Chapter 4: The Conservation Table

"You're humming," Ruthanne said.

She stood in my office doorway on Thursday with a sandwich in one hand and her purple glasses pushed up into her silver-streaked hair.

I was not humming.

I was standing at my desk looking at an office chair with a long crease in the left armrest where a man's hands had been.

"I'm working," I said.

"You are not working. You are looking at a chair and smiling like a woman who is getting some."

I sat down fast on the chair and pulled a catalogue draft in front of me.

Ruthanne has been the museum's Head Registrar for fifteen years, and she has been my friend for nine.

She can find a misplaced vase in a warehouse by looking at the shelf.

She is not easy to lie to.

"Who is he?" she said.

"There's no he."

"Mm-hm."

"There's a guard on nights who is very good at his job."

"I see," said Ruthanne, and she took a bite of her sandwich and went away down the hall, humming louder than I had.

I put my face in my hands.

I got through the afternoon on three coffees and sheer stubbornness.

At ten o'clock that night I was standing in the conservation lab on the floor below with the lights off.

The lab is cold and white.

It has a long steel table in the middle, a fume hood at one end, and a rack of brushes and scalpels on the wall.

The table was covered with the clean white sheet we use under fragile objects.

I stood next to it in my coat, and he came in through the door at five past ten with his keys in his hand.

"Lock it," I said.

He locked it.

He stood there in his dark uniform, as he had stood in my office.

He looked at me.

"I have not done this in forty-one years," he said.

I blinked.

"Done what?"

"All of it. The last time was in 1985, a woman who ran a ferry on the bay. She did not know what I was."

"I know what you are," I said.

"You know what I was." He said it so simply that my chest ached. "You also know my name."

I took off my coat and let it fall.

Under it I wore a black slip, nothing else, and my own hair down for once, a cloud of dark gold over my shoulders.

I had spent twenty minutes in the ladies' room doing it.

He made a sound.

"Take your clothes off," I said. "All of them. Put them on the stool."

He undressed in the cold white light with slow, careful hands, and I watched every inch of it.

The blazer.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Immortal Emperor Returns to Work the Museum Night Shift from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.