“It took them three weeks to reach Cairo. Almasy 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 Almasy. A desert lover as well. He had spent his childhood in the Levant and knew the Bedouin. But the thing about Almasy 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. Almasy 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.”
(3 CC’S BROMPTON COCKTAIL. 3:00 P.M.)
Caravaggio slips the book out of the man’s hands.
“When you crashed in the desert—where were you flying from?”
“I was leaving the Gilf Kebir. I had gone there to collect someone. In late August. Nineteen forty-two.”
“During the war? Everyone must have left by then.”
“Yes. There were just armies.”
“The Gilf Kebir.”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“Give me the Kipling book … here.”
On the frontispiece of
He traces his black hand along the Numi River till it enters the sea at 23°30’ latitude. He continues sliding his finger seven inches west, off the page, onto his chest; he touches his rib.
“Here. The Gilf Kebir, just north of the Tropic of Cancer. On the Egyptian-Libyan border.”
What happened in 1942?
I had made the journey to Cairo and was returning from there. I was slipping between the enemy, remembering old maps, hitting the pre-war caches of petrol and water, driving towards Uweinat. It was easier now that I was alone. Miles from the Gilf Kebir, the truck exploded and I capsized, rolling automatically into the sand, not wanting a spark to touch me. In the desert one is always frightened of fire.
The truck exploded, probably sabotaged. There were spies among the Bedouin, whose caravans continued to drift like cities, carrying spice, rooms, government advisors wherever they went. At any given moment among the Bedouin in those days of the war, there were Englishmen as well as Germans.
Leaving the truck, I started walking towards Uweinat, where I knew there was a buried plane.
Wait. What do you mean, a buried plane?
Madox had an old plane in the early days, which he had shaved down to the essentials—the only “extra” was the closed bubble of cockpit, crucial for desert flights. During our times in the desert he had taught me to fly, the two of us walking around the guy-roped creature theorizing on how it hung or veered in the wind.
When Clifton’s plane—
