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“What a necropolis the human heart is.”
Beginning to write, I sighed. Heavily. And sighing, wrote.
After awhile I noticed the sounds, but I did not investigate them. I was (so I thought) happily at work.
The man I was writing about had led a covert life behind his insatiably public life, and I was engaged in multiple acts of detection as much as any biographer I knew of. So without deciding I found I had decided: I would sequence my biography as a detective fiction. Which is to say, first the violent death, then clouds and confusions, speculations and flashbacks that the reader would try to re-assemble from the multiple points-of-view of the witnesses—a fragmented, contradictory, apparently unknowable history that we would, nonetheless, come to know.
If, that is, I could find it out.
From the beginning I remained steadfastly blind to the shadows in my own history. There had been violent death in my immediate family and there were enough secrets there for anybody; I only knew I was curiously at home here, with my subject and his double life.
And that formal mimicry is easier than fresh invention. My heart felt light as I began to reconstruct the murder:
A shadow passed his doorway. Max Ananius2 looked up.
“Yes, what can I do for you?”
The first shot, fired pointblank, shattered a window