Уильям Голдман - The Princess Bride

"I thought you knew all about this kind of thing," Inigo said, starting to get upset himself now.

"I'm out of practice, retired; it's been three years, you can't mess around with these resurrection recipes; one little ingredient wrong, the whole thing blows up in your face."

"Here's the hex book and your glasses," Valerie puffed, coming up the basement ladder. As Max began thumbing through, she turned to Inigo and Fezzik, who were hovering. "You can help," she said.

"Anything," Fezzik said.

"Tell us whatever's useful. How long do we have for the miracle? If we work it—"

" When we work it," Max said from his hex book. His voice was growing stronger.

" When we work it," Valerie went on, "how long does it have to maintain full efficiency? Just exactly what's going to be done?"

"Well, that's hard to predict," Inigo said, "since the first thing we have to do is storm the castle, and you never can be really sure how those things work out."

"An hour pill should be about right," Valerie said. "Either it's going to be plenty or you'll both be dead, so why not say an hour?"

"We'll all three be fighting," Inigo corrected. "And then once we've stormed the castle we have to stop the wedding, steal the Princess and make our escape, allowing space somewhere in there for me to duel Count Rugen."

Visibly Valerie's energy drained. She sat wearily down. "Max," she said, tapping his shoulder. "No good."

He looked up. "Huh?"

"They need a fighting corpse."

Max shut the hex book. "No good," he said.

"But I bought a miracle," Inigo insisted. "I paid you sixty-five."

"Look here—" Valerie thumped Westley's chest—"nothing. You ever hear anything so hollow? The man's life's been sucked away. It'll take months before there's strength again."

"We haven't got months—it's after one now, and the wedding's at six tonight. What parts can we hope to have in working order in seventeen hours?"

"Well," Max said, considering. "Certainly the tongue, absolutely the brain, and, with luck, maybe a little slow walk if you nudge him gently in the right direction."

Inigo looked at Fezzik in despair.

"What can I tell you?" Max said. "You needed a fantasmagoria."

"And you never could have gotten one of those for sixty-five," Valerie added, consolingly.

Little cut here, twenty pages maybe. What happens basically is an alternation of scenes—what's going on in the castle, then what's the situation with the miracle man, back and forth, and with every shift he gives the time, sort of 'there were now eleven hours until six o'clock,' that kind of thing. Morgenstern uses the device, mainly, because what he's really interested in, as always, is the satiric antiroyalty stuff and how stupid they were going through with all these old traditions, kissing the sacred ring of Great-grandfather So-and-So, etc.

There is some action stuff which I cut, which I never did anywhere else, and here's my logic: Inigo and Fezzik have to go through a certain amount of derring-do in order to come up with the proper ingredients for the resurrection pill, stuff like Inigo finding some frog dust while Fezzik is off after holocaust mud, this latter, for example, requiring, first, Fezzik's acquiring a holocaust cloak so he doesn't burn to death gathering the mud, etc. Well, it's my conviction that this is the same kind of thing as the Wizard of Oz sending Dorothy's friends to the wicked witch's castle; it's got the same 'feel,' if you know what I mean, and I didn't want to risk, when the book's building to climax, the reader's saying, 'Oh, this is just like the Oz books.' Here's the kicker, though: Morgenstern's Florinese version came before Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, so in spite of the fact that he was the originator, he comes out just the other way around. It would be nice if somebody, maybe a Ph.D. candidate on the loose, did a little something for Morgenstern's reputation, because, believe me, if being ignored is suffering, the guy has suffered.

The other reason I made the cut is this: you just know that the resurrection pill has got to work. You don't spend all this time with a nutty couple like Max and Valerie to have it fail. At least, a whiz like Morgenstern doesn't.

One last thing: Hiram, my editor, felt the Miracle Max section was too Jewish in sound, too contemporary. I really let him have it on that one; it's a very sore point with me, because, just to take one example, there was a line in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Butch said, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals,' and one of my genius producers said, 'That line's got to go; I don't put my name on this movie with that line in it,' and I said why and he said, 'They didn't talk like that then; it's anachronistic.' I remember explaining, 'Ben Franklin wore bifocals—Ty Cobb was batting champion of the American League when these guys were around—my mother was alive when these guys were alive and she wore bifocals.' We shook hands and ended enemies but the line stayed in the picture.

And so here the point is, if Max and Valerie sound Jewish, why shouldn't they? You think a guy named Simon Morgenstern was Irish Catholic? Funny thing—Morgenstern's folks were named Max and Valerie and his father was a doctor. Life imitating art, art imitating life; I really get those two confused, sort of like I can never remember if claret is Bordeaux wine or Burgundy. They both taste good is the only thing that really matters, I guess, and so does Morgenstern, and we'll pick it up again later, thirteen hours later, to be precise, four in the afternoon, two hours before the wedding.

"YOU MEAN, THAT'S it?" Inigo said, appalled.

"That's it," Max nodded proudly. He had not been up this long a stretch since the old days, and he felt terrific.

Valerie was so proud. "Beautiful," she said. She turned to Inigo then. "You sound so disappointed—what did you think a resurrection pill looked like?"

"Not like a lump of clay the size of a golf ball," Inigo answered.

(Me again, last time this chapter: no, that is not anachronistic either; there were golf balls in Scotland seven hundred years ago, and, not only that, remember Inigo had studied with MacPherson the Scot. As a matter of fact, everything Morgenstern wrote is historically accurate; read any decent book on Florinese history.)

"I USUALLY GIVE them a coating of chocolate at the last minute; it makes them look a lot better," Valerie said.

"It must be four o'clock," Max said then. "Better get the chocolate ready, so it'll have time to harden."

Valerie took the lump with her and started down the ladder to the kitchen. "You never did a better job; smile."

"It'll work without a hitch?" Inigo said.

Max nodded very firmly. But he did not smile. There was something in the back of his mind bothering him; he never forgot things, not important things, and he didn't forget this either.

He just didn't remember it in time....

AT 4:45 PRINCE Humperdinck summoned Yellin to his chambers. Yellin came immediately, though he dreaded what was, he knew, about to happen. As a matter of fact, Yellin already had his resignation written and in an envelope in his pocket. "Your Highness," Yellin began.

"Report," Prince Humperdinck said. He was dressed brilliantly in white, his wedding costume. He still looked like a mighty barrel, but brighter.

"All of your wishes have been carried out, Highness. Personally I have attended to each detail." He was very tired, Yellin was, and his nerves long past frayed.

"Specify," said the Prince. He was seventy-five minutes away from his first female murder, and he wondered if he could get his fingers to her throat before even the start of a scream. He had been practicing on giant sausages all the afternoon and had the movements down pretty pat, but then, giant sausages weren't necks and all the wishing in the world wouldn't make them so.