Where on Earth, Spies Ch. 35

"Cela fait quatre jours, faire cinq. Cela fait cinq jours, faire six. Le temps de faire une semaine."

Waldo muttered to himself, checking the burns on the back of his wrist. They were healing. There were some slightly newer marks, but all was starting to heal, during his time in Russia. He couldn't wait to get back home, maybe take a summer away from work. He was sick and tired of Russian Winters. He put some medicine on the back of his wrist and bandaged it, since Carmen (the first)'s daughter wasn't around to kid him about it, and Zach had started giving him worried looks when he messed with his watch. The medicine was cool to the touch, and smelled vaguely of sesame oil. He wasn't a fan, but it stopped the other two from being worried. He switched his watch to the other wrist to keep it from getting the oil on it, and to avoid aggravating the wound further. He had no desire to drink, at least. Not since he had gotten back from dancing with Carmen weeks before.

He had just finished filling Zach and Ivy in on the original Carmen. The two were trained to how Carmen used to operate, as were all Acme agents (as Carmen was one of the biggest threats the agency had ever really needed to worry itself over). They were therefore moderately surprised to hear she was living a happy, quiet life in Russia as a model citizen with many friends and (presumably) a dating life. Waldo had a plan to infiltrate while Carmen was away, investigate her house for the family hiding spots that her daughter had mentioned years later (time travel is weird) and then if that didn't work, keep time-traveling until it did, or they ran out of ideas. It was by no means a foolproof plan, but then they were planning for a redundancy, not as a last resort. Unlike spy movies that would have one believe that everything exciting is last-resort and complex, the truth of the matter was that spying was built on redundancies, boredom, and 'close enough for government work' mentality. Well, depending on the organization, and how serious the matter was.  

Waldo sighed a bit. He didn't want to go out and wait for Carmen to leave. It was cold out, and he didn't have a lot of things he could use to monitor the status of the house otherwise. It was either wait until she was out of the house, or fabricate a date for Carmen, and he didn't feel like tempting the stability of the time stream any more than he already was. So the next day they packed up, put on warm coats, and headed out. Waldo wore a white coat with a matching hood, rather than his usual hat. For all his favoritism of the "hide in plain sight" method, he couldn't deny that camouflage was a much better option when one was an easily-recognizable friend of the target. The other two dressed in normal warm clothes. Ivy took to a dark grey wool, while Zach preferred a chipper blue. Not that it was relevant. Waldo was glad neither of them went for red, however. Despite Waldo's personal fashion choices, he would have been glad to spend a few days not seeing the colour.

The three positioned themselves around Carmen's house, Waldo sticking by the snow and keeping up muted chatter with the nearby people about 'recent' news. Foreign policy and an unfortunate incident at a school, among other grim things. Not that everything was grim, it's just that that was what made for interesting chatter. Certainly more interesting than the weather. Waldo would've been just as happy to talk about favourite chess openings or opinions on contemporary poets, but world tragedies won out. Who was he to argue? Zach and Ivy, meanwhile, started socializing with some nearby kids. They were pretty young, themselves, and since Waldo was nearby and the neighbourhood was getting to know them a bit, they figured letting the little ones socialize with the responsible teenagers wasn't a problem. It was downright precious watching Zach and some little girl try to teach Ivy Russian children's songs.

"Kotja, koten'ka, kotok,
Kotja – seren'kij hvostok,
Pridi, kotja, nochevat',
Nashu detochku kachat',
Uzh kak ja tebe, kotu,
Za rabotu zaplachu –
Dam kusok piroga
Da kuvshin moloka!"

Ivy looked and sounded like she had no idea what was going on, but she played along like a good sport and Zach patiently taught her what he could of it. Waldo caught the tune of it and hummed along, himself. He remembered it, and gritted his teeth again. But only because it reminded him how long it'd been since he'd had a cigarette.

They kept this behavioral pattern up for a while. As said previously, spying is mostly boredom, but luckily Carmen was an active girl even when she didn't need to be, and left about midday, possibly to greet friends. Waldo waited until she was definitely gone before slipping away to go to her house. He found it an easy matter to get in, as Carmen used standard locks on her house. No traps, no clever detection methods (he checked), and no real trickery to it. The only reason she didn't have a key under the mat was because she wasn't an idiot. There was no spare key about the house, just a deadbolt that Waldo unlocked after about a minute of poking around with a pick. He slipped inside without anyone being any the wiser, leaving his boots at the door, along with his coat. He undoubtedly made tracks that wouldn't cover well, but somehow he suspected Carmen wouldn't mind much.

From there, Waldo started exploring. First checking the lower level of the house, finding that she had wide (he presumed 'uneducated') taste in wines, and a fondness for the 'loose stone in the masonry' trick (rather like loose floorboards, but heavier) which held little more than little whimsical things. Under one , a pressed flower in a note full of eloquent words (literally, just words that happened to be very nice, with no structure to them). Under another, he found a few pages from old, well-read novels. One of which he recognized as a page from the Wizard of Oz, another he noted was a page from Frankenstein in German. There were a few others he couldn't quite make out the origin of. Under another stone, he found a few coins from across the globe (and a few he was quite sure were from pre-industrial civilizations). Neat little trinkets and papers. He wondered what the purpose was, even as he replaced them carefully exactly as they were. But on reflection, it made more sense the more he thought about both of the Carmens. A fondness for exploration and education, a desire for companionship, and that occasional far-off look they both got. He suspected it was just Carmen's mother preparing for maybe one day having a family; Something whimsical to tie her eventual daughter up for a few hours. There were things to discover and learn about, words to look up, civilizations and languages and literature to understand. Waldo rather wished there were more parents like Carmen the first.

The cellar having gotten nowhere, he checked behind paintings (nothing but plaster), the undersides of chairs (Cheaply made, nothing inside them except shoddy building materials), and yes, under the bed and mattress. Clean. He took the moment in her bedroom to look at her bookshelves. The Wizard of Oz (with all its pages intact, so he wondered where the ripped page came from) and other classics, and three shelves of leather-bound journals he realized were of her travels, organized by date over the years. Some were devoted to a particular month of a particular year, because so much had happened.

He looked at one that described in ludicrous detail Carmen visiting the Mayans and accidentally convincing them she was some sort of goddess. This, of course, disrupted their calendar-making, and by the time she had left, enough chaos had ensued that they had to put a lengthy pause on the endeavor. Basically the entire journal revolved around this lengthier story, and it was nearly halfway through before she'd stolen anything (based on Waldo's skim-reading, anyway), leading Waldo to believe she had much more interesting stories than Acme ever knew.

"Didn't your mother ever teach you not to enter a girl's room without an invitation?" Carmen queried lightly, leaning against the door frame. Waldo had expected this, and had no doubt that Zach and Ivy were having panic attacks trying to figure out how to warn him Carmen was there.

"I never knew my mother well enough for that." Waldo stated shortly, idly flipping a page out of curiosity before he shut the book and replaced it where it was. "You really should publish. I'd love to read more of these." He admitted thoughtfully, looking back at the books, unconcerned.

"That was one of my better months. I still haven't figured out what god they could have thought I was, or if I was some new figure. You should see the time I flirted with Caesar. That was –after- Cleopatra confronted me about the colour of my coat, of course. I'm not sure if she ever figured out that harmless little fling, but I wasn't about to sleep with anyone in History anyway, It's rule one in the operation's manual of the time machine."

"Wait, seriously?"

"You never read it?"

"I might, now. It sounds like a good read." Waldo chuckled at the thought. "Now I really must read your journals." He remarked. He honestly did feel a bit of a loss at the fact that he might never get the chance to read up on all of Carmen's past adventures.

"Maybe someone can publish them after I'm dead and gone or something. I won't care then. For now, they're just a little chapter of my past that's over now. I still write in my journals about more interesting bits of my life, a little book of annotations I add in. But the point is, what are you doing here?" Carmen queried patiently, somehow not terribly bothered by him snooping around her house.

"Looking for something you may not know is here. If it's here at all."

"You broke into my house for a hunch?"

"Semantics, really. Nothing's broken." Waldo remarked with mock-indignation. Carmen seemed to find it funny, anyway.

"A man after my own heart. If it'l make you happy, look. I'll keep you company." Carmen was oddly obliging, but mostly because she didn't know what Waldo was looking for. If he found anything, she'd find out what he was looking for. If not, at least they both had a bit of company.

"Good. Hold on." Waldo walked to the window and opened it (the ice came off in a big, loud sheaf, making Zach and Ivy look up.
"You two go back to base, I've got this covered." Waldo remarked airily out the window. The other two were surprised, shrugged, and went off to their temporary lodgings, wondering what had happened and waiting for an explanation.
Waldo returned to Carmen with a smile. "On we go. Why don't you tell me more about Ceasar?" He smiled a bit and went back to exploring while Carmen went on about the Romans.