Read Online Indecent Exposure by Tom Sharpe - Free Book Online

him from the jacket of As Other Men Are was proof positive that all those values like chivalry and courage, to which Kommandant van Heerden paid so much private tribute, still existed in the world.
    Once home and ensconced in an armchair with a pot of tea made and a cup by his side, he opened the book and began to read. “Eve Malory Carew tilted her sweet pretty chin,” he read, and as he read the world of sordid crime, of murder and fraud, burglary and assault, cowardice and deception, with which his profession brought him into daily contact, disappeared, to be replaced by a new world in which lovely ladies and magnificent men moved with an ease and assurance and wit towards inevitably happy endings. As he followed the adventures of Jeremy Broke and Captain Toby Rage, not to mention Oliver Pauncefote and Simon Beaulieu, the Kommandant knew that he had come home. Luitenant Verkramp, Sergeant Breitenbach and the six hundred men under his command were happily forgotten as the hours passed and the Kommandant, his tea stone cold, read on. Occasionally he would read some particularly moving passage aloud to savour the words more fully. At one o’clock in the morning he glanced at his watch and was amazed that time had passed so unnoticeably. Still, there was no need to get up early in the morning and he had come to another stirring episode.
    “The pearls that George gave me sprawl, pale and indignant by my side,” he read aloud in what he vainly imagined was an adequate impersonation of a female voice, “I’ve taken them off. I don’t want his pearls about me; I want your arms.”
    While Kommandant van Heerden was finding it a wonderful relief to escape from the real world of sordid experience into one of pure fantasy, Luitenant Verkramp was doing just the opposite. Now that the sexual fantasies he had entertained about Dr von Blimenstein through many sleepless nights seemed all too likely to be fulfilled in reality, Verkramp found the prospect unbearable. For one thing, the attractions which an absent and imagined Dr von Blimenstein had held had quite disappeared, to be replaced by the awareness that she was a heavily built woman with enormous breasts and muscular legs whose sexual needs he had no desire whatsoever to satisfy. And for another, the walls of his apartment were so constructed as to allow the sounds in one flat to be clearly heard in another. To add to his worries, the doctor was drunk.
    In a foolish attempt to induce in her the feminine equivalent of whisky droop, Verkramp had plied her with Scotch from a bottle he kept for special occasions and had been horrified not only by the doctor’s capacity for hard liquor but also by the fact that the damned stuff seemed to act as an aphrodisiac. Deciding to try to reverse the process, he went through to the kitchen to make some more black coffee. He had just lit the stove when an eruption of noise from the living-room sent him scurrying back. Dr von Blimenstein had switched on his tape recorder.
    “I want an old-fashioned house with an old-fashioned fence and an old-fashioned millionaire,” cried Eartha Kitt.
    Dr von Blimenstein accompanying her was more modest in her demands. “I want to be loved by you, just you and nobody else but you,” she crooned in a voice several decibels above the legal limit.
    “For heaven’s sake,” said Verkramp, trying to edge past her to the tape recorder, “you’ll wake the neighbourhood.”
    In the flat above, the creak of bedsprings suggested that Verkramp’s neighbours were taking notice of the doctor’s demand even if he wasn’t.
    “I want to be loved by you alone, boo boopy doop,” Dr von Blimenstein continued, clasping Verkramp in her arms. In the background Miss Kitt added to his embarrassment by announcing to the world her desire for oil wells and Verkramp’s own predilection for coloured singers.
    “Whasso wrong with love, baby?” asked the doctor, managing to combine whimsy with sex in a manner Verkramp