Disclaimer and such: see prelude.
A/N: First of all, I want to apologize for the delay. First, RL got in the way of my posting schedule and when that was fixed, I realized the second part of the chapter sucked so evidently, I had to fix it. Don't know how much better it is, but I here it is at last.
As usual, to my readers: ranma8962Thanks for the confidence. imag1ne, that's my fave line too ;). jerseyno1, glad you enjoyed Broots Crazyrussiangal, nice to have you on board.
mariel4000, hope your world is exactly in the same place – whenever you get to read this, the following chapter is for you. =)
-For whoever wonders: I figured the Blue Cove-Paris trip would take 4 to 4.5 hours, since I don't know exactly what model of planes the centre has. Then, Paris-Munich takes 1.35 hours and Munich-Sarajevo is 2.25 (on a fancy Lufthansa flight -ticket is about US$600, one way). You can do that all in a day if you start early, have the means (and stamina). Also, considering airport security and other details, I think Miss P would charter private flights. So that's how my timetable works: Parker leaves Blue cove at 9.30 am. And yes, I'm a freak. Please do not be scared and read on.
::Right margin is out of service. Or so it seems. ::
Chapter eleven
Between the hours
["How many lives do we live?" – 21 grams.]
The ceiling of the cheap hotel room was a creamy shade of white; a very generic creamy shade of white that perfectly matched the paint on the walls. As her eyes met the green curtain that hung drawn to one side of the sealed window, Parker decided it was a good thing that the establishment didn't seem to have a large budget for interior decorations: bold colors, flowery wall paper or some other such nonsense would have only made the room feel smaller and she was already having trouble breathing. Turning in search of a more comfortable position, she was for some reason reminded of how she'd ended up here, in this too wide for one bed, pondering color choices.
It hadn't been a huge deed, getting rid of Lyle's sweepers back in Paris. She'd snuck up on them and sent them back to daddy with a good scare and the clear warning that while on vacation, she would remain armed and not in the mood to deal with her twin's crap. She'd then put them on the company jet, changed her hair color, dropped some clothes and boarded a plane bound for Munich. The remaining leg of her trip, Munich-Sarajevo, she had done with far less luggage than she'd brought from the states (thank the Lord for storage services). And now- now she was sinking on this uncooperative mattress, wishing fervently she could sleep a little, if only for the sake of her sanity. She wasn't holding out much hope for that particular miracle to happen, though. In fact, despite the considerable Jet-Lag she should be and was probably covertly experiencing, she hadn't been able to shut her eyes for anything longer than a literal blink. Instead of sleep laden she felt hyperactive, depressed and more than slightly hostile all at the same time, and the only thought her convoluted brain was able to conjugate clearly, was that the building across the street was the kind of run-down location that Jarod would like. An unfortunate thought by all accounts, since thinking of Jarod made her think of Lyle and thinking of Lyle made her want to throw up.
'Please god, please.'
She'd had a good scare when she'd switched to shots, soon after their encounters had started. She hadn't trusted the pill that much and due to the nature of her …relationship with the pretender, she'd rather be safe than sorry. However, her system had taken "a while to adjust" and she'd spent almost a week dodging calls and remembering all the prayers she'd ever been taught, hoping that fifty would be her lucky number. Fifty two had done the trick, and by fifty three she couldn't remember being so grateful about seeing blood in her entire life. Immediately afterwards she'd let the matter slip into her subconscious.
'Thank you.'
Parker had never told Jarod about that incident because she'd never deemed it important, so she didn't really know why that specific memory was revisiting her now. Maybe it was one of those funny connections the brain makes when going through the beginning stages of sleep deprivation. Maybe it was just that she sucked at waiting games. Padding across the room she stopped before the only window and leaned against the pane of glass. The building she'd spotted before stood right in front of her now and, as she idly wriggled her toes in the rose colored carpet that covered the floor, she decided it really wasn't in such bad condition. It could definitely use a good paint job but the structure was decent enough –which was more than she could say about most of the institutions known in her life, herself included. With the grimness of that conclusion, her thoughts started to drift back to the pretender; he would have like Sarajevo: it was a city full of contradictions, much like the two of them.
'Just give me the damn gun, alright? You'll shoot your own foot.'
With Jarod, things were always going in different directions. The night in San Jose when she'd told him he needed a haircut followed the glaring contest in Wichita; the evening at the empty house in Hartford where they'd barely made it to the stairs, came after the stuffed whale he'd sent to her office and that she still refused to ask about. Sometimes they wouldn't speak to each other when they met, and sometimes they couldn't stop talking to take off their clothes, but whatever the case, their senseless phone conversations in the middle of the night had never failed to take place. Oddly enough, it was those chopped and sometimes awkward bits of communication that she missed the most at this time.
'Maybe I'll go back to New York for a while, drive a cab. I'd make a good cabbie don't you think?'
'Sure, you'd chat your costumers to death. What are you watching anyway?'
The mini bar honored its name with its composition: three small bottles of brand-less Vodka, a bag of peanuts and a glass that only tried to appear clean. Parker however was not in the mood to complain so she picked up one of the tiny bottles and twisted the cap to break the safety seal. When she'd arrived to the room, she'd made herself promise that she wouldn't gulp it all down, and she was working on it, she really was. But the gods seemed to be conspiring against her because her current surroundings weren't helping her resolve all that much. Sarajevo was a beautiful city, full of life and color in the summer, yet choked with an underlying sadness everywhere around. Scars of past fights were still visible (if sometimes just barely), underneath layers of fresh paint and re-edified walls. Some wounds were still not healed and some would remain open for years to come. It put her in a black mood, mainly because it presented a perfect portrait of her usual state of mind.
'You have to stop watching cartoons'
'It's too early for newscasters… Hmmm, this cherry ice cream's great.'
'You are five.'
'Ah, wouldn't that make you a felon?'
She had never been a chatty teenager, so spending uncountable minutes on the phone with Jarod was something she could definitely file as a new experience. They had developed some kind of addiction to the device, she was sure, to the extent that even their fights had taken place through a phone line. Well, most of their fights. The big ones. The ones that would go on for several days with a lot of sudden clicking in between. She liked to think of those as their swan song fights, always about the same three things: The Centre, him getting too close or her pulling away. The kicker was that they rarely ever yelled about any of those things when they met up to have sex. But then the sex was good. Shit, the sex was great.
'What have your read about hobbits?'
'Not now, Jarod. I need coffee first.'
As she arranged the only chair in the room next to the window, Parker thought that maybe the sex wasn't that good. For a long time, sex for her had been about control, personal enjoyment and maybe some minor bond. Then Tommy had made his appearance (with a little help from Jarod, no less), and she'd allowed herself to change her perception; this in turn had made her happy, if only for a little while. The truth was that Tommy had made her feel good, not just physically but mentally so. During the time she'd spent with him, Parker had been warmed by the notion that there was still some light inside of her, something an honest man like Tommy could appreciate without judgment. With him, she'd felt hopeful. With Jarod in the other hand, there was… she just… hurt. No, the sex was fantastic, she had to give him that much. But the peripherals (the night she'd sit with him as he cried himself to sleep in that motel room in Cleveland; the fact that she could slide into a bed next to the man whose life she'd been trained to destroy; the knowledge that when together, they were both only a bullet away from "freedom"), made her relationship with the hunted genius a complicated, and most of the time, painful affair.
Taking notice of the two empty Vodka bottles laying next to her vacated chair, the former Centre heiress wondered again why the hell had she stopped smoking, as she told herself repeatedly that she wouldn't grab the third and only bottle left.
'A rabbi, a priest and a politician are sitting in a bar…'
Standing before the bathroom mirror, Parker beheld herself: in the white neon light that radiated from the ceiling her skin seemed paler that it was, making the dark circles under her eyes stand out in stark contrast. Thankfully, it was nothing a large amount of corrector and some lip color couldn't diminish to make her look alive.
I look like I just did a service for a bachelorette's party
He was leaning against the doorway, a make-up smudge adorned the collar of his shirt.
I don't want to know how you acquired that piece of information.
He gave her a tilted head smile and she knew he was going to be trouble.
Actually…..
Blinking back into reality, she turned off the water, toweled her face dry and reached for her make-up bag. That had been a motel room in Sacramento. She was now in Sarajevo and she really had to start gearing up.
Before stepping out of the room, Parker regarded her image in the smooth surface of a small oval mirror. At least she was out of that hideous blond wig she'd worn for her flight the previous day. She was however, wearing dark blue jeans and a strappy, wine-colored top under a light, knee-length black coat, none of which constituted what she considered her personal style. At least she had the shoes. They weren't boots, although that would have been her choice to go with the outfit, but they were high above ground enough for her not to feel completely out of her element. Standing just outside the hotel entrance, Parker thought back on the conversation she'd had in the morning, Professor Hadzic would be waiting for her at six o'clock. It was now four fifteen and she was already waiting for her cab to arrive. Not that she was nervous -she wasn't. But she did know better than to show up at some random place in a foreign territory without scanning the area first. She would walk around for a while, find the building by her own means. That would give her an idea of the surrounding geography in case anything came up.
Considering her current train of thought, Parker chuckled bitterly: Lyle would be so proud if he knew. As she fidgeted quietly on the sidewalk where she was waiting for the cab to arrive, she caught a glimpse of her own skin peaking between the elegant cut of her shoe and the hem of her jean; the image only cemented her belief that she really should be wearing boots with this ensemble. Sometimes you needed a little more than height.
You know, high heels are very damaging for toes, especially the ones with narrow toe boxes. They are a prominent cause of several foot deformities, like bunions, hammer toes, Morton's neuroma, and other conditions like bursitis in the proximal phalanges.
Even though he did like playing know-it-all genius, Parker had to admit that Jarod wasn't really a pain in the ass…unless he felt strongly about something, and therein laid the problem. Jarod felt strongly about all the wrong things: the Centre, his past, the injustice of the world and her.
'I love you.'
"You too, lab-rat. You too"
It irked her that only now, as she cruised through an unfamiliar labyrinth of asphalt in the back of an old taxi cab, was she mumbling it to the potato-head key chain he'd given her for some reason. And it irked her, because all the cheap romantic movies she'd watched to cure her insomnia made the words seem like something of a joyful realization when to her, finally saying it out loud felt like dying a little. Of course, all the cheap romantic flicks' female characters were sweet, funny, smart girls who despite their always featured pseudo neurosis, were actually golden inside and wanted nothing but to find true love. Parker in the other hand, was a gun toting, self-proclaimed bitch who wanted nothing but to find a clue about her life; so maybe, she guessed, she was simply not the right type.
But it still irked her, mostly because she'd also heard the pain in Jarod's voice when he'd uttered the statement and she knew he'd been cheated on the joyous part as well. And the overgrown boy certainly deserved 'joyous' a thousand times more than any skinny ass idiot with the only problem of a bad hair-style choice. Looking at the small figurine that still dangled form her left hand, she wondered why it rattled her anymore: life wasn't fair and that was something she should be used to by now. Because you know, finding your lovers dead on your front porch should kinda drive that point home.
The cab came to a halt right in the middle of a lonely looking block and she knew it was the end of her ride. Deftly tossing the item she was holding back into her purse, Parker fished out the money for the fare and stepped out of the car into a summer afternoon that felt too much like a spring mid morning. A cool breeze whispered in her ears, sweeping her hair out of place and bringing a fake calm to her senses. After walking for a while through a web of generic, narrow streets, she finally came to stand before the building she had come searching for: a run down, five-story facility with an institutional gray façade. Wondering what was the secret charm of secluded falling apart properties that geniuses obviously found them so appealing, Parker let her annoyance fall back into its usual place and switched into Centre huntress mode, as she charged ahead looking for her next prey: fifth floor, third apartment on the left.
…
"Da?" Despite the bad lighting in the hallway, Parker was happy to find that the place didn't look like a set for some corny self-help movie. This had more of a surreal contemporary noir feel to it, which jived perfectly fine with the rest of her life. Not bothering to come into the viewing range of the magic eye that peered out from the door she'd just knocked on, the Centre employee answered the question with one of her own.
"Professor Hadzic?"
"Qui lui cherche?"
"I am. Can you go fetch him?"
"Miss Richmond?"
"Professor?"
The old, reddish-brown door opened only as far as the security chain allowed; enough for a set of aged eyes to spy on Parker, as she pushed away from the wall she'd been leaning against throughout the verbal exchange. In a succession of sudden movements, the door closed and reopened again, this time as wide as its hinges permitted, leaving a an stunned Parker to stare at the back of a man that was definitely walking away in the wrong direction. Conscious of the weight of the gun she carried holstered to waistband of her jeans, the former Centre heiress quickly overcame her shock and followed her host inside, closing the door behind her.
The loft was far more spacious and luminous than the hallway advertised, and a far cry from what Parker expected to find. Perhaps the only feature that was congruent with her mental image was the excess of books: an impossible number of volumes on different subjects and in different languages occupied every available corner, and betrayed with their presence the studious nature of their owner. Educated in Oxford and La Sorbonne, Ragib Hadzic was an established historian, a brilliant anthropologist and, according to Ethan, the go to man when it came to the history behind antique texts. Looking around, Parker had the certainty that her little brother had been right.
"Please, sit down."
Accepting the invitation, Parker eased into the worn leather couch and switched her focus to the person seated across from her. Hadzic was a tall, well built man, with gray eyes and thinning, platinum hair. His general appearance gave away his sixty four years of life, yet there was something in his expression that could have made anyone think twice while guessing his age.
"I must confess I was very curious to meet you Miss Richmond", Hadzic started in a polite tone. "Especially after the events of the morning."
"Another visitor came earlier. The professor filled in, obviously noticing Parker's raised eyebrow. "A woman, also seeking information on the Vespusian scrolls".
"I hear they've become rather popular lately".
Hadzic tilted his head and gave her an unbelieving look that Parker ignored with practiced ease.
"Yes, I've heard that too. But I had not heard that they were in such high demand. My other visitor was willing to pay a high sum of money if could point her in the direction of the actual scriptures".
"Did you?"
"I have no knowledge of where the original scrolls are or have been for the past eleven centuries. I told you this over the phone".
Parker nodded. "So what happened to your visitor?"
"She left", the older man said pensively "She said she already knew everything she wanted to know on the subject". Then he mused out loud: "She truly wanted to find the scrolls".
The mood the professor seemed to be slipping into wasn't helping matters with Parker's racing mind. Even though she was playing disinterested, news of that female visitor had set off all alarms inside her head. It just didn't sound right. Although maybe…
"Maybe I actually know your mystery woman. There's a …book dealer, I've been following around. An older woman with -"
Hadzic's emphatic headshake was followed by his own spoken negative.
"No, I'm afraid not. She was young, and very beautiful; tall, blond, with a lovely Rumanian accent…Do you know her?"
"No". She'd known it was a long shot, but it had seemed more encouraging than the alternative: another woman looking for the same thing she was, at the same place, on the same date…it was too much of a coincidence, and history dictated those didn't heralded good news in her life.
"Well, then", the professor said at last. "Perhaps we should get started with the matter at hand. What would you like to know about the Vespusians?
With the image of the blond woman still lingering behind her eyes, Parker didn't hesitate before she gave her answer. "Everything".
A/N2: 3149 words, plus notes. If you've come this far in one try, you've got both my utmost respect and my infinite gratitude.