The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Two: I'll Get Away With it Too

The villain of our story was having less than an average day. In fact, he was having a tremendous day, if such a word can be used by someone so heinous. It'd been ages since he'd stolen something precious and a crow's age since anyone had died by his hands and he'd been successful in both in just one day! Sitting down, after a long day's work, the blood cleaned from his hands but still clinging in dark spots under his fingernails, he sipped claret from a crystal goblet belonging to the most recent skeleton in his closet.
"Ollie, you really, truly, had fine tastes," he mused as the liquid carried over his lips and danced on his tongue.
His house was no castle. No dreary tapestries hanging from the walls, no secret passageways between rooms, no dungeon where his enemies hung by their wrists in shackles. His house was very much a pleasant home, or had been a pleasant home when it belonged to the old woman he'd conned into turning the ownership over to him. It was still filled with old knick-knacks and would forever smell of floral perfume and the vanilla from thousands of baked cookies, but he had cultivated the old Victorian-style relic into a museum for all of his more sinister undertakings. In the corner by the main window in the great room stood the priceless Roman-era bust on its pillar that he'd absconded with in his earliest days of thievery. It had no cover and had certainly fallen to greater ruin since coming into his possession, but he cared not for it's beauty, the mastery of its design, but for the beauty and mastery of his own cleverness. That was what was truly on display. Opposite this pillar, on the other side of the great room, a golden cage with a stuffed and long-extinct bird perched inside it, hung from a hook in the vaulted ceiling. Throughout the many rooms of the home he occupied by himself, there were stolen paintings, statues, vases, and even a mummified corpse. That, of course, has no origin in Egypt, although the sarcophagus in which it is stored was delicately and purposefully styled as if it came from the ancient place. In fact, the home's former owner was the occupant, her disappearance after assigning all of her worldly belongings away having never been solved.
His hiatus from villainy over and the wine from the exquisite glass settling over him, his mind wandered back to the day's events. The plan had been simple and every moment had gone smoothly. He had no partners and therefore no one with whom to share the treasure and that was exactly how he liked it. Oliver Van Der Long had stupidly broadcast the invitation to his gala in unsecured messages to his elite friends and fabricating the necessary document was one of the easier schemes our villain has ever done. Oliver himself went down with nary a fight, although, as mentioned, there was a considerable amount of blood. The man's collection of fine wines, some on display and some in use for the gala, were protected by only a small measure of security. Technically, the blood under his fingernails belonged to multiple victims that night, but the security guards were not much for fighting after their throats had been slit from behind. They barely counted toward the skeletons in his closet, as far as he was concerned.
The next scheme would need to be more advanced. He couldn't simply allow his creative mind to go without use and he'd barely flexed a thinking muscle while collecting the rare Bordeaux from Ollie. He swirled another gulp of the wine that was meant to sit in the bottle on display as he ticked through the mental list of items he so badly wanted to capture.
"France...no, too similar. Belgium. Amsterdam. No, no...something...stunning. Something difficult," he mumbled as the images of soon-to-be-purloined icons and masterpieces floated in and out of his mind.
His thoughts a catalog of everything he'd ever learned, a golden statue appeared there, beckoning for his attention. Actually just a drawing of what the statue looked like, its face was clear and sharp as the day he read about it, memorized the image that accompanied the story, and began longing to be the one to find it. The one to keep it. The claret had been a rich and hearty flavor but was instantly cleared from his senses, any kind of intoxication ignored as one thought prevailed, fueled by the day's successful acquisition.
"Oaxaca."