“Of course they do,” said the doctor soothingly. “It’s only natural… between… passionate men and women.”
Luitenant Verkramp resisted the siren tone.
“It’s not natural. It’s wicked.”
Dr von Blimenstein laughed softly.
“You mustn’t laugh at me,” shouted Verkramp.
“And you mustn’t shout at me,” said the doctor. Verkramp wilted before the tone of authority in her voice. “Come here,” she continued. Verkramp crossed the room nervously. Doctor von Blimenstein put her hands on his shoulders. “Look at me,” she told him. Verkramp did as he was told. “Do you find me attractive?” Verkramp nodded dumbly. “I’m glad,” said the doctor and taking the astonished Luitenant’s head in her hands she kissed him passionately on the mouth. “And now I’ll go and rustle up something for lunch,” she said breaking away from him and before Verkramp could say anything more she was in the kitchen clattering away quite surprisingly for a woman of her size. Behind her in the kitchen doorway Luitenant Verkramp struggled with his emotions. Furious at himself, at her, and at the situation in which he found himself, he looked round for someone to blame. Sensing his dilemma Dr von Blimenstein came to his assistance.
“About the problem you mentioned,” she said, bending over seductively to get a saucepan from the cupboard under the sink, “I think I might be able to help you after all.”
“What problem?” Verkramp asked brusquely. He’d had enough help with his problems already.
“About your men and the kaffir girls,” said the doctor.
“Oh them.” Verkramp had forgotten his original reason for coming.
“I’ve been thinking about it. I can see one way it might be tackled.”
“Oh really,” said Verkramp, who could think about a great many more but didn’t feel up to it.
“It’s really a question of psychic engineering,” the doctor continued. “That’s my term for the experiments I have been conducting here with a number of patients.”
Luitenant Verkramp perked up. He was always interested in experiments.
“I’ve had a number of successful cures already,” she explained, chopping a carrot up with a number of swift strokes. “It’s worked with alcoholics, transvestites and homosexuals. I can’t really see any reason why it shouldn’t work just as well in the case of a perversion like miscegenation.” There was no doubting Verkramp’s interest now. He moved away from the kitchen doorway all attention.
“How would you go about it?” he asked eagerly.
“Well the first thing to do would be to isolate the personality factors in men with a tendency towards this sort of sexual deviation. That shouldn’t be too difficult. I could work out a number of likely attributes. In fact it might be a good thing if your men were to fill in a questionnaire.”
“What? About their sex life?” Verkramp asked. He could see the sort of reception a questionnaire like that would get in the Piemburg Police Station.
“About sex and other things.”
“What other things?” Verkramp asked suspiciously.
“Oh the usual. Relations with mother. Whether the mother was the dominant figure in the home. If they were fond of their black nanny. Earliest sexual experience. Normal things like that.”
Verkramp gulped. What he had just heard sounded positively abnormal to him.
“A careful analysis of the answers should give us some lead to the sort of men who would benefit from the treatment,” Dr von Blimenstein explained.
“Do you mean to say you can tell just by answers to a questionnaire if a man wants to sleep with a kaffir?” Verkramp asked.
Dr von Blimenstein shook her head. “Not exactly, but we’d have something to go on. After we had weeded out the likely suspects, I would interview them, in the strictest confidence, of course, and see if any were suitable for treatment.”
Verkramp was doubtful. “I can’t see anyone admitting he wanted a kaffir,” he said.
The doctor smiled. “You would be amazed at some of the things people confess to me,” she said.
“What would you do when you’d found out?” Verkramp asked.
“First things first,” said Dr von Blimenstein, who knew the value of keeping a man in suspense. “Let’s have lunch on the stoep.” She picked up the tray and Verkramp followed her out.
By the time Luitenant Verkramp left the cottage that afternoon he had in his pocket the draft questionnaire he was to put to the men in the Piemburg Police Station but he still had no idea what form the doctor’s treatment would take. All she would tell him was that she would guarantee that after a week with her no man would ever look at a black woman again. Luitenant Verkramp could well believe it.
On the other hand he had a far clearer picture of the sort of man who had transracial sexual tendencies. According to Dr von Blimenstein the signs to look for were solitariness, sudden changes of mood, pronounced feelings of sexual guilt, an unstable family background and of course an unsatisfactory sex life. As the Luitenant went through in his mind the officers and men in Piemburg one figure emerged more clearly than all the others. Luitenant Verkramp had begun to think he was about to discover the secret of the change that had come over Kommandant van Heerden.
Back in his office he read through the directive from
BOSS
just to make sure that he was empowered to take the action he contemplated. It was there in black and white. “You are hereby instructed to investigate suspected cases of liaison between police officers and Bantu women.” Verkramp locked the memo away and sent for Sergeant Breitenbach.
Within the hour he had issued his instructions. “I want him watched night and day,” he told the Security men assembled in his office. “I want a record of everything he does, where he goes, who he meets and anything that suggests a break in his usual routine. Photograph everyone visiting his house. Put microphones in every room and tape all conversations. Tap his phone and record all his calls. Is that clear? I want the full treatment.”
Verkramp looked round the room and the men all nodded. Only Sergeant Breitenbach had any reservations.
“Isn’t this a bit irregular, sir?” he asked. “After all, the Kommandant is the commanding officer here.”
Luitenant Verkramp flushed angrily. He disliked having his orders questioned.
“I have here,” he said, brandishing the directive from
BOSS
, “orders from Pretoria to carry out this investigation. Naturally,” his voice changed from authority to unction, “I hope as I’m sure we all do that we’ll be able to give Kommandant van Heerden full security clearance when we’re finished but in the meantime we must carry out our orders. I need, of course, hardly remind you that the utmost secrecy must be maintained throughout this operation. All right, you may go.”
When the Security men had left, Luitenant Verkramp gave orders for the questionnaire to be xeroxed and left on his desk ready for distribution the following morning.
Next day Mrs Roussouw, whose job it was to superintend the black convicts who came from Piemburg Prison every day to do the Kommandant’s housework, had her work cut out answering the front-door bell to admit a succession of Municipal Officials who seemed to think there was a damaged gas pipe under the kitchen, a mains short circuit in the living-room and a leak in the water tank in the attic.
Since the house wasn’t connected to the gas and the electric stove in the kitchen functioned perfectly while there were no signs of damp on the bedroom ceiling, Mrs Roussouw did her best to deter the officials who seemed determined to carry out their duties with a degree of conscientiousness and a lack of specialized knowledge she found quite astonishing.
“Shouldn’t you switch off the main supply first?” she asked the man from the Electricity Board who was laying wires in the Kommandant’s bedroom.
“Suppose so,” the man said and went downstairs. When ten minutes later she found the light still on in the kitchen, Mrs Roussouw took matters into her own hands and went into the cupboard under the stairs and switched the mains off herself. There was a muffled yell from the attic where the Water Board men had been relying on a handlamp connected to a plug on the landing to help them find the non-existent leak in the cistern.
“Must be the bulb,” said one of the men and clambered down the ladder to fetch another bulb from the Kommandant’s bedside light. By the time he was back in the darkness of the attic the Electricity man had assured Mrs Roussouw that there was no need to cut the mains off.
“You know your own job, I suppose,” Mrs Roussouw told him rather doubtfully.
“I can assure you it’s quite safe now,” the man said. Mrs Roussouw went back under the stairs and turned the supply on again. The scream that issued from the attic where the Water Board man had his fingers in the socket of the lamp was followed by an appalling rending noise from the bedroom and the sound of falling plaster. Mrs Roussouw switched the electricity off again and went upstairs.
“Whatever will the Kommandant say when he finds what a mess you’ve made?” she asked the leg that hung through the hole in the ceiling. An answering groan came from the attic. “Are you all right?” Mrs Roussouw asked anxiously. The leg wriggled vigorously.
“I told you you should have cut it off,” Mrs Roussouw told the Electricity man reprovingly. In the attic the remark provoked a string of protests and the leg jerked convulsively. The Electricity man went out onto the landing.
“What’s he say?” he asked peering up the ladder into the darkness.
“He says he doesn’t want it cut off,” said a voice from above.
“Just as you say,” said Mrs Roussouw and went downstairs to turn the mains on again. “Is that better?” she asked pulling the switch down. Upstairs in the Kommandant’s bedroom the leg twitched violently and was still.
“You just hang on and I’ll give you a shove from below,” the Electricity man said and clambered onto the bed.
Mrs Roussouw emerged from the cupboard and went upstairs again. She was getting rather puffed with all this up and down. She had just reached the landing when there was another terrible yell from the bedroom. She hurried in and found the Electricity man lying prostrate amid the plaster on the Kommandant’s bed.
“What’s the matter now?” she asked. The man wiped his face and looked up at the leg reproachfully.
“It’s alive,” he said finally.
“That’s what you think,” said a voice from the attic.
“I’m sure I don’t know what to think,” Mrs Roussouw said.
“Well I do,” the Electricity man told her, sitting up on the bed. “I think you ought to go and cut the mains supply off again. I’m not touching that leg till you do.”
Mrs Roussouw turned wearily back to the stairs.
“This is the last time,” she told the man, “I’m not running up and downstairs any more.”
In the end with the help of the black convicts they managed to get the unconscious Water Board official down from the attic and Mrs Roussouw was persuaded to give him the kiss of life on the couch in the Kommandant’s sitting-room.
“You can get those kaffirs out of here before I do,” she told the Electricity man. “I’m not doing any kissing with them looking on. It might give them ideas.” The Electricity man shooed the convicts out and presently the Water Board official recovered enough to be taken back to the police station.
“Bungling idiots,” Verkramp snarled when they reported back to him. “I said bug the house, not knock it to bits.”
When Kommandant van Heerden arrived home that evening it was to find his house in considerable disorder and with most of the services cut off. He tried to make himself some tea but there was no water in the tap. It took him twenty minutes to find the stopcock and another twenty to discover a spanner that fitted it. He filled his Five Minute kettle and waited half an hour for it to boil only to learn at the end of that time that the water in it was still stone cold.
“What the hell’s wrong with everything?” he wondered as he filled a saucepan and put it on the stove. Twenty minutes later he was rummaging about under the stairs trying to find the fuse-box with the help of a box of matches. He had taken all the fuses out and put them back again before he realized that the main switch was off. With a sigh of relief he pulled it down to “ON”. There was a loud bang in the fusebox and the light in the hall which had come on momentarily went out again. It took the Kommandant another half an hour to find the fuse wire and by that time he was out of matches. He gave up in disgust and went out and had dinner in a Greek café down the road.
By the time he got home again Kommandant van Heerden’s temper was violent. With the help of a torch which he had bought at a garage he made his way upstairs and was appalled by the mess in his bedroom. There was a large hole in the ceiling and the bed was covered with plaster. The Kommandant sat down on the edge of the bed and shone his torch through the hole in his ceiling. Finally he turned to the phone on his bedside table and dialled the police station. He was sitting there staring out of the window wondering why it took so long for the Duty Sergeant to answer when he became aware that what looked like a shadow under the jacaranda tree across the road was smoking a cigarette. The Kommandant put the phone down and crossed to the window to take a better look. Staring into the darkness he was startled to notice another shadow under another tree. He was just wondering what two shadows were doing watching his house when the phone behind him on the bed began to squeak irately. The Kommandant picked the receiver up just in time to hear the Duty Sergeant put his down. With a curse he dialled again, changed his mind and went through to the bathroom which overlooked his back garden and opened the window. A light breeze drifted in, ruffling the curtains. The Kommandant peered out and had just decided that his back garden was free of interlopers when an azalea bush lit a cigarette. In a state of considerable alarm the Kommandant scurried back to his bedroom and dialled the police station.
“I’m being watched,” he told the Duty Sergeant when the man finally picked up the phone.
“Oh really,” said the Sergeant, who was used to nutters ringing him up in the middle of the night with stories of being spied on. “And who is watching you?”