security, and that if a paper clip disappears, he is the one who answers. About late afternoon, he notes that Leonor vanished from 4 to 6:15 p.m. and came back by taxi, made up, in a new blouse, asking him not to tell Teodoro, but says he accuses no one, only reports. He says Teodoro had kidnap insurance, from a London policy he renews himself, and that the insurer has already sent a negotiator.

Nestor knows the manager who handles the cars and security is the one asked how security failed. When the detective says he staged the fake police stop, he adjusts the loose gold watch on his wrist and answers that it's fifteen years at the company and they call him a criminal, and says no more without the agency's lawyer. The pride of a veteran employee, or too many numbers so that none is his own: the loose watch slides.