Indecent Exposure

by Tom Sharpe

  As he laid her on her bed Mrs Heathcote-Kilkoon smiled in her sleep. ‘Not now, darling,’ she murmured, evidently dreaming. ‘Not now. Tomorrow.’

  The Kommandant tiptoed from the room and went to thank his host for a lovely evening. There was no sign of the Colonel in the dining-room where the Dornford Yates Club lay inertly on or under the table. Only Major Bloxham showed any signs of activity and these were such as to prevent any conversation.

  ‘Totsiens,’ said the Kommandant and was rewarded for his Afrikaans farewell by a fresh eructation from the Major. As the Kommandant glanced round the room he noticed a movement under the table. Someone was evidently trying to revive La Marquise though why this should require the removal of her trousers the Kommandant couldn’t imagine. Lifting the table cloth he peered underneath. A face peered back at him. The Kommandant suddenly felt unwell. ‘I’ve had too much,’ he thought recalling what he had heard about DTS and dropping the cloth hurriedly he rushed from the room. In the darkness of the garden the click of the cicadas was joined erratically by the sound of the Colonel’s secateurs but Kommandant van Heerden had no ear for them. His mind was on the two eyes that had peered back at him from beneath the table cloth – two beady eyes and a horrid face and the face was the face of Els. But Konstabel Els was dead. ‘I’ll be seeing pink elephants next,’ he thought in horror as he got into his car and drove dangerously back to the Spa where presently he was trying to purge his system by drinking the filthy water in his room.

  10

  Kommandant van Heerden was not alone in suffering from the illusion that he was having hallucinations. In Piemburg Luitenant Verkramp’s efforts to extirpate subversive elements in the body politic were resulting in the appearance of a new and bizarre outbreak of sabotage, this time in the streets of the city. Once again the violence had its origins in the devious nature of the Security chief’s line of communication with his agents.

  628461’s ‘drop’ for Thursday was in the Bird Sanctuary. To be precise it was in a garbage can outside the ostrich enclosure, a convenient spot from everybody’s point of view because it was a perfectly logical place to drop things into, and just the sort of place for a Security cop disguised as a hobo to get things out of. Every Thursday morning 628461 sauntered through the Bird Sanctuary, bought an ice cream from the vendor and wrapped his message in sticky silver paper and deposited it in the garbage can while ostensibly observing the habits of the ostriches. Every Thursday afternoon Security Konstabel van Rooyen, dressed authentically in rags and clutching an empty sherry bottle, arrived at the Bird Sanctuary and peered hopefully into the garbage can only to find it empty. The fact that the message had been deposited and then removed by an intermediary never occurred to anyone. 628461 didn’t know that Konstabel van Rooyen hadn’t collected his message and Konstabel van Rooyen had no idea that agent 628461 even existed. All he knew was that Luitenant Verkramp had told him to collect sticky pieces of icecream paper from the bin and there weren’t any.

  On the Thursday following the Kommandant’s departure, 628461 coded an important message informing Verkramp that he had persuaded the other saboteurs to act in concert for once, with a view to facilitating their arrest while on a job for which they could all be hanged. He had suggested the destruction of the Hluwe Dam which supplied water for all of Piemburg and half Zululand, and, since no one could blow a dam by himself, he had urged that they all take part. Much to his surprise all eleven seconded his proposal and went home to code messages to Verkramp warning him to have his men at the dam on Friday night. It was with a sense of considerable relief that he was finally going to get some sleep that 628461 walked to the Bird Sanctuary on Thursday morning to deposit his message. It was with genuine alarm that he observed 378550 following him and with positive consternation became aware as he was buying his ice cream that 885974 was watching him from the bushes on the other side. 628461 ate his ice cream outside the hoopoe cage to avoid drawing attention to the garbage can by the ostrich enclosure. He ate a second ice cream half an hour later staring wearily at the peacocks. Finally after an hour he bought a third Eskimo Pie and walked casually over to the ostriches. Behind him 378550 and 885974 watched his movements with intense curiosity. So did the ostriches. 628461 finished his Eskimo Pie and dropped the silver paper in the garbage can and was just about to leave when he became aware that all his surreptitous efforts had been in vain. With an avidity that came from their having been kept waiting for an hour the ostriches rushed to the fence and poked their heads into the garbage can and one lucky bird swallowed the icecream wrapper. 628461 forgot himself.

  ‘Damnation and fuck,’ he said. ‘They’ve got it. The bloody things’ll eat anything.’

  ‘Got what?’ asked 378550 who thought that he was being addressed and was glad of the chance to drop his role as shadow.

  628461 pulled himself together and looked at 378550 suspiciously.

  ‘You said “They’ve got it”,’ 378550 repeated.

  628461 tried to extricate himself from the situation. ‘I said, “I’ve got it”,’ he explained. ‘“I’ve got it. They’ll eat anything.”’

  378550 was still puzzled. ‘I still don’t see it,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said 628461 desperately trying to explain what the omnivorousness of ostriches had to do with his devotion to the cause of world Communism, ‘I was just thinking that we could get them to eat gelly and let them loose and they’d blow up all over the place.’

  378550 looked at him with admiration. ‘That’s brilliant,’ he said. ‘Absolutely brilliant.’

  ‘Of course,’ 628461 told him, ‘we’d have to put the explosive in something watertight first. Get them to swallow it. Fix a fuse and bingo, you’ve got the perfect sabotage weapon.’

  885974 who didn’t want to be left out of things in the bushes came over and joined them.

  ‘French letters,’ he suggested when the scheme was put to him. ‘Put the gelignite in French letters and tie the ends, that’d keep it watertight.’

  An hour later in Florian’s café they were discussing the plan with the rest of the saboteurs. 745396 objected on the grounds that ostriches might eat anything but he doubted if even they would be foolish enough to swallow a contraceptive filled with gelignite.

  ‘We’ll try it out this afternoon,’ said 628461 who felt that 745396 was somehow impugning his loyalty to Marxist Leninism and the motion was put to the vote. Only 745396 still objected and he was voted down.

  While the rest of the group spent the lunch hour coding messages to Verkramp to warn him that the Hluwe Dam project was cancelled and that he might expect an onslaught of detonating ostriches, 885974 who had thought of French letters in the first place, was deputed to purchase twelve dozen of the best.

  ‘Get Crêpe de Chine,’ said 378550, who had had an unfortunate experience with another brand, ‘they’re guaranteed.’

  885974 went into a large chemist’s on Market Street and asked the young man behind the photographic counter for twelve dozen Crêpe de Chine.

  ‘Crêpe de Chine?’ asked the assistant, who was obviously new to the job. ‘We don’t sell Crêpe de Chine. You need a haberdashers’ for that. This is a chemist shop.’

  885974 who was already embarrassed by the quantity he had to ask for turned very red.

  ‘I know that,’ he muttered. ‘You know what I mean. In packets of three.’

  The assistant shook his head. ‘They sell it in yards,’ he said, ‘but I’ll ask if we have it,’ and before 885974 could stop him had shouted across the shop to a girl who was serving some customers at the counter there.

  ‘This gentleman wants twelve dozen Crêpe de Chine, Sally. We don’t sell stuff like that do we?’ he asked, and 885974 found himself the object of considerable interest to twelve middle-aged women who knew precisely what he wanted even if the assistant didn’t and were amazed at the virility suggested by the number he required.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, never mind,’ he muttered and hurried from the shop. In the
end he managed to get what he wanted by buying six toothbrushes and two tubes of hair cream at other chemist shops and asking for Durex Featherlites.

  ‘They seemed more suitable,’ he explained when he met the other agents outside the ostrich enclosure in the afternoon. With a unity of purpose noticeably absent from their previous gatherings the agents applied themselves to the business of getting an ostrich to consume high-explosive concealed in a rubber sheath.

  ‘Better try one with sand first,’ 628461 suggested, and was presently scooping earth into a Durex Featherlite, an occupation which caused some disgust to a lady who was feeding the ducks on a nearby pond. He waited until she had moved off before offering the contraceptive to the ostrich. The bird took the sheath and spat it out. 628461 got a stick and managed to retrieve the thing from the enclosure. A second attempt was equally unsuccessful and when a third try to introduce half a pound of latex-covered earth into the bird’s digestive system failed, 628461 suggested coating the thing with ice cream.

  ‘They seemed to like it this morning,’ he said. He was getting sick of scrabbling through the fence for obviously well-filled condoms. Finally, after 378550 had bought two icecreams and a chocolate bar and the sheath had been smeared with ice cream by itself and chocolate by itself and then with a mixture of the two, the proceedings were interrupted by the arrival of a Sanctuary warden, fetched by the lady who had been feeding the ducks. 628461, who had just rescued the French letter from the ostriches’ enclosure for the eighth time, stuffed it hurriedly into his pocket.

  ‘Are these the men you saw trying to feed the ostriches with foreign matter?’ the warden asked.

  ‘Yes, they are,’ said the lady emphatically.

  The warden turned to 628461.

  ‘Were you trying to induce the bird to digest a quantity of something or other contained in the thing this lady says you were?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly not,’ said 628461 indignantly.

  ‘You were too,’ said the lady, ‘I saw you.’

  ‘I’ll ask you to move along,’ said the warden.

  As the little group moved off 745396 pointed out how right he had been.

  ‘I told you ostriches weren’t so dumb,’ he said and put 628461’s back up still further. He’d just discovered that the sheath in his back pocket had burst.

  ‘I thought you were supposed to get Crêpe de Chines,’ he grumbled to 885974 and tried to empty his pocket of earth, chocolate, ice cream and ostrich droppings.

  ‘What am I going to do with twelve dozen Frenchies?’ 885974 asked.

  It took 378550 to come up with a solution. ‘Popcorn and honey,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘What about it?’ 628461 asked.

  ‘Coat them with popcorn and honey and I guarantee they’ll swallow the things.’

  At the first shop they came to 378550 bought a packet of popcorn and a pot of honey and taking a contraceptive from 885974 went back to the Bird Sanctuary to try his recipe out.

  ‘Worked like a treat,’ he reported ten minutes later. ‘Swallowed the thing in one gulp.’

  ‘What do we do when we’ve filled them all up and set the fuse?’ 745396 asked doubtfully.

  ‘Lay a trail of popcorn into the centre of town, of course,’ 628461 told him. The group dispersed to collect their stocks of gelignite and that night at nine gathered at the Bird Sanctuary. The sense of mutual suspicion which had so informed their earlier meetings had been quite replaced by a genuine cameraderie. Verkramp’s agents were beginning to enjoy themselves.

  ‘If this works,’ 628461 said, ‘there’s no reason why we shouldn’t try the zoo.’

  ‘I’m damned if I’m feeding contraceptives to the lions,’ 745396 said.

  ‘No need to feed them anything,’ said 885974 who didn’t feel like buying any more French letters. ‘They’d be explosive enough on their own.’

  *

  If Verkramp’s agents were cheerful, the same couldn’t be said of their chief. The conviction that something had gone seriously wrong with his plans to end Communist subversion had gathered strength with the discovery by the armourer that large stocks of high-explosive and fuse were missing from the police armoury.

  He reported his findings or lack of them to Luitenant Verkramp. Coming on top of a report by the police bomb-disposal squad that the detonators used in all the explosions were of a type used in the past solely by the South African Police, the armourer’s news added weight to Verkramp’s slow intuition that he might in some curious way have bitten off more than he could chew. It was an insight he shared with five ostriches in the Bird Sanctuary. What had seemed at the outset a marvellous opportunity to fulfil his ambitions had developed into something from which there was no turning back. Certainly the ostriches viewed it in that light as the secret agents discovered to their alarm when they released the loaded birds from their enclosure. Gregarious to the last and evidently under the impression that there was more to come in the way of popcorn-coated contraceptives, the five ostriches strode after the agents as the latter headed for town. By the time the mixed herd and flock had reached the end of Market Street the agents were in a state of near panic.

  ‘We’d better break up,’ 628461 said anxiously.

  ‘Break up? Break up? We’ll fucking disintegrate if those birds don’t get the hell out of here,’ said 745396 who had never approved of the project from the start and who seemed to have attracted the friendship of an ostrich that weighed at least 300 lbs unloaded and which had a fifteen-minute fuse. The next moment the agents had taken to their heels down side roads in an effort to shake off the likely consequences of their experiment. Undaunted, the ostriches strode relentlessly and effortlessly behind them. At the corner of Market and Stanger Streets 745396 leapt onto the platform of a moving bus and was appalled to see through the back window the silhouette of his ostrich loping comfortably some yards behind. At the traffic lights at Chapel Street it was still there. 745396 hurled himself off the bus and dashed into the Majestic Cinema which was showing Where Eagles Dare.

  ‘Show’s over,’ said the Commissionaire in the foyer.

  ‘That’s what you think,’ said 745396 with his eye on the ostrich which was peering inquisitively through the glass doors. ‘I just want to use the toilet.’

  ‘Down the stairs to the left,’ the Commissionaire told him and went out to the pavement to try to move the ostrich on. 745396 went down to the toilet and locked himself in a cubicle and waited for the explosion. He was still there five minutes later when the Commissionaire came down and knocked on the door.

  ‘Is that ostrich anything to do with you?’ he asked as 745396 tore paper off the roll to prove that he was using the place for its proper purpose.

  ‘No,’ said 745396 without conviction.

  ‘Well, you can’t leave it outside like that,’ the Commisionaire told him, ‘it’ll interfere with the traffic.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ said 745396.

  ‘Say what again?’ asked the Commissionaire.

  ‘Nothing,’ shouted 745396 frantically. He had reached the end of his tether. So it appeared had the ostrich.

  ‘One last question, do you usually—’ said the Commissionaire and got no further. An extraordinary sensation of silence hit him to be followed by a wall of flame and a gigantic bang. As the front of the Majestic Cinema crumbled into the street and the lights went out agent 745396 slowly slumped onto the cracked seat of the toilet and leant against the wall. He was still there when the rescue workers found him next day, covered in plaster and quite dead.

  Throughout the night rumours that Piemburg had been invaded by hordes of self-detonating ostriches spread like wildfire. So did the ostriches. A particularly tragic incident occurred at the offices of the Zululand Wild Life Preservation Society where an ostrich which had been brought in by a bird-lover exploded while being examined by the society’s vet.

  ‘I think it’s got some sort of gastric disorder,’ the man explained. The vet listened to the bird’s crop with
his stethoscope before making his diagnosis.

  ‘Heartburn,’ he said with a finality that was entirely confirmed by the detonation that followed. As the night sky erupted with bricks, mortar, and the assorted remains of both bird-lover and vet, the premises of the Wild Life Preservation Society, historically important and themselves subject to a preservation order by the Piemburg Council, disappeared for ever. Only a plume of smoke and a few large feathers, emblematic as some dissipated Prince of Wales, floated lethargically against the moon.

  In his office Acting Kommandant Verkramp listened to the muffled explosions with a growing sense of despair. Whatever else was in ruins, and by the sound of it a large section of the city’s shopping centre must be, his own career would shortly join it. In a frantic attempt to allay his alarming suspicions he had just searched the few messages from his secret agents only to find there confirmation that his plan if not their efforts had misfired. Agent 378550 had said that the sabotage group consisted of eleven men. Agent 885974 had said the same. So had 628461. There was a terrible congruency about the reports. In each case eleven men reported by his agent. Verkramp added one to eleven and got twelve. He had twelve agents in the field. The conclusion was inescapable and so it seemed were the consequences. Desperately searching for some way out of the mess he had got himself into, Luitenant Verkramp rose from the desk and crossed to the window. He was just in time to see a large ostrich loping purposefully down the street. With a muttered curse Verkramp opened the window and peered after the bird. ‘This is the end,’ he snarled and was astonished to see that at least one of his orders was obeyed. With a violent flash and a blast wave that blew out the window above him the ostrich disintegrated and Verkramp found himself sitting on the floor of his office with the inescapable conviction that his sanity was impaired.

  ‘Impossible. It can’t have been an ostrich,’ he muttered, staggering back to the window. Outside the street was littered with broken glass and in a bare blackened patch in the middle of the road two feet were all that remained of the thing that had exploded. Verkramp could see that it had been an ostrich because the feet had only two toes.