The meanest Flood

1
     
    As a professional he wore false cheeks and a wig together with a dark and shiny Van Dyck beard. Tan makeup to set off the sapphire blue of his eyes. The dinner jacket was compulsory, as were the patent-leather shoes, the top hat and cape, the white kid-gloves and his silk cane. Diamond Danny Mann sparkled in the footlights.
    ‘I need another volunteer,’ he said, eyeing the Nottingham audience, producing a fanned deck of cards from the ether. ‘Perhaps a lady this time?’ He walked to the edge of the proscenium, descended the steps and chose a short young woman from the second row of the stalls. Her warm damp hand in his, Diamond Danny returned to the boards and offered her a chair, using his considerable charm to ensure her breathing and heartbeat rapidly returned to normal. ‘You’re going to need both hands,’ he told her. ‘Please put your bag under the chair.’ His concern for the lady’s welfare was palpable and the audience warmed to it and to the magician himself.
    Danny asked her to pick a card from the pack and when she drew the eight of spades he gave her a pen and asked her to sign her name on the face of it. Marilyn, for that was her name, used Danny’s back as a desk and returned the card to the pack.
    The magician shuffled the cards and handed them to' his dimpled volunteer. ‘Now find your card.’ He passed his hand over the pack and threw back his head. ‘Katha,’ he said, pulling out and extending the final vowel. ‘A word to conjure with, given to me by a humble magician at Pak Nam Pho in Thailand. We did a little trade in spells and talismans.’
    A murmur of soft laughter went around the audience but the magician didn’t smile and neither did the woman with the pack of cards. Rings on every finger of one hand, Danny noticed.
    Marilyn looked through the pack and shook her head. She looked through again. ‘It isn’t here,’ she said. ‘You didn’t put it back.’
    Diamond Danny smiled. A remarkable smile when it came, with all the clarity and innocence of a child. ‘You’re right,’ he told her. ‘I put it in your purse.’ Marilyn, flustered now, reached beneath the chair for her handbag, which had been in full view of the audience while she was on stage. She snapped open the clasp and looked inside. She shook her head. ‘It’s not here.’
    ‘In the purse,’ Danny said, ‘next to your driving licence.’
    The lady withdrew a wallet from the handbag. The wallet was black pigskin and fastened with a zipper. When she opened it, Marilyn’s lower jaw dropped. ‘Oh, no, I don’t believe it,’ she squealed.
    She withdrew a card, folded twice. She straightened it and waved it towards the audience. ‘It’s the one I signed,’ she said. ‘How did you do that? It’s impossible.’
    The magician returned the lady to her seat while the applause resounded around him. He returned to the stage to take his bow before withdrawing into the wings. He had the unsettling feeling that he had not chosen the lady at all, that in some strange way she might have chosen him.
     
    When the ASM delivered his cape and caddy to the green room she hesitated before leaving. ‘How is it that the magician always knows which card you’ve chosen?’ she asked.
    ‘It’s magic,’ Diamond Danny told her with a twinkle in his eye. ‘I could introduce you to the black art if you ask the right question. Or perhaps you will decide to leave well enough alone. Many an explanation turns out to be an illusion in itself.’
     
    The wheel was running on wet tarmac illuminated by streetlights. It had a new radial-tread Bridgestone tyre, slightly warm from the journey. Rubber and carbon black designed to perform with low noise and to grip the road in all weathers. Some time ago, when the vehicle was new, he had fitted chrome wheel-well trim but this was peeling now, as was the black paint it had been designed to protect.
    The wheel veered to the right and came slowly to a halt a couple of centimetres from a white stone kerb. An owl hooted softly in the distance. Apart from the contractions of the cooling engine there were no other sounds.
    The magician sat in the driving seat. He was wearing his other face. He was still, composed, a sihouette. An observer might have noticed the regular rise and fall of his chest, the blink of an eyelid. But there was no observer present; only the moon and the stars.
    Several minutes passed and the silence was broken by the mechanism of the driver’s door