The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Fourteen: The Abandoned Commode

    Someone's been here.
    He'd never been there before, of course, but the scene was obviously disturbed. And recently. It wasn't a heavily populated area but he'd already had to contend with a few hundred spring-breakers on the first leg of his journey in Mexico—but there was no reason at all, Spring Break or otherwise, for someone to have been here.
The key's chain would not hang from his neck—the rotting carcass and all its juices and bits of flesh had seen to the deterioration of the chain's integrity. The clasp had fallen to pieces and the links in the chain had corroded over time into a nearly solid piece. He'd wanted the key, not the chain, but he'd taken the whole thing off of the broken body he'd left behind (which, unfortunately, did not count toward his personal body count) and vacated the graveyard without much further care for either Aurelio or the once sacred place he'd rested.
    Having found no trace of hospitality in the small village where Aurelio had called home both in life and death, he'd driven the clunking automobile—if it passed as one—into the nearest city, the nearly one-hour drive taxing the little motor on the car about as far as it could possibly go. He'd planned to leave the car somewhere in town, and had even thought he might set the thing to flame, having rented it from the tiny shop near the airport under a false name. But when he'd realized that his choices for a replacement vehicle were between an agave truck or an ornery and neglected burro at the same farmhouse he'd stolen the tools, he thought twice about leaving the yellow clunker.
    The accommodation he did find in the next city was barely suitable to his needs. His regular needs, he corrected himself upon finding a twin-size bed sandwiched between a dining table with a single broken (repaired with duct tape and chewing gum, it appeared) wooden chair and a dresser-TV stand. Given that the television had a rabbit-ear antenna held together with foil and more duct tape, he allowed his standards to slip into what he referred to as his heist-mode.
This mode permitted drab appearances, disgusting food, and even, if time also permitted, loose morals with the first available street worker. Not this heist, he'd decided. He wanted out of Mexico and back to his refined lifestyle.
Once in the barely secured room, he'd slipped out of his muddied and human remains covered clothes and examined the key and its chain in more detail, all while sitting in the relative comfort of silk boxers and the blue argyle socks that had been too sweat-soaked and sticky to remove with ease. His slight belly (he had to keep in some kind of shape if he intended to subvert common security features) rolled into itself as he sat cross legged on the bed with the key in his palm.
    Aurelio's secret stash—the cache of art, sculptures he'd dabbled in, and, hopefully, the very painting he hoped to claim for himself—was locked away not somewhere in the village where the artist had lived and died, but in a village that was very near the city in which Mr. Steach was staying that night. The vault, bequeathed via living will and testament (one of the few documents found by Mr. Steach's dark-web accomplices) to Aurelio's second wife, was built near the end of the artist's life. In a final twist of what clearly became a contentious relationship, the late artist had commissioned the vault on the very spot he'd learned his second wife had begun an enduring affair. Built with standards that the world's armies (at the time) would envy, the artist secured his remaining fortune within the walls and ensured that the only key was buried with him upon his death. If she wanted his fortune, she'd have to pry it from his cold, dead hands. She outlived him by a few decades, Mr. Steach had gathered, and never got her hands into the grave dirt or on the fortune itself.
    Now in Mr. Steach's filthy (both figuratively and literally—there was no hope for a shower in this dump), the key, marvelous in its original craftsmanship, was the only thing between him and at least one of the treasures he sought. The building still stood, amazingly, some miles away, and all Mr. Steach planned to do that night was get some modicum of sleep. He stowed the key, still immovable on its chain but wrapped in the delicate fabric of his favorite cravat, in the inside pocket of his satchel and then tucked the satchel under the foot of the bed where he'd placed his briefcase.
The bed, crawling with more than just bedbugs, made his desire for a bit of rest disappear instantly. He remained in his underwear and paced about the room where he could for a little while, the single bulb lamp next to the ancient television flickering if his socked-steps landed too hard. Finally, but not too long from his triumphant return from the graveyard, the sun began to peek over the horizon and the world outside the dingy hotel began to take on the sleepy orange glow of morning.
    He donned a new ensemble, gray in color instead of the white he'd worn to the graveyard, and left the muddy clothes behind on the floor of the disgusting room. He still smelled of death, not only from the actual body into which he'd needed to riffle, but from his own scent of decay. The sweat in his hair and where it clung to his body made him gag when he caught a whiff, and he had to remind himself constantly of the existence of heist mode.
    "Hola señor," a man on the stoop of the hotel's entrance bade him a he shuffled through the doorway and onto the street.
    Mr. Steach dipped his head in response and scaled back the sneer he'd had planted on his face as he looked to vacate his so-called accommodations. Still carrying his cases, he at once looked for some kind of street vendor that might be open at such an early hour. He turned back to the man on the stoop and set his cases down at his feet, looping his foot through the handles of his satchel.
    "Hi ha algun lloc on puc menjar per aquí?" he asked the man.
    "¿Qué?
    The other man was confused, as if Mr. Steach was speaking...
    "Ah." Steach thought for a moment, accessing his secondary dialects. ¿Hay algún lugar por aquí donde purdah conseguir also de comida?" His accent was rough and pronunciation poor, but he believed that he'd managed to ask the same question but in the man's language.
    The other man still looked confused but Mr. Steach saw that he ultimately understood. "Sí. Mi madre vende empanadas a turistas. Te llevaré. Vale."
    Mr. Steach raised his hands and told the man no, then caught himself and told him no and thank you. If there were two things he knew about Mexico, they were don't drink the water and don't follow a man to a second location. Honestly, he would never follow anyone anywhere that they bade him—that was what he did often enough to the victims of his schemes.
    Confused further, the man still pointed Mr. Steach around the corner and told him that his mother would just be opening up her shop. Adding another nod of thanks, Mr. Steach picked up his bags and headed down the street and around the corner. There he found a woman of indeterminate age (but also clearly older than God—and, strikingly to Mr. Steach, was the mother of a thirty-something year old man) sitting on a light blue painted wooden chair in front of a large woven blanket, upon which were sitting row after row of empanadas wrapped in oil-stained paper towels. Steam rose from the pockets of seasoned beef and hit his nostrils with a welcoming punch. He greeted the woman as kindly as he could muster and collected two of the empanadas after offering what he assumed was much more than he should have paid. Throughout the whole transaction the woman spoke not a single word and only nodded, smiling, when the man before her paid and then wolfed down the food.
    Mr. Steach hadn't made it more than a few steps away from the woman's blanket-shop before the empanadas were gone and he thought about getting another (or two or three) for the road. But heist mode was calling. And he detected a certain disgust in the woman's face when he was near her. Not that she smelled like a basket of roses either, but he knew he wasn't the most pleasant company the woman could share. Stomach sufficiently filled, he labored back down the street and toward the hotel once again.
    His rental was still parked along the street but a few car-lengths down. He hadn't worried about theft but had instead welcomed it. Alas, it was still waiting for him, untouched but still thoroughly blemished. It started, with the same shrill cry of an animal needing euthanasia, and Mr. Steach replaced his cases in the backseat and hoped that any bedbugs that they now carried would find their way into the car's vinyl seats.
    He had no GPS to follow, only the maps he'd downloaded into his own head, and after two false turns, he found his frustration growing. Remarkably, he found the correct turn, despite the road's name being almost identical to the one that he had passed, and found himself parked and idling in front of Aurelio's spiteful fortress well before midday. The empanadas had served him well on the trip but his belly was beginning to require another visit to a food stall—and preferably one that would not later require an urgent call to nature.
    At the same time, his curiosity, his desire to win and to claim the lost goods as his own, and the close proximity he had to completing his heist were dominating his nerves and placing any other needs in the background. He wanted inside that vault. And he wanted it right now.
     He retrieved his satchel from the backseat and then the cravat-wrapped key. Despite the care he'd taken, in the rumble of the backseat part of the chain had snapped where it was closest to the key and the key itself was loose inside the cloth and finally free of its century-plus shackle.
    The building in front of him looked innocuous in many ways. It was adobe-built, but had been reinforced with metal rods—some of these had been exposed over time but the general integrity of the structure was still sound. There were no windows that he could see and the only door did not look like a door at all. It was round and made of solid oak and had no visible hardware save for a keyhole in the center. The building had likely stood solitary for many decades but had more recent buildings attached to its sides, indicating that the world had moved on around Aurelio's last jab at his adulterous wife but had allowed the artist's tribute to himself to stand through time. Graffiti littered its walls and the treasures inside, lacking a proper temperature-controlled environment all these years, were more than likely ruined to dust.
    Still, the door beckoned him to use the purloined key and he prepared to move upon it. This village with its many dwellings seemed more deserted than any other place he'd seen in Mexico thus far. There were, however, herders about in the midday sun and a few women and children could be heard from somewhere nearby, the women talking loudly and the children at play with some kind of ballgame. The bell from the church on the next street over sounded and alerted all who could hear that noon had arrived on this warm March day.
    Mr. Steach would not need the cover of night for this job, although it would have made it more secretive and eliminated the chance of having to explain himself to a sheepherder who might catch him entering a long-forgotten vault. Once inside, he'd have full run of the building and there'd be none the wiser of his presence. Getting inside unnoticed would be the trickiest part. But that was what he loved most. The thrill of doing something obviously nefarious right under the noses of even a casual observer was half of the reason he considered himself a master thief.
Realizing that he was pushing his luck and being totally obvious, he willed himself to put the car back into drive and to find a suitable hiding place for the hulking piece of garbage. Steering clear of the places he was sure he'd heard people gathering and going about their daily lives, Steach brought the car to a street that appeared to dead end into a cluster of cypress. The branches of the old trees hung low and were thick enough—their roots likely fed by one of the branches of the river that connected all of these southern cities and villages—to hide the car within. The ground was soft there and not only did the tires sink in once he'd left the packed gravel of the rural road, his brown leather oxfords sunk in to their eyelets.
    Cursing his entire walk out of the marshy copse of cypress, he cursed again, he was most annoyed with his shoes, but also because he knew he'd have to come back for his things. And if he couldn't find another car to take, it would be the ornery burro for him, since there'd be no chance of getting the car out of that mess.
    This area was not as laden with agave fields as the town where Aurelio had been buried, although it was situated more closely to the area's main water source. There were fields aplenty, some with crops growing tall and others with grazing animals, and the very atmosphere was richer and more lively, but was altogether less populated and less historic. Some of the buildings—ranch houses and storage barns—looked contemporary and others—small dwellings and the storefronts along the main thoroughfares—had older architecture with modern upgrades like fresh paint and new windows.
    As he walked back toward the vault, a single man dressed in gray with muddy oxfords and his precious key tucked into the pocket of his linen trousers, he drew some attention from the locals who emerged from their tasks seemingly just to stare at him as he passed. That he could hear, none of them called him the devil or made the Sign of the Cross like the old man in the graveyard had (not that it hurt his feelings, or that he had any feelings to be hurt in the first place), but the curiosity on their faces was enough to make him just the slightest bit anxious. Mr. Steach had, by then, re-entered the main part of the town where it was busiest.
    "Bon dia," he said to the man in the open-air market that consisted of three tables weighed down heavily with various fruits and vegetables from the region.
    The man nodded and gave the price of the two apples Mr. Steach had stopped to collect. Steach fished in his pocket for his wallet and felt the silk of the cravat that was still wrapped around the key. He pushed past it and retrieved the pesos the man required for what would have to be Mr. Steach's midday meal.
    "Aigua?" he asked the vendor while making a simple sign of drinking with his free hand.
    Before he caught himself, the vendor nodded with a grimace. Mr. Steach had all but forgotten how he must smell and, thanks to the muddy shoes, how he must look. The vendor realized quickly, however that Mr. Steach was looking for a drink, not a bath, and, annoyed, the he gestured to his right where the market expanded into the busy center. A small boy seated next to several battered cooler chests raised was raising his arms to wave at every passerby.
    "Gracies," Mr. Steach offered.
    He found that the boy was seated on one of the cooler chests from which he was selling various bottled drinks and other kinds of concoctions filled into large-mouth mason jars. When Steach approached, the boy happily jumped from his seat and opened the lids of each cooler to show off their contents.
    "¿Agua Fresca, Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, 7-Up? Señor, for you, vente...twenty pesos," the boy of about fifteen identified Mr. Steach as a tourist immediately and used English with a practiced accent.
    "Water?" Mr. Steach asked plainly, using general Australian accent.
    The boy looked disappointed but also saw his opportunity for a sale. "Ah, American, yes? I give you water for free with purchase of one Agua Fresca! Super deal. Twenty five pesos."
    "A moment ago, it was just twenty," Mr. Steach said, amused. "And no, not American." He'd thought the accent was obvious, but then again, what would a boy in rural Mexico know of British versus Australian versus American dialects?
    "Twenty five with a free water," the boy insisted.
    Steach rolled his eyes but didn't have the effort or time to argue. He proffered the money, shifting the apples he'd just purchased into the crook of his arm, and selected the orange Agua Fresca from the cooler. The boy handed him the cooled drink from the crowded bin and then pulled from the depths of the same cooler a sealed bottle of water.
    "Gracies," Mr. Steach said as they exchanged.
    The boy laughed and offered his own thanks, adding something to the effect of the same gringo insult Mr. Steach had heard often before. He closed up the coolers and looked for his next customer before retaking his seat.
Steach walked away from the market and back onto the side streets so he could avoid seeing more people and has he walked, he sipped from the mason jar, enjoying the melon drink. The apples were tart but still filling as much as they could be—Mr. Steach could have looked for a hot meal at the market, but he needed to get going and back to some reasonable measure of secrecy.
    By the time he'd maneuvered back to the quiet street where the vault was located, he'd finished the Agua Fresca, thrown the glass jar onto the road behind him, not caring when it shattered, and finished both apples down to and including the cores. He still had the bottle of water and used some of it to wash his hands before slipping it into his empty pocket. Key retrieved from the cravat, he stood in front of the keyhole and took an exciting breath to hold as he tried it.
    The key, old and not in the best shape, gave a little against the rusted steadfastness of the lock. Mr. Steach could feel the key begin to break and he knew he had not dug through both grave dirt and human remains to allow it to come to this. He could see scrapings along the side of the keyhole where dozens of would-be looters had tried their hand at opening the vault before him. At his feet in the weeds lay the broken ends of lock-picks and even one thoroughly mangled crowbar with a filed point. He picked up the crow bar and examined the point. It was thin enough to slide into the keyhole on the side of the key to act as a brace against the strength of the lock.
    He could hear a car approaching and he froze in place. There was absolutely no explanation he could offer for standing here at this abandoned relic, but he found that he needn't worry. The car drove past and from his periphery, he could see that the driver ignored the street signs and accelerated through the next intersection.
Steach slid the crowbar point into the lock and pinched the key against it. Carefully, he rolled the key to the left and leaned in closely to listen for tumblers falling into place and the latch opening. Mercifully, he heard a successful click and, instead of a single door swinging open, a vertical split in the oak just the right of the keyhole appeared and the right side of what was now clearly a double door sunk into the room beyond it by a few millimeters. As the tops of the arched doors separated with a satisfying clunk, a rain of fine dust fell and drifted out of the dark room and into the crack between the doors, carrying with it the smell of mildew and decay.
    In dismay, Mr. Steach complained to himself that he'd neglected to plan for a daytime search and robbery of the completely dark building. He'd thought to bring a flashlight to the graveyard, but, despite having seen the street-view photo of the building, he hadn't even thought of the windowless vault having no lighting whatsoever. Built so long ago and remained untouched in the years since, the building probably hadn't even connected to any type of grid, power or otherwise.
    "Beginner's mistake," he chastised himself. Back in the sunken and irretrievable car, he knew, were his flashlight and the other night-work equipment he hadn't discarded. It was useless to him now. He pushed gently on the right-side door. It opened on creaking hinges but the light from the outside was swallowed by the room after only a few feet. He poked his head inside the opening and saw that there were, after all, at least four beams of daylight shining through as many holes in the ceiling. He took a chance and stepped over the threshold and into the room, hoping to acclimate his senses. It only took a few moments to realize that something was wrong.
    The room looked lived-in, from what he could see in the beams of light. On the ground next to a set of empty bookcases was a worn cot, its mattress thin and soiled. Squinting, Mr. Steach could see a large clay pot in the corner by the west wall and what looked to be a kerosene camping lantern sitting next to it. Not one to back away from anything eerie or fearful—Mr. Steach was one to make others do that—he slid into the room and made his way through the dark to where the lantern lay.
    When he picked it up, he could hear the swishing of the liquid fuel inside the tank. It wasn't much but it was useless without a—
    "Unbelievable," Steach exclaimed. Sitting next to the clay pot, which he quickly realized from the smell was a commode, was a campfire lighter with a long neck and, upon his inspection, had a nearly full fuel compartment itself and a perfectly working striker.
    Mr. Steach had always assumed that he had some kind of supernatural-type level of luck. He was ruthless, unkind, and selfish and proud to call himself all three characteristics, but he'd never seen the inside of so much as an interrogation room, never crashed his escape vehicle after heist, and had only a few minor injuries to list (not including wounds to his pride—the failure to plan this part of the heist properly came to mind in that regard). He smiled to himself for all the familiar luck as he used the flame from the lighter to read the instructions on the lantern, lit the lantern after (well, it was a few tries) a short time, and opened the valve for the gas so as to bring a near daylight brightness to the room. But that was where his luck ran out.
    The room was utterly destroyed. Graffiti, human waste, broken furniture, shattered artifacts, and, in the middle of the south wall sat a safe that more than likely fit the same key he had shoved into his pocket, but it had long been broken open. How the doors to the building had remained locked and intact this whole time was beyond him. Worse still, he had no idea how anyone might have otherwise gained access to the building and caused such a terrible mess.
Someone, or rather, so many people had clearly been there over the years, it was laughable to refer to this shoddy edifice as a vault. Not only had the building been historically devalued by vagrants and thieves, by the smell of the commode and the freshness of reeking body odor emanating from the cot, there had been a visitor here recently.
    He hadn't heard the shallow breathing quieted further still when he entered the vault. He hadn't stopped to check if the shadows behind the large pieces of fallen furniture were hiding any foes. He hadn't thought that there was any chance that anyone or anything could or would live in such a hovel. He hadn't brought any weapons.
    But she had.