In 1954 an Italian orchestra toured the American South on visas that called every man a farm labourer. A clerk who knew a category made a furrow out of a staff so that saxophones could travel in a year when saxophones looked like politics. Seventy years later Marcello Agneli requests the file. The week the letter goes out, Ennio Toth - ninety-four, last keeper of the tin - is found in his kitchen with one cup used and one cup waiting.

What follows is not a chase so much as an inventory of last copies: a granddaughter with reels shipped home in a crate labeled citrus; an Atlanta attorney whose foundation prefers the word drowned; a viola in Muggia who says shame is a luxury of grandchildren; a nephew who cannot be only one word at dinners. Written with Svevian sarcasm and a researcher's bad posture, Farm Worker is a murder mystery about administrative lies that outlive the men who stamped them.