Acácio

Acácio is the night clerk of the Hotel Borges, Lisbon, and has held the position since 1994. He was, in his youth, a sailor — Atlantic routes, primarily, between 1981 and 1989. He has a tattoo on the inside of his left forearm. He does not, in conversations with hotel guests, refer to the tattoo, and the records of the Borges do not include a description of it.

He does not knock on guest-room doors. He rings the room telephone. The Borges was built in 1894 and the building's original conventions were, by all accounts, conservative on questions of guest privacy. Acácio has continued the conventions.

He was on duty on the night of the seventh of October, 2026. He did not, by his subsequent account given to the compiler, see anyone enter or leave the building between three-twelve and four-thirty-eight in the morning. The institution has not, to the compiler's knowledge, interviewed him directly.