Eyes of the Innocent

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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.

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