AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I don’t believe it,” Finn croaked, and finally fell asleep.
He dreamed of Pettingill Park. Colleen was on the roundy-round. Marie was on the monkeybars, 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 elderly 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 mostly 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. White-haired Mr. Ludlum seemed a bit 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 shirt. His hands were folded on the desk again, and Finn observed 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 interlocutors 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, in 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 Cluedo 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 sangy-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 thought those millions of fans could be wrong. They 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 Doc looked tired and—maybe—sad.
“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 he was some old-time bugger who died on the toilet. 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 supposed 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 Elvis and 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.”
