Which Lie Did I Tell?

by William Goldman

  Shall we get to it, then?

  SEAN CONNERY

  Of course.

  (beat)

  Suppose I could deliver to you, and you alone, the most valuable object in the world.

  J. P. MORGAN

  For which, no doubt, I would pay a very great deal.

  SEAN CONNERY

  More than just a great deal, sir. A gasping amount is what I have in mind.

  J. P. MORGAN

  And when do I get to know just what it is I’m purchasing?

  SEAN CONNERY

  (enjoying this)

  You don’t.

  J. P. MORGAN

  Are you being silly with me, sir? Not a wise idea. Why on earth should I pay you anything at all for something about which I know so little.

  SEAN CONNERY

  Because I don’t have it yet.

  J. P. MORGAN

  Have not purchased it, you meant?

  SEAN CONNERY

  (sharp)

  Are you being silly with me, sir? I don’t much like that either.

  (beat)

  When I possess it, you will know, simply by reading any headline from any paper in the world.

  J. P. MORGAN

  (a little interested now)

  Dramatically put. But if you have nothing, why meet now?

  SEAN CONNERY

  Because when I do have it, there will be no time for bargaining. I will want your money, in cash, of course, immediately.

  J. P. MORGAN

  If you plan to sell me something acquired by less than legal means, what possible good does it do me? I cannot ever show it to anyone. I must keep it hidden from the world.

  CUT TO

  CONNERY. He gets up, strides around the fabulous room.

  SEAN CONNERY

  Some men…

  (he stops, looks dead at Morgan now)

  …there are some men who would kill to possess what no one else owns. Who would build a shrine to it, kept locked, with only the one key. There are some men, sir, who could thrill to walk into this secret place late at night, to unlock a single door, to stare at this greatest secret, the single most famous achievement of man.

  This has been clearly directed at Morgan, who is uncomfortable with it, deflects it as best he can.

  J. P. MORGAN

  I have never been involved in anything so criminal.

  SEAN CONNERY

  Of course not--which is why I am keeping it a secret--the minute you know, you become an accomplice.

  (beat)

  The world respects you as the paragon you are. And of course you would never get involved with stolen property--

  J. P. MORGAN

  --so you are going to steal it?

  SEAN CONNERY

  There is always that possibility.

  J. P. MORGAN

  (rising abruptly)

  Good night, sir.

  (CONNERY smiles)

  I just threw you out of my house, why on earth are you smiling?

  SEAN CONNERY

  Because Frick predicted you would behave this way.

  (and on this he rises)

  He will deny our chat just as you will deny this--but he told me you would behave, at first, like an outraged virgin.

  (going to the door)

  A pleasure, Mr. Morgan.

  J. P. MORGAN

  (moving right with him)

  Henry Clay Frick is a detestable fraud--

  SEAN CONNERY

  --but he is almost as rich as you and has almost as great a collection. And soon it will be far greater.

  J. P. MORGAN

  (moving in on CONNERY)

  Frick said he’d buy your merchandise?

  CUT TO

  CONNERY. CLOSE UP.

  SEAN CONNERY

  I have nothing to sell…yet.

  CUT TO

  MORGAN. Studying him.

  J. P. MORGAN

  When will you have it?

  SEAN CONNERY

  Very soon. You will know by the headlines. And I will come to the Plaza Hotel. And I will have it with me. And you will leave a message--a message with the amount you will pay. Frick has agreed to do the same.

  (heading out now)

  Winner wins all.

  (a final smile, and he is gone)

  Not the greatest scene ever, but it might play, if, say, we got Duvall to take a shot at Morgan. These two brilliant guys, discussing something in a strange way, all the secrets involved.

  You might even open a movie with it. Connery leaving the Plaza, getting into a horse-drawn carriage, clip-clopping through the streets to the Morgan manse.

  But if you did, pretty soon you’d have to reveal what the item under discussion was. Which I shall do now.

  It’s the Mona Lisa, da Vinci’s masterpiece and arguably the most famous image on earth. And in case you wondered why I set that scene in such a weird year as 1911, here’s why: that’s when it happened.

  The Mona Lisa really was stolen, from the Louvre Museum. And it was gone for two years. And maybe, just maybe, what was returned wasn’t the real Mona Lisa. (All this is in Seymour Reit’s book The Day They Stole the Mona Lisa. Try it, you’ll like it.)

  How much do you think that painting is worth? What if it came up for auction and the Sultan of Brunei wanted it a lot and Bill Gates wanted it a lot and so did half a dozen other computer-nerd billionaires? Well, if a good, but not that great, van Gogh went in the nineties, you start from there for this baby.

  I think if these rich guys really got into a dick-swinging contest, the price could reach a billion.

  And it was already incredibly famous back when it was taken.

  What follows is not precisely as it happened. But we’re not making a documentary.

  Three main guys: the Mastermind himself. Anxious to retire and live well forever. In order to pull off his plan, he has to spend some money in advance. And he does.

  Second main guy: the thief. No elegance here. He is an Italian carpenter working in France. He dislikes the French, lives alone in a crummy room. He is perfect for the Mastermind because (1) he has worked some in the Louvre, and (2) more importantly, when the Mona Lisa was recently enclosed in a glass-fronted box, the thief was one of the guys who built the box.

  Last main guy: the forger. Cadaverous, brilliant, incredibly gifted as a painter, yet with shockingly little ego. He dies of old age, with the money from this job, happily. Never a whisper of trouble. Because of all the great forgers, he’s the one who never let his ego loose, never wanted to be known for his own art.

  The Mastermind took the forger to the Mona Lisa, said, “Can you copy this?” The forger thought about it, realized the difficulties, finally, challenged, said, “Yes, I can make you a copy.”

  To which the Mastermind replied: “No good. I need six.”

  So the forger got to work. Great stuff in the book about just how he had to do it—the Mona Lisa is not painted on canvas but wood, so he had to find wood from the time of the painting, centuries before.

  (Aside to screenwriters—George Roy Hill once told me this: “Audiences love ‘how-to.’ ” When I asked what he meant, he explained that if you were going to, say, crack a safe, audiences would be interested in the problems involved in really doing it. I believe Hill was right. End of aside.)

  Now, while this is being done, the Mastermind comes to America and meets with six rich, greedy Americans. He makes his pitch, without ever telling what he’s selling. They’ll find out in the papers.

  So when the theft happened, and became worldwide news, his six believed.

  The theft itself was almost comic. The Louvre was closed on Mondays, so if you could hide inside Sunday night, you could be alone in the place the next day with only other workers and guards. And workers in those days were constantly removing paintings from the walls, under orders to take them to be photographed, cleaned, etc.

  The thief knew a place to hide. A tiny closet where art students were allowed to leave their paints over th
e quiet Monday so they wouldn’t have to lug their stuff around.

  The thief spends the night, early Monday he takes a tunic that Louvre workers wear, goes out into the museum. As he gets to the gallery where the painting is, things empty out, so he takes it down, throws a cloth over it, and goes walking along, passing all kinds of other workers in similar tunics also carrying paintings with cloths over them.

  He gets to a dark staircase, removes the painting itself from the box that enclosed it—which, remember, he helped make—tucks it under his tunic. So now it’s a quick to-the-door-and-out kind of deal.

  Problem, the key he has made for the door won’t work. In desperation, he takes off the doorknob, sticks it in his pocket—

  Which is when another guy who works there comes along.

  The thief snarls to this guy. “Some idiot stole the doorknob. How am I expected to get out of here?” To which the other worker says in essence, hey no problem, I’ll let you out.

  Almost free now.

  Oops. The heavy outside door is open—but a uniformed guard is there.

  Fug!

  Another incredible event—the porter has not shown up for work that day so the guard is cleaning the entranceway—

  And it is at that exact moment he decides he needs some clean water, goes off in search of some. That’s when the thief leaves the Louvre with the painting.

  Now the thief hides the masterpiece in a crummy trunk in a crummy apartment and has nothing more to do than this: wait for the Mastermind to come and pay him.

  Which doesn’t happen—because the Mastermind doesn’t need the Louvre Mona Lisa. He could care less about the Louvre’s Mona Lisa—he’s got six of his own.

  He sails to America, sells his paintings to six greedy Americans and is safe—because the minute they talk, they become accomplices.

  Rich and contented, having pulled off the greatest scam in history, the Mastermind retires and lives a glorious life.

  Not as rich but very well off, the forger also retires, except for occasional special jobs.

  And the thief? Read for yourself in Reit’s book.

  Did I hook you? Did you put this book down in the middle of reading that story? I wouldn’t have been able to.

  Why didn’t I write the Mona Lisa story?

  The truth is, I don’t remember. It sure seemed a natural as I told you the story. Maybe whoever owned it was somebody I wasn’t sure of. Maybe I came across it myself and it was during my leper period, when I was writing only books.

  I think the reason is that storytellers change. The kind of narrative that moves us shifts and alters. I don’t know that I would do Maverick today. I’m six years older, six additional years of movie experience—would I now want to spend half a year on a western caper that comes from an ancient TV series? Maybe. Maybe if Dick Donner were involved, as he was, or if Mel Gibson were involved. But my guess is not. I would certainly do Misery, though. Never could resist the lopping scene.

  Story Four: The Dolphin

  * * *

  Every so often I come across a piece of material that just rocks me. The story I am calling The Dolphin was one of those. I was having coffee by myself three years ago, I’d finished the sports section of The New York Times—I do that out of some awful sense of masochism; any sports fan from New York will understand—and I turned to the front page, saw this in the corner. In a few minutes, I was flooded with tears.

  I don’t know if you’ll have so extreme an experience, but if you aren’t moved even a little, boy, is there something wrong with you. No question this material is wonderful. But is it a movie we want to write?

  I want you to read the article now and think about it a little. I’m going on to some other stuff, but eventually, we’ll all circle back and meet around Taylor Touchstone’s campfire.

  Autism No Handicap, Boy Defies Swamp

  By RICK BRAGG

  FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla., Aug. 16 — Taylor Touchstone, a 10-year-old autistic boy who takes along a stuffed leopard and pink blanket when he goes to visit his grandmother, somehow survived for four days lost and alone in a swamp acrawl with poisonous snakes and alligators.

  He swam, floated, crawled and limped about 14 miles, his feet, legs and stomach covered with cuts from brush and briars that rescuers believed to be impassable, his journey lighted at night by thunderstorms that stabbed the swamp with lightning.

  People in this resort town on the Gulf of Mexico say they believe that Taylor’s survival is a miracle, and that may be as good an explanation as they will ever have. The answer, the key to the mystery that baffles rescue workers who have seen this swamp kill grown, tough men, may be forever lost behind the boy’s calm blue eyes.

  “I see fish, lots of fish,” was ail Taylor told his mother, Suzanne Touchstone, when she gently asked him what he remembered from his ordeal in the remote reservation on Eglin Air Force Base.

  Over years, Taylor may tell her more, but most likely it will come in glints and glimmers of information, a peek into a journey that ended on Sunday when a fisherman found Taylor floating naked in the East Bay River, bloody, hungry but very much alive.

  He may turn loose a few words as he sits in the living room, munching on the junk food that is about the only thing his mother can coax him to eat, or when they go for one of their drives to look at cows. He likes the cows, sometimes. Sometimes he does not see them at all, and they just ride, quiet.

  Taylor’s form of autism is considered moderate. The neurological disorder is characterized by speech and learning impairment, and manifests itself in unusual responses to people and surroundings.

  “I’ve heard stories of autistic people who suddenly just remember, and begin to talk” of something in the far past, Mrs. Touchstone said. “But we may never know” what he lived through, or how he lived through it, she said.

  His father, Ray, added, “I don’t know that it matters.” Like his wife and their 12-year-old daughter, Jayne, Mr. Touchstone can live with the mystery. It is the ending of the story that matters.

  Still, they have their theories. They say they believe that it is possible that, Taylor survived the horrors of the swamp not in spite of his autism, but because of it.

  “He doesn’t know how to panic,” Jayne said. “He doesn’t know what fear is.”

  Her brother is focused, she said. Mrs. Touchstone says Taylor will focus all his attention and energy on a simple thing — he will fixate on a knot a bathing suit’s draw string — and not be concerned about the broader realm of his life.

  If that focus helped him survive, Mrs. Touchstone said, then “it is a miracle” that it was her son and not some otherwise normal child who went for a four-day swim in the black water of a region in which Army Rangers and sheriff’s deputies could not fully penetrate. He may have paddled with the gators, and worried more about losing his trunks.

  “Bullheaded,” said Mrs. Touchstone, who is more prone to say what is on her mind than grope for pat answers, instead of coddling and being overly protective of her child, she tried to let him enjoy a life as close to normal as common sense allowed.

  Taylor’s scramble and swim through the swamp, apparently without any direction or motive beyond the obvious fact that he wanted to keep in motion, left him with no permanent injuries. On Wednesday, he sat, in his living room, the ugly, healing, cuts crisscrossing his legs, and munched junk food.

  “Cheetos,” he said, when asked what, he was eating.

  But when he was asked about the swamp, he carefully put the plastic lid back on the container, and left the room. He did not appear upset, Just uninterested.

  Lifelong Swimmer At Home in Water

  Taylor has been swimming most of his life. In the water, his autism seems to disappear. He swims like a dolphin, untiring.

  His journey began about 4 P.M. on Aug. 7, a Wednesday, while he and his mother and sister were swimming with friends in Turtle Creek on the reservation lands of the Air Force base. Taylor walked into the water and floated downstream, disap
pearing from sight. He did not answer his mother’s calls.

  An extensive air, water and ground search followed. It involved Army Rangers, Green Berets, marines, deputies with the Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Department and volunteers, who conducted arm-to-arm searches in water that was at times neck-deep, making noise to scare off the alligators and rattlesnakes and water moccasins, and shouting Taylor’s name.

  He is only moderately autistic, Mrs. Touchstone said, but it is possible that he may not have responded to the calls of the searchers. At night, when it was nearly useless to search on foot, AC-130 helicopters crisscrossed the swamp, searching for Taylor with heat-seeking, infrared tracking systems.

  In all, the air and ground searchers covered 36 square miles, but Taylor, barefoot, had somehow moved outside their range,

  “The search area encompassed as much area as we could cover,” said Rick Hord of the Sheriff’s Department. “He went farther,”

  It was not just the distance that surprised the searchers, Taylor somehow went under, around or through brush that the searchers saw as impassable, Yet there is no evidence that anyone else was involved in his journey, or of foul play, investigators said.

  Apparently, Taylor just felt compelled to keep moving. Members of his family say they believe that he spent a good part of his time swimming, which may have kept him away from snakes on land,

  The nights brought pitch blackness to the swamp, and on two nights there were violent thunderstorms. Lightning would have penetrated his shell, Mrs. Touchstone said,

  “I think it may have kept him moving,” she said, and that might have been a blessing. Certainly, said his mother and doctors who treated the boy, he was exhausted.

  “Do you really think God would strike him with lightning?” she asked. “Wouldn’t that be redundant?”

  Somewhere, somehow, he lost his bathing suit. His parents said he might have torn them, and, concentrating on a single blemish, found them unacceptable, Mrs. Touchstone compared it to a talk she once heard by an autistic woman who had escaped her shell, who told the audience that most people in a forest see the vastness of trees, but she might fixate on a spider web.

  On the third day oí Taylor’s journey, Mrs. Touchstone realized that her son might be dead. For reasons she could not fully explain, she did not want to see his body recovered. It would have been too hard to see him that way. Even though Taylor is physically fit and strong, friends and relatives knew that this was the same terrain that in February 1995 claimed the lives of four Rangers who died of hypothermia while training in swampland near here.