Let me tell you a story,” Caravaggio says to Hana. “There was a Hungarian named Almásy, who worked for the Germans during the war. He flew a bit with the Afrika Korps, but he was more valuable than that. In the 1930s he had been one of the great desert explorers. He knew every water hole and had helped map the Sand Sea. He knew all about the desert. He knew all about dialects. Does this sound familiar? Between the two wars he was always on expeditions out of Cairo. One was to search for Zerzura—the lost oasis. Then when war broke out he joined the Germans. In 1941 he became a guide for spies, taking them across the desert into Cairo. What I want to tell you is, I think the English patient is not English.”
“Of course he is, what about all those flower beds in Gloucestershire?”
“Precisely. It’s all a perfect background. Two nights ago, when we were trying to name the dog. Remember?”
“Yes.”
“What were his suggestions?”
“He was strange that night.”
“He was very strange, because I gave him an extra dose of morphine. Do you remember the names? He put out about eight names. Five of them were obvious jokes. Then three names. Cicero. Zerzura. Delilah.”
“So?”
“ ‘Cicero’ was a code name for a spy. The British unearthed him. A double then triple agent. He got away. ‘Zerzura’ is more complicated.”
“I know about Zerzura. He’s talked. about it. He also talks about gardens.”
“But it is mostly the desert now. The English garden is wearing thin. He’s dying. I think you have the spy-helper Almásy upstairs.”
They sit on the old cane hampers of the linen room looking at each other. Caravaggio shrugs. “It’s possible.”
“I think he is an Englishman,” she says, sucking in her cheeks as she always does when she is thinking or considering something about herself.
“I know you love the man, but he’s not an Englishman. In the early part of the war I was working in Cairo—the Tripoli Axis. Rommel’s Rebecca spy—”
“What do you mean, ‘Rebecca spy’?”
“In 1942 the Germans sent a spy called Eppler into Cairo before the battle of El Alamein. He used a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca as a code book to send messages back to Rommel on troop movements. Listen, the book became bedside reading with British Intelligence. Even I read it.”
“You read a book?”
“Thank you. The man who guided Eppler through the desert into Cairo on Rommel’s personal orders—from Tripoli all the way to Cairo—was Count Ladislaus de Almásy. This was a stretch of desert that, it was assumed, no one could cross.
“Between the wars Almásy had English friends. Great explorers. But when war broke out he went with the Germans. Rommel asked him to take Eppler across the desert into Cairo because it would have been too obvious by plane or parachute. He crossed the desert with the guy and delivered him to the Nile delta.”
“You know a lot about this.”
“I was based in Cairo. We were tracking them. From Gialo he led a company of eight men into the desert. They had to keep digging the trucks out of the sand hills. He aimed them towards Uweinat and its granite plateau so they could get water, take shelter in the caves. It was a halfway point. In the 1930s he had discovered caves with rock paintings there. But the plateau was crawling with Allies and he couldn’t use the wells there. He struck out into the sand desert again. They raided British petrol dumps to fill up their tanks. In the Kharga Oasis they switched into British uniforms and hung British army number plates on their vehicles. When they were spotted from the air they hid in the wadis for as long as three days, completely still. Baking to death in the sand.
“It took them three weeks to reach Cairo. Almásy shook hands with Eppler and left him. This is where we lost him. He turned and went back into the desert alone. We think he crossed it again, back towards Tripoli. But that was the last time he was ever seen. The British picked up Eppler eventually and used the Rebecca code to feed false information to Rommel about El Alamein.”
“I still don’t believe it, David.”
“The man who helped catch Eppler in Cairo was named Sansom.”
“Delilah.”
“Exactly.”
“Maybe he’s Sansom.”
“I thought that at first. He was very like Almásy. A desert lover as well. He had spent his childhood in the Levant and knew the Bedouin. But the thing about Almásy was, he could fly. We are talking about someone who crashed in a plane. Here is this man, burned beyond recognition, who somehow ends up in the arms of the English at Pisa. Also, he can get away with sounding English. Almásy went to school in England. In Cairo he was referred to as the English spy.”
She sat on the hamper watching Caravaggio. She said, “I think we should leave him be. It doesn’t matter what side he was on, does it?”
Caravaggio said, “I’d like to talk with him some more. With more morphine in him. Talking it out. Both of us. Do you understand? To see where it will all go. Delilah. Zerzura. You will have to give him the altered shot.”
“No, David. You’re too obsessed. It doesn’t matter who he is. The war’s over.”
“I will then. I’ll cook up a Brompton cocktail. Morphine and alcohol. They invented it at Brompton Hospital in London for their cancer patients. Don’t worry, it won’t kill him. It absorbs fast into the body. I can put it together with what we’ve got. Give him a drink of it. Then put him back on straight morphine.”
She watched him sitting on the hamper, clear-eyed, smiling. During the last stages of the war Caravaggio had become one of the numerous morphia thieves. He had sniffed out her medical supplies within hours of his arrival. The small tubes of morphine were now a source for him. Like toothpaste tubes for dolls, she had thought when she first saw them, finding them utterly quaint. Caravaggio carried two or three in his pocket all day long, slipping the fluid into his flesh. She had stumbled on him once vomiting from its excess, crouched and shaking in one of the dark corners of the villa, looking up and hardly recognizing her. She had tried speaking with him and he had stared back. He had found the metal supply box, torn it open with God knows what strength. Once when the sapper cut open the palm of his hand on an iron gate, Caravaggio broke the glass tip off with his teeth, sucked and spat the morphine onto the brown hand before Kip even knew what it was. Kip pushing him away, glaring in anger.
“Leave him alone. He’s my patient.”
“I won’t damage him. The morphine and alcohol will take away the pain.”