~ The Fall of Augustus ~

by

Sarah Wisseman

Monday, January 13

The Emperor Augustus hovered over the elevator shaft. Light danced on his snow-white limbs and gaudy parade armor, and he hardly noticed the bonds that held him standing erect in an unusually shaped chariot.

“Ready?” I called to Dylan Luneau, who was poised at the top of the elevator shaft on the fourth floor.

“Almost!” said Dylan.

I heard a metallic clank as he adjusted the cables. Despite the frigid temperatures outside, I was sweating. And it wasn’t because I’d just raced down the stairs from the fourth to the first floor of our ancient classroom building at Boston University.

Ellen Perkins—our conservator and my best buddy—stood next to me at the bottom of the shaft. Ellen’s job was to make sure the elevator doors didn’t close at the wrong time. She pushed one hand through her short blonde hair and held the other hand over the “open door” button. We both looked up apprehensively.

The enormous bulk of our biggest, heaviest plaster cast lurked overhead, invisible to us since the bottom of the open-sided platform filled our sky. Dylan, our museum’s preparator and Ellen’s current boyfriend, was in charge of moving the statue. I had to admit, he was pretty good with purely mechanical stuff. He’d successfully moved the Apollo Belvedere, festooned with deposits of pigeon shit (a result of being housed in a fourth floor attic museum with broken windows); that one had been easy because the Apollo could be broken down into sections. Moving the Primaporta Augustus, with its fancy drapery and outstretched arm—was much more dangerous.

“Who thought of this harebrained scheme, anyway?” I asked Ellen, just to make conversation.

“Lisa Donahue, how could you forget? It was Victor. He wouldn’t agree to my suggestion of lifting the statues out with a crane through a hole in the roof. Too expensive.” Ellen made a face.

Oh, yes. Victor Fitzgerald, our penny-pinching director, had finally agreed to remove the walls of the elevator car—a model almost as old as some of our artifacts—after careful measurements had convinced him that our biggest statues couldn’t fit in the shaft any other way. Taking them down four flights of stairs in Wigglesworth Hall was out of the question; it would require a small army of expensive musclemen from Operations and Maintenance. Our puny university museum budget didn’t allow for that kind of expenditure.

George Skirvin’s whiny voice sounded from the top of the shaft. “Hey, Dylan, shouldn’t there be a little more padding around the base of the statue?” George, a pudgy, sullen undergraduate student, acted as Dylan’s assistant.

“Nah, it’s okay, I’ve got it under control.”

Of course Dylan would say that. He had an inflated sense of his abilities sometimes.

“You run down to the third floor so you can monitor the statue as we lower it,” Dylan yelled to George.

This was our safeguard—to lower each statue floor-by-floor, checking its position at every level (except the second floor, which had no access to the elevator). The statue itself was balanced on a platform—the floor of the original elevator car—between Ethafoam bumpers to shield the plaster during its journey.

“Ready at the top!” called Dylan.

I pictured him in the fourth floor hallway, with other statue casts—the Laocoon, the Venus di Milo, and the Pieta—lurking in line behind him. The Laocoon was my personal favorite—it showed a Trojan priest and his two sons being strangled by sinister sea serpents. The priest was the poor guy who tried to warn Trojans not to bring the Greeks’ gift of a giant wooden horse into their city; the serpents were sent by the god Poseidon, who was on the side of the Greeks.

Creaks from the cables mixed with murmurs from the other staff who were all on different floors. The acoustics of an open elevator shaft were peculiar, to say the least.

“Okay here!” replied George, from the third floor. He was a surprisingly fast runner despite his bulk.

“Ready at the bottom!” I replied, glancing behind me at the packing crate that stood ready to receive Augustus after he had descended the narrow shaft. Thank goodness the news media hadn’t picked up on this event.

Uh-oh. Around the corner appeared my boss, Victor Fitzgerald, with Dean Saltonstall and two reporters bearing camcorders and notebooks.

“Don’t look now,” I whispered to Ellen.

She stuck her head out of the elevator. “Good grief!” she hissed. “Why can’t they wait until the grand opening of the new museum?”

“They’re probably hard-up for human interest stories,” I said. “After all, no one has ever moved a whole pantheon of Greek gods and Roman emperors this way.”

Susie Blake, our assistant director, waltzed up. She was as sleek as ever in a navy-blue pantsuit and matching suede pumps. Smoothing her salon-enhanced red curls, she chirped, “Now, now, Lisa. You know that publicity is always good for a university museum!’

I allowed myself a cynical smile. Publicity could also be a severe handicap, as I knew very well. Three years ago, when I’d been preparing to mount an exhibit on Egyptian burial customs, our registrar had been murdered—bashed on the head and stuffed in a sarcophagus. Reporters had made our lives miserable by camping out in the parking lot and pouncing on us whenever we showed our faces.

The steel cables creaked again as the heavy statue began its descent.

Victor stepped into the elevator shaft and looked up. “This should make a good shot,” he said, motioning to the video tech. The elevator light gleamed on his distinguished sweep of dark hair touched with gray. The cameraman, standing just outside the shaft for a better angle, pointed his camcorder up. Ellen moved closer and craned her neck.

“Victor!” said Susie, who had the boss’ ear at most times since they were a couple both in and out of regular business hours. He looked back at her indulgently as she put a hand on his sleeve. “Don’t you think we ought to—”

What Susie thought was never revealed, because the left side of the platform suddenly tilted.

The Emperor Augustus hurtled down, crashing against the side of the shaft as he went. Victor, Susan, and Ellen vanished in a maelstrom of smashed plaster. There was a bone-jarring thud... then an awful silence.

I’d shut my eyes involuntarily and my mouth and nostrils were choked with dust. As I blinked and rubbed my face with both hands, Susie’s scream rushed up and down the scale like a tornado siren. The dust lifted.

Victor’s crumpled upper body was partially hidden under the wreck of the cable car and chunks of plaster.

One dead museum director.