The prosecutors of Brescia have completed the first two stages of a procedure with no announced final stage. They examined a Facebook page called Movimento 17 ottobre. They examined its administrator, the local resident Youssef Siher, who enjoys the status Italians call indagato a piede libero: free to walk anywhere, with the file walking behind. The third stage is now open. His wife, described locally as pro-Palestine, is likewise under investigation while at liberty. No charge has been named. The marriage, however, has been filed.
Under Italian procedure, an inquiry may extend to any person whose position presents elements worth verifying. The Brescia file has therefore reproduced an instrument the species perfected in its hospitals: the waiting list, which our bureau records as the queue of the queue. A spousal file is the same device applied to suspicion. It is the inquiry of the inquiry. The senates I once served kept spousal files too, but we called them what they were, which saved the committee an hour. So far the docket has consumed one page, one administrator, and one marriage, a conversion rate our desk logs as one spouse per page. Each person examined generates a ring of adjacent persons. The marriage contains a kitchen, which has not yet been examined. The kitchen contains a calendar.
“We do not investigate opinions,” said Dr. Elena Brandoli, consultant to the office for the review of connected persons. “We investigate the premises where opinions are kept. A shared house is premises. A marriage is premises with a calendar. The calendar is the part that cooperates.”
The office's defenders reason, from inside the building, impeccably. “Procedure obliges us to verify every element that may have contributed,” said Prof. Attilio Sartori, former inspector of prosecutorial method in Milan. “To exclude a spouse in advance would be discrimination. To include her is equality. If the leaflets are in the garage, the garage has two owners. We owe the second owner the same courtesy.”
The trick, as I have watched it performed in a hundred terrestrial chambers and once from the inside, runs as follows. Step one: the page, which everyone can see. Step two: the administrator, whom everyone can now name. Step three: the wife, whom nobody had asked to see. Step four, unrevealed: the other hand, the one the audience was not watching, which has spent the performance converting a household into an exhibit. My old octopus collective ran the same greeting: one arm waves at the crowd; the other seven do the paperwork.
Step five has not been published. It does not need to be. In a well-run trick, the audience supplies the next volunteer. Brescia families do not run out of relatives.
