The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Five: Cheap Gin and Walking Statues

Mr. Steach hated the travel part of any plan he'd contrived.The cramped quarters of even the most luxurious of cabins on a passenger train, the food, or what still passes as food, in first class (although the drink service was rather good no matter the airline), the shabbiness of the average hired car when he attempted to be incognito. Most of all, he hated the people. They tended to be everywhere. Alas, without them, there'd be from no one to steal, no one to scheme against, and his talents would be useless and wasted.
"Another glass, sir?" the peppy attendant asked, interrupting his daily mental organization ritual. If she was working for tips, he wasn't planning on offering any, not that it was common practice on an airline. She was just performing a task, checking in on her first class passengers, but Mr. Steach felt that the extra pitch in her voice was unnecessary. When he raised an eyebrow and nodded curtly, she pulled from a tray a fresh glass before she added, very specifically, two ice cubes from the small bucket she carried as well and set down a single serving bottle of chilled gin.
His tastes, while treated to pilfered and rare Bordeaux at times, was not as refined as those of a man who lived a life of luxury might have been. He enjoyed delicacies like turtle soup, foie gras, or even bushmeat, but regularly enjoyed cheeseburgers, fries, and the occasional chocolate shake from the closest American or pseudo-American fast food restaurant he could find. His choice of gin was no different from this theme and on his long flight, he'd been satisfied with the cheapest brand they had.
"It's complementary, sir," the attendant had reminded him. She'd had a level of concern to her voice then, as if he were an unaccompanied minor who needed help securing his oxygen mask in the event of an emergency.
"I'm aware." His voice contained no inflection or dialect that she would have been able to notice, though he kept his words short and unmemorable just the same.
He poured the bottle into the glass and let it settle and melt the ice just barely before he took another sip. His mind had begun reorganizing his thoughts into the present plan but the pieces were already in place. They always were. He, unlike every other passenger in both first and business classes, did not have a laptop, tablet, or even a smartphone out to complete his work. His plans and all the details remained in the only record, the only hard drive that he trusted: his own mind. No paper trail, no evidence, no convictions. Not that he'd been caught so far, but there had been a few close calls in his career.
The location of the statue was completely unknown. It had vanished, without a single trace, predating any living memory, but at least within the last two centuries. Knowing that didn't narrow down his search area, Mr. Steach had used a few contacts he had on the dark web (although he would never call them partners and their relationship was as fast and fleeting as he could make it) and came up with not only a painting made of the statue in the late nineteenth-century, but the location of the artist's family home, where his studio had been, and the location of his final resting place. The struggling artist, known simply as Aurelio but later identified as Aurelio Reyes González, hadn't been very good, in Mr. Steach's opinion, but he had nonetheless captured the details of the mystical and possibly autonomous statue. Steach had memorized the painting, with its crude lines and visible mistakes covered with piles upon piles of sloppy brushstrokes, and determined that, along with its artist, the painting and the subject had never left the Oaxaca state or even the municipality in which it was said to have appeared.
The wear depicted on the statue as Aurelio saw it and the aging on the bronze, if the color used could be relied upon, indicated that he had studied the statue where it was kept in the plaza when the statue was approximately a century old. Although still terrible in style, Aurelio's form did improve in his later years and the brushstrokes could easily compare to that of some of his later works, found among lots of paintings listed for sale on cheap auction sites throughout the web. A prison record indicated that between 1882 and 1888, Aurelio was serving a sentence for a petty crime and would not have been spared the oil paint for such a hobby. Still not an oil painting specialist, Steach felt confident with Aurelio's history in mind and placed the painting's origin around the year 1889. Records of Aurelio's existence were sparse in total, but a bare census in 1895 counted him among the older residents in San Luis Almatán. A later census had no record of the artist and Steach could only assume that the artist had died by then. The statue had likely disappeared sometime between 1889 and 1900, and Aurelio might have been one of the last to view it in detail.
Most interestingly, he had come across another legend from the area, a myth about a cave from which those who chose to venture into it never returned. There was more than one testimonial found by Steach's contacts that swore the cave was filled with fantastic and rich treasure that was forever untouched because it carried the curse of an ancient Zapotec deity. Might the statue have been claimed by this deity, or perhaps it really was imbued with the spirit of some powerful god? Whatever its curse or whatever its secrets might be, Steach had the strong opinion that it was tied to the mystery of the statue's disappearance. In all likelihood, he would have to spend some time in the darkest pits of a cursed cave if he truly wanted to find the where the bronze statue of San Luis Amatlán's namesake had found itself.
Aurelio's death records burned into Steach's mind, the plane bore him to the capital city in Mexico, rather than any number of smaller airports he could have used, or landing strips he might have commandeered if he'd chosen a private method of ingress. The anonymity of entering via the international airport appealed most to him, allowing him to be his laziest in matters of personal security. As the flight continued and the cheap gin bit at his tastebuds, he felt the normal level of calm begin to settle over him as his confidence overtook him. He chose unattainable targets that were forgotten or thought to be myth, there were no bumbling idiot partners to spoil his plans with unforgivable mistakes, and, save for a few aging detectives or operatives in law enforcement agencies in Europe, there was no one chasing after him and no one to foil his schemes.