He snapped the book shut, sending a cloud of dust into a ray of blue-gray light. “Come closer, and I’ll tell you a secret,” he said. I took a few hesitant steps toward him, and because he was taller than me, I had to tilt my head as he whispered close, “They were all Catholics.”
The hair on my neck rose. “Catholics…” I kept my voice as low as his, the word sounding too treacherous. They were followers of the Western teaching, and any teachings from the West were forbidden and could result in an execution.
“The victims were all Catholics, so no one in the bureau cared. But the killing of Lady O, now…” Officer Ky?n shook his head, and a humorless chuckle escaped him. “You will suddenly find Inspector Han no longer so indifferent.”
I turned to Lady O, her unblinking gaze fixed upward, along with the staring hole in her face. Someone had killed her in the wide open, so close to the patrolling guards. This someone could have immediately run away to avoid any chance of capture, but instead had crouched before the corpse and had taken the time to cut off her nose. I took a step back.
I had hoped that Lady O would be the first and last murder victim I’d have to touch. But after what Ky?n had said … Gods, would I have to handle more corpses?
TWO
THE NEXT DAY, on my errand to deliver a letter for a police clerk, I took the long way around until I found what I was looking for. It was still there, the wanted poster of Priest Zhou Wenmo pasted onto the clay wall of an inn. Straw roof thatching cast a shadow over his thin face and eyes drooped down at the corners.
Only two months ago, the drawing of him had portrayed a man with a pair of much smaller ears and a rounder face. His changing appearance was like a man’s trembling reflection on a puddle, never the same. No one knew how he truly looked, the artists who painted him guided only by floating rumors.
But his eyes had always stayed their same shape, the saddest eyes I had ever seen.
Now I could no longer look at the priest’s silent gaze without recalling the dead bodies of Catholics. Since the king’s passing, I had watched death swell and push its way through the gates of the bureau, and it had seemingly failed to shock Commander Yi. As though he had expected these killings to occur.
Two siblings starved to death, locked up in a storage hut by their own father. A drowned servant, pushed into his watery grave by his master. A missing girl, last seen collecting water from the well, only to be found lying lifeless under a thornbush, killed by her aunt. Following that, seven burned corpses piled in a cart, recovered from a hut that had burned down, right after the doors had been locked by the orders of an upper-class woman.
“To execute any person is a grave matter for the kingdom,” Commander Yi had said while interrogating the noblewoman in the police bureau. “Even if your servants were Catholic rebels, the fact that they are the ruler’s subjects should have prevented you from harming them carelessly.” Her case had moved up into the hands of the Ministry of Justice for a final appeal, yet I’d heard whispers of the already-made decision: the execution of the Catholic rebels had been necessary for the good of the kingdom.
What was it about this teaching called Catholicism that terrorized the culprits enough to kill their own servants, their own children?
After delivering the police clerk’s letter to a government office on Yukjo Street, near Gyeongbok Palace, I hurried back to the bureau to finish sweeping the main pavilion as the chief maid had instructed me. But once I retrieved my broom, I paused on the way and hid by the examination room door. I’d wanted to know more about the cause of Lady O’s death since yesterday, but police protocols and the state-mandated mourning period for the king had pushed the examination to today.
Once it seemed safe enough, I inched closer, then peered through the crack in the door, drawn to look inside by the sound of solemn voices.
I shouldn’t be here, I thought, but curiosity anchored me to the spot, as did the question: Was Lady O’s death related to the other murders? Had heresy from the West killed her too?