“When you tell a lie, Damo Seol, how do you feel?” Inspector Han said unexpectedly.
It took me a moment to realize he expected a reply. “Extremely nervous, sir.” Just as I felt a moment ago.
“Anxiety is a potent trigger. It leaves clues all over you. The pattern of your speech, the color of your cheeks, the movement of your hands.”
I remembered Maid Soyi’s eyes, those black, unknowable pools. I dared myself to ask a last question. “What about the eyes, sir?”
“They break away sometimes. Hiding secrets makes an individual flighty.”
“What if they stare intensely at you in a very unusual way?”
He swung his leg over the saddle, and for a man of his height and build, he landed on the ground with the lightest crunch. “There is a special breed of liars who will lock their eyes on you. They are those who know how to manipulate and control.”
Before I could say anything more, he handed the reins over to a manservant, then strode into the bureau. I paused before it and felt myself fold up; my head lowering, my shoulders drawing in, one hand hiding under the other. I shrank into my shell every time I beheld the invisible warning on the gate: Be careful. Cross no one. Obey always.
Cautiously, I passed through the gate. Everyone was bustling about the courtyard. A servant boy with a dirty face pushed a cart, its wooden wheels whining; a line of maids passed him by, holding trays of side dishes, neatly arranged; two men appeared—Officers Goh and Kyŏn—carrying a wooden stretcher with a corpse hidden beneath a straw mat.
“Inspector Han! You have arrived!” Kyŏn said with a simpering air.
“What is it?”
“The commander wishes us to move Lady O to the examination room.”
“Do so.” Then Inspector Han looked over his shoulder. “Seol, assist them.”
I stared at the stretcher, at the sight of lifeless gray fingertips left uncovered. Keep it away from me, I wanted to say. But I kept silent before Inspector Han. His waiting gaze upon me, I wrung my hands as the odor of death reached my nose again, and at last dragged my feet forward, if only to show him my obedience.
I followed the officers into the drafty room filled with the scent of vinegar and decay. On a stand was an open book, an illustration of the human body. Next to it, a table with tools: knife, ruler, bowl, needle, a silver pin. My attention lingered on the pin. The last time I was in this room, a corpse had been brought in with witnesses claiming he’d died from drinking poison. I had watched the coroner’s assistant inserting the pin into the corpse’s mouth, then the anus. Apparently, the pin turned black in the case of poisoning.
“Servant!” Kyŏn called out. “Lift this corpse onto the table. The head needs to point south and the feet to the north.”
The moment I grabbed and lifted the stiff corpse, my skin crawled. I had carried people before, like when I’d piggybacked my friend while playing, but her weight had felt different. She had felt alive. A corpse was nothing but a slab of meat. Death was heavier. When at last I dragged her onto the wooden table, I stepped back and waited for my stomach to settle.
“Get used to it.”
I looked over my shoulder and found that I was alone with Officer Kyŏn, the other man gone. “Neh? Get used to what, sir?” I spoke to him in honorific, using the polite form of the language, as if he were a venerable soldier. But he was a low-ranking police officer, hardly two years older than me.
“You saw all those corpses this week.” He picked the book off the stand and flipped through the pages of calligraphy and human body illustrations, stopping at the drawing of organs. “Commander Yi moved most of the corpses to another region to avoid autopsy. The rest were buried in surrounding hills, their killers acquitted or lightly punished. Do you know why?”
This was no trick question. I was always observant, watching everything from the corner of my eye. “The victims were all lowborn.”
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 Kyŏn 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 Kyŏn 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.