In 1991 Robert Maxwell died under mysterious circumstances. His body was found near his yacht, Lady Ghislaine, off the coast of the Canary Islands. It was unclear whether he had fallen overboard, jumped, or was murdered. His appetite and ambition had always been larger than life; his assets included The Daily Mirror, Phaidon Press, and countless other journals. It was as a member of the Wiener Library Committee—named after the German Jewish Community’s premier legal representative—that I first became aware of Maxwell.

I had been recruited by Alan Montefiore to raise money for the Library. Maxwell was expected to provide a substantial contribution—not that we made a direct solicitation. It was Isaiah Berlin, a close associate of Maxwell, who agreed to make our request. Indeed, the library benefited greatly from our effort.

One evening, living in Paris some years later, my upstairs neighbor Jacque Berger, a journalist at Paris Match, knocked at my door. He presented me with a videotape of the entire pathologists’ inquiry into the death of Robert Maxwell by Tel Aviv’s Abu Kabir Forensic Institute. Maxwell’s family, for reasons both personal and tied to insurance, had ordered a secondary autopsy after the initial efforts of the Spanish authorities had proven inconclusive.

The video was recorded from a camera an opportunist at the Institute had attached to a monitor in the autopsy room. That video was then sold to Paris Match for a good sum. Knowing French and Hebrew, Jacques Berger asked me to have a look at the autopsy footage, an idea I hated until I remembered the Stan Brakhage film, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, which was entirely shot at a morgue in New York. I accepted the challenge.

As it was indirectly recorded, it was constantly overcast by waves of blue haze and the sounds of a doctor who spoke Hebrew with a heavy Hungarian accent. Not long into my first viewing, I realized that Maxwell’s family had flown in this pathologist and his assistant from London.

Both pathologists registered heavy blue marks on Maxwell’s body as they began to cut into it. It was painful to watch the layers of fat just below the skin. I realized “thick skin” is not only a metaphor, but also an extremely unpleasant reality. The autopsy was nothing like the Rembrandt painting, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632), where only the bloodless arm is exposed. Here the corpse was relentlessly present in layers of fat, tissue, and blood revealed in the blue haze of a video that presented every detail of his inner body, as large and as corpulent as when he was alive. Above all, the indirect camera’s point-of-view made it all the more surreal.

Nearly thirty years later, the impressions of this autopsy are as strong in my memory as they were on the evening I watched it in my flat in Paris, two streets away from the Bibliothèque Nationale and Place de la Bourse in the still of a Parisian evening. Above all, I remember his tongue, freshly pulled. The London pathologist had said to his assistant, “Strange, the Spanish team examined his brain and his heart, but in a case of a man like Robert Maxwell, it is the Tongue that is important. Give me the Tongue.” Indeed, the tongue was presented to him with a blood clot the size of a boxing glove on its underside. But as drowning does not clot blood, Maxwell had to have been clubbed to death, then thrown in the ocean. That’s all we needed to know. To this day the motive and agents of this crime remain unknown.

I passed on my decipherment of the video to Paris Match, and the next day they broke the news to the world. Although I was paid for my work, since the editors felt like giving me some greater form of compensation, they commissioned me to write an additional four articles in the following weeks on topics of my choosing.

Villa dall’Ava, recently completed by Rem Koolhaas, was to be the subject of the first article. With the images of the autopsy fresh in mind I picked up the phone and called Koolhaas in Rotterdam to coordinate a visit. He explained to me that per agreement with the residents, no one could visit the Villa unless escorted by him; though, since he was caught up in the competition for the Jussieu Library, he would be unavailable to do so. But as soon as I phoned Madame Ava, owner of the Villa, and told her about the article for Paris Match, she insisted I take a taxi and visit the house right away.

Rather than take a taxi, I took the train in from Gare Saint-Lazare, like the locals. Madame Ava was prepared to consider any topic and at length. I had free reign and could visit any part of the house. Ultimately the collage-like composition of Villa dall’Ava itself was not unlike the chaotic reconfiguration of Robert Maxwell’s body by the pathologists. It made sense that Koolhaas had wanted to protect himself and his work from visitors. Madame Ava herself, that was another story.

Perhaps the agent that carried out Robert Maxwell’s execution would have been able to tell us who was so interested in putting an end to the life of Robert Maxwell, who had transacted so shadily in a world that was being rearranged after the Soviet Union’s collapse. I imagine Maxwell’s appetite had been too large and was what brought on his eventual downfall.