Indecent Exposure

by Tom Sharpe

  To Verkramp the alternatives he was now facing were if anything more shocking than exploding ostriches and camp konstabels. He lay in bed and wondered what to do. If he refused to admit that he was responsible for all the bombings and violence in the city, the doctor would use the truth drug to get it out of him and he would have forfeited her good-will into the bargain. If he admitted it openly, he would escape the legal consequences of his zeal only to be led to the altar. There seemed to be little choice. He swallowed nervously, stared round the room for the last uncommitted time and asked for a glass of water.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he said finally.

  Dr von Blimenstein smiled sweetly.

  ‘Of course, I will, darling. Of course I will,’ and a moment later Verkramp was in her arms and the doctor’s mouth was pressed closely over his lips. Verkramp shut his eyes and considered a lifetime of Dr von Blimenstein. It was, he supposed, preferable to being hanged.

  *

  When Kommandant van Heerden arrived at Fort Rapier to see the Luitenant it was not surprising that he found his way strewn with extraordinary obstacles. In the first place he found the clerk in the Enquiry Desk at Admissions decidedly unhelpful. The fact that the clerk was a catatonic schizophrenic chosen by Dr von Blimenstein for his general immobility to help out at a time of acute staff shortage led to a sharp rise in the Kommandant’s blood pressure.

  ‘I demand to see Luitenant Verkramp,’ he shouted at the motionless catatonic and was about to resort to violence when a tall man with an exceedingly pale face interrupted.

  ‘I think he’s in Ward C,’ the man told him. The Kommandant thanked him and went to Ward C only to find it was filled with manic-depressive women. He returned to Admissions and after another one-sided altercation with the catatonic clerk was told by the tall thin man who happened to be passing through again that Verkramp was definitely in Ward H. The Kommandant went to Ward H and while unable to diagnose what the patients there were suffering from was grateful to note that Verkramp wasn’t. He went back to admissions in a foul temper and met the thin tall man in the corridor.

  ‘Not there?’ the man enquired. ‘Then he’s certainly in Ward E.’

  ‘Make up your mind,’ shouted the Kommandant angrily. ‘First you say he’s in Ward C, then in Ward H and now Ward E.’

  ‘Interesting point you’ve just raised,’ said the man.

  ‘What point?’ asked the Kommandant.

  ‘About making up your mind,’ said the man. ‘It presupposes in the first place that there is a distinction between the mind and the brain. Now if you had said “Make up your brain” the implications would have been quite different.’

  ‘Listen,’ said the Kommandant, ‘I’ve come here to see Luitenant Verkramp not to swop logic with you.’ He went off down the corridor again in search of Ward E only to learn that it was in the Bantu section which made it unlikely Verkramp was in it whatever he was suffering from. The Kommandant went back to Admissions swearing to murder the tall man if he could find him. Instead he found himself confronted by Dr von Blimenstein who pointed out acidly that he was in a hospital and not in a police station and would he kindly behave accordingly. Somewhat subdued by this evidence of authority the Kommandant followed her into her office.

  ‘Now then, what is it you want?’ she asked seating herself behind her desk and eyeing him coldly.

  ‘I want to visit Luitenant Verkramp?’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Are you parent, relative or guardian?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘I’m a police officer investigating a crime,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Then you have a warrant? I should like to see it?’

  The Kommandant said he hadn’t a warrant. ‘I am Kommandant of Police in Piemburg and Verkramp is under my command. I don’t need a warrant to visit him wherever he is.’

  Dr von Blimenstein smiled patronizingly.

  ‘You obviously don’t understand hospital rules,’ she said. ‘We have to be very careful who visits our patients. We can’t have them being disturbed by casual acquaintances or by being asked questions about their work. After all, Balthazar’s problems largely stem from overwork and I’m afraid I hold you responsible.’

  The Kommandant was so astonished by hearing Verkramp called Balthazar that he couldn’t think of a suitable reply.

  ‘Now, if you could let me have some idea of the sort of questions you wish to put to him. I might be able to assist you,’ continued the doctor, conscious of the advantage she had already gained.

  The Kommandant could think of a great many questions he would like to put to the Luitenant but he thought it wiser not to mention them now. He explained that he simply wanted to find out if Verkramp could shed any light on the recent series of bombings.

  ‘I see,’ Dr von Blimenstein said. ‘Now if I understand you rightly, you are quite satisfied with the way the Luitenant handled the situation in your absence?’

  Kommandant van Heerden decided that a policy of appeasement was the only one likely to persuade the doctor to allow him to interview Verkramp.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Luitenant Verkramp did everything he could to put a stop to the trouble.’

  ‘Good,’ said Dr von Blimenstein encouragingly, ‘I’m glad to hear you say that. You see it’s important that the patient shouldn’t be made to feel in any way guilty. Balthazar’s problems are largely the result of a longstanding sense of guilt and inadequacy. We don’t want to intensify those feelings now, do we?’

  ‘No,’ said the Kommandant who could well believe that Verkramp’s problems had to do with guilt.

  ‘I take it, then, that you are absolutely satisfied with his work and feel that he has handled the situation with skill and an exceptional degree of conscientiousness. Is that correct?’

  ‘Definitely,’ said the Kommandant, ‘he couldn’t have done better if he had tried.’

  ‘In that case I think it is quite all right for you to see him.’ Dr von Blimenstein said and switched off the portable tape recorder on her desk. She got up and went down the passage followed by the Kommandant who was beginning to feel that he had in some subtle way been outmanoeuvred. After climbing several flights of stairs they came to yet another corridor. ‘If you’ll just wait here,’ said the doctor, ‘I’ll go and tell him that you want to see him,’ and leaving the Kommandant in a small waiting-room she went off to Verkramp’s private room.

  ‘We’ve got a visitor,’ she announced gaily as Verkramp cringed in his bed.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked weakly.

  ‘Just an old friend,’ she said. ‘He just wants to ask you a few questions. Kommandant van Heerden.’

  Verkramp assumed a new and dreadful pallor.

  ‘Now there’s no need to worry,’ Dr von Blimenstein said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and taking his hand. ‘You don’t have to answer any questions unless you want to.’

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ said Verkramp emphatically.

  ‘Then you shan’t,’ she said, extracting a bottle from her pocket and a lump of sugar.

  ‘What’s that?’ Verkramp asked nervously.

  ‘Something to help you not to answer any questions, my darling,’ said the doctor and popped the lump of sugar into his mouth. Verkramp chewed it up and lay back.

  Ten minutes later the Kommandant who was trying to keep his temper at the long wait by reading a magazine about motor cars was horrified by the sound of screams coming from the corridor. It sounded as though one of the patients was enduring the torments of hell.

  Dr von Blimenstein came into the room. ‘He’s ready to see you now,’ she said, ‘but I want to warn you that he’s to be handled gently. This is one of his good days and we don’t want to upset him do we?’

  ‘No,’ said the Kommandant trying to make himself heard above the demented shrieks. The doctor unlocked a door and the Kommandant peered very nervously inside. What he saw sent him hurriedly back into the corridor.

  ‘No need to be alarmed,’ said the doctor and pushed him
into the room. ‘Just put your questions to him gently and don’t excite him.’ She locked the door behind him and the Kommandant found himself alone in a small room with a screaming scurrying creature that had when the Kommandant could catch a glimpse of its face some of the features of Luitenant Verkramp. The thin nose, the fierce eyes and the angular shape were those of the Kommandant’s second-in-command but there the resemblance ended. Verkramp didn’t scream like that, in fact the Kommandant couldn’t think what did. Verkramp didn’t slobber like that, Verkramp didn’t scurry side-ways like that, and above all Verkramp didn’t cling to the window bars like that.

  As the Kommandant pressed himself terrified into a corner by the door he knew that he had made a wasted trip. Whatever else the day had taught him, one thing was quite sure: Luitenant Verkramp’s insanity was unquestionable.

  ‘Ugh, ugh, snow man balloon fill up baboon,’ shrieked Verkramp and hurled himself from the window bars and disappeared under the bed still shrieking only to reappear precipitously scrabbling for the Kommandant’s legs. The Kommandant kicked him off and Verkramp shot across the room and up the window bars. ‘Let me out of here,’ yelled the Kommandant and found himself beating on the door with a dementia that almost equalled that of Verkramp. An eye regarded him bleakly through the spy hole in the door.

  ‘You’re quite sure you’ve asked him all the questions you want to?’ Dr von Blimenstein asked.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ shouted the Kommandant desperately.

  ‘And there’s no question of Balthazar being held responsible for what has happened?’

  ‘Responsible?’ screamed the Kommandant. ‘Of course he’s not responsible.’ It seemed a totally unnecessary question to ask.

  Dr von Blimenstein unlocked the door and the Kommandant staggered into the corridor. Behind him Verkramp was still gibbering from the window, his eyes alight with an intensity the Kommandant had no doubt was a sign of incurable insanity.

  ‘One of his good days,’ said the doctor, locking the door and leading the way back to her office.

  ‘What did you say was the matter with him?’ the Kommandant asked wondering what Verkramp’s bad days were like.

  ‘Mild depression brought on by overwork.’

  ‘Good Heavens,’ said the Kommandant, ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was mild.’

  ‘Ah but then you’ve had no experience of mental illness,’ said the doctor. ‘You judge these things from a lay position.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said the Kommandant. ‘Do you think he’ll ever recover?’

  ‘Positive,’ said the doctor. ‘He’ll be as right as rain in a few days time.’

  Kommandant van Heerden deferred to her professional opinion and with a politeness that sprang from the conviction that she had a hopeless case on her hands thanked her for her help.

  ‘If there’s anything I can do at any time,’ she told him, ‘don’t hesitate to call on me.’

  With a silent prayer that he would never have to, the Kommandant left the hospital. In his room Luitenant Verkramp continued his trip. It was the first time he’d taken LSD.

  13

  If Kommandant van Heerden’s visit to Fort Rapier Mental Hospital had given him a new and terrible insight into the irrational depths of the human psyche, his next appointment did nothing to remove the impression that everyone in Piemburg had changed for the worse in his absence. Certainly the thirty-six men who stumbled from their cells to receive the Kommandant’s profound apologies and expressions of regret were no longer the upstanding and prominent public figures of a fortnight before. The Mayor, whom the Kommandant had decided to see first, couldn’t reciprocate the process. His eyes were swollen and black as a result, the Security Sergeant told the Kommandant, of the suspect’s having banged himself against the door knob of his cell. Since the cells weren’t equipped with door knobs it didn’t seem a likely explanation. The rest of the Mayor wasn’t in much better shape. He had been kept standing for eight days with a bag over his head and hadn’t been allowed to perform his private functions let alone his public ones in the manner to which his office entitled him. As a result he was distinctly soiled and suffering from the delusion that he was presiding at a Mayoral banquet.

  ‘This has been a most unfortunate incident,’ the Kommandant began, holding a handkerchief to his nose.

  ‘I am privileged to be here today in this august assembly,’ mumbled the Mayor.

  ‘I would like to proffer my …’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Most sincere congratulations on …’ the Mayor interrupted.

  ‘For this unwarranted action,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘It is not all of us who have the honour …’

  ‘In keeping you under lock and key.’

  ‘Serve the public to the best …’

  ‘Won’t happen again.’

  ‘Look forward to …’

  ‘Oh bugger me,’ said the Kommandant who had lost track of the conversation. In the end, after being helped by three warders to sign a statement he couldn’t even see, let alone read, to say that he had no complaints to make about the way he had been treated and thanking the police for their protection, the Mayor was carried out to a waiting ambulance and allowed to go home.

  Several of the other detainees were less amenable to reason and one or two harboured the illusion that the Kommandant was merely a new and more sinister interrogator.

  ‘I know what you want me to say,’ the manager of Barclays Bank declared when he saw the Kommandant. ‘All right I’ll admit it. I am a member of the Anglican Church and a Communist.’

  The Kommandant looked at the manager in some confusion. The manager’s face was badly bruised and his ankles terribly swollen from standing so long.

  ‘Are you really?’ said the Kommandant doubtfully.

  ‘No,’ said the manager encouraged by this dubious note. ‘I’m not. I hardly ever go to Church. Only when my wife insists and she’s a Baptist.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Kommandant, ‘but you are a Communist.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ wailed the manager, ‘would I be a bank manager if I was a Communist?’

  The Kommandant pushed the form indemnifying the police across the desk. ‘I don’t give a stuff what you are so long as you sign this form,’ he said irritably. ‘If you refuse I’m going to charge you with sabotage.’

  ‘Sabotage,’ croaked the manager in terror, ‘but I haven’t committed sabotage.’

  ‘By your own admission you’ve peed in the Hluwe Dam and that constitutes sabotage in terms of the General Laws Amendment Act of 1962.’

  ‘Peeing in a dam?’

  ‘Polluting the public water supply. Carries the death penalty.’ The manager signed the form and was helped out.

  By the time the Kommandant had dealt to his own satisfaction with the detainees, it was already late at night and he was still faced with the intractable problem of the wave of bombings. True there had been no explosions since the ostriches had destroyed themselves and so many public buildings but public confidence would only be restored when the saboteurs were caught. The Kommandant left the prison and told Els to drive him back to the police station.

  As he mounted the steps and passed the Duty desk where a konstabel was soliciting a man who had come in to complain that his car had been stolen, the Kommandant realized the enormity of the task before him. With a demoralized force of policemen he had to defend the city against saboteurs so well organized that they used police high-explosive for their bombings and who, apart from one dead man in the toilet of the Majestic Cinema, were wholly unidentifiable. It was a task that would have defeated a lesser man and Kommandant van Heerden had no illusions. He was a lesser man.

  He ordered a mixed grill from a Greek café and sent for Sergeant Breitenbach.

  ‘These secret agents that Verkramp was always talking about,’ he said, ‘do you know anything about them?’

  ‘I think you’ll find he lost touch with them,’ said the Sergeant.

  ‘Not t
he only thing he’s lost touch with, I can tell you,’ said the Kommandant with feeling. Verkramp’s terrible antics were still fresh in his memory. ‘Does anyone else know who they are?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘There must be records,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Burnt, sir.’

  ‘Burnt? Who burnt them?’

  ‘Verkramp did when he went mad, sir.’

  ‘What, the whole bloody lot?’

  Sergeant Breitenbach nodded. ‘He had a file called Operation Red Rout. I never saw what was in it but I know he burnt it the night the ostriches went off. They affected him badly, sir, those ostriches. He was a changed man after one exploded in the street out there.’

  ‘Yes, well, that doesn’t help us very much,’ said the Kommandant, as he finished his mixed grill and wiped his mouth. ‘You know,’ he continued leaning back in his chair, ‘there’s been something puzzling me for a long time and that is, why did the Communists bug my house? Verkramp seemed to think they wanted to get something on me. Didn’t seem likely. I don’t do anything.’

  ‘No sir,’ said the Sergeant. He looked round the room rather nervously. ‘Do you think Luitenant Verkramp will ever recover, sir?’ he asked.

  Kommandant van Heerden had no doubts on that score.

  ‘Not a celluloid rat’s chance in hell,’ he said cheerfully. Sergeant Breitenbach looked relieved.

  ‘In that case, I think you ought to know that those microphones weren’t placed there by Communists, sir.’ He paused to allow the implications of the remark to sink in.

  ‘You mean …’ said the Kommandant turning an alarming colour.

  ‘Verkramp, sir,’ said the Sergeant hurriedly.

  ‘You mean that bastard bugged my house?’ yelled the Kommandant. Sergeant Breitenbach nodded dumbly, and waited for the Kommandant’s outburst to exhaust itself.

  ‘He said he had orders from BOSS to do it, sir,’ he said when the Kommandant calmed down a little.

  ‘BOSS?’ said the Kommandant. ‘Orders from BOSS?’ A new note of alarm in his voice.