ZaYa FF - Sweet Liar[Completed - Page 44] - Page 29

ausome chapter really loved reading it do continue soon plzz

Chapter 32

They had to go over the wall.

When they hid their vehicle in the trees, under cover of darkness, and went to the gate to find that it was locked, aaliya's first reaction was to turn around and go back to the city. According to Zain, Faraz had bribed the men guarding the gate and it wasn't supposed to be locked.

"We don't have time for you to turn coward now," Zain said. He was afraid for her, true, but he'd had a lifetime of experience of living with his older brother: If Faraz said the gate was going to be open, then it was - they were probably at the wrong gate.

At the far back of the walled property was a tree with a sturdy branch hanging over the tall brick wall. Climbing the tree first, Zain then helped Aaliya up behind him. After throwing a few small packages of very fragrant meat onto the uncut lawn to ascertain whether the dogs were penned as they were supposed to be, he lowered Aaliya to the ground. Lifting her hands above her head, lacing her fingers, she made a handle for her body, then Zain stretched out on the tree branch, slowly lowered her to the ground, then jumped down behind her.

"Run," he ordered and took off, Aaliya on his heels.

As promised, the side door to the house was unlocked, and there were little night-lights on so they could see their way around furniture. Zain noticed that in a few places there were tables missing and places where chairs should have been.

When they sneaked past the kitchen, they heard voices, even though it was after midnight now and the house should have been asleep. Holding their breaths, they tiptoed past whoever was in the kitchen and went up the stairs.

One of the stairs creaked when Aaliya stepped on it. Seconds later, a guard appeared, looking up the darkened stairs, but Zain's quick thinking saved them, for he practically threw her up the two remaining stairs where she crouched behind a sideboard, while zain pressed himself into a doorway.

"You're getting nervous in your old age," they heard a man say.

"There's something going on tonight, I can feel it," answered another voice. "You think the old man's all right?"

"I think he'll outlive us all," was the answer, and the voice held no love for its employer.

When the men walked away, Aaliya let out her pent-up breath and followed Zain when he motioned her to follow him. He seemed to have memorized the floor plan, because he knew where to go and which door to open.

Sitting up in bed, Doc was waiting for them. He wasn't sleeping, he wasn't reading, he was merely waiting. Fully dressed, on top of the covers, he didn't so much as blink in surprise when they entered.

"I heard you on the stairs," he said to Zain. "You would never have made a cat burglar."

"I leave thievery to you," Zain answered, then cocked his head at the man. "You're going with us."

"I had planned to. I want to see this party you have planned for me. It's been many years since anyone went to such trouble for my benefit, and I wouldn't miss it for the world."

"What do you know about us?" Aaliya hissed at him.

When he turned to her, for a moment, Aaliya's blood seemed to grow cold, for in this dim light, he didn't look like a pathetic, crippled old man but like a young, heartless gangster, a man who cared for no one and nothing.

"I did not live as long as I have by not knowing what goes on around me. I know that you have bribed most of my guards into leaving doors unlocked and penning up the dogs." He gave a nasty grin. "I relocked the front gate. I didn't want you to have it too easy, and in seven minutes I will have the dogs released."

At those words Aaliya thought she and Zain should leave, and quickly, as she didn't want a wild run with snarling dogs nipping at their heels. This seemed to be Zain's idea too, but before he left the room, he scooped Doc's frail body into his arms, then took the stairs down two at a time, Aaliya right behind him. By the time the two drowsy men in the kitchen looked up the stairs, the three of them were on their way out of the house.

Zain ran so fast Aaliya could hardly keep up with him, but the idea of a pack of dogs coming after them, as well as a few men with guns, put wings on her feet. She had no idea where Zain was going, but she followed him as though her life depended on it - which it probably did.

When zain stopped abruptly, she slammed into the back of him, but he didn't so much as waver on his feet. A narrow gate was in front of him. When Aaliya, with a nervous backward glance, pulled on it, she found it latched with a lock with a big dial.

"What's the combination?" Zain asked the man in his arms.

Doc just grinned.

"If the dogs come, I'll throw you to them first."

"Young man," Doc said, sounding as though he were on a throne instead of being kidnapped, "you are the type who'd guard a man's life with his own."

Aaliya thought that whatever else Doc was, he was an excellent judge of character, for she knew without a doubt that Zain was incapable of doing something as vile as throwing an ancient old man to a pack of dogs.

"What do we do?" Aaliya whispered, scared half to death of what was coming.

For a moment, Zain looked at Doc, who was staring at them as though highly amused by all of this, then Zain turned to Aaliya. "Try 5-12-28," he said. It took Aaliya a moment to realize that Zain had given her the date of the massacre, the date Masuma had run away.

With shaking hands, Aaliya turned the round dial on the lock. When the combination didn't work, she looked at zain in helpless terror.



"Try it again," he said, sounding as though they had all the time in the world.

The second time the lock opened, and they hurried through, with Aaliya taking a few seconds to relock the gate, hoping to hinder dogs and men who might pursue them.

They ran to the little truck that waited under the trees for them. Nearly a week ago Rizwan had called his older brother, Kashif,and asked his advice about a very fast car, stipulating that the car had to have room for four people, one of them not well. According to all of the Qureshis and the Abdullahs, Kashif was second only to his mother in knowing more about cars than anyone else in the world.

To the astonishment of them all, Kashif drove down from Maine in a little black GMC truck called a Syclone. According to Kashif, there had been only a very few of the trucks made in 1990 before the government took them off the market because they were much too fast (0 to 30 in 1.4 seconds). The only road-legal vehicles in the world faster than the Syclone were a Porsche 959 and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar Ferrari, both of which Kashif owned, but they were two-passenger sports cars.

Kashif had been intrigued by what was going on and had stayed to help. After outfitting his truck with a camper shell, he helped Banu equip it with an oxygen tank and the accoutrements of an ambulance.

Now, Banu was waiting for them inside the camper shell, ready to take Doc and see that he lived through what might turn out to be a very rough ride. As Zain put Doc inside the shell and strapped him to the bed, Aaliya slipped behind the driver's seat. When Zain ran to the front of the vehicle, he told Aaliya to get over to the passenger side.

"I'm driving," she said.

"Like hell you are," Zain answered and started to push her into the other bucket seat, but Aaliya was strapped inside her seat belt and didn't move so easily.

"Zain, I can drive! I drove in Santa Fe for four years and never had so much as a fender bender." She offered this explanation in the same tone that one would say, I won the Indianapolis 500 three years in a row, except that Aaliya's words made no sense.

It was at that moment that the first shot rang out and Zain, disgusted, knew that he had no time to argue with Aaliya. Jumping on the side of the truck, just inside her open door, he commanded her to drive.

And drive she did. There were three cars heading straight for them, big, heavy American cars, and Aaliya maneuvered around them as though she were riding the dodge 'em cars at the state fair, passing them by quarter inches, but never so much as scraping the paint on Kashif's precious, rare truck.

When she was past the three cars,she slammed on the brakes and ordered Zain to get inside. Without a word of protest, he rolled across the hood of the truck and dove into the passenger side, slamming the door after him and fastening his seat belt.

As Aaliya started to drive again, he looked at her with new respect and not a little awe. For just a second, she turned her head and grinned at him. "If you think that was something, you should try a four-way stop in Sante Fe. No rules apply; it's whoever is the most macho goes first, and I learned to never give in."

For Zain it was a ride in hell. With the three cars pursuing them on the freeway back into the city, Aaliya wove in and out of traffic as though she were an animated shuttle on a tapestry loom. The little truck was not only sickeningly fast, but it was also highly maneuverable, what's more it was four-wheel drive, real four-wheel in which all four wheels are independently driven, which meant that the truck could probably climb greased telephone poles. When Aaliya saw an opening in the fence, she made a sharp right and ran up the very steep side of the embankment and suddenly changed freeways. Unfortunately, the truck had the road clearance of a BMW, which is to say that it had none at all, so they scraped bottom all the way up the hill, but when they'd made it to the top, they had lost their pursuers.

When they reached Masuma's nursing home, they had none of Doc's men behind them - but they did have three police cars.

Getting out of the truck, Zain found that he was shaking. Nothing he'd ever done in his life, not kidnapping a man and being nearly attacked by killer dogs or anything else, had frightened him as much as Aaliya's driving. She, however, seemed perfectly calm as she ran up the stairs into the nursing home, leaving Banu and Zain to deal with the police, who would be shown the now-sleeping figure of Doc and told their drive through hell was a medical emergency.

* * * * *
As she ran into her grandmother's room, Aaliya knew Masuma would be awake and waiting for her, for she'd known what Zain and Aaliya had planned to do tonight.

"It's done," Aaliya said as she climbed into bed with her grandmother.

Masuma put her arms around Aaliya. "Then he's here," she said softly.

"Yes," Aaliya whispered, and in another minute she was asleep.

Here, Masuma thought. Doc was here under the same roof with her after all these years.

Chapter 33

After spending the morning in the bathroom relieving herself of her dinner from the night before, Aaliya spent the rest of the day of the performance with the other women in a brownstone hair salon in the East Eighties getting her hair set in a Marcel wave and a lesson in 1920s cosmetic application. Vajiha had arranged everything. The women, who were to play gangsters' girlfriends, cigarette girls, and waitresses were happy and giggly and excited. Only Aaliya was subdued as she sat under a dryer and flipped through the latest issue of New York Woman.

Back at Zain's house there was no peace to be found, no quiet corner where she could sit and think about the approaching evening, for the house was the headquarters for everything that had to be done. It had come about naturally that Suraiyya Abdullah would become the crew boss, as she called herself. "You raise a dozen kids and see if you ever think anything else in life is difficult," she said to Aaliya.

One bedroom was a last-minute fitting room, another the makeup room, where Vajiha had a couple of experts helping the women apply the cosmetics. Two other rooms were briefing rooms, one headed by Zain's father as he informed his players what they were to do. When Osman saw Aaliya standing in the doorway, without a smile, he shut the door in her face.

In the late afternoon, Aaliya escaped to a corner of the garden to try to be by herself. She couldn't explain how she felt: calm but agitated, excited but tranquil. She wished Zain were with her, but he was away from the house, doing things he wouldn't tell her about.

When Zaid's boys suddenly appeared before her, storybooks in their hands, she looked up and smiled at their father in gratitude. Pulling the heavy boys onto her lap, she began to read to them about Curious George.

It was evening when Vajiha told her it was time to go to Jubilee's Place and get ready for the show. Kissing the boys goodnight, wishing she
didn't have to leave them, Aaliya went outside to the waiting car and started the drive north to Harlem.

In the previous weeks when everyone had been working, while Aaliya had been rehearsing with Ornette, no one had allowed her to see the renovation of Jubilee's club. Now, slipping in the back door of the stage entrance, she silently moved away from Vajiha and walked to the front, where she stepped into a shadow, hidden from view so she could watch what was going on.

Juhaina had done a breathtaking job on the club. It looked like something straight out of the Art Deco period, which was the hottest, latest way of decorating in 1928. Everything was turquoise and silver, the dance floor in front of the band looking as though it had been appliqued with silver leaf. Behind the dance floor were tiny tables, what looked to be a hundred of them, each covered with long turquoise cloths and a little lamp in the center of each table.

On a dais was the band, with Ornette looking fiercely handsome in his tuxedo as he talked to his musicians, his beloved trumpet in his hand, and the sight of him made Aaliya smile. Under Ornette's faade of anger, he was a sweetheart, a perfectionist who loved music more than life, but a man who was afraid to show his soft inner parts. Now he was warming up his orchestra with a jazzy little number, and Aaliya knew he'd soon start on the blues. In 1928, during the very happy, rich time before the stock market crash,
the country was wild for the blues, but after the crash, people only wanted cheerful songs, such as "Happy Days Are Here Again." As a result, singers such as Bessie Smith went out of favor.

As Aaliya watched from her shadowy hiding place, she saw people begin to enter the club, laughing, the women beautifully, exquisitely dressed in long gowns. The 1920s fashions today might look shapeless, but there was so little to them that they showed off everything a woman had. When a woman walked, the draping fabrics swayed and clung to her in a very sexy way.

Two pretty young women came in together, their gangster men behind them, the men looking tough and complacent, smug even.

Watching them, Aaliya moved farther back into the shadows so they wouldn't see her, for she was beginning to feel as though she were an anachronism in her slacks and casual blouse. Gradually, the club was beginning to fill up, and the more people who entered, the more Aaliya felt as though she had stumbled into a time warp, for all the people and their surroundings were part of 1928.

When Zain entered the room, Aaliya pressed herself back against the wall as she watched him move about the club, obviously very familiar with it. Maybe she should have been jealous, for Zain flirted with every female in the place, but she wasn't, because this man didn't seem like her Zain; this man was Zain abdul kareem. This Zain walked differently in his beautifully cut tuxedo, and he used his good looks to advantage.

Aaliya watched Zain go to one tootsie - the name perfectly suited the woman: too much makeup, movements too silly, a giggle that could be heard in Peoria, and, frankly, to Aaliya's eye, too much breast - and ask her to dance. With a squeal of delight, the woman stood, actually, she wiggled into an upright stance, managing to make all the excessive parts of her jiggle. Before Zain took the hand she was offering to him, he looked to the man sitting across the little table for permission. The man had a fat belly that he'd encased in a spectacularly tasteless vest of black and yellow plaid. Looking over his belly, he gave a superior nod to Zain, as though he were a king granting a request to a subject. It always amazed Aaliya that a person could feel superior because he or she was a criminal, as though the person had accomplished something that had meaning in life.

Escorting the woman to the silver dance floor, under lights so soft they would make the Wicked Witch look good, Zain took the woman in his arms and led her in a tango. Startled, for a moment Aaliya held her breath, for she'd just discovered another of Zain's lies. He'd said he wasn't any good on a dance floor, at least not for anything except holding a girl tight and rubbing together, but as Aaliya watched him, she saw that he was a dream of a dancer. With as much muscle as he had at his disposal, he could lead a woman who was a less than perfect dancer in a dip; he could turn her when she was supposed to turn. Zain was even able to make the bimbo in his arms look as though she could dance.

When the tango was over, Zain led the floozy back to her gangster. After looking at him for permission, Zain kissed the back of the woman's hand.

"Hey, kid!" the gangster said as he imperiously motioned for Zain to come to him.

With no sign of what he must be feeling at such an autocratic command, Zain went to the man who then stuffed a ten-dollar bill in Zain'sjacket pocket.

Aaliya had to catch herself, for she was about to step forward into the light. How dare that two-bit nobody whose only claim to fame was that he'd engaged in illegal activities treat Zain like that!

"Are you ready?"

Startled, Aaliya turned to see Vajiha, who was wearing a lovely, slinky dress of blue satin, white feathers sticking up at the back of her head, a triple band of what Aaliya had no doubt were real diamonds about her forehead. "Yes, I'm ready," Aaliya answered softly.

Following Vajiha back to the dressing room, aaliya knew that with each passing minute, she was beginning to lose touch with reality. When Vajiha opened the door, Aaliya was sure she was no longer in the nineties. Nafeesa and the other women were in various stages of undress; there were clothes strewn everywhere in front of a long, garishly lit, mirror-backed counter that held countless dirty bottles and pots of makeup.

"Lila?" Aaliya whispered.

"Yeah, honey?" Nafeesa/Lila said, then turned to look Aaliya up and down. "You better get ready. You're on in no time flat." Bending forward, Lila whispered. "Wouldn't want to disappoint Zain on the last night."

As though she'd been kicked in the stomach, Aaliya drew in her breath. Lila wasn't supposed to know that this was Masuma's last night to sing in Jubilee's club.

Looking over her shoulder at the other girls, Lila whispered, "Don't worry, not one of them is going to tell."

Masuma - no, Aaliya - nodded.

"Your dress," Vajiha said, and when Aaliya turned, across Vajiha's arms was Masuma's dress. It wasn't a reproduction as first planned, but the original dress. Zain had explained that it would have cost too much to reproduce the dress, so Zunera had contacted the Costume Society of America and through them had found a conservator who could clean the dress properly.

Aaliya's hands were shaking as she took the dress from Vajiha.

"The jewelry is on the table, and underwear is behind you."

"Break a leg," Lila called as she and the others trooped out of the dressing room, followed by Vajiha.

Standing in the middle of the dressing room, the once-bloody red gown across her arms, alone in the long, narrow room, Aaliya felt a chill go through her. Turning, she saw the couch, as always, covered with the discards of the women: torn hose, soiled blouses, heelless shoes. In the corner was another pile of clothes and Aaliya knew without a doubt that buried under the heap was MasumaMs little traveling purse that contained the life savings of both her and Zain, about five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.

Still trembling, Aaliya draped the dress over the back of a chair and began to take her clothes off, then put on Masuma's underwear. As before when she'd put on Masuma's clothes, she began to feel as though she were a different person. It was almost as though the clothes had magical properties that transformed the wearer into someone else. And no wonder, Aaliya thought as she pulled the silk gown over her head. What the dress had witnessed that night was enough to leave an impression on fabric.

A few days ago her grandmother had told her what had actually happened that night that had changed so many people's lives. Masuma had told Aaliya everything up until she had walked out the stage door carrying her purse and Half Hand's bag.

Aaliya had listened to her grandmother, had even felt some of what she was telling her, but sometimes it seemed to Aaliya as though she were almost numb. Just days before she heard Masuma's story she had been told that her mother had been tortured before she had been cold-bloodedly murdered. Wasn't there a limit to how much a person could feel? How much a person could even comprehend?

With the dress on, she sat down at the counter to check her makeup.

"Ten minutes, Masuma," came a man's voice from outside the door.

In ten minutes she was going to have to go in front of these people and sing for them; she was going to have to do what Masuna did that
night.

Abruptly, she looked at the closed door of the dressing room. It was dirty looking, but there were no lacerations on it. No one had tried to claw her way out of this dressing room.

Making herself turn back around, Aaliya looked in the mirror. She had to remember that this was just a play; she was acting and she was trying to help Zain. He said he was going to have pictures taken to use in his book and he was-

Bowing her head, she put her head in her hands. Ornette was playing outside now, and she was having difficulty remembering that this was just an act. She was having a very hard time not thinking about her mother and her granddad Zubair's loneliness after his wife had left him. Everything that she knew seemed to be screaming in her head, not being quiet as she usually managed to keep it.

It had all started on this night, everything that had happened began on this one long harrowing night: lives ruined, lives extinguished, hatreds kindled.

"I can't do this," Aaliya whispered and started to get up, but then she saw a box of powder on the counter. It was an ordinary box, blue and white, with a big lambswool puff with a pink ribbon on top; the box was full of ordinary dusting powder.

Picking up the puff, she looked at it.

Maybe it had started with the powder Masuma dumped over Zain abdul Kareem's head. For a few moments Aaliya put her head on her arms on the counter, releasing her mind to all that she had been told, not fighting it, but letting herself go, allowing herself to remember everything.

"You're on," Vajiha said as she opened the door.

When Miss Aaliya ghulam haider stood up, smoothing her blonde hair back in its perfect waves, she was Masuma, and she was ready.

awesome update.
I really liking the way story going into more mysterious.
thanks for pm and double update always.

Thank you for writing two chapters ! Love this story

loved the upadte thanks for double dhamaka do continue soon plzz

Wow the build up was so good
My heart was beating out of my chest all the way to the end
I could feel exactly what aliya must have been going through
So scary for her
loving this
I finally catches up with all chapters
Thanks for all the pms

Awesome update..nd i luv u fr updating this Sumi..as much as i don't want it 2 end..bt den i can't help bt be a lil greedy nd ask fr d next update :*

Sumiya the mystery is building up I don't want the story to end I want zain and aaliya pls continue soon

That was awesome..
Read three chapters back to back..
Loved them
Thanks for tbr pm