you’ll do nothing? She was following me! That means she saw everything.” The roar in Ky?n’s voice strained into a whisper, scraping his throat raw. “I’ll lose my position if she tells the inspector!”
“If she tells, then he’ll be exposed prematurely. Why would anyone punish you, Ky?n, for seeking the truth?”
Neither man could speak above a whisper with the patrolmen nearby. I myself didn’t want them to be arrested. Not yet. I had too many questions racing in my mind.
“Scholar Ahn,” I said, avoiding Officer Ky?n, who seemed incapable of a levelheaded conversation. “What he did was wrong. He went into Inspector Han’s office and stole a document.”
“This?” Scholar Ahn held up a sheet of paper. The moonlight glowing through it exposed the vertical lines of Hangul characters. He folded it and slipped it inside his robe. “This letter confirms my suspicion that Inspector Han does indeed have vengeance in his heart toward Catholics. Coincidentally, a Catholic woman ended up dead, a woman who had information he may have wanted.”
“What do you mean?” Incredulity prickled through me, then flashed into heat that raised my voice a notch higher. “He had no reason to kill!”
“Ah, ‘reason.’ That is a word I like. I have read many detective tales in my lifetime, and often ‘motive’ paves the path to the ‘who.’” He drew his hands behind his back, gazing down at me in solemn consideration. Perhaps he was a cruel man—he had to be to conspire with Ky?n—yet along with his meanness were brushstrokes of sincerity. “I once asked your inspector how he knew so much about Catholicism. He quoted Sun Tzu to me: ‘Know thy enemy.’ He knew his enemy too well, had spent five years trying to catch a priest whom no one had seen before.”
Motive. Catholicism. Inspector Han’s past. Loose strands whirled in my mind, a chaos I couldn’t make sense of.
Scholar Ahn seemed to notice my confusion, for he said, “What I am saying is this: if you understood the inspector’s hatred for Catholicism, you would understand that the man you think to be so honorable and kind is the darkest book in the human library. And you will find it odd that on the night Inspector Han was roaming the capital, a night he coincidentally was too drunk to remember, a Catholic girl ended up dead.”
I shook my head. Perhaps Inspector Han was filled with contempt for Catholics, but so were hundreds of others. Scholar Ahn had leapt from Inspector Han’s personal hatred to his actually being involved in a killing. A ridiculous connection.
“And you, sir, are a family friend of Lady O’s. Where were you on the night of the incident?” I demanded.
Scholar Ahn’s lips parted, then shut, hesitation flickering clear in his face. “I was studying at home.”
“Can someone vouch for your whereabouts?”
“Unfortunately not. My wife was ill, and so all the servants were tending to her.”
“Then you have no alibi.”
Officer Ky?n, who had stood quietly by the trunk, now approached. His black uniform pooled around him as he crouched before me. I waited for his display of brute strength, a slap across the head, a tug at my collar until the seams ripped. Instead, he whispered, “Don’t fill your head with useless speculations. You’ll see, Inspector Han will soon be out of power.”
He leaned closer until I could see my reflection in the moonlit irises of his beetle-black eyes, so close that his breath disturbed the tendrils of my hair, the very depths of my soul.
“No one will be by his side in the end,” he whispered, “not even you.”
“You are wrong,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “I will always be loyal to Inspector Han.”
The corner of his lips rose. “You are naive, Seol. There is no such thing as always. Loyal, you mean, until one of you dies.”
EIGHT
THE FOLLOWING DAY, my search for an excuse to leave the bureau, to get far away from Officer Ky?n, arrived in the form of the chief maid’s order that I deliver a note for her. I gladly complied, and after delivering the message, I was in no hurry to return to the bureau. I wandered the capital, then paused to watch a deolmi puppet play at the marketplace, appreciating that I could have a moment where I didn’t need to worry about Ky?n’s threat.
But I slowly realized: I was no safer here than in Ky?n’s presence.
Deolmi puppet plays were always about resistance, but this, this one was the story about Queen Regent Jeongsun’s