In the sixteenth century, a Jesuit priest named Matteo Ricci showed the Chinese how to create a memory palace. The memory palace, a prototypically Renaissance conceit, was an elaborate imaginary edifice intended to help its owner defeat the erosion of time by providing an organizational principle for the storage of a lifetime of mental baggage. The floor plan of the palace guided its owner from idea to idea, detail to detail, simple to complex: the anteroom might be a museum of first things; branching corridors led to ramifications and possibilities; the inner rooms could be furnished with outcomes. The various stories suited perfectly the Renaissance preoccupation with ordering things from highest to lowest. The memory palace wasn't a new concept in Europe even in the sixteenth century, but it was a dazzler for the Chinese, and Ricci was a persuasive salesman, renowned throughout China for his ability to look once at a list of one hundred Chinese ideograms and recite them, in order, weeks later.
My own memory palace, to the extent that I had one, was a replica of the tumbledown shack I called home. At the moment I was filling its rooms with a jumble of places, times, personalities, cultures, dangers, possibilities, drawbacks, wild cards; and no matter how I arrayed them in the cramped rooms of my memory hovel, the rooms kept filling up with corpses. Some of them people I loved.
If the artifice failed to function, it wasn't for lack of furniture. Tran and Peter Lau, Everett and Mrs. Summerson, had given me more data than I could sort into categories and raised more possibilities than I could entertain. No matter how I tried to order them, I wound up piling everything I couldn't fit behind the couch and mentally jumping up and down on it. Well, that was pretty much the way I cleaned house, too.
Tran got up for yet more ice cream, and Horace lapsed into a pallid sulk. I decided the time was right for a heart-to-heart, took another look at his face, and decided I'd been wrong. Okay, discuss plans.
“This is what we want to do,” I said to Horace, who responded with a sullen stare. “Let's take our goals in increasing order of difficulty. One. We want to mess this deal of theirs up in a way that makes it harder for them to do it next time. Got that?”
He nodded without much interest.
“Damn it, we can't get Lo,” I said for the third time. “He's in China, remember?”
“I'm Chinese,” Horace said meaningfully, “but I speak English.”
I retreated. “So we want to screw up the deal. If Tran knows all he says he knows, I think I can do that.”
“Yeah?” Horace asked. He put his index fingers under his eyes and rotated them up and down, and I stopped feeling irritated. He was at least as tired as I was.
“Two. We want to put Claude B. Tiffle somewhere dark and small for a long time. If we can do the first, we can do the second.”
“Tiffle,” Tran spat, materializing with a strawberry ice-cream cone in his hand.
“Old Claude B.,” I said. “Three. We want to get Charlie Wah. We want to cross him up so he comes out of wherever he's hiding and runs the wrong way. Into us, preferably.” No one said anything. “And that's going to be tough.”
“And four,” I said, abandoning hope for the discussion, “we want to get out of this alive, in a way that won't endanger your family, Horace, when the assholes sort this out.”
I glanced at Horace, and got more reaction than I'd expected. He was staring past me and above me, looking like the crack of doom had just opened in the parking lot.
“Five,” Dexter said, dropping a hand onto my shoulder, “we want to free the slaves.”
“I was getting to that,” I said, and then I looked beyond him and into a face that would have stopped a grizzly in mid-charge. It belonged to a man the color of fresh asphalt who might have been six and a half feet tall and who might have weighed two hundred and ninety pounds, and who might have been the end of civilization as we know it. He wore a pink Bryn Mawr sweatshirt, baggy blue jeans, and a black watch cap rolled low over his eyebrows.
“This here Horton Doody,” Dexter said. “He my surprise.”
“Horton Doody?” I said involuntarily.
The obsidian marbles Horton Doody used for eyes rolled slowly toward me and fell into a slot that locked them on my face. “Somethin wrong with that?” he growled, bumping the bottom of the aural ocean.
“Horton a knife man,” Dexter offered tactfully.
“Wrong?” I said immediately. “What could be wrong? Fine old name, Doody. One of the Philadelphia Doodys?”
The left corner of Horton Doody's mouth twitched upward. He probably thought he was smiling.
“So, Mr. Doody,” I said, “you're joining our merry band?” Hope made a belated reentrance, wearing a tutu and gossamer wings.
“Dexter say money in it,” Horton Doody rumbled.
“Horton here fond of the green,” Dexter advised. “Take a lot of cash to sustain all that flash.”
“Whuff,” Horton Doody said. I think it was a laugh.
“He already been watchin Everett at a hundred an hour.”
“Big job,” Horton Doody said, sounding like an entire bowling alley.
“Of course, money ain't everything,” Dexter said. “Horton want to free the slaves, too, even if they Orientals.”
Something came to mind. “Who's watching Everett?”
“Horton's bigger brother.” Dexter said. “He in, too.”
“The Doody Brothers?” Horace asked, looking confused. His frame of reference, on rock and roll and practically everything else, had stopped expanding in 1979. “How many more are there?”
“Five,” Horton Doody thundered. “I the baby.”
“I take it all back,” Horace said to me. “You might have the help you need.”
“This little Oriental peewee name Tran,” Dexter said to Horton Doody. “Big bald Oriental name Horace.”
“Horace?” Horton Doody asked. His eyebrows did something complicated under the cap. “Whuff, whuff.”
“People who live in glass houses,” Horace said, passing a hand self-consciously over his remaining hair.
“And the faggot asked you about his merry band name Simeon. Think he got a big brain. He the one gone suicide us all.”
“Whuff,” Horton Doody said. He was having a great time.
Dexter looked at each of us in turn. “What a bunch,” he said. “Look like somethin in a bum's pockets.”
“Count Horace out,” I said. “He's going home.”
Horace slapped the table. “Goddamn it, Simeon, stop speaking for me.”
“But you've got a fam-”
“I know what I've got. And we've got Horton Doody, here.”
“He only one man,” Tran said. Horton Doody gave him a glance that knocked him back a step.
“Yeah, but he a man we can all hide behind.” Dexter said. “And he got brothers.”
“Eleanor will kill both of us,” I said to Horace.
“Thass Simeon,” Dexter told Horton Doody. “Takes on the whole Chinese mafia but scared of his girlfriend.”
“Look,” I said, the soul of reason, “why don't we all sit down and sort this out? Pull up a couple of chairs, Mr. Doody.”
He took it literally. “Name Horton,” he said, distributing his weight.
“It's really swell to meet you,” I said. “Really, really swell. You have no idea. Tran? Have a seat. Horace?”
“I've got to go the bathroom,” Horace said. “I was in that car for hours.”
“I'll come with you,” Dexter said. “Just a couple of girls.”
“That Dexter,” Horton Doody said fondly when they were gone. People looked around to see who was moving furniture. “Ack like a African violet. You're cute,” he said to Tran, who was working on his ice-cream cone, looking perhaps eleven.
“I can shoot you,” Tran said mildly.
“Whuff, whuff,” Horton Doody chortled. “You wear high heels yet?”