Twice a Spy_ A Novel - Keith Thomson [42]
The odd television screen shimmered through lace curtains as well as holes in regular curtains. The dwellings themselves, almost all three-story apartment buildings, were either old and dilapidated or new constructions done on the cheap, with views not of the sparkling Baie des Flamands, a block away, but of a four-story, graffiti-covered municipal parking garage. In short, they were apartments where residents would depend on a self-serve Laundromat. The closest thing to a Laundromat Charlie saw, however, was a hairdresser.
He reached down and nudged his father awake. “Sorry, I need you to take a look.”
Drummond tried to shake away his sleepiness.
“Does this look familiar?” Charlie asked.
Drummond rose the fraction of an inch necessary to peer out his window. He smiled, as if in reminiscence.
“Familiar?” Charlie asked, meaning the question to be rhetorical.
“No. Should it be?”
“If for no other reason than we flew four thousand miles to go to a Laundromat here.”
“What Laundromat?”
“That’s a good question.”
“Thank you.”
“How about this, Dad? What if you were, say, a CIA operations officer working under nonofficial cover and you had a fake ten-kiloton atomic demolition munition concealed within a washing machine and you needed to hide it in an urban residential area. Where would you put it?”
“Plain sight.” Drummond’s mouth tightened, as if he were annoyed that Charlie would ask such a stupid question.
“Like where?”
“Is that why you were asking about a Laundromat?”
“Right.”
“For an operation of that magnitude, I might buy an existing Laundromat to use as a front, or open my own.”
“Where, ideally, would you locate it?”
“Easy. A place with access for a delivery truck.”
“Close to a parking garage?”
“Exactly.”
Charlie sped to the end of the one-way street, turned left on Boulevard Alfassa, took another left onto rue François Arago, then doubled back to the top of rue Joseph Compère, bringing the car to a stop at the municipal garage he’d noticed earlier.
Still no Laundromats in sight. Just a quartet of three-story apartment buildings painted in repeating pastel squares and adorned with enough architectural flourishes to prevent the residents from realizing that they lived in concrete boxes. The buildings were new, evidenced by the freshness of the paint and the clean stretch of cement fronting them—without any of the stains or ruts on the sidewalks that were everywhere else on rue Joseph Compère.
Charlie indicated the apartments with a sweeping gesture. “How much do you want to bet that the Laundromat used to be there?”
Drummond reacted as if he’d just swallowed vinegar.
Charlie spun in his seat. “What’s wrong?”
“Always with the betting,” Drummond grumbled, taking Charlie back to the years when the two of them still got together on major holidays, always at restaurants where they could eat in less than an hour, ideally with televised bowl games to minimize the time Drummond lectured on squandering one’s life on the horses.
A truck shaped like a baby’s shoe—and not much larger—whizzed past, snapping Charlie back to rue Joseph Compère.
“Well, you’ll be happy to know that I now wish I’d become an engineer at the Skunk Works,” he told Drummond. “If only because I’d be in Palmdale, California, instead of on this wild Laundromat chase, unsure if I’m going to live through the night.”
Drummond regarded him as if through a fog.
The bluesy saxophone drifting down the block offered a fitting sound track. The music emanated from a slender two-story hole-in-the-wall. Hand-painted on one of the smoky windows, in a feathery silver cursive, was “Chez Odelette.”
The hair rose on the back of Charlie’s neck. “Your cutout, wasn’t she named Odelette?”
“Nice girl,” Drummond said.
Charlie