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stepped inside and I caught a glimpse of waiting arms.
    Of all the people in the world, I thought, why did she have to choose Rudolphe Toubert?
    Rudolphe Toubert was the closest thing to a gangster in Frenchtown and yet no one ever spoke that word aloud. He was known as “the man to see.” The man to see if you wanted to place a bet on a horse or a football game. The man to see for a loan when the Household Finance Company downtown rejected your application. The man to see if you needed a favor. It was well known in Frenchtown that if you were faced with trouble of some kind—at the shop, on the streets, even in your family—Rudolphe Toubert was the man to see. Of course, you paid for his services in more ways than one. For instance, people still changed the subject when the name of Jean Paul Rodier came up. Jean Paul was found bruised and bleeding in Pee Alley one morning and it was said he had not paid back a loan he had taken out with Rudolphe Toubert. But there was no proof. And no witnesses.
    Rudolphe Toubert was a dashing figure who commanded instant attention. Tall and slender with a movie star moustache on his upper lip, he always wore a suit with a vest and drove a big gray Packard that rolled majestically through the streets of Frenchtown, a pretty girl sometimes at his side. My mother said he was cheap-looking with his slicked-down hair and his pinstripe suits, like someone in a B movie at the Plymouth. My father said it didn't matter whether he looked cheap or not—he was a success at what he did. My father bought a lottery ticket every week from the runner at the shop who worked for Rudolphe Toubert. A twenty-five-cent ticket of hope, my father called it. Old man Francoeur on Ninth Street had once won fifteen hundred dollars on one of Rudolfe Toubert's tickets, and Mr. Francoeur's name was still spoken with awe and wonder by people who remembered his good fortune and had memorized the winning number: 55522. But it never came up again.
    Rudolphe Toubert controlled all the newspaper routes in Frenchtown, including the delivery of the Boston newspapers—the Globe, Post, and Daily Record — as well as the Monument Times. He paid the boys a flat fee for each route instead of a commission. As a result, Frenchtown newsboys earned far less than the boys who delivered papers in other sections of town. He arranged the routes to suit his own purposes, giving the best routes to boys he favored. The routes everyone wanted were those that covered a small territory of three-deckers where papers could be delivered quickly and the customers always paid on time and gave big tips.
    My younger brother, Bernard, was struggling that summer with the worst of the routes, the longest, least profitable, and spookiest route in Frenchtown, which Rudolphe Toubert always gave to the newest and youngest boy. Although the route consisted of only twelve customers, it stretched more than two miles from the railroad tracks at the edge of downtown Monument along Mechanic Street to the small cottage of Mr. Joseph LeFarge at the gate of St. Jude's Cemetery. Mr. LeFarge was the parish bedeau, which meant that he was the church janitor as well as in charge of the cemetery, where he dug the graves and cut the grass. He was a silent, forbidding man with thin lips that never softened into a smile and eyes that seemed to contain secrets. He could have stepped out of a Boris KarlofF movie, although my father claimed he was actually a gentle man who wouldn't harm a fly.
    But then my father didn't have to deliver papers to Mr. LeFarge's house day after day, especially during the fall and winter months when darkness had already descended or was threatening by the time you arrived there, the tombstones visible from his front walk. Not only was his house isolated, a quarter mile from the nearest three-decker, but it was located across the street from the city dump, where clouds of smoke from smoldering rubbish rose like pale ghosts against the sky. The