Chapter 28
"You want to tell me about you and Nelson?"
"Nelson?" Aaliya asked vaguely, for her mind was on the twins, the dear boys Zaid had taken away immediately after breakfast. It was almost as though he were afraid that if he left the boys with her any longer, she might succeed in taking them away from him.
"The guy in the bar. You remember him? You met him when you paraded yourself before half of New York while wearing practically nothing."
Aaliya laughed. "Ah, yes that Nelson. Zain, do you think I have the qualifications to be one of those five-hundred-dollar-a-night call girls?"
Zain grunted in answer. "Are you planning to tell me what Nelson wrote on that piece of paper he gave you or not? Of course, I could be like you and snoop through all your possessions to find it, but I have more ethics than that."
As she picked up his dirty lunch plate, she kissed the tip of his nose. "Couldn't find it, could you?"
For a moment, Zain looked away, not meeting her eyes, then he left the table to follow her into the kitchen. "Aaliya," he said, "what are you up to?"
"The paper had a name on it, Walden, and a telephone number."
As he watched her load dishes into the washer, he realized that she was avoiding his eyes. Putting his hands on her shoulders, he turned her to face him. "And what have you done about this name and number?"
"I called the number and it seems that Mr. Walden is an attorney and I have an appointment to see him today at three."
"Were you planning to go alone? Maybe you were planning to tell me that you wanted to do a little shopping, then sneak away to the appointment?"
"Zain, it's not as though I was planning to secretly meet somebody like Doc by myself. This man is an attorney, and he's young, at least he's younger than most of the people who know anything about Masuma are, so he couldn't have been too involved with what happened in 1928. Mr. Walden is only fifty-five."
"And how do you know that?"
"I, well, asked his secretary. I told her I thought he was a man I'd met at a singles' bar and described him as about twenty-six, blond, and tall. She informed me that Mr. Walden was fifty-five years old, married with four grown children, and five feet six and had gray hair and a potbelly. If he's that young, what can he know about my grandmother? Do you think he handled some legal work for her or do you think he does actually know something?"
"I guess there's only one way to find out, isn't there? Get dressed and we'll go see him."
"Zain, you don't have to go. I can meet him, then come back here and tell you what he had to say."
It half enraged Zain and half pleased him that she was trying to protect him, for he knew that's exactly what she was trying to do. He'd made it clear that he wanted her to stop sticking her nose into the mystery of what happened to cause Masuma to leave her family. Now she was continuing to search but was trying to keep her searching from him.
He kissed her softly. "Do you realize that it's after two o'clock now? If you plan to get into one of those suits of yours and spray your hair with that epoxy stuff and paint your face and-" Aaliya was already running toward the bathroom.
* * * * *
At three-fifteen, Aaliya and Zain were ushered into Mr. Walden's office by his thin, pinched-looked secretary. Through a process that Aaliya found infuriating (Zain had sent Aaliya off to the restroom while he sat on the desk of a very pretty receptionist, looked at her through lowered lashes, and asked her questions about Mr. Walden) they had found out that Walden was a criminal defense attorney; he took on the cases of the most reprehensible men and kept them out of jail. The receptionist had shuddered prettily as she described some of the underworld characters who sometimes came into the office. She said that Mr. Walden didn't seem to mind the fact that his brilliant defenses kept the most awful people on the street.
"Underworld connections," Zain said. "No wonder Nelson knows him. What's wrong with you?"
Aaliya was walking beside him so stiffly that her legs hardly bent. "Absolutely nothing is wrong with me. Why should anything be wrong with me? Just because you were looking down that woman's blouse is no reason for anything to be wrong with me."
Smiling, Zain took her arm and wouldn't let her move away. "She had a nice pair of-
"If you like cows!" Aaliya said through clenched teeth, jerking her arm away and walking ahead of him.
When they were ushered into Walden's office, Aaliya was angry and Zain was chuckling. Mr. Walden, who was exactly as he'd been described, took one look at the two of them as they sat down and said, "I don't handle divorce cases."
With a laugh, Zain reached for Aaliya's hand resting on the arm of the chair in front of Mr. Walden's desk, but she snatched it away. "Actually, we've come here on another matter. Your name was given to us indirectly through Jubilee Johnson."
For just a second the expression of joviality on Walden's face changed.
It was odd to think of this man as a defender of criminals, because put a white wig and beard on him and a red suit and he'd be every child's picture of Santa Claus. "Ah, yes, Jubilee. I hope he's well and his family is doing all right."
It was at that moment that AaliyA saw Walden's left hand. When she'd entered the room, she'd been so upset with Zain that she hadn't really looked at Mr. Walden or noticed much of anything about him except that he was such a pleasant-looking man that she immediately thought that he could know nothing about Masuma.
Now she was staring at his left hand. His hand had been tattooed a solid black from his wrist upward, covering his smallest finger and the
one next to it, and those two fingernails were polished with black enamel.
"Half Hand," she whispered, because at first glance his hand looked as though half of it were missing. "Half Hand," she said louder, interrupting whatever Zain and the man were saying.
Stepping around the desk, Walden smiled at her, then held out his hand, palm down, and she took it in her own, looking at it. Releasing his hand, she looked up at him. "Who are you and what do you know about Masuma?"
Mr. Walden chuckled, sounding like the man he resembled. "I was born with the name of Joseph Elmer Gruenwald 3d. Since my father was called Joe, I was called Elmer. Ugly name. It's difficult to get ahead in this world with a name like that because you spend a lot of your life hearing jokes about Elmer Fudd. To counteract the name I think I spent a lot of time thinking about my gangster grandfather."
It was Zain's turn to speak. "Half Hand."
"Yes," Mr. Walden said. "Half Hand Joe was my grandfather. My father was nine when Half Hand was killed and I think he glorified him. Rather than facing the facts that his father was nothing more than a hired killer, my father tried to make him into a hero, so I grew up hearing about how great Half Hand was." He hesitated. "When Half Hand died, my father was given some money, but my grandmother went through it within six months."
Holding his left hand up, Walden studied it. "When I was sixteen, I got drunk for the first time in my life, and when I woke up I found that I had gone to a tattoo parlor and had this done to my hand in memory of my grandfather. When I was sober I wanted to have it removed, but my father said it was an omen."
When both Aaliya and Zain looked puzzled at that, Mr. Walden chuckled. "My dad had a rich fantasy life. He got married when he was little more than a kid and I was soon on the way, so he never had a chance to go to school. After he saw my hand, he said I was destined to become an attorney and save men like my grandfather. I don't know how a sixteen-year-old with a hellacious hangover and a tattooed hand equaled attorney to my father, but the whole scheme sounded good to me. I went to law school thinking that I was going to be spending my life saving misunderstood men and women, but I find that I defend the dregs of humanity."
His words and his expression were at odds with each other, for he looked well pleased with himself.
"Why?" Aaliya asked.
"Money, my dear. The scum-of-the-earth wouldn't do scummy deeds if it didn't make them a lot of money, and defending them has made me a rich man. My parents lived in a two-room apartment with five kids. I have a penthouse on Fifth Avenue and an estate in Westchester. I've sent my four daughters to Ivy League schools, and my wife has her clothes made for her in Paris."
He smiled at the innocence of the two handsome young people before him, for their faces were readable, telling him that they would never sell their souls for money. But, then, from the looks of the way they were dressed and from the way they carried themselves, neither of them knew what it meant to be hungry or cold or have the landlord evict them in the middle of the night for nonpayment of rent. His daughters were like this pretty little Aaliya, well groomed, well fed, not haunted by memories of poverty. Inadvertently, the garbage he defended had done this good deed and helped put something clean and good on earth.
"When I was twenty-one, I changed my name to H. H. Walden, a nice WASP name that I used all through law school. It helped me with the blond tennis players, and later, I could tell the bums I defended that the H. H. stood for Half Hand, so it helped me there too."
"Because they had heard of Half Hand's lost three million," Zain said, making Walden smile.
"You've done some searching, haven't you?"
Zain told him about the biography he was writing and about Masuma being aaliya's grandmother. "What can you tell us about her?" he asked.
"Nothing," Mr. Walden said, his eyes locked with Zain's and never flinching.
A practiced liar, Zain thought. "Not even the name of the nursing home she's in?" Zain asked. "Do you have any idea who's paying her bills?"
At that Walden put his head back and laughed uproariously. "Caught me, did you? Yes, I know where Masuma is, but I'm not paying her bills. If you want to know that, you should ask her where the money comes from."
"She pretends she's someone named Abby and won't even admit she's Masuma."
"Ah, well, that's understandable. She's probably afraid for the young lady here, afraid Doc will do something to her, or if not Doc, then someone else. The legend of Half Hand's money is still alive in some circles. Of course, you do know that her name really is Abby, don't you? No? It's M. Abeer Danish. When she signed on with Jubilee to sing in his club, she initialed the contract, but instead of using her initials of M.A.D., she wrote M.A.S. Jubilee's bookkeeper, who needed glasses, thought her name was Masuma and the name stuck."
Zain gave Walden a hard look, for he had a feeling the man was withholding information, information that he had no intention of telling them. "Someone broke into an upper floor of my house and tried to kill Aaliya."
Walden didn't so much as blink, but then he lived with death and murder and mayhem on a daily basis. "Did they now? You catch him?"
"No," Zain said tightly. "You have any idea who it could have been? Someone you know?"
Walden smiled. "It could have been any one of thousands of people I know. There isn't a person I've defended who isn't capable of climbing into a window and trying to kill a pretty girl. You just have to tell me a time and a place, and I can match a murder with it."
Aaliya opened her mouth to speak, but Zain beat her to it.
"February 1975, Louisville, Kentucky," Zain shot out, but he didn't turn to look at Aaliya who was
glaring at him. That was the time and place when her mother had died.
"I'd like to go now, Zain," she said softly, but Zain kept looking at Walden and didn't move from his chair.
After looking from one to the other of them, Walden punched a button on his phone and told his secretary that he wanted anything she had for the date and place Zain had given him. "She has everything on computer so it should take only a minute," he said into the silence that had developed after Zain asked his question.
For five long minutes he sat back in his chair and looked at the two of them, trying to figure out what was going on besides the writing of a biography. He wondered if they knew the full extent of what a nasty creature Doc was, or if they thought he was a sweet old man merely because he had defied the devil long enough to reach the age of ninety-something.
When his secretary placed a single fat file folder on his desk, Walden leaned forward.
"Ah, I remember this creep well. He went to the gas chamber about ten years ago and never was there a more deserving occupant. I defended him, but I was glad to know that there was no way I could win the case. On the night before he was executed, he asked me to come to his cell so he could tell me all about his life. I'd like to tell you that he was remorseful, but he said he wanted me to write everything down so he could be put on TV or in the movies like Al Capone was."
Walden flipped through the pages of notes. "I wasn't going to tell him that I'd die before I made him into a folk hero, but I recorded everything he said in case I later had someone accused of something he'd done."
Running his finger down the pages he said, "1975. Ah, here it is. My, my, but he was busy that year. Four, no five killed by him, all of them gang members. No, wait, here's one."
Glancing up at Zain, he said, "Louisville, Kentucky. February." He looked back down at the pages. "Nasty, nasty, this one. Good lord! I
had forgotten about this. He was looking for Half Hand's money. I think someone hired him but he wouldn't say if he was hired or on his own. I think he wanted me to think he was smart enough to kill people without someone else telling him who, what, and where."
"What did he do?" Zain asked quietly
"He killed a woman. He said he had a tip that someone in her family knew about Half Hand's money, so he went to Louisville, kidnapped the woman, and tortured her a while to get her to talk. Let's see... He held her against a hot radiator, but when he realized that she didn't know anything, he took her out and ran her over with his car. He bragged about how the woman
begged him not to hurt her little girl, so after he killed her he stayed in town a few weeks and talked to the kid and asked lots of questions to see if she or her father knew anything. He decided they didn't, so he left town."
H.H. looked up at the two of them. A moment before they had been healthy-looking and pink fleshed, but now they appeared pale and sickly. The man reached out and took the woman's hand where it was gripping the chair arm, and it was then that H.H. realized that the tortured woman was probably this young woman's mother.
"I... I..." he began, and H. H. Walden, the man who was never at a loss for words, could think of nothing to say..
Zain stood up. "Mr. Walden, thank you so much for your help. I think we'll leave now."
"Look, I'm sorry I told you that story. I didn't mean..." There was nothing else he could say as he watched the two of them leave his office.
* * * * *
"Are you all right?" Zain asked when they were on the street.
Aaliya nodded. "Fine. Really, Zain, I'm fine, but I think I'd like to take a little walk now. By myself. So I'll see you later."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely." When he continued looking at her anxiously, she gave him a reassuring little smile and put her hand on his arm. "Zain, it happened a long, long time ago. I've had many years to get over my mother's death, and it really doesn't matter how she died. Dead is dead, whether it was an accident or murder. I'd just like to be alone now. Maybe I'll go to a church for a while." With a little squeeze on his arm and another little smile, she turned away.
Zain caught her arm and spun her around. She was a good actress, he had to admit that, and if he hadn't known what she'd just found out, he'd never have known she was suffering. But he was beginning to know Aaliya, know her well. Most of her life had been spent keeping grief and despair to herself, sharing it with no one. "You'r going with me."
"No, I..." She tried to get away from him, but he caught her arm and held her to him.
Curling his bottom lip around his teeth, he gave a piercing whistle that made a cab come screeching to a halt. Zain opened the car door and pushed Aaliya inside. When she tried to speak to him, he told her to be quiet. As they neared the house, he took her chin in his hand and turned her face to the light to look at her. Her skin was pale and clammy to the touch; her breath was uneven.
When the cab stopped, Zain paid and got out, pulling Aaliya behind him as he ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, half carrying
her when she couldn't keep up with him. Shoving the key into the lock, he flung the front door open and once inside, he ran with her toward the bathroom.
He barely made it before Aaliya began vomiting into the toilet. With one big hand on her forehead, the other arm wrapped around her ribcage, he held her while she heaved and heaved and heaved, her stomach convulsing, jerking in its attempt to bring up more. When there was no more, when she was hanging over the bowl with her stomach moving in spasms, he went to the sink and soaked a washcloth in cold water, then pressed it to her forehead as he flushed the toilet and put the lid down.
He had to help her off the floor to sit down. "I'm fine," she whispered. "Really, I am."
"Like hell you are." Leaving her alone for a moment, he got her some orange juice, then had to make her drink it. "And this." He held out a mint and when she shook her head no, he squeezed her chin and popped it into her mouth.
Taking the washcloth from her, he rinsed it, wrung it out, and wiped her hot face. What did one do in situations like this? he wondered. How did one deal with such devastating news as Aaliya had just received? He tried to imagine how he'd feel if he'd just been told that his mother had been tortured and killed at the whim of some criminal who thought she might know where some money was.
"When you were a child," Zain asked, tenderly stroking her hot face with the cool cloth, "and you were sick, who took care of you?"
"My mother," she whispered.
"And after you were twelve?" Pausing in wiping her face, he waited for her answer, but she gave none.
Aaliya turned her face away. "I think I'd like to lie down now," she said as she started to rise.
"Go to bed? By yourself?"
"Zain, please. I really don't want to-"
He would not allow himself to be angry because she seemed to think that he'd demand sex from her at a time like this. Remembering that she'd said that when she found out her father was dying all she wanted to do was go home to her husband and have him hold her, he caressed her cheek. But her husband hadn't been there when she'd needed him, and after her mother had died and she'd needed her father, he'd failed her too. Zain thought that it was time that a man didn't fail her. "Aalu, I'm not going to leave you alone. Your father may have left you alone to be an adult, but I'm not going to." Picking her up in his arms, cradling her like a child, he started out of the bathroom.
"Put me down," she said, struggling against him.
Stopping in the hallway, he looked down at her. "I'm not going to allow you to be alone. Call me autocratic,call me a male chauvinist pig. Call me whatever you want, but tonight you aren't going to be alone. This time you aren't going to have to deal with death by yourself." When she pushed against him, he pulled her closer. "You aren't big enough to fight me."
He started walking, not toward his bedroom as she'd thought he meant to, but toward the back garden, and as he walked, he pulled an afghan from the back of a chair. When he was in the garden, he sat with her on a chaise, holding her on his lap as though she were a child, and put his hand on the side of her head as he pulled her head down to his shoulder.
"Tell me about your mother," he said
Burying her face in the muscle of his shoulder, Aaliya shook her head. Right now the last thing in the world she wanted to think about was her mother, about her mother being held to a hot radiator, her mother begging for the safety of her child.
"What was her favorite color?"
He waited, but when Aaliya didn't speak, he said, "My mother's favorite color is blue. She says it's the color of peace, and with all of us kids peace is what she most wants in life."
Aaliya was silent as he tucked the afghan over the two of them. It was a balmy, warm day, but Aaliya's shock had made her body cold to the touch, as though all her warmingblood had retreated to somewhere deep within her. Stroking her damp hair back from her temple, Zain pulled her closer, trying his best to cover all of her with his own body. He didn't know why he was so adamant about it, but he felt it was imperative that he get her to talk.
"Did your mother sing to you?" he asked. Aaliya didn't answer. "Did I ever tell you that my great-great-grandmother was a famous opera singer? She was called La-Reina. Ever hear of her?"
Aaliya shook her head no.
"My father has some records she made. Pretty good voice if I do say so myself. It amazes me, though, that no one in my family can sing a note. Not fair, is it?"
She was silent as he rubbed her back and held her so very tightly, so very securely to his big body. Aaliya remembered what she had worked so hard not to remember: No one had held her after her mother died. After her mother's death, her father had spent three years sitting in a darkened room. Most days he didn't bother to shave or change out of his bathrobe, and he ate only enough to keep himself alive. Aaliya had done her best to cheer him up, but whatever she did, she never allowed him to see her own loneliness. She had never let him see her own sadness, never let him know how much she needed him, and how much she missed her mother.
"Yellow," Aaliya whispered. "My mother liked yellow."
Zain held Aaliya for hours as she talked to him and told him about her mother and about how much her mother had meant to her. Remembering the story she'd told him about her father and her being like clocks that ran down after Shabana haider died, Zain began to hear something else in Aaliya's words: She blamed herself for her mother's death. She'd said that to him once, that she had killed her mother with her demands to go to a children's party, but she'd covered herself by saying that she knew that wasn't true. He now realized that had been an intellectual response. On a gut level, Aaliya really and truly thought her mother's death was her fault. What's more, she thought that her father also believed she was responsible. Why else had Ghulam shut her off, not looking at his only child, not talking to her, not comforting her? The selfish bas***d! Zain thought. He'd thought only of his own grief and not his daughter's.
After Zaid's wife had died, Zaid's grief had debilitated him, but he'd done his best to be there for his boys who'd waked in the night crying for their mommie.
But Aaliya hadn't cried and she wasn't crying now. She was pale and cold and so weak she could hardly move her hands, but she was dry eyed. Denying herself the release of tears was the way she had punished herself for causing her mother's death and her father's grief.
"As a child I was a terror," Aaliya was saying. "I was selfish and demanding and always had to have my own way. Once my mother bought me a beautiful pair of blue velvet shoes, and I was so rotten, I wouldn't even try them on. I'd wanted red patent leather shoes."
"What did your mother do?"
"She told me that she was not going to drive all the way back downtown to purchase different shoes for me. She said she was not raising a prima donna and that I was to take what I could get."
"Did you get your red shoes?" he asked softly, already hating this story. It was the third one she'd told in which her normal, childish selfishness was blown up into making Aaliya sound like a child demon.
"Oh yes. The next day, I told my mother how pretty her hair was and how blue her eyes were. I told her I was pleased she didn't look old like my friends' mothers who were without exception fat and ugly. I told her she should dress like the beauty she was. She smiled at me and asked what I had in mind, so I told her I remembered seeing a dress on a mannequin in the window of Stewart's Department Store that would look fabulous on her."
"And she took you back downtown?"
"She said that such sincere flattery and such cleverness in trying to get what I wanted deserved to be rewarded, but she warned me that there had better actually be a dress in Stewart's window or I'd catch it."
"I guess there was."
"I sweat all the way downtown. I was afraid Stewart's would have a display of men's clothes only, but they didn't let me down. I got my red shoes and Mom got a new dress." Aaliya was silent for a moment. "It was the dress she was buried in."
Zain continued holding her, continued stroking her hair, continued listening to one story after another, but with each story his resolve hardened. Banu had suggested that Aaliya go to therapy. For what? So some guy could tell her over and over that it wasn't her fault that her mother died? Tell her that her father's depression wasn't her fault? It was going to take more than words to make Aaliya actually believe that what had happened wasn't her fault.
Somewhere in one of her stories she mentioned how her father had brought Zeeshan ahmad home for her to meet. It took Zain a few questions to realize that she'd married him mainly because her father seemed to have wanted her to. And why not? She'd dedicated her life from the age of twelve to twenty-three to her father in an attempt to make it up to him for what she thought she'd done to him, so why not marry to try to please him?
Her father's attorney had said that Aaliya gave up all her outside life to spend time with her father and help him with his depression. Aaliya had been so isolated during that time that the attorney thought maybe Aaliya had been the victim of incest, but he hadn't wanted to get involved so he didn't really know for sure.
Alone from the time she was twelve, without her mother who had been, as far as zain could tell, her best friend, Aaliya had had no one to turn to, but she'd tried to be the best little girl in the world in an attempt to make her father love her again. It was understandable that she'd marry whomever he wanted her to marry. Maybe marrying a man chosen by her father would make him love her again.
When Aaliya's marriage had turned sour, she'd had no one to turn to. She couldn't very well call her father and tell him that the man he'd chosen for her - and Zain found out that it was Ghulam haider who had funded Zeeshan's share in the CPA office in Santa Fe - was using her like a pack mule. Since Aaliya had spent her childhood isolated and burdened with secrets, she'd not learned how to make friends, friends she could tell her problems to.
Thinking back to the first month she'd been in his house, he now understood her depression, understood why she'd wanted to retreat into a room and never come out again. Retreat into her father's room, he thought. Her father had deserted her when he was alive, but maybe she'd hoped to find him after he was dead.
Over and over again the question of what could he do went through his mind. What could he do to make Aaliya realize that her mother's death wasn't her fault? That Ghulam's depression wasn't her fault? Zain had heard that depression was anger turned inward. What could he do to make her turn that anger outward? He wanted to see her smash things, wanted to hear her curse her father for deserting her, wanted to hear her scream about what her ex-husband had done to her. He wanted to see her cry.
Getting up from the chaise, he carried her into the house. Aaliya thought he was going to take her to bed, and she hoped he was because she was very, very tired. Instead, he started for the front door.
"Where are we going?" she asked tiredly.
"I'm taking you to your grandmother. I think it's time for the charade to stop; I think it's time for some questions to be answered."
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