The meanest Flood

character and the courage to renounce his magic and as a result he is given back his rightful freedom in the city of Milan.
    Danny would renounce his own magic after the final illusion. There would be no Milan for him, with which to replace it, but that didn’t matter. There would be redemption of a kind. He would be free. He understood that in a strange way Sam Turner was his own version of Prospero’s island. The life of Sam Turner was the cell in which Diamond Danny Mann was imprisoned and it was only by bringing Sam Turner down that Danny would demolish the walls that confined him.
    Through the long days and nights in Oslo Danny made lists in his head. He listed the things he missed: his own bed and Jody, the smell of his sheets freshly returned from the laundry. Television commercials. Why? For God’s sake, why? His slippers, which he could have and should have brought with him if he’d known he was going to be here so long. The photographs of his mother; the portraits of her alone and of the two of them together. The one taken in Blackpool on the front after he’d wheeled a toy horse out of a department store. The other of her face, the background a blur, which he had taken as a timed exposure the day he left school. His mother’s hard-earned furniture. The Chesterfield. The Ercol chair with the broken back in the kitchen (must get that repaired as soon as he got home). The water. The privacy and familiarity of his own house. His mirror and trolley in the bathroom. The silence. The temperature. Minster FM in the background. The English language spoken without an accent. His books. Sunday morning. Fish and chips. Real ale. All-Bran.
    The lists got longer and longer. He would spring awake in his hotel room and add one more item to the list -Evensong at the Minster - though he had only been once, years ago with his mother. But it didn’t matter, he missed it now, terribly, achingly, while he was confined to the foreignness of another land. And once awake he would search around for other things to add to the list, anything would do, even if it was available in Norway it didn’t matter. Brown sliced bread, raspberry jam, his car with the faulty seatbelt. He wanted the list to grow so that it formed a bridge between Oslo and York, a physical walkway that would lead him back home.
    Danny observed himself at times like this. His obsessiveness was something he had inherited from his mother. Her father, his grandfather, had apparently been the same. It was a family trait. Obsession and will, together they got things done. They were movers and shakers. There was a cluster of genes which defined them as separate from other people, made of them a natural elite. This in turn meant that they didn’t fit in and were subject to misunderstandings. But that was the price you paid. There was no point in grumbling. To become a master magician you had to fork out a bag of gold and your heart and your soul.
    Obsessive. But that wasn’t the only thing. What Danny had also inherited from his mother and her ancestors was courage, real courage which involved a large slice of imagination.
    That was what had enabled her to go on after fortune was twisted out of shape, and what had enabled Danny to become a magician and rise above the herd of humanity. Courage and imagination.
    He had watched the street, Calmeyers gate, for two days and seen not a sign of Sam Turner. But there had been a boy there, a young man, early-twenties. He’d been there all day today, off and on, watching and waiting. Danny had been watching and waiting at one end of the street and the young man had been watching and waiting at the other end. Not even in the street, really, but way down over the intersection at Henrik Ibsen’s gate, so far away he could have been watching another street.
    Which was exactly how they worked, policemen and detectives. They didn’t show themselves, they used others to do the legwork. So although he hadn’t seen Sam Turner in person, Danny was convinced that he had seen someone who was working on Sam Turner’s behalf.
    When he’d been nursing the idea for the Sam Turner illusion Danny had not realized that Turner was a magician as well. But he was beginning to see it now. They were worthy opponents. Diamond Danny Mann had earned his reputation by studying the masters and practising their craft. Sam Turner belonged to a different fraternity and was a past wizard in the black art of surveillance.
    Danny was sure that the