by Tom Sharpe
‘Twelve,’ said Verkramp emphatically, ‘I counted them.’
‘Twelve bloody great explosions in the middle of the night and you aren’t worried?’ said the Sergeant with astonishment. Luitenant Verkramp refused to be flustered.
‘I’ve been expecting this for some time,’ he said truthfully.
‘Expecting what?’
‘The sabotage movement has begun again,’ he said going downstairs to his office. Behind him Sergeant Breitenbach, still literally and metaphorically in the dark, tried to follow him. By the time he reached the Kommandant’s office, he found Verkramp checking a list of names by the light of an emergency lamp. It crossed the Sergeant’s mind that Verkramp was remarkably well prepared for the crisis that seemed to have caught the rest of the city unawares.
‘I want the following people detained at once,’ Verkramp told him.
‘Aren’t you going to check on what’s been going on first?’ Sergeant Breitenbach asked. ‘I mean you don’t even know for sure that those explosions were made by bombs.’
Luitenant Verkramp looked up sternly.
‘I’ve had enough experience of sabotage to know a bomb when I hear one,’ he said. Sergeant Breitenbach decided not to argue. Instead he studied the list of names Verkramp had handed him and was horrified by what he saw. If Verkramp were right and the city had been disrupted by a series of bomb attacks, the consequences to public life in Piemburg would be mild by comparison with the chaos that would ensue if the men on the list were arrested. Clergymen, councillors, bank managers, lawyers, even the Mayor himself appeared to be the object of Verkramp’s suspicions. Sergeant Breitenbach put the list down hurriedly. He didn’t want anything to do with it.
‘Don’t you think you’re being a bit hasty?’ he asked nervously.
Luitenant Verkramp clearly didn’t. ‘If I am right, and I am, the city has been subjected to a premeditated campaign of sabotage. These men are all well-known—’
‘You can say that again,’ muttered the Sergeant.
‘—opponents of the Government,’ continued the Acting Kommandant. ‘Many of them were Horticulturalists.’
‘Horticulturalists?’ asked the Sergeant who couldn’t see anything wrong with being a horticulturalist. He was one himself in a small way.
‘The Horticulturalists,’ Verkramp explained, ‘were a secret organization of wealthy farmers and businessmen who were planning to take Zululand out of the Union at the time of the Republic referendum. They were prepared to use force. Some were officers in the Piemburg Mounted Rifles and they were going to use weapons from the military arsenal.’
‘But that was ten years ago,’ Sergeant Breitenbach pointed out.
‘Men like that don’t change their opinions,’ said Verkramp sententiously. ‘Will you ever forgive the British for what they did to our women and children in the concentration camps?’
‘No,’ said the Sergeant, who hadn’t had any women or children in concentration camps in the Boer war but who knew the right answer.
‘Exactly,’ said Verkramp. ‘Well, these swine are no different and they’ll never forgive us for taking Zululand out of the British Empire. They hate us. Don’t you understand how the British hate us?’
‘Yes,’ said the Sergeant hastily. He could see that Verkramp was working himself up into a state again and he preferred to be out of the way when it came. ‘You’re probably right.’
‘Right?’ shouted Verkramp. ‘I’m always right.’
‘Yes,’ said the Sergeant even more hastily.
‘So what do they do, these Horticulturalists? Go underground for a time, then gang up with Communists and Liberalists to overthrow our glorious Afrikaner republic. These bomb attacks are the first sign that their campaign has started. Well, I’m not going to sit back and let them get away with it. I’ll have those bastards in prison and squeeze the truth out of them before they can do any real harm.’
Sergeant Breitenbach waited until the seizure had run its course before demurring once again.
‘Don’t you think it would be safer to tell Kommandant van Heerden first? Then he can carry the can if there is a balls-up.’
Luitenant Verkramp wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Half the trouble in this town is due to the way the old fool treats the English,’ he snapped. ‘He’s too bloody soft with them. Sometimes I think he prefers them to his own people.’
Sergeant Breitenbach said he didn’t know about that. All he knew was that the Kommandant’s grandfather had been shot by the British after the Battle of Paardeberg which was more than could be said for Verkramp’s. His grandfather had sold horses to the British army and had been practically a khaki Boer but the Sergeant was too discreet to mention the fact now. Instead he picked up the list again.
‘Where are we going to put them all?’ he asked. ‘The cells on the top floor are being used for your kaffirboetje cure and the ones in the basement are all full.’
‘Take them down to the prison,’ Verkramp told him, ‘and see that they’re kept in isolation. I don’t want them cooking up any stories.’
Half an hour later the homes of thirty-six of Piemburg’s most influential citizens had been raided by armed police, and angry frightened men had been hustled in their pyjamas into pick-up vans. One or two put up a desperate resistance in the mistaken belief that the Zulus had risen and had come to massacre them in their beds, a misunderstanding that arose from the total black-out into which Verkramp’s agents had plunged the city. Four policemen were wounded in these battles and a local coal merchant shot his wife to save her from being raped by the black hordes before the situation was clarified.
By dawn the arrests had all been made though one or two mistakes remained to be rectified. The man torn from the arms of the lady Mayoress turned out to be not the civic dignitary himself but a neighbour he had asked to help with his election. When the Mayor was finally apprehended he was under the impression that he was being arrested for corruption in high places. ‘This is disgraceful,’ he shouted as he was bundled into the pick-up van. ‘You have no right to pry into my private wife. I am your ewected representative,’ a protest that did nothing to effect his release but went some way to explain the presence of the neighbour in his wife’s bed.
In the morning after a few hours’ sleep Luitenant Verkramp and Sergeant Breitenbach toured the installations which had been destroyed by the saboteurs. Once again the Acting Kommandant’s grasp of the situation astonished Sergeant Brietenbach. Verkramp seemed to know exactly where to go without being told. As they surveyed the remains of the transformer on the Durban Road, the Sergeant asked him what he was going to do now.
‘Nothing,’ said Verkramp to his amazement. ‘In a few days time we’ll be in a position to arrest the whole Communist organization in Zululand.’
‘But what about all the people we arrested last night?’
‘They will be interrogated and the evidence they give will help to reveal their co-conspirators,’ Verkramp explained.
Sergeant Breitenbach shook his head in bewilderment.
‘I hope to hell you know what you’re doing,’ was all he said. They drove back via the prison where Verkramp gave instructions to the teams of Security Policemen who were to conduct the interrogation round the clock.
‘The usual routine,’ he told them. ‘Keep them standing up. No sleep. Rough them up a bit to start with. Explain they’ll be tried under the Terrorist Act and have to prove their innocence. No right to a lawyer. Can be detained indefinitely and incommunicado. Any questions?’
‘Any, sir?’ asked one of the men.
‘You heard me,’ snapped Verkramp. ‘I said, “Any questions?”’ The men looked at him dumbly and Verkramp dismissed them and they filed off to begin their arduous duties. Luitenant Verkramp went to see Governor Schnapps to apologize for the temporary inconvenience he was causing in the prison. When he returned to the wing in which the detainees were being interrogated Luitenant Verkramp found that his orders were being obeyed to the letter.
‘Who won Test Series in 1948?’ shouted Sergeant Scheepers at the manager of Barclays Bank.
‘I don’t know,’ squealed the manager who had been twice kicked in the scrotum for his failure to follow cricket.
Verkramp asked the Sergeant to come out into the corridor.
‘What do you want to know that for?’ he asked.
‘Seems a fairly easy question,’ said the Sergeant.
‘I suppose it does,’ said Verkramp. He went to the next cell where the Dean of Piemburg had avoided a similar fate by knowing the road distance between Johannesburg and Capetown, the age of the Prime Minister, and what the initials USA stood for.
‘You said “Any questions”,’ the Security man explained when Verkramp demanded the reason for the quiz game.
‘You dumb bastard.’ Verkramp yelled, ‘I said “Any questions?” not “Any questions.” What do I have to do? Spell it out for you?’
‘Yes sir,’ said the man. Verkramp called the teams together and briefed them more explicitly.
‘What we need is proof that these men have been conspiring to overthrow the government by force,’ he explained, and got the Security men to write it down. ‘Secondly that they have been actively inciting the blacks to rebel.’ The men wrote that down too. ‘Thirdly that they have been receiving money from overseas. Fourthly that they are all Communists or communist sympathizers. Is that quite clear?’
Sergeant Scheepers asked if he could tell the Mayor that one of the aldermen had said he was a cuckold.
‘Of course,’ Verkramp said. ‘Tell him that the Alderman is prepared to give evidence to that effect. Get them started giving evidence against one another and we’ll soon get to the root of this affair.’
The men went back to the cells with their list of questions and the interrogations began again. Having satisfied himself that his men were keeping to the point. Luitenant Verkramp returned to the police station to see if there were any messages from his secret agents. He was rather disappointed to find that none had arrived but he supposed it was too early to expect any concrete results.
Instead he decided to test the effectiveness of the aversion therapy on the volunteers on the top floor who were still screaming rhythmically. He sent for Sergeant Breitenbach and ordered him to bring a coon girl from the cells.
The Sergeant went away and returned with what he evidently thought was a suitable subject. She was fifty-eight if she was a day and hadn’t been a beauty at half her age. Luitenant Verkramp was horrified.
‘I said “Girl” not “Old bag”,’ he shouted. ‘Take her away and get a proper girl.’
Sergeant Breitenbach went back downstairs with the old woman wondering why it was that you called a black man of seventy or eighty a boy but you couldn’t call a woman of the same age a girl. It didn’t seem to make sense. In the end he found a very large black girl and told her to come up with him to the top floor. Ten minutes and eight konstables later, one of whom had a broken nose and another complained he couldn’t find his testicles, they managed to get the girl up to the top floor only to find that Verkramp was still not satisfied.
‘Do you really think that any sane man would find that attractive?’ he asked pointing to the unconscious and battered body that the konstables were trying to keep on its feet and off theirs. ‘What I want is a nice kaffir girl that any man would find attractive.’
‘Well, you go and get one then,’ Sergeant Breitenbach told him. ‘You just go down to the cells and tell a nice attractive black girl that the policemen on the top floor want her and see what happens.’
‘The trouble with you, Sergeant,’ Verkramp said as they went down for the third time, ‘is that you don’t understand psychology. If you want people to do things for you, you mustn’t frighten them. That’s particularly true with blacks. You must use persuasion.’ He stopped outside a cell door. The Sergeant unlocked it and the large black girl was pitched inside. Verkramp stepped over her body and looked at the women cringing against the wall.
‘Now then, there’s no need to be frightened,’ he told them. ‘Which of you girls would like to come upstairs and see some pictures? They are pretty pictures.’ There was no great rush of volunteers. Verkramp tried again.
‘No one is going to hurt you. You needn’t be afraid.’
There was still no response apart from a moan from the girl on the floor. Verkramp’s sickly smile faded.
‘Grab that bitch,’ he yelled at the konstabels and the next moment a thin black girl was being hustled upstairs.
‘You see what I mean about psychology,’ Luitenant Verkramp said to the Sergeant as they followed her up. Sergeant Breitenbach still had his doubts.
‘I notice you didn’t pick a big one,’ he said.
On the top floor the girl had her clothes stripped off her by several willing konstabels whom Verkramp put down on his list for treatment and was then paraded before the volunteers in the nude. Luitenant Verkramp was delighted by their lack of positive reaction.
‘Not an erection from one of them,’ he said. ‘That’s scientific proof that the treatment works.’
Sergeant Breitenbach was, as usual, more sceptical.
‘They haven’t had any sleep for two days,’ he said. ‘If you brought Marilyn Monroe in here in the raw, I don’t suppose you’d get much response.’
Verkramp looked at him disapprovingly. ‘Peeping Thomas,’ he said.
‘I don’t see what that has to do with it,’ said the Sergeant. ‘All I’m saying is that if you want to be really scientific you should bring a white girl up and try her out on them.’ Luitenant Verkramp was furious.
‘What a disgusting suggestion,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t dream of subjecting a white girl to such a revolting ordeal.’
He gave orders for the treatment to be continued for at least another two days.
‘Two more days of this and I’ll be dead,’ moaned one of the volunteers.
‘Better dead than a black in your bed,’ said Verkramp and went back to his office to draw up the plans for the mass treatment of the other five hundred and ninety men under his temporary command.
*
At Florian’s café Verkramp’s secret agents were making remarkable headway in their search for members of the sabotage movement. After years of frustration in which they had mingled in liberal circles but had been unable to find anyone remotely connected with the Communist party or prepared to admit that they approved of violence, they had suddenly met quite a number. 745396 had discovered 628461 who seemed to know something about the explosion at the telephone exchange and 628461 had gained the very definite impression that 745396 wasn’t unconnected with the destruction of the transformer on the Durban Road. Likewise 885974 had bumped into 378550 at the University Canteen and was sounding him out about his part in the disappearance of the radio mast, while hinting that he could tell 378550 something about the bomb that had destroyed the railway bridge. All over Piemburg Verkramp’s agents had something to report in the way of progress and busied themselves encoding messages and moving digs as instructed. By the following day the conviction that each agent held that he was onto something big grew when 745396 and 628461, who had arranged to meet at the University Canteen, found a sympathetic audience in 885974 and 378550, who had been so successful there the previous day they had decided to return. As the coalescence of conspirators continued Verkramp was kept busy trying to decode the messages. This complex process was made even more difficult because he had no idea on which day the message had been sent. 378550’s message had been deposited at the foot of a tree in the park which was the correct drop for Sunday but after working at it for two hours using the code for that day Verkramp had managed to turn ‘hdfpkymwrqazxtivbnkon’ which was designed to be difficult to understand into ‘car dog wormsel sag infrequent banal out plunge crate’, which wasn’t. He tried Saturday’s code and got ‘dahlia chrysanthemum fertilizer decorative foxglove dwarf autumn bloom shady’. Cursing himself for the limited vocabulary provided by p
age 33 of the Piemburg Bulb Catalogue which he had chosen as the codebook for Saturday on account of its easy availability, Verkramp turned wearily to Friday’s code-book and finally came up with the deciphered message that Agent 378550 had carried out instructions and was proceeding to new lodgings. After six hours hard labour Verkramp felt his efforts merited something more interesting than that. He tried 885974’s message and was glad to find it came out correctly first time and contained the reassuring information that the agent had made contact with several suspected saboteurs but was having difficulty in reaching the drop as he was being followed.
885974’s experience was not confined to him alone. In their attempts to find where the other saboteurs lived Verkramp’s secret agents were tailing one another all over Piemburg or being tailed. As a result they were covering an enormous mileage every day and were too tired when they finally got home to sit down and encode the messages he expected. Then again they had to move lodgings every day on his orders and this required finding new ones so that all in all the sense of disorientation already induced by the multiple identities their work demanded became more pronounced as the days went by. By Monday 628461 wasn’t sure who he was or where he lived or even what day of the week it was. He was even more uncertain where 745396 lived. Having tailed him successfully for fifteen miles up and down the side-streets of Piemburg he wasn’t altogether surprised when 745396 gave up the attempt to shake him off and returned to a lodging house on Bishoff Avenue only to find that he had left there two days before. In the end he slept on a bench in the park and 628461, who had several large blisters from all this walking, turned to go back to his digs when he became aware that someone was following him. He stepped up his limp and the footsteps behind him did the same. 628461 gave up the struggle. He no longer cared if he was followed home. ‘I’ll move in the morning anyway,’ he decided and climbed the stairs to his room in the Lansdowne Boarding House. Behind him 378550 went back to his digs and spent the night encoding a message for Luitenant Verkramp giving the address of a suspected saboteur. Since he started it at ten-thirty on Monday and finished it at two a.m. on Tuesday Verkramp had even more difficulty than usual making out what it meant. According to Monday’s codebook it read ‘Suggest raid on infestation wood but pollute in the’, while Tuesday’s ran ‘Chariot Pharoah withal Lansdowne Boarding House for Frederick Smith.’ By the time Luitenant Verkramp had decided that there was no sense in ‘Chariot Pharoah withal infestation wood but pollute in the’ there was no point in raiding the Lansdowne Boarding House, Frederick Smith had registered at the YMCA as Piet Retief.