Eyes of the Innocent

The electrician patted his breast pocket for the tenth time and, once again, exhaled noisily: the envelope-Primo’s envelope-was still there.

It was the weight of the thing that threw him. He thought $10,000 ought to have more heft to it. In his hometown of Belem, Brazil, $10,000 was a substantial sum, enough for a down payment on a house-a brick house in a decent neighborhood, not one of those shanties in the slums. There was a time when if you converted 10,000 American greenbacks into cruzeiros, you needed a wheelbarrow to haul it.

Here in the States, meted out in hundred-dollar bills, it could be bound in paper bands and slipped into an envelope. And it weighed, well, not enough to stop the electrician from constantly checking the pocket of his winter coat.

His errand was simple enough. Or at least it should have been. He picked up the money at Primo’s office, a small warehouse in a swampy section of Newark, New Jersey-the industrial part that runs alongside the New Jersey Turnpike. He dropped it off at a storefront office on Springfield Avenue, in the heart of the Central Ward. It was a route the electrician had come to know well.

He had done this, what, fifteen times? Twenty? He was starting to lose count. But every time, it made him feel as if he had scorpions in his underwear. It was only a matter of time until he got stung.

Cash. Why did it always have to be cash? And why did it have to be delivered personally? Why couldn’t Primo just write a check and slip it in the mail?

The electrician brought his hand to his pocket one last time. Still there. He parked his truck and braced himself for the worst part: the twenty feet from the curb to the storefront, where he had to wait to be buzzed in-all the while feeling as if that cash brick were a signal flare to every punk, thug, and stickup artist for five blocks.

He glanced around to see no one was coming, made his twenty-foot dash, then mashed the buzzer four times in rapid succession. After what seemed like forever but was really just ten seconds, the door buzzed open. Relieved, he burst through it. The scorpions had decided not to sting him. Not this time.

A thickset, round-shouldered black man looked up from behind his desk.

“Damn, boy, where the fire at?”

It had been the same man receiving the money every time, but they had never bothered with introductions or niceties. They were simply doing the bidding of their powerful bosses. Names didn’t matter. Banter accomplished nothing.

“Ten?” the man asked.

“Ten.”

The electrician handed the man a piece of paper. The man scowled.

“You Spanish guys got to learn to write English. The last letter on the last name … That a a or a o?”

The electrician swallowed the insult. The name wasn’t his. And he didn’t bother to inform this ignoramus that the name was Portuguese, not Spanish, and that they used the same alphabet-which happened to be Roman.

“Ronaldo. With an o,” he said.

The man scribbled for a few more seconds, then handed the electrician a receipt. Not another word passed between them.