“Are you Bobby Feeney or Finn Murrie?” Mr. Ludlum asked.
Finn was at first coughing too hard to answer. When it eased a little he said, “Whichever you want. I’ll swear to it. Just don’t do it again. Please, no more.”
“Let’s say investigation has proved to our satisfaction that you are Murrie, rather than Feeney. Where is he?”
“Who?”
Mr. Ludlum nodded. One of the men—not Doc, not Pando, they weren’t here—fetched him a terrific open-handed wallop. A mixture of vomit and water flew.
“Feeney, you eejit, Feeney! Where is he?”
“I don’t know!”
“Where is the bomb factory? Last chance, my boy, before you enjoy another baptism.”
Finn coughed, choked, turned his head to the side, heaved, spat. “You said ... papers. Papers in a briefcase.”
“Papers be damned. Where is the bomb factory?”
“I don’t know anything about—”
Mr. Ludlum nodded. The wet cloth went over Finn’s face. The water began to flow. Soon he wanted to die. He wanted that more than anything. But he didn’t. At last, semiconscious with the puke-stained bag once more over his head, he was brought back to his cell. He was no longer hungry. There was that, at least.
The last thing Mr. Ludlum said before closing the door was “It doesn’t have to be this way, Finn. Tell us what Feeney did with the blueprints and this can end.”
~
THERE WERE NO BLASTS of music, but Finn was still unable to sleep for a long time. Every time he started to drift, a new coughing fit would shake him awake. The last one was so furious he thought he might pass out, which would have been welcome. Anything to escape this nightmare. The skylight high above him sent a few slices of subdued light through the slopped-over black paint. Outside, in a world that was no longer his world, it was daytime. Maybe early, maybe late. Whichever it was, there were people out there going about their business with no idea that in this cell, a young man with no luck but bad luck was trying to cough water out of his lungs.
For every stroke of bad lack God deals oat, his grandma had said, he gives two strokes of good.
“What shite,” Finn croaked, and finally fell asleep.
He dreamed of Pettingill Park. Colleen was on the roundy-round. Marie was on the monkey bars, hanging upside down and picking her nose—a habit of which she could not be broken. Grandma said Marie would pick her nose on her deathbed. That fine old lady sat on a nearby bench with her knitting in her lap as she frowned over her latest word search. Finn climbed the spiral curves of the Twisty on his hands and knees, then sat and slid down again and again and again.
~
THERE WERE NO musical interludes to interrupt this pleasant dream, which finally slipped away unnoticed, as dreams tend to do. He was awakened by Doc and another man, much older than the others, some unknown time later. They yanked him off the cot and hustled him back through the kitchen and dining room to the study, where white-haired Mr. Ludlum awaited. Mr. Ludlum looked grizzled this morning (it was morning to Finn, at least), his eyes were rimmed with red, and there was what looked like a mustard stain on his tweed coat. His hands were folded on the desk again, and Finn observed that his scarred knuckles looked swollen. Stained, too. Was that blood?
Mr. Ludlum stared at him. Finn stared back, thinking of something else he’d seen on the telly. One of the boring and endless panel discussions on BBC that Finn’s mother seemed to enjoy for reasons he and his sisters and Grandma (who liked Coronation Street, EastEnders, and Doctor Who) could never understand. This panel had been talking about enhanced interrogation techniques (aka torture), and one of the panelists—-a jowly man who looked like Prince Andrew might after a year in a dark room drinking milkshakes and eating double burgers—said that it never worked.
“Because if the poor fellow don’t know what his ... hum ... his interlocators want to find out, he’ll ... hum ... make something up. Stands to reason!”
It did stand to reason, and Finn was an inventive lad—inventive enough to have gotten out of any number of minor scrapes at home, at school, and around the neighborhood. But inventive or not, he couldn’t think of a story that would satisfy Mr. Ludlum and keep him from another near drowning. Finn could have made up a tale about the missing briefcase, could even have added in the blueprints, but was he supposed to say that the missing blueprints were stashed in a briefcase in the bomb factory? It sounded like something from that Claedo board game. And what might come next? Stolen submarine parts? Hacked passwords to the bank accounts of Russian oligarchs?
Meanwhile, Mr. Ludlum went on staring.
“I’m hungry,” Finn blurted. “Could I possibly have something to eat, sir?”
Mr. Ludlum went on staring. Just when Finn decided he wasn’t going to speak, that he was in some kind of trance, Mr. Ludlum said, “How does the full Irish sound to you, Mr. Herlihy?”
Finn gaped. Mr. Ludlum laughed.
“Just yanking your lower extremity, Finn. Finn now, Finn forever. What do you say to the whole shooting match? Eggs, bacon, mushroomies, and a nice plump banger. With a tomato for good looks!”
Finn’s stomach gurgled. That made Mr. Ludlum laugh again. “Asked and answered, I’d say— by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. Not to mention my Finny-Finn-Finn. Eh? Eh?”
“Are you all right, Mr. Ludlum?” This was a strange question for Finn to ask, given the circumstances, but the man seemed to have lost some of his scmgy-froidy, as Grandma said when someone on a quiz program couldn’t come up with the proper answer and the time ticked away to nothing.
“I am swell” Mr. Ludlum said. “A swell fella is what I am. You shall have breakfast, Finn, if you can tell me the names of three songs by the late Elvis Presley.”
Finn didn’t bother asking why—the man was clearly crazy—but instead thought back to his grandma’s extensive record collection. One of her favorites, played until the grooves had a strange whitish look, as if dusted with chalk, was called 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t Be Wrong. Colleen and Marie made faces and clapped their hands over their ears when she put it on, but did Grandma mind? She did not.
He said, “You’ll really give me breakfast?”
Mr. Ludlum put his hand over his heart and, yes, those were almost surely bloodstains grimed into his knuckles. “My word on it.”
Finn said, “All right. ‘I Got Stung.’ That’s one. ‘One Night of Sin.’ That’s two. And ‘A Bigga-Bigga-Hunka Love.’ That’s three.”
“Very good!” The oldish man was standing in the corner, hands clasped in front of his chinos. Mr. Ludlum turned to him and said, “Breakfast for our friend Finn, Marm! He has rung the bell!”
Marm left. Doc stayed. Finn thought he looked tired.
“You know your Elvis songs,” Mr. Ludlum said. He leaned forward, gazing at Finn from eyes that were bloodshot as well as red-rimmed. “But do you know Elvis? Do you know the King of Rock and Roll?”
Finn shook his head. All he knew about Elvis was that, according to Grandma, he was some old-time rock-and-roller who died on the jakes. And that Grandma loved him. She had probably screamed for him in the days of her youth.
“He was a twin,” Mr. Ludlum breathed, and the smell of alcohol—maybe Scotch, maybe whiskey—drifted to Finn from across the desk. “A twin but also a single birth. How do you explain that paradox?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then I’ll tell you. The future King of Rock and Roll absorbed his twin brother in utero. Ate him in an act of fetal cannibalism!”
Finn was momentarily shocked out of his own troubles. He was sure (fairly sure) that Elvis’s twin brother was as mythical as the briefcase full of stolen papers or the bomb factory, but the idea of fetal cannibalism was strangely fascinating.