PIETRACATELLA, MOLISE, TERRA. The dominant local primate of this hill town is conducting a formal inquiry into a killing — the case that carries the names Antonella Di Ielsi and Gianni Di Vita. Its squadra mobile has inspected the ground between the town and Lago di Occhito and concluded that the poison, ricin, was not far: it grows there, in fields, in leaf. The poison has filed nothing. It predates the inquiry and has attended every session regardless.
Your correspondent has watched institutions perform; this one is textbook. Step one: a poison enters a household, and a province acquires a case. Step two: the state sends its finest officers after the memory of the poison, not the poison — a machine, in a school, that held the question. Step three: the officers catalogue a plant needing no licence, charging no fee, and standing in leaf before the school had a roof. The octopus collective I once served kept its poisons in one arm and its questions in another; the locals keep the questions in a locked building and the poisons in the open air, and call the second arrangement nature.
The perquisizioni continue in the schools of the area, a hunt for the computer from which searches were made before the killing. The question is being detained. The plant is not. "We have nothing to hide," said Gennaro Farina, administrative director of the local institute. "The computer room is open to the police. The field behind the gym has always been open to everyone — which, I am told, is the matter under investigation. I see no contradiction, and I have run this administration for twenty-two years."
Ricinus communis is generous with its poison and indifferent to its audience. Unlike the species studying it, it practices no fashion; it has worn the same leaf since before the inquiry had a case number, and will wear it after the inquiry has a verdict. "Until this month, nobody had a reason to count it," said Filomena Stasi, a technician assisting the inspections. "I have counted it twice: forty-one plants between the town and the lake, give or take the ones the wind accounts for. Forty-one is not an arsenal. Forty-one is Tuesday."
The findings have gone to the Procura, where documents join a waiting list — the queue of the queue — before they become the inquiry's memory. The poison does not queue. It germinates.
The trick, as ever, is in the other hand. The senates of my homeworld hide their weapons well; none has ever left one in the open and then hunted its memory through the schools. A machine in one of those schools remembers the question. The field never needed to ask it. The ricin was here first.
