Indecent Exposure by Tom Sharpe Read Free Book Online

Kommandant put “Yes” only to find that the next question was “Size of breasts. Large. Medium. Small.” After a moment’s hesitation not unmixed with alarm he ticked “Large,” and went on to consider “Nipple Length. Long. Medium. Short.” “This is a bloody funny way to fight Communism,” he thought, trying to remember the length of his nanny’s teats. In the end he put “Long” and found himself faced with “Did black nanny tickle private parts? Often. Sometimes. Infrequently?” The Kommandant looked desperately for “Never” and couldn’t find it. In the end he ticked Infrequently and turned to the next question. “Age at First Ejaculation, Three years, four years…?”
    “Don’t leave much to chance,” thought the Kommandant, indignantly trying to make his mind up between six years, which was quite untrue but which seemed less likely to undermine his authority than sixteen years, which was more accurate. He’d just put eight years as a compromise based on a nocturnal emission he’d had when he was ten when he saw that he’d walked into a trap. The next question was “Age at First Wet Dream?” This time the list started at ten years. By the time he had rubbed out his answer to the previous question to make it consistent with a Wet Dream at eleven years, the Kommandant was in a thoroughly bad temper. He picked up the phone and called Verkramp’s office. Sergeant Breitenbach answered the phone.
    “Where’s Verkramp?” the Kommandant demanded. The Sergeant said he was out, and could he help? The Kommandant said he doubted it. “It’s this damned questionnaire,” he told the Sergeant. “Who’s going to read it?”
    “I think Dr von Blimenstein intends to,” the Sergeant said. “She drew it up.”
    “Did she?” snarled the Kommandant. “Well you can tell Luitenant Verkramp that I have no intention of answering question twenty-five.”
    “Which one is that?”
    “It’s the one that goes ‘How many times do you masturbate every day?’” said the Kommandant. “You can tell Verkramp that I think it’s an invasion of privacy to ask questions like that.”
    “Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Breitenbach, studying the possible answers on the questionnaire, which ranged from five times to twenty-five times.
    The Kommandant slammed down the phone and locking the questionnaire in his desk went out to lunch in a filthy temper. “Dirty bitch, wanting to know things like that,” he thought as he stomped downstairs, and he was still grumbling to himself when he finished lunch in the police canteen. “I’ll be up at the Golf Club if anyone wants me,” he told the Duty Sergeant and left the police station. He spent a fruitless couple of hours trying to hit a ball down the fairway before returning to the Clubhouse with the feeling that this was not one of his days.
    He ordered a double brandy from the barman and took his drink out to a table on the terrace where he could sit and watch more experienced players drive off. He was sitting there absorbing the English atmosphere and trying to rid himself of the nagging conviction that the even tenor of his life was being undermined in some mysterious way when a crunch of gravel in the Clubhouse forecourt made him glance over his shoulder. A vintage Rolls-Royce had just parked and the occupants were climbing out. For a moment the Kommandant had the extraordinary sensation that he had been transported back to the 1920s. The two men who emerged from the front seat were dressed in knickerbockers and wore hats that had been out of fashion for fifty years, while their two women companions were attired in what appeared to the Kommandant to be fancy dress with cloche hats, and carried parasols. But it was less the clothes or the immaculate vintage Rolls than the voices that affected the Kommandant so profoundly. High-pitched and languidly arrogant, they seemed to reach him like some echo from the English past and with them came a rush of certitude that