The Stirlings and the Missing Statue

Chapter Sixteen: Aurelio, You Crazy Old Coot

    Mr. Steach was no spring chicken, but he was far from old. He'd often lie about his age, not for any kind of shame, but because it added to his abilities to blend and be unmemorable. He granted, however, that there were various ways in which he showed himself to be a man of a fair number of years: the way he spoke, the manner in which he dressed and the food he liked. For argument's sake, what had happened just then to him in that dark vagrant's room, was the first of its kind in almost forty of his years. To have come so far in his life without major injury was not just by chance but by careful calculations.
    The gray of his ensemble was not dark enough to hide the bloodstains and he'd never make it out of town and back to the car without some attention. He imagined, as he subdued the bleeding cut across his chest with the only things at his disposal—although he risked tetanus, hepatitis, or whatever else lurked in the soiled and tattered blanket on the cot.
His attacker, silent but for grunts and pained wails of her own, kept to the shadows and seemed to regard the light from the camping lantern as heinous. Steach could have sworn that the tiny creature that looked barely human after however long she'd spent as a transient hissed not at him, but at the light, and tried to kick it over and extinguish it.
    "You," Mr. Steach accused her (of simply existing in the first place) and added a short laugh. The cut on his chest was deep and the weapon that had caused it was held firmly in the girl's hand.
    She growled in response. A stream of insensible Spanish punctuated with vulgar profanities followed when Mr. Steach made a slight step in her direction.
    "Espanyol? Hauria cregut que ets nord-americà," he told her, noting her lighter skin and hair that had no trace of indigenous origin. "Poster europeu?"
    The girl glared at him and gently waved the knife slowly in front of her. Wearing tattered clothes but originally well dressed, she had to have come from somewhere and would have to have been missed. She had dark circles under her eyes, her bare arms below her t-shirt were untoned and weak, and the her shoe-less feet were bruised and covered in cuts.
    He tried to ask her where her parents were in both Spanish—his inferior North American dialect barely making the question understandable—and then again in English. Both versions of the question seemed to perk her dark eyebrows but she only gave a slight thrust of the knife as her answer. Growing impatient and, unaccustomed to general friendly conversation, Mr. Steach shifted his focus to the girl's existence in such a hidden place.
    "How did you get here?" He'd given up entirely with translating from Catalan into Mexican Spanish, so he used English. The girl gave no indication that she understood the question.
    He laughed and checked on the bloody spot on his chest. The blood had slowed and the torn edges of his shirt were sticking to the wound. The disgusting blanket had soaked up his blood well enough, but it had left behind a smear of something brown and textured.
    "I had to dig up a corpse to get here, you know," he continued. He moved closer to the lamp that still burned on stoically, unaffected by the conflict.
    The girl flinched and grunted another string of curses.
    "You kiss your mother with that mouth?" Mr. Steach quoted. He'd always loved that line in movies—although it only served to trigger his not-so-fond memories of his long-dead family. The girl clearly had a better grasp of Spanish than of English, but he didn't bother to adjust. She had stabbed—sliced—him, after all. Why should he cater to her needs?
He fished for the key and held it in the light for her to see. It was bent from the lock but did manage to catch a glint in the lantern light.
    "See that? I had to pull this off a dead man to get in here," he told her.
She scowled at him.
    Mr. Steach looked around the room and found it once again to be everything he wasn't expecting. At the least, he'd expected a museum-like room with ruined-by-time artifacts. The sculpture, and perhaps the painting, he'd hoped was secured in something like the safe that lay cracked open at the back of the room. Even if the girl had appeared to have lived here longer than a few weeks, there was no way she'd caused this damage. This disarray, this chaos was from years and years of transients finding their way inside somehow.
    "So how did you do it? Did you come through there?" Mr. Steach pointed to the sloped roof that had the few broken pieces that allowed daylight to stream inside. None of the holes were big enough for even the slight figure before him.
The girl shifted on her feet and winced. A caring person might have wondered what injuries the adolescent might have. Mr. Steach only saw a potential vulnerability and an opening for him.
    "Hurt, young lady?" He pointed to her feet.
    She winced again, but at the sound of being called a young lady, not from any physical harm.
    Mr. Steach reached down and picked up the lantern by its wire handle and pulled it up to eye level, focusing his gaze beyond the brightness and watching the girl react. She was angry again, he assumed by the glare on her features. She had settled into some kind of bland hatred until he'd moved again. He surmised that the lantern was hers and she didn't like him touching her things.
    Steach winced himself as he took a step toward the safe near where the girl was posed for another attack. His injury burned and he could practically feel the infection take hold from whatever was on the blanket or the knife itself. The girl remained in place but her growls became more guttural and feral.
    The safe was sitting on the ground and was about half of his height. It was old—not to be unexpected—and had not a keyhole like he had hoped when he'd made the assumption that the safe existed in the first place, but a combination lock. As he neared it, he could see that there was no damage to the safe at all. The crowbar on the exterior would have been no use on it anyway, but clearly, whoever opened it had used the combination itself. The inside of the safe was completely empty and where one might have found shelves for organizing documents or valuables, the cavity had been modified to fit a large object instead. Immaculate inside but covered with a thick layer of dust that obscured the black paint on the outside, making it gray and dingy, Mr. Steach could only tell by the imprint left on the velvet cushion on the bottom what might have called the safe home for so many years.
    "Did you open this, girl?" He found himself asking her before realizing how ludicrous the question was.
    "El curso," she spat. She repeated the word over and over again, her inflection and volume changing with each syllable.
    "No," he told himself. "You would have needed the combination. Which would have been lost when Aurelio passed. What would you have hidden here, you crazy old man? The statue itself?"
    He was talking himself through a brainstorm and feeling the indent in the velvet cushion on the bottom of the safe. He nearly hadn't heard the barefooted girl move until the knife was an inch away from his throat. He swung upward with a closed fist and caught the girl on the underside of her jaw, slamming her scowling, enraged mouth closed and snapping her head back onto her shoulders. She fell, dazed and reeling in pain onto the floor and the knife tumbled out of her grasp. Mr. Steach scrambled for it although the girl made no movement to recover. Seeing his opportunity, he lifted his foot to launch the girl further into unconsciousness, but held back at the last minute. If she had any information on what had been in the safe and when it had been taken, a kick to the head might do more harm than just the concussion that was intended. He replaced his foot on the ground and set the lantern on top of the safe. The gas sloshed inside and the light sputtered slightly, but Mr. Steach fell into the shadow of the safe as he reached down and lifted the limp girl back into the light.
    "Did you see the statue, girl?" He shook her by the shoulders and repeated the question.
    "El curso. El curso," she mumbled through what might have been broken teeth. There was blood on her lips and terror in her eyes.
    "What curse?"
    "San Luis..."
    "The statue! Yes, the statue of San Luis! Saint Louis. King Louis! You saw it?"
    "El curso..."
    Mr. Steach grunted in exasperation and let the girl fall back to the floor again. "San Luis. El curso."
    The girl groaned again and closed her eyes as her head flopped to the side but her limbs twitched in revolt and she refused to submit to darkness. Steach paced the short distance between the safe and the girl a few times and repeated the words San Luis and el curso over and over again as the girl had done.
    "The statue is cursed. Or became cursed," he corrected himself. "It allegedly showed up out of nowhere and kept disappearing. Reappearing more and more adorned with jewels and riches."
    He repeated the history of the statue from memory as he reassembled the information from the cache of information he'd stored from the various web sources, both legitimate and underground. He filtered out the stories from the myths and determined that any idea of a curse was borne of Catholic guilt and the assumption that by corrupting the statue, the Saint himself became corrupt—the statue's curse that affected everyone who attempted to keep it for him or herself fed itself.
    With renewed fervor, he reached down once more for the girl's shoulders and bade her to tell him if it was the statue that had been in the safe and where it was now.
    "San Luis..." came her repeated reply.
    "Yes, yes. San Luis! The stat—"
    Another moment of clarity came to him.
    "San Luis Amatlán? The town?"
    "San Luis. El curso. San Luis. El curso. San Luis. El curso..." the girl had lapsed into a trance of repeating the two phrases over and over, the terror never leaving her eyes.
    Steach let her fall back to the ground and this time the girl's eyes closed and her breathing, once rapid and ragged, became steady as either unconsciousness or sleep overtook her. In Steach's mind, she'd confirmed that the statue had been in the safe but it had somehow been taken back to Aurelio's hometown. Had the crazy old artist fallen to the psychosis that surrounded the statue and alleged curse, encased the rare object within the safe and within the vault under the ruse that he was keeping his wife from his fortune, and, by burying the key with him and ensuring that no one else had the combination, intended to protect the world from it? A harmless little statue that may or may not have walked itself back home?
    "Not walked," Mr. Steach told himself. Someone had taken it and left this girl to fend for herself, a forgotten ransom, perhaps. As mad as she's become in solitude, she could be the only remaining link to the statue. He couldn't leave her and, regrettably, he would have to wait for nightfall to find a new mode of transportation and a way of absconding with the girl back to San Luis Amatlán.
    Injured and more-or-less working with a direct accomplice. This was not how Mr. Steach worked and as this particular scheme played out, every twist made him reconsider ever leaving Europe for a job again.