The Last Four Days of Paddy Buckley (8 page)

8:45 a.m.

I
'd no idea how I was still able to maintain this suspended midair state; it felt effortless, not to mention surreal and bizarre. But I never wanted to be back in my skin again. I felt more in control like this, more in tune with what was happening. I felt no pain. No tiredness. There was a part of me that wanted to call in sick and go to Phoenix Park or up the mountains and discover the world anew. But even more, I felt drawn to the yard in Uriel Street, and the idea of carrying on as I usually would to allay any suspicion of my culpability for Cullen's death seemed like the most intelligent course.

At a quarter to nine in the morning, I pulled Eva's car to a halt in the yard while hovering somewhere above the radio. This was the first time I'd driven her car out since she'd crossed over. I'd left it in the garage for fear I'd be overcome by the faint smell of her scent, but now with everything that was happening, my feelings and memories of Eva had been put in perspective. They were still there, but there was no more pain or expectation or longing attached to them. When I thought of Eva now, of seeing her grinning at me on Grafton Street or fitting her hand into mine as we strolled along the South Bull Wall to the Poolbeg Lighthouse, I felt nothing but fondness and gratitude. And love.

As I walked from the back office down the corridor towards the front office, I floated four or five feet ahead of my body. It happened effortlessly: Almost before I had a chance to think about it, there I was. Before my body had caught up, I joined the buzz of activity around Frank, who sat behind the main desk, with Christy and Eamonn standing by his side, looking over the list of runners, while Jack sat in the corner, listening.

“Christy,” said Frank. “The Hayes remains from Manchester is being delivered here from the airport in an hour's time. Can you bring it up to Walkinstown before lunch?”

“Sure I can, yeah,” said Christy.

Over at the reception desk, Corrine, Frank's secretary, put down the phone and turned to Frank.

“Vincent Cullen's brother was killed last night . . .” The very mention of Cullen's name silenced the room.

We'd got the call. Of course we had. It stood to reason. But the fear that had entered the room by Cullen's name being uttered didn't touch me. It should have, but I was impervious to it.

“They want somebody up to the house in Terenure straight away to make arrangements,” Corrine said.

Just as she said the last word, my body stopped at the old grandfather clock by the parlor door. Frank's face lit up as he looked at me.

“Paddy, right on cue. Vincent Cullen's brother is dead. Can you go up and make the arrangements?”

I watched myself looking back at Frank. And then the words came.

“I'll just get a coffee,” I said, unwilling to commit to anything.

“We're doing Donal Cullen's funeral,” said Jack, with so much pride you'd swear we were burying Bono.

I moved towards the back office again, wondering would the fear find its way into my removed state now there'd been mention of the lion's den. I searched for any sign of it, any trace, and found none. I was fear-free.

As I was tire-kicking my fearlessness, Frank came in holding out the address on a bit of paper. Even though I was feeling invincible, I figured it was probably better if I stayed away from Cullen. He did have a reputation for being impossible to lie to, after all.

“Frank, is there any chance you'd go up and make those arrangements yourself? I'm feeling a little odd this morning.” I looked at myself along with Frank. The picture of health.

Frank smiled at me.

“To Vincent Cullen's? There's nobody I'd send up there but yourself, Pat. And you look good to me—in fact, I don't remember seeing you as relaxed.”

He handed me the address as well as the keys to his Mercedes.

“Take my car up,” he said, and left the room.

9:25 a.m.

T
he Dublin I knew was different from the one sold on the tourist brochures. The Dublin I knew had teeth and needles and lots of tears. It wasn't devoid of smiles or charm, but it had more than its fair share of deviants. It didn't lack magic, and it had its heroes and class acts, but for the most part, it was dirty, depressive, and corrupted. Drimnagh, the suburb where I lived, with its terraced houses cramped side by side and its dreary similitude, was right beside Crumlin, a well-known breeding ground for villains and thieves that was the birthplace of the Cullen brothers. But Vincent Cullen didn't live there anymore. He'd moved to the more affluent suburb of Terenure, with taller trees, bigger houses, and loftier ideas. Comprising every class and creed, Terenure played all houses to all men and was renowned for its Edwardian architecture. Cullen's house was one of its finest examples.

I stopped the car outside Cullen's electric gates and got out. The house was on a two-acre plot and was well hidden behind a high stucco wall. All I could see from the gates was a long drive lined by white oaks. I pressed the intercom on the wall and waited. This was it. Time to sit down with the man. My task was simple: take down the details for the funeral. Nothing more. I'd sit with Cullen, nod at all his requests, then split, and go about implementing them, just like I always did. I'd walk through it by treating it just like any other job.

The gates leaped back from me, continuing steadily away until the path was cleared. As I got back into the car, I clocked the little camera on a pole by the nearest tree. Seen and attended to, and silently ushered in.

The house was enormous. It was magnolia white with large shadowed windows and a steeply sloped roof with wide eaves, and was beautifully sheltered by a scattered assortment of giant trees. I parked on the gravel drive, and as I got out of the car, the front door was opened by a young man in a tracksuit.

“From Gallagher's, right?” he said.

“That's right,” I said, and followed him into the house. In the front hall, the young man disappeared but two old men dressed in suits stepped forward. This was Old Dublin reaching out to me, these old guys with their weathered skin and Brylcreemed thinning hair. Without opening their mouths, their stoic faces spoke a thousand words of endurance and loyalty, and of another Dublin in a simpler time. One of them took my coat while the other knocked on a door off the darkened hallway, which was opened by a slim man around the fifty mark, also dressed in a suit, only this guy looked dangerous. He had a devious face and lucid eyes. When he saw me, he moved towards me with his hand outstretched.

“Sean Scully,” he said.

“Paddy Buckley, from Gallagher's,” I said, shaking his hand. Sean nodded towards the door he'd come out of and led the way in.

This was the test. This was make or break. I was about to meet the man whose picture I'd seen in the paper a hundred times, the man whose very name instilled fear throughout the city, the man who, by all accounts, never missed a trick. And I didn't doubt it. My salvation, I hoped, would be served through my removed state.

I walked through the door, moved to the center of the room, and waited. It was a big study with mahogany paneling, chesterfield couches and chairs in front of the fireplace, a large antique desk by the window, and a bookshelf lining one of the walls. The room was lit solely by daylight.

“This is Paddy Buckley,” said Sean, before sitting down on a seat in front of the desk.

Vincent, who'd been standing by the fireplace, stepped forward and clamped his hand around mine, which nearly disappeared in his. He was a big man in his late forties. He wore a suit with an open-necked shirt, and he smelled of oil, leather, and menace. His broad forehead was underpinned by hard-boiled black eyes and an equanimity loaded with malice and fortitude.

“All right, Paddy,” he said.

“Hello,” I said with a nod.

“Sit down.”

I sat down in the chair beside Sean's, took out an arrangement form that I placed on my closed briefcase, and uncapped my pen. Vincent moved behind the desk but remained standing. He stayed there saying nothing for a few moments, just jingling the change in his pockets. The two men looked directly at me with no emotion, no apparent expectation, just indifference. I was a little thrown. Usually, I'd be the one opening the proceedings as people would have no clue where to start—I was the one with the questions after all—but with Vincent Cullen, I thought it would be wiser to wait to be dealt with. I observed all this from just above the three of us, where the top of the wall met the ceiling.

“How long are you in this game?” said Vincent eventually.

“The undertaking?”

Vincent nodded.

“Twenty-odd years,” I said. Vincent nodded again while continuing to look at me.

“Right,” he said softly, and then as an afterthought: “Will you have a cup of coffee, Paddy?”

“Yeah . . . thank you,” I said. Vincent glanced at Sean, who got up and left the room, and then he stayed standing for another few moments before sitting down in his chair, relaxing a little.

“There's going to be a lot of publicity surrounding this funeral. I want everything to go off smoothly with complete precision. Understood?”

“Yes,” I said, my pen still at the ready. Sean came back into the room and sat back down. From my aerial perspective, I could see that the top of Sean's head was practically bald; only the little tuft on top gave the illusion that his hair was only receding.

“Now, you want to ask me a few questions,” said Vincent.

“Just a few details I need. Now, when were you thinking of having the funeral?”

“Thursday. We'll go to the church Wednesday evening.”

“Okay. Do you want ten or eleven o'clock Mass on the Thursday morning, in Pius X, is it?”

“Twelve o'clock in the Pro-Cathedral.”

“Right,” I said, making a note of everything. “Mr. Cullen, your brother is lying in St. James's at the moment; do you want to have the removal from Donal's house or would you prefer to use the funeral home?”

“The funeral home. I want complete privacy while Donal is there; no other funerals are to be going out of the place. Clear?”

“Absolutely,” I said. The young man in the tracksuit who'd opened the door to me came in carrying a tray with a cup of instant coffee on it. He placed it on the table beside me.

“Do you want milk?” he said.

“Just a little sugar,” I said, and added it myself from the bowl on the tray.

“Thanks, Richie,” said Sean, and Richie left us.

“How old is Donal?” I asked, looking at Vincent, having no problem watching myself keep my composure.

“Forty-one” came the answer.

“Is he married?”

“Yes.”

I wondered where the wife was, as, technically, she was chief mourner, but I didn't question it.

“Does he have any children?”

“No.”

“Did you think about a death notice for the paper?”

“That's taken care of,” said Sean.

“Right,” I said. “There's an offering for the church, it's usually two hundred—”

“Make it a grand,” said Vincent, cutting me off. I wrote down the details as the two men continued to stare at me.

Before I could get another question in, Vincent started tapping the desk with the nail of his index finger, slowly and deliberately. I decided against asking anything further and waited. From my perched position, I looked at Sean to see his reaction, but he was giving nothing away, wearing the expression of a man fishing happily on a lake.

“Tell me about the embalming, Paddy,” said Vincent.

“What do you want to know about it?”

“The process, how it works.”

“Well, basically, it's a small injection to delay the decomposition of the remains.”

Vincent just looked at me, letting the ticking of his desk clock punctuate the silence.

“A small injection,” he repeated back to me.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Save the granny speech, Paddy, and tell me how it fucking works.” There wasn't the slightest change of emotion in Vincent's voice. Sean was almost smiling, looking at me while barely nodding his head, as much as to say,
Spit it out there, man, we're not precious.

These were the kind of details nobody needed to know and even fewer wanted to know. A frank, unvarnished explanation would be upsetting to most people, especially when the imagined remains in the conversation was their relative; plus, the sugarcoated one-liner that I'd just proffered usually sufficed whenever a family member asked about the process. But these were no ordinary family members. These were guys who didn't mind killing people to get what they wanted, and they dealt in nearly as much death as I did. To them, death was part of the deal. Besides, who was I to deny Vincent Cullen?

“All right. The process happens in three stages. First of all, you've got to find one of the body's six main accessible arteries. There's one just on the inside of each upper arm near the armpit, there's another on either side of the neck, and another at the top end of each leg, just beside the groin. The underarm ones are what you'd usually work off. You make an incision a little over an inch long, find the artery, and cut an opening in it. You then put in an L-shaped tube pointed in towards the body and tie it off with a bit of ligature. Through that tube, you inject what we call arterial fluid, which is a pink chemical formula that clears any discoloration in the skin, like at the end of the fingernails or at the back of the neck or the ears, wherever the blood might have collected. The arterial fluid clears that away completely; you can actually see the collected blood disappearing. This is all being pumped around the artery system by an electric pump. After that's cleared—”

“How long does that take?” said Sean, no longer almost smiling but focusing fully, along with Vincent, on what I was telling them.

“Not long, maybe ten, fifteen minutes, depending on the condition and size of the remains. After that, you stitch up the arm and get out the trocar, which is a long, hollow, needlelike instrument about two feet long and twice as thick as a pen with three or four little holes at the pointed end of it. If you were to draw a triangle using the base of the sternum and the navel as the base and draw the top over the body's left side, the top of that triangle is where you make the incision with the trocar. The electric pump that the trocar is connected to by a long tube is now turned to vacuum. You puncture all the vital organs with the trocar and remove the blood, which works its way through the pump machine and out through another tube into a five-liter glass jar. You get the most blood out of the heart and lungs, and the rest of it from the abdominal and thoracic cavities. When you've finished that, you disconnect the trocar from the electric pump and attach a pint bottle of formaldehyde to the end of the tube and briefly go through the organs again, emptying the bottle, letting the formaldehyde work its way into them, putting a stop to any further decomposition . . . and that's basically it. After that, you could have the remains on display for months if you wanted to.”

“When you puncture the organs, does it take much effort?” said Vincent. He asked as if he'd done it before and was looking to have his procedural style validated.

“Yeah, you've got to get your back into it,” I said.

Vincent gently pinched the stubble on his chin while continuing to look at me, along with Sean, both apparently grateful for the candid explanation.

I watched myself sitting with them from my viewpoint up at the ceiling, and as Vincent seemed to navigate our meeting into another pocket of silence, I let my attention wander.

Down in a darkened corner at the other end of the room, I noticed a shimmering, like a pair of orange jewels. After another moment, it became clear what it was: a dog curled up like a sleeping fox but with open eyes that glimmered.

For the first time since I'd been in my dislocated state, I felt enveloped by a rush of fear, not because I'd sighted the dog, but because the dog had sighted me in my suspended, shifted state and appeared to have been looking at me there for quite some time.

And then, as if I were inhabiting two spaces at once, I felt the disconcerting sensation of shifting uncomfortably in my chair and being slapped back into my body simultaneously. I tried to repeat my dislocating trick but couldn't. I was locked inside my skin again. The shock of the sudden change brought about the beginnings of a panic attack, which I found almost impossible to mask.

How could the dog have spotted me, and was there even a dog there in the first place? Compelled to check, I turned around in my seat and looked to the end of the room where I saw the same dog rising to its feet, staring at me now, at my face, in my chair.

I turned back around to Vincent, who'd noticed the change in me and was quite at home in the silence again. Even though I'd been sitting here all along, being this close to Vincent in the firing line of his stare was a new experience, and a very unsettling one. Sean, too, seemed to be studying me, wondering where my panic had come from.

The dog, up on all fours now, walked over to my chair. Still looking into my eyes, it began to sniff around my face, its snout twitching from side to side. I'd never seen a dog like it. Its eyes had an almost human aspect to them, only with something stranger still. And its markings were unusual: rusty like a fox, with a white chest and bushy tail, but with an added blackness through its coat. It was bigger than a fox, reminding me more of a wolf, but clearly it was neither. The dog's nose was now an inch from my cheekbone.

Even as it invaded my space, I didn't mind the dog so much; in fact, I'd always had a great affinity with dogs. It was being back in my body with my fear and guilt and pounding heart, and being this close to Vincent with his penetrating gaze, that had brought on the panic.