Finn

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Stephen King

Stephen King

Finn

FINN HAD A HARD CO of it from the very beginning. He slipped through the hands of a midwife who had delivered hundreds of babies and gave his birthday cry when he hit the floor. When he was five, there was a house party next door. He was allowed out to listen to the music (Shane MacGowan blasting from pole-mounted portable speakers) on his side of the street. It was summer, he was barefoot, and a cherry bomb thrown by an exuberant partygoer flew up, arced down with the stub of its fuse fizzing, and blew off the baby toe on his left foot.

Wouldn’t have happened again in a thousand years, his grandma said. Also: God must have wanted that toe for an angel.

When he was seven, he and his sisters were playing in Pettingill Park while Grandma sat on a nearby bench, alternately knitting and doing one of her word search puzzles. Finn didn’t care for the swings, had no use for the seesaws, could not have cared less about the roundy-round. What he liked was the Twisty, an entrancing curlicue of blue plastic twenty feet high. There were steps, but Finn preferred to climb the slide itself on his hands and knees, up and around, up and around. At the top he would sit and glide to the packed dirt at the bottom. He never had an accident on the Twisty.

"Stop that awhile, why don’t ya,” Grandma said one day. “You’re always on that old Twisty. Try something new. Try the monkey bars. Show me a trick.”

His sisters, Colleen and Marie, were on them, climbing and swinging like ... well, like monkeys. So, to please Grandma, he went on the monkey bars and slipped while hanging upside down and fell and broke his arm.

His teacher that year, pretty Miss Monoghan, liked to end each day by saying, What have we learned today, kiddos? At the urgent care, while having his arm set (the lollipop he was given afterwards hardly seemed adequate compensation for the pain), Finn thought what he’d learned that day was Stick to the Twisty.

At fourteen, running home from his friend Patrick’s house in a driving thunderstorm, a stroke of lightning hit the street directly behind him, close enough to char a line down the back of his jacket. Finn fell forward, hit his head on the curb, suffered a concussion, and lay unconscious in his bed for two days before waking up and asking what had happened. It was Deirdre Hanlon from across the street (one of the partygoers on that long-ago Shane MacGowan day, although not the cherry bomb thrower) who saw him and fished the unconscious boy out of the gutter “I thought poor old Finn was dead for sure,” she said.

His late father said Finn was born under a bad sign. Grandma (who never apologized for the monkey-bars day) held a different view. She told Finn that for every stroke of bad luck God dealt out, he gave two strokes of good. Finn thought that over and said he’d had no good luck to speak of, unless it wasn’t being hit dead center by the lightning bolt.

You should be glad your luck’s out,” Grandma said. Maybe it will come in all at once and you’ll win the Lotto. Or a rich relative will die and leave you everything.”

“I don’t have any rich relatives.”

That you know of,” Grandma said. She was the kind of woman who always got the last word. “When things go wrong, just remind yourself, ‘God owes me.’ And God always pays His debts.”

Not soon enough to suit Finn, however. Worse luck awaited.

~

NOW NINETEEN, Finn came running home from his girlfriend s house, not because it was raining but because even with a case of blue balls, all that hugging and touching and smooching had left him exhilarated. He felt he had to run or explode. He was wearing a leather jacket, jeans, a Cabinteely cap, and a vintage T-shirt with the logo of an old band—Nazareth—on the front. He rounded the corner onto Peeke Street and ran into a young man running the other way. They both fell down. Finn picked himself up and started to apologize, but the young man was already legging it again, looking back over his shoulder. He was also wearing jeans, a bill cap, and a T-shirt, which didn’t strike Finn as particularly coincidental; in this city, it was the uniform of the young, men and women both.

Finn carried on running down Peeke, rubbing a scraped elbow as he went. A black tradesman’s van came toward him, lights off. Finn thought nothing of it until it pulled up beside him and some men—at least four—came rushing out of the back even before the van had rolled completely to a stop.

Two of them grabbed him by the arms. Finn managed, “Hey!”

A third man said “Hey yourself!” and pulled a bag over his head.

There was a sting in his upper arm just above his scraped elbow. He was aware of being hustled, feet not touching the pavement, and then the world flew away.

~

WHEN FINN CAME TO, he was lying on a cot in a small room with a high ceiling. In one corner was a table lamp with no table beneath it. In another was a commode. The commode was blue plastic, exactly the same shade as the Twisty in Pettingill Park. There was no other furniture. There was a skylight, but it had been painted black in slopping, careless strokes.

Finn sat up and winced. He didn’t have a headache, exactly, but his neck was terribly stiff and his arm hurt the way it had after he’d gotten his Covid shot. He looked at it and saw someone had put a sticking plaster above his scraped elbow. He peeled it back and saw a tiny hole with a red corona around it.

Finn tried the door and found it locked. He knocked, then pounded on it. As if in answer, AC/DC blasted at him: “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” at what sounded like two thousand decibels. Finn clapped his hands over his ears. It went on for twenty or thirty seconds, then stopped. He looked up and saw three speakers mounted high up. To him they looked like Bose models, which meant expensive. In the corner above the table lamp without a table, the lens of a camera stared down at him.

Unlike the time when he had almost been struck by lightning, Finn remembered what had happened before he temporarily lost the plot, and guessed what it meant. It was absurd but not amazing. Being kidnapped was just another example of Finn Murrie luck.

He went back to pounding on the door and yelling for someone to come. When no one did, he stepped back and looked up at the camera.

“Is someone there? Like, monitoring this? If you are, please come and let me out. I believe you’ve dropped a bollock. You want the other fella.”

There was no response for almost a full minute. Finn was walking back to the cot, having decided to lie down until someone came to rectify what was obviously a mistake, when the speakers blared again. Finn liked the Ramones, but not at such apocalyptic volume in a closed room. This time the sonic assault went on for about two minutes before cutting out just as abruptly.

He lay on the cot and had just begun to drift when Cheap Trick roared down. Twenty minutes later it was the dirty sax break from “Tequila, by the Champs.

It went on like that for quite some time. Probably hours. There was no way Finn could tell for sure. His captors had taken his watch.

~

HE WAS DOZING when the door opened. Two men came in. Finn wasn’t sure they were the ones who had grabbed him by the arms, but pretty sure. One of them had a droopy eye. He said, “Are you going to be troublesome, Bobby-O?”

“Not if you’re going to make this right,” Finn said. He took little notice of being called Bobby-O, thought it was just some kind of nickname, like Daddy-O, or how if his father had seen a drunk staggering up the street, he’d always say, “There goes Paddy O’Reilly headed home to thump up his wife.”

“That’s up to you,” the other said. He had a narrow face and black eyes, like a weasel.

They went out the door, Finn between the two men, who were both wearing chinos and white shirts. Neither of them had a gun, which was a bit of a comfort, although Finn had no doubt they could handle him easily if he decided to make trouble for them. They looked fit. Finn was tall but weedy.

The room they came out in was lined with shelves, all of them empty. To Finn it looked like a pantry, or maybe, given the size, what his grandma would have called a larder. As a young woman in County Down, she’d been “in service.”

From the pantry they entered the biggest kitchen Finn had ever seen. There were a couple of empty bowls on the counter with spoons in them. Judging by the scum inside, he guessed they had contained soup. His belly rumbled. He didn’t know how long it had been since he’d eaten. Ellie had made him some scrambled eggs before the necking started, but Finn reckoned that was long since digested. If digestion continued when you were unconscious, that was. He thought it must. A person’s body just went on about its business. As long as it could, anyway.

Next was a dining room with a shining mahogany table that looked long enough to play shuffleboard on. Heavy plum-colored drapes had been pulled all the way closed. Finn strained his ears for the sound of passing traffic and heard nothing.

They went down a hall and the droopy-eyed man opened a door on the right. The weasel gave Finn a light shove. There was a fancy desk in the room. The walls were lined with books and folders. More drapes, a deep dull red, had been drawn over the window behind the desk. A man with white hair combed back like the early Cliff Richard sat behind the desk. He was wearing a tweedy jacket with elbow patches. A rusty black tie was pulled down. His tanned face was scored with lines. He looked not much older than Finn’s father had been when he died.

“Sit down.”

Finn sat down across from the white-haired man. Mr. Droopy Eye stood in one corner. Mr. Weasel stood in the other corner. They clasped their hands in front of their belt buckles.

There was a folder in front of the white-haired man, thinner than the ones crammed in helter-skelter on the shelves. He opened it, lifted a sheet of paper, looked at it, and sighed.

“This can be easy or hard, Mr. Feeney. That’s entirely up to you.”

Finn leaned forward. “See, that’s not my name. You have the wrong person.”

The white-haired man looked interested. He put the sheet of paper back in the thin folder and closed it. “Not Bobby Feeney? Is that so?”

“My name is Finn Murrie. That’s Murrie with an ie at the end, not ay.” He felt that this detail alone should be enough to convince the white-haired man. It was so specific.

“Is it now?” the white-haired man said. “Wonders never cease, do they?”

“I’ll tell you what happened. What I think happened. When I came round the corner into Peeke Street I ran into a fella running the other way. We knocked each other down. He got up and ran on. I got up and ran on. These fellas”—he pointed at the men in the corners—“must have wanted that other fella, your Bobby Feeney. He was dressed the same as me.”

“Dressed the same, was he? Cabinteely cap? Nazareth T-shirt? Leather jacket?”

“Well, I don’t know what was on the shirt, and I can’t remember if he was wearing a cap, it all happened so fast, but it’s sure that’s who you wanted. This happens to me all the time.”

The white-haired man leaned forward, his hands (scarred, Finn saw, or maybe burned) clasped on his thin folder. He looked more interested than ever. “You are taken into custody all the time, are you?”

“No, bad luck. Bad luck happens to me all the time.” He told the white-haired man about being dropped at birth, and the cherry bomb that took his toe because an angel wanted one, the broken arm because he let his grandma coax him off the Twisty, the lightning strike. There were other things he could have added, but he thought the lightning strike and the resulting concussion made a good place to stop. Like the climax of a storybook story. “So you see, I’m not the one you’re looking for.”

“Huh.” The white-haired man sat back, pressed a hand to his belly as if it pained him, and sighed.

Inspiration struck Finn. “Just think about it, sir. If I was running away from these fellas of yours, I’d run away. But I didn’t, did I? I ran right into their outstretched arms, so to speak. It was the other fella, this Bobby Feeney, who ran away.”

“You’re not Bobby Feeney?”

“No sir.”

“You’re Finn Donovan.”

“Finn Murrie. With an ie.” This should have been settled by now. That it apparently was not gave Finn a bad feeling.

“Do you have any identification? Because if you had a wallet, it must be crammed up your arse. That’s the only place we didn’t look.”

Finn actually reached for his back pocket before remembering.

“I left it at my girlfriend’s house. We were sitting on the couch”—lying on it, actually, Ellie on top—“and it was digging into my butt, so I took it out and put it on this little table, with our cans of lager. I must have forgotten it.”

“Forgot it,” said Mr. Weasel, grinning.

“Must have,” said Mr. Droopy Eye. He was grinning, too.

“You see, we have a problem here already,” the white-haired man said.

Finn had another inspo. The unpleasant situation he was in—the unbelievable situation, really, although he had no choice but to believe it— seemed to be bringing inspirations on thick and fast. “I had my Odeon card in my pocket, I kept it separate in case Ellie wanted to go out to the Stillorgan ...”

He felt for the card. It wasn’t there.

The white-haired man opened his folder, riffled through the few papers inside, and brought out an orange card. “This card?”

“Yes, that’s it. See my name?” He reached for it. The white-haired man leaned back. Mr. Weasel and Mr. Droopy Eye unclasped their hands, ready to pounce should pouncing be called for.

The white-haired man held the card close to his face, as if he were nearsighted. “Finn Murray, it says here. With an ay.”

Finn felt heat rising in his cheeks, as if he had been caught in a lie. He hadn’t been, but that was how it felt. “People misspell names all the time, don’t they? My father’s name was Stephen and people were always spelling it with a v or even an f like Stefan.”

The white-haired man slipped the Odeon card back into his folder. “Did you enjoy the music we had piped into your room?”

“I know why you do that. I’ve seen it on telly. It’s a tactic, like. To keep people on edge.”

“Ah, is that why we do it? Pando, did you know that’s why we do it?”

“Hard to say,” Mr. Weasel replied with a shrug.

“I have heard it said that music soothes the savage beast, although I’m not sure that speaks to your question.”

“We can arrange some Nazareth, if you like,” said the white-haired man. “You being a fan and all.” And, with what sounded grotesquely like pride: “We have Spotify!”

“I want to go home.” Finn didn’t like the tremble he heard in his voice but couldn’t help it. “You made a mistake and I want to go home. I won’t say nothing.” He was sorry as soon as it came out. Kidnap victims were always saying it and it never worked. He’d seen that on telly, too.

“Going home might also be arranged, and very easily. But first you must answer one question. What did you do with the briefcase, Bobby? The one with the papers in it. For you surely didn’t have it when you were brought here.”

Finn felt tears sting at the corners of his eyes. “Sir—”

“Call me Mr. Ludlum, if you like. I used to call myself Mr. Deighton, but I got tired of it.”

“Mr. Ludlum, I’m not Bobby Feeney and I didn’t have any briefcase. I never did. I’m not who you’re looking for, and while you’re gassing at me the fella you are looking for is getting away.”

“So your name is Bobby Murrie. With an ie.”

“Yes. I mean no. I’m Finn Murrie. Finny

“Doc.” The white-haired man—Mr. Ludlum— nodded to the one with the droopy eye. “Help this fine young man to remember his name.”

Doc stepped forward. Pando, aka Mr. Weasel, grabbed Finn by the shoulders. Doc removed a heavy ring, put it in the pocket of his chinos, and slapped Finn across the face, good and hard. Then he went the other way, even harder. Spit flew from the side of Finn’s mouth. It hurt plenty, but what he felt most in that moment was astonishment. And shame. He had nothing to be ashamed of, but ashamed he was.

“Now,” Mr. Ludlum said, leaning back and clasping his hands on his midsection, “what is your name?”

“Finn! Finn Mur—”

Mr. Ludlum nodded to Doc, who administered two more brisk slaps. Finn’s ears rang. His cheeks burned. The tears came. “You can’t do that! Why would you do that? You made a mistake! ”

“I can do it.” Mr. Ludlum opened his folder and tossed a pamphlet across the desk. “Open-handed slaps are a world-approved technique for advanced interrogation. I think you should read this carefully before we talk again. See what other techniques we might decide to employ. Take him back, you two. Mr. Bobby Donovan has some homework to do.”

“You don’t even know who you’re—”

He was jerked to his feet, Pando on one side and Doc on the other. Pando picked up the pamphlet and stuffed it into the waistband of Finn’s jeans. “Come along, Bobby-O,” he said. “Let’s take a wee dooter.”

“Ta-ta,” said Mr. Ludlum.

With that Finn was hustled from the study with his cheeks burning and tears streaming from his eyes.

~

BACK IN HIS ROOM—his cell—Finn pulled the pamphlet free of his jeans and looked at it. There was no binding, not even a staple. It was just a few sheets of paper folded together. On the front, smearily printed and slightly askew, was this: WORLD-APPROVED TECHNEEKS FOR ADVANCED INTEROGATION.

“Are you shitting me?” Finn asked. He spoke in a whisper, so the mics—surely there were mics as well as the camera staring down—wouldn’t pick it up. His first thought was that the “pamphlet was a joke. But the slaps hadn’t been a joke. His face still burned.

The first page of the pamphlet: OPEN-HANDED SLAPS, OKAY!

The second page: SLEEP DEPERVATION TECHNEEKS (LOUD MUSIC, SOUND FX, ETC.), OKAY!

Third page: THREATS (TO FAMILY MEMBERS, FUCK-BUDDIES, ETC.), OKAY!

Fourth: ENEMAS, OKAY!

Fifth: STRESS POSITIONS, OKAY!

Sixth: WATERBORDING, OKAY!

Seventh: FIST HITTING, FOOT PADDLING, BURNING (WITH CIGARETTES OR LITERS), RAPE &, SEXUAL ABUSE, NOT OKAY!

Eighth: IF NOT SPECIFICALLY MENTIONED, PROBABLY OKAY!

The rest of the pages were blank.

“They can’t even fucking spell,” Finn whispered. But if it wasn’t a mistake, or someone’s macabre idea of a joke, it could mean he was in the hands of psychopaths. The idea was more terrifying than believing it was a case of mistaken identity. That could be resolved.

One of his grandma’s aphorisms (she had many) came to mind: Most people will be reasonable if you speak soft and gwe them a chance.

Because he had no better idea, he dropped the pamphlet on the floor, got up, and faced the camera. He spoke soft. “My name is Finn Murrie. I live at 19 Rowan Tree Road with my grandma and my two sisters, Colleen and Marie. My mother is away on business, but she can be reached on her mobile at ...” Finn reeled off the number. “All of them will tell you I am who I say I am. Then ...”

Then what?

Inspiration came. Or logic. Maybe both.

“Then you can put a bag over my head, even knock me out again if you feel like you need to, and drop me off on some random street corner. You can do that because I don’t know who you are and I don’t know where this is. I don’t have no briefcase and I don’t have no papers. Just, you know, be reasonable. Please.”

He’d lost track of how many times he’d said please. Quite a few, for sure.

Finn went back to the cot and lay down. He began to drift. Did that other fella look like him? Had he really been dressed like him? Had it possibly been a setup instead of a mistake? He wished he’d gotten more than a glimpse of Bobby. Just as he was slipping away, Anthrax came ripping out of the speakers: “Madhouse.”

He almost fell off the cot. He covered his ears. After two minutes that seemed much longer, the music stopped. He no longer felt sleepy, but he felt plenty hungry. Would they feed him? Maybe not. Starving a prisoner wasn’t specifically mentioned, so it was PROBABLY OKAY!

He slept. He dreamed that Bobby looked like him. Or was him.

They gave him four hours.

Then they came for him.

~

FINN DIDN’T SEE if it was Doc and Pando or some of the other ones. Before he realized what was happening, he was hauled to his feet, still mostly asleep. A bag came down over his head. It smelled vaguely of chicken dirt. He was propelled forward and slammed into the side of the door.

“Whoops, sorry!” someone said. “Little off course there, Bobby.”

He was yanked back and propelled forward again. His nose was bleeding, maybe broken. He snuffled up blood, choked, began to cough. They were moving him at suicidal speed, his paddling feet barely touching the floor. They came to stairs and he was driven down them like a hog in a chute. Near the bottom they let go and one of the men gave him a hearty push. Finn screamed into the bag, imagining a drop of a hundred, two hundred, three hundred feet, with broken-bodied death awaiting him upon touchdown.

It was only two or three steps. His foot caught on the bottom one and he went sprawling. He was grabbed again. Every time he drew a breath, the bag went into his mouth and he tasted his own blood, fresh and still warm, set off by a soupgon of chicken shit.

“Stop it! ” he screamed. “Stop it, I CQn’t breathe! ”

“Pull the other one, Bobby,” one of them said. “The not-breathing part comes later.”

His knees hit something hard. He was whacked open-handed across the back of the neck and he fell forward onto what felt like a bench.

“Gotta flip the omelet so it doesn’t burn,” someone said cheerily, and he was turned over. One of his flailing hands hit something soft.

“Off my langer, faggot,” a new voice said, and he was slapped through the bag. “That’s strictly my girlfriend’s proppity.”

“Please,” Finn said. He was crying, trying not to choke on the blood now running down his throat. His nose throbbed like an infected tooth. “Please don’t, please stop, I’m not the guy, I’m not Bobby Donovan—”

Someone fetched the side of his face a tremendous whack. “Bobby Feeney, you stupid git.”

A cloth was draped over the bag. The first voice said, “Here it comes, Bobby! Bwoosh! ”

Warm water soaked the cloth, then the bag, then Finn’s face. He sucked water in and spluttered it out again. He held his breath. The water continued to pour down. At last he had to breathe. Instead of air, he sucked in water. He gargled it, choked on it, spat it out, swallowed more. There was no air. Air was gone. Air was a golden oldie, a blast from the past. He was drowning.

Finn thrashed. The water continued to pour through the hood. There was no sense of drifting away, no peace, only the horror of constant water. He reached for unconsciousness and couldn’t find it. Only more water.

At last it stopped. They rolled him onto his side. He vomited into the bag. One of the men patted it gently all around. “A puke facial!” he exclaimed. “And we don’t even charge!”

They rolled him onto his back and yanked the hood off. He was allowed a hand free to wipe his face. He coughed and coughed while he did it. At last his vision cleared enough for him to see Mr. Ludlum peering down at him. Because he was at the head of the bench, he looked upside down. His rusty black tie hung down like a stopped pendulum.

“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.

“Can that actually happen?”

“Can and did,” Mr. Ludlum said. “My dear old mother was very prim and proper, but she had a coarse joke about Mr. Presley. She said he was Elvis the Pelvis and his twin brother would have been Enos the Penis. Do you get it, Finn?”

Finn nodded, thinking, I am being held prisoner and tortured by a man who believes I know where there’s a bomb factory and that Elvis Presley gobbled up his twin brother while still in his mother’s belly.

“I always found Elvis a trifle gay,” Mr. Ludlum said in a ruminative tone. “There are songs— ‘Teddy Bear’ is one, ‘Wooden Heart’ is another— where he sings in a kind of whispery falsetto. One can almost envision him prancing in the studio as he warbled, arms outstretched, fingers gently waving, perhaps in patent leather shoes. I never believed that story about Nick Adams, total rot, but the rhinestone outfits he wore toward the end ... and the scarves ... there were rumors of a girdle ... yes, there was something there, something we might call latent, and ...” He stopped, sighed, and briefly covered his face. When he lowered his hands he said, “Two of my men have left me, Finn. Scarpered. Did a bunk. Buggered off. I tried to persuade them to stay, but they feel our enemies are closing in. The putain de bougnoule, so to speak.”

He drooped one bloodshot eye in a wink.

“So our time has grown short. I’ll send you back to your quarters now to eat your breakfast, but think very carefully. I’m sure you don’t want to suffer any more discomfort. All we need to know is where you put the translation. And the key to the code itself, of course. We’ll want that. Doc, will you escort our young friend?”

Doc went to the door and gestured for Finn, who got up and joined him. “Are you going to be good?” Doc asked.

Finn, who was thinking of bacon and eggs with mushroomies and a plump banger as well, nodded that he would be good. Absolutely. He walked beside Doc to the kitchen, where the oldish man—Marm—was using tongs to put what looked like a perfectly fried sausage on a plate that already held two eggs (fried hard, just the way Finn liked them), four strips of bacon, mushrooms still sizzling in butter, and a slice of tomato. Finn veered toward the plate like a compass needle swinging to magnetic north. Doc pulled him back.

“Wait,” he said. “No grabbing, my son.” And to Marm: “I’ll take it from here. He’ll want you.”

Marm nodded, gave Finn a wink, and headed for Mr. Ludlum’s study.

Doc picked up the plate with its freight of cholesterol-loaded goodies, but as soon as Marm was gone, he put it down again and pulled Finn to the right, away from the pantry and the room beyond.

“Hey!” Finn said. “My breakfast!”

Doc’s hand clamped Finn’s elbow hard enough to hurt. He dragged Finn to a door between the sink and the refrigerator. They emerged in an alley. Finn smelled fresh air tanged with gasoline. The black tradesman’s van was there, the engine running. Mr. Weasel was behind the wheel. When he saw Doc and Finn, he went between the seats into the back. The rear doors flew open.

“Hurry the fuck up,” Pando said.

“No fear, he’ll be in the jakes doing a Number Two Toodle-oo,” Doc said.

“Yeah, but he don’t stay in there long these days, and he ain’t entirely stupid, even yet. Get in here, son.”

Finn had time for one amazed look at the thin slice of blue sky above the alley, then stumbled into the back of the van. His legs were stiff and he went sprawling, half in and half out. Pando grabbed him and hauled him the rest of the way. From his back pocket he pulled a black hood.

“Put this over your head. No argument. This ain’t the time.”

Finn pulled the bag over his head. His hands were trembling. One of the men—Doc, he thought—shouldered into him and he went down on his arse, head banging the side of the van hard enough to see stars inside the bag. The doors slammed shut.

“Go,” Doc snarled. “And mind you don’t get us into a haxcident.”

Finn heard Pando return to the driver’s seat and the squeak of springs as he sat down. The van started to move. There was a pause at the end of the alley, and then a hard right turn.

Doc thumped down beside Finn with a sigh. “Fuck me for a criminal,” he said.

Well, Finn thought, what else would you call yourself?

“Are you taking me somewhere to kill me?” The idea actually didn’t seem so bad. Not compared with being faceup on the drowning board.

Doc gave a brief grunt of what might have been laughter. “If I’d wanted you dead, I would have let you eat breakfast. The mushrooms were poisoned.”

“What—”

“Poison, poison! You never heard of it, you thick prat?”

“Where are you taking m—”

“Shut up.”

There was a left turn, a right, then some of both as they circled at least two roundabouts. There was a long pause—at a traffic light, Finn assumed—and Pando laid on the horn when the queue didn’t move quick enough to suit him.

“Belay that, you numpty,” Doc called. “Draw no attention.”

On they went. More lefts and rights. Then the van picked up speed, so they were on a faster road, but Finn didn’t hear enough noise to make him believe it was a motorway. Time passed. There was the click of a lighter, then the smell of cigarette smoke.

He don't let us smoke when we’re on a job,” Doc said.

Finn kept quiet. He was thinking about the poisoned mushrooms. If they had been poisoned.

Sometime later—maybe fifteen minutes, maybe twenty—Doc helped himself to a fresh fag and said, “He thinks he’s only lost two men, but the rest slipped away last night. Me ’n’ Pando were the last. Except for Marm. Marm won’t leave him.”

From up front Pando said, “Feckin’ Marm’s as crazy as he is.”

“We risked our lives to bring you out, Finn,” Doc said. “I don’t expect thanks, but that’s what we did.”

Finn thanked him anyway. His voice was trembling and his legs were shaking. Shake, shake, sugar, but you’ll never shake me, he thought. That was Elvis, “Stuck on You.” Finn wondered if his grandma knew Elvis had gobbled up his twin brother, Enos.

“Thank you so much.”

“I don’t know if you’re worth a shite farthing to anyone, but you don’t deserve to die just because he is the way he is now. Did you see that pamphlet he’s so proud of? Wrote it himself, didn’t he? But he wasn’t always that way. No. We did good work once upon a time, didn’t we, Pando?”

“Saved the fucking world in 2017,” Pando said, “and not more than a dozen people ever knew. But we knew, kid. We did.”

“The Feeney lad’s up to something,” Doc said. “That much I never doubted. You weren’t a part of it, but he wouldn’t let it go. Even though he don’t remember squat.”

“Is it—” Finn began.

“Shut up,” Doc said. “Just be a good little laddie and keep your goddamned mouth shut. Unless you want to get into worse trouble.”

From the front Pando said, “No, he wasn’t always this way. I remember ... ah, never mind. For half a crown I’d put a bullet in your goddamned head myself.”

~

TWO HOURS LATER—at least two—they came into another town, a biggish one from the sound of the cars and lorries and the voices Finn heard at stoplights. Voices and laughter, the sound strange to him.

At last the van pulled up and Doc yanked the bag from Finn’s head. “This is your stop, son. And this is for your trouble.” He stuffed something into the front pocket of Finn’s jeans. Then, suddenly—Doc didn’t seem to know he was going to do it until it was done—he kissed Finn on the forehead. “Keep me in your prayers. I’ll need a fuckload of them.”

He opened the back doors. Finn step-stumbled out. The van pulled away while Doc was still yanking the doors shut. Finn looked around like a man waking from a vivid dream. A bicyclist rang a bell and called, “Left, on your left!”

Finn stepped up onto the curb to keep from being hit broadside by an old buffer with a white mustache and a nose like the prow of a destroyer. To his right was the Randolph Street newsagent’s, where he bought Grandma’s word-search books, and sometimes—if he was feeling generous—an OK/ or a Heat for his sisters. Next to it was the Yor Best chipper. Finn had spent half a fortune in there over the last ten years. He was less than a mile from home.

He walked that way slowly, looking around, meeting the eyes of other pedestrians (most looked away at once, surely believing they were crossing gazes with a crazy street person), looking at the sky, looking in every window. I’m alive, he thought. Alive, alive, alive. He also looked over his shoulder several times, making sure there was no sign of the black tradesman’s van.

He stopped at the corner of Peeke Street and peered around the corner, this time making sure Bobby Feeney wasn’t running toward him on a collision course, bearing away the secret papers, or the blueprints, or heading for the bomb factory. No one was there. He reached into his pocket and brought out a wad of banknotes: green euros, forty or more. He stuffed the wad back into his pocket.

For every stroke of bad lack, two strokes of good, Grandma had said. Well, he had at least four thousand, that was one stroke. And he had his life, that was another.

Home was only two blocks down and one street over. They would be worried about him— for all he knew his mother had flown home early from her big business thingy—but they could wait a little longer. He turned back along Peeke Street to Emberly, then from Emberly to Jane Street. Halfway down Jane was Pettingill Park. It must have been early afternoon of a school day, because the playground was empty except for two toddlers on the roundy-round circling slowly, pushed either by their mother or their minder. Finn sat on a bench.

He looked at the Twisty and a terrible memory came to him. In his last year of school, Mr. Edgerton had assigned them a story by Ambrose Bierce. After they had all read it (presumably; not all of Finn’s classmates were of the reading class), Mr. Edgerton showed them a short film based on the story, which was about the hanging of a slave owner in the American Civil War. The slave owner is pushed off a bridge, but the rope breaks and he swims to safety. The twist is this: The fortuitous escape was all in his mind, a kind of mini-dream before he’s actually pushed from the bridge and executed.

That could be happening to me, Finn thought. They went too far with the waterboarding and I’m drowning. Only, instead of my whole life fashing in front of my eyes, as it’s supposed to do, Tm imagining that Doc took me out, Pando drove us away, and here I am, in the park I enjoyed so much as a wee lad. Because, really, is my escape likely? Is it realistic? You might believe it in a story, but in real life? Especially in the real life of a luckless bastard like me?

Was it real life, though? Was it?

Finn seized one of his cheeks, still tender from slaps administered by Doc before Doc’s (unlikely) change of heart. He twisted it hard. It hurt, and for a moment Pettingill Park seemed to waver like a mirage. That was caused by tears of pain, though.

Wasn’t it?

Nor was it just Doc’s change of heart that was bizarre. Mr. Ludlum, who used to be Mr. Deighton ... the badly printed pamphlet (and badly spelled, don’t forget that) ... the business about Elvis’s twin brother ... wasn’t that all the stuff of dreams? What if Bobby Feeney hadn’t just knocked him on his arse but on his noggin? What if Finn had hit said noggin in the exact same place where it had once been cracked on the memorable (not that he actually did remember) day when he had been brushed by lightning? Wouldn’t that just be Finn Murrie’s luck? What if he was lying in a hospital bed somewhere, deep in a coma, his damaged brain creating some crackpot alternate reality?

Finn got up and walked slowly to the Twisty. He hadn’t climbed its spiral curves in years, not since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, as Grandma would say. He climbed it now, pulling himself along by the sides. It was a tight fit, and he felt every bump and bruise, but he managed.

The mom or childminder stopped pushing the kids on the roundy-round. She shaded her eyes with her hands and said, “What in heaven’s name are you about? You’ll break it!”

Finn didn’t reply, and he didn’t break it. He reached the top, turned himself around, and sat with his legs on the first curve. He thought, Either I’ll still be here when I gef bottom, or I won’t be. Simple as that.

He looked at the woman and called, “Elvis has left the building.” Grandma said it was always the line in the old bugger’s shows. Then he pushed off.