The Boys of Sabbath Street

By Shelly Reuben

When Artemus Ackerman, retired magician and mayor of Calendar, hears about the first fire on Sabbath Street, he sends his publicist, Maggie Wakeling, to the fire department to find out what caused it. He has his heart set on turning the shabbily elegant Baldwin Theater into a museum of magic, but the theater is located on Sabbath Street, and after a second and then a third fire, Sabbath Street suddenly seems to be burning down.

Artemus orders Maggie to follow the trail of char. First to Fire Marshal George Copeland; then to The Boys of Sabbath Street, who had so valiantly saved occupants from two fires; and ultimately, to the shocking revelation of what caused of all three fires. Intermixed with fascinating details about fire investigation are a little love, a little idiosyncrasy, a town full of endearing characters, and a lot of magic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780988418110

Book preview

magician!

CHAPTER 1

SINCE I AM A PROFESSIONAL SIDELINER, I usually do what I do away from the glare of the public eye. Being an essential part of this story, however, I concede the necessity to put myself up for a minimal amount of scrutiny.

Therefore, and in the spirit of not-too-full disclosure:

Name: Margaret Wakeling. But nobody calls me Margaret. It’s Maggie to the world. Maggie to you. And Maggie to me.

Age: Let’s put off discussing that for a while longer, shall we? Like forever.

Physical description: Hazel eyes; crooked mouth; short brown hair, usually wind-blown, with or without a wind; five-foot seven inches tall in bare (pedicured) feet; one hundred twenty-five pounds eleven months of the year. One thirty from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day.

Favorite feature: My hands. I have long, expensive-looking fingers. I dote on manicures.

Most profitable asset: My voice. More about that later.

With a few notable exceptions, very little about my past has any relevance to the fires in the town of Calendar. My father was a diplomat stationed in Paris. My mother was Parisian. I was born in Marseilles. We moved to Chicago when I was two years old. Therefore, I am completely bi-lingual. I sing in the rain in English; I sing in the shower in French.

That I speak fluent French is relevant.

Before coming to Calendar, I worked exclusively in advertising and public relations. When I was employed by Toomey, Wallis, Tumulty & Freer, I single-handedly developed the advertising campaign for Morning Dew, a new body lotion developed by CMC Cosmetics. This lotion was easy to promote, because it is ultra-light, ultra-absorbent, ultra-smooth, and...

What am I saying, here?

See how easy it is for me to slip back behind a product or a person or a story line to avoid talking about myself?

Maggie, behave!

Okay.

Morning Dew. My idea was to do some really sexy and provocative television ads, but at the same time to avoid alienating our less libidinous viewers. So I came up with a very sexy rose. She was thorn-less, of course. She had sumptuous curves, two extremely sensuous green leaves, and crimson petals that were silky, seductive, and soft.

To encourage the women in our audience to identify with Rose, we gave her a human face with saucy eyes, a delicate nose, pouty and pretty lips, and a sultry voice. In other words, Rose was hot. If I had not liked her so much, I would have been appalled by her lack of inhibitions.

Consider this: It is an average morning. Rose fills the leaf of her right hand with a palm-full of Morning Dew. Then slowly, smoothly, with wickedly lingering strokes, she slathers it all over the luscious curves of her sinuous body ... I mean stem.

Fun, isn’t it?

Since it was all done by animation, we in the creative department were able to indulge our beloved Rose in brazen and exhibitionistic behavior without the need of self-censorship.

We were outrageous.

For one thing, Rose was always naked.

For another, at some point during each :30 or :60 second spot, Rose’s Morning Dew theme music would become noticeably burlesque and she would segue into a shameless bump and grind.

Elliot Sperber, art director at Toomey, Wallis, Tumulty & Freer, tried to convince me that Rose was my alter ego. At the time, I had thought that Elliot was delusional. I have subsequently and profitably changed my mind.

In my original conception of her, Rose chattered away, completely self-absorbed, in both English and French. A typical Rose sentence might be:

And you see, mon ami, how I rub Morning Dew, like so, into my soft and silky skin. Je ne puis pas décrire comment douloureux exquis que la sensation est. (I cannot describe how unbearably exquisite that sensation is.)

Rose rhapsodized in English only enough to convey the few facts that we wanted viewers to remember about our product. Then she would slip in a French phrase or two to reinforce her status as a coquette.

We auditioned hundreds of actresses for Rose’s voice.

Elliot, however, had gotten stuck in the rut of my voice. To him, I was not only the first Rose, I was the only Rose.

Why is this relevant?

Because when we finally got around to shooting the Morning Dew commercial, it was I, with my perfect French accent, who did all of Rose’s voice-overs.

Il était enchanteur pour que je dépeigne une femme si délicieuse du monde. (It was enchanting for me to portray such a delightful woman of the world.)

And when the Morning Dew spots were aired on television, it was I who received all of Rose’s residuals.

What happened next?

Elliot Sperber left Toomey, Wallis, Tumulty & Freer to become Marketing Director for CMC Cosmetics, the company that had developed Morning Dew, and he took my Rose voice along with him.

Briefly...

Elliot’s replacement was a quarrelsome creature of indeterminate gender and firm convictions about my ideas. She hated all of them. She also had no sense of humor, no sense of style, no sense of honor, and chapped elbows.

Why do I mention her elbows?

No reason. I’m just getting back at the loathsome bitch.

Because of her, I quit my job at the advertising agency.

Elliot offered me a lucrative position at CMC Cosmetics. He also proposed to me, but by then I was engaged to the man I would eventually marry. So I turned down his proposal and his job, got married, and stayed on the East Coast.

This did not end my alliance with the Sperber family, because Elliot had a brother named Sandy Sperber who was president of Sandford Sperber & Associates, a small, local public relations firm. Sandy and I had always liked each other, but he had never offered me a job before because he knew that he couldn’t afford me. He still couldn’t afford me, but now I didn’t care. I was earning so much money on Rose’s voice-over residuals that I could more than make up for the downward salary dip.

Which is how I went from working in advertising to working in public relations.

Why is that relevant?

Because of magic.

Makes no sense to you, right?

Let me explain.

Most of Sandy Sperber’s accounts were manufacturers of home improvement products. This included replacement windows, insulation, aluminum siding, recessed lighting, and mailboxes that you could run over with a tractor and they wouldn’t get crushed.

If I remember correctly, one of our clients was participating in a landscapers’ convention at the time and needed to introduce a new line of lawn care products. Sandy’s suggestion was that the client should hire a magician. How does one get rid of weeds? The magician’s way would be to make them disappear in a top hat or a goldfish bowl. Our way, the right way, would be to use Weed-Out ... or whatever the product was called.

Sandy contacted a few people in the business to ask about magicians, and the overwhelming majority (two of them) recommended Artemus Ackerman, The Professor of Prestidigitation who Will Tease, Taunt, Titillate and Delight you with his Tongue-in-Cheek and Sleight of Hand.

Up until that point, my only experience with magic was what I had seen on television, and that had heartily under-whelmed me. I am not a fan of trick photography, but with the obtuse camera angles, diffuse lighting, and other high-tech gizmology I was seeing on my TV screen, that is exactly what I felt I was being subjected to.

Then I met Artemus Ackerman.

Then I saw close-up magic. Eyeball-to-eyeball and eyeball-to-knuckle, as it were. That was when I realized how pure, clean, and exhilarating honest-to-goodness legerdemain is when it is performed no more than a foot or two away.

Half-dollars, silk scarves, decks of cards, baby chicks ... Artemus Ackerman was able to make them all vanish right before my disbelieving eyes.

It is because of him, only and exclusively because of him—his dexterity, his enthusiasm, his professionalism, his patter, and his style—that I fell in love with magic.

I love the innocent delight of it all.

I love the look of pleasure, pride, and astonishment I see on a conjurer’s face when the elephant sitting on a platform in the middle of a stage really does disappear, as if the magician is as surprised and enthralled as the rest of us.

It is an act, of course.

But what an act!

Houdini, the greatest escape artist of them all, instructed magicians to "Say it as if you mean it, and believe it yourself. If you believe your own claim to miracle doing and are sincere in your work, you are bound to succeed."

I have been with Artemus Ackerman almost twenty years now, so I know how he can make a quarter disappear in a glass of water, turn wet strips of colored papers into a long banner of dry silk, make an endless stream of quarters pop out of thin air, transform three pennies into one, and mysteriously insert a dollar bill inside a tangerine.

Still, I am taken in by it.

Every time.

Harlan Tarbell, the quintessential teacher of magic, wrote, The ability to make something happen that others know cannot happen, is necessary to the successful magician.

When I am watching Artemus perform, I know what effect he is striving to achieve and I know how he achieves it. Each and every time, though, I forget what I know and I am amazed all over again. Which illustrates another of Dr. Tarbell’s precepts: Always remember that the first impulse of people is to believe. Doubting is secondary.

From my early apathy about television magic to the woman I am today, I have been transformed like a coin, like a rabbit, like a dove, into Professor Ackerman’s unapologetic groupie. It started the day we booked him for that first landscapers’ convention and it has never stopped. Of course, that was the good professor’s doing, because immediately after the convention, he hired Sanford Sperber & Associates to do his public relations work.

I asked Sandy to assign me to the new account, which he did, and for the next two years, I generated all of the publicity and promotion for Professor Artemus Ackerman’s Prestigious Presentations of Prestidigitation. During those years, I came to know and love Artemus’ wife, Dorothy, who died seven years ago, and I developed unreasonable attachments to assorted rabbits, canaries, and doves.

And so when Artemus, at age fifty-three, decided to quit magic, return to his hometown, and run for mayor, I mourned not only the loss of a friend, some mammals, and a few birds, but also the loss of a job that I loved. I dreaded returning to the world of weed killers, replacement windows, and indestructible mailboxes.

Chin up. Shoulders back. Stiff upper lip and all that, so I did it. But I hated what I was doing, and I longed for salvation.

A little over a year after the weed killers had reclaimed me, Artemus telephoned my office.

Listen, darling, he said. I need you to come back and work for me.

Did he want me to hawk hotdogs during intermission?

Did he want me to do backward somersaults upon a stage?

No matter. I could be bought, packaged, and paid for with the wave of his magic wand.

I’m in, I answered instantly. What are we doing? Do we have a new act?

After a moment of silence, Artemus enunciated slowly, Well ... I suppose you could call it a new act.

He explained how he had won the election, hired his staff, and made all of his political appointments. But how, when he got up and looked at himself in the mirror that morning, he realized that he was still missing what he called the key player in my professional life.

Me! I exclaimed happily.

Artemus laughed.

Yes. You, darling. You will be my aide de camp and my confidant. You will occupy the office next to mine, cater to my every wish and whim, keep me out of trouble, and make me look good in the press. He paused for a moment. That is, if I can afford you. How much is Sandy paying you, Maggie?

I told him.

Artemus snorted. The town of Calendar can do better than that. Of course, we can’t pay what you’re worth, but nobody could do that.

Ah. Magicians. I love their patter.

Then he asked, Did Jack leave you any money?

My husband, Jack, a war correspondent, had been killed by a sniper’s bullet the year before in War Torn Wherever.

Jack had a small life insurance policy. But—

I explained about Morning Dew, CMC Cosmetics, and the residuals I was getting for putting words into Rose’s little vixen mouth.

Money was not my problem.

Boredom was.

I missed magic. I missed my magician.

Enter heart and soul into the part you are playing, Dr. Tarbell had instructed fledgling illusionists. Your audience believes you have marvelous powers.

I believed that Artemus Ackerman had