Ivan Vladislavic: 101 Detectives

‘Hey, Klopper, what’s a gonad?’

Klopper did not answer.

Tetrodotoxin. Bate turned the word over in his wounded mouth. It was found in the gonads of the fugu fish and a grain of it was enough to kill you. It paralysed the nervous system, shutting down your organs one by one, until you died a horrible death.

‘Listen here,’ he said. ‘ The fugu fish is twenty-seven times more deadly than the green mamba . Incredible.’

The back of Klopper’s head bristled. Bate could imagine the morose expression on his face.

Bate was sitting on the bed reading a copy of the Reader’s Digest , which he’d carried away from his dentist’s waiting room the day before. He’d been halfway through the article on fugu fish when the nurse summoned him to the chair and so he’d slipped the magazine into his jacket pocket. This morning, when he put the jacket on again, there it was. A label stuck to the dog-eared cover read: ‘Please do not remove from the waiting room.’

Klopper was at the window of the hotel room, looking out into the street. He was sitting the wrong way round on a chair, with his folded arms leaning on the backrest and his chin propped on one wrist. Glancing down through the gap between the frame of his glasses and his cheek he saw the digits on his watch flashing. Eleven hundred hours, eleven hundred hours.

Bate shifted on the mattress so that he could rest his shoulders against the headboard.

‘Don’t put your shoes on the bedspread,’ Klopper said, without looking round.

‘Get off my case.’ And Bate thought: He’s got eyes in the back of his head — but how do they see through that stuff? In the nape of Klopper’s neck was a sludge of bristly grey hair, like iron filings in grease. Maybe his glasses had little mirrors in the corners, like those spymaster specs they used to advertise in the comics.

‘Is he coming?’

‘I told you already, he won’t pitch until this afternoon.’

‘What’s the point of watching all day then?’

Klopper’s neck bulged. ‘Did you go to school or what?’

Bate stuck the tip of his tongue in the hole at the back of his mouth where his wisdom tooth had been. It was no longer bleeding, but it tasted of blood.

‘Mr Bate,’ Dr Borkholder had said, ‘it doesn’t look good. These wisdoms will have to go. But a clever chap like you won’t even miss them. Some of the others are also too far gone…’

‘It’s sergeant, if you don’t mind.’

‘You haven’t been flossing, sergeant. This molar is holding on by a thread.’

‘Do I need a filling?’

‘I’m afraid it’s too late for that. You should have come to me ten years ago. There’s not a lot I can do now. I might be able to save a couple at the side here and these two’ — tapping on them with a silver rod — ‘but most of them will have to go. To give you a better idea…’

He opened a drawer in a cabinet and took out a plastic model of the human jaw. It was a gory-looking thing, with gleaming white fangs jutting from inflamed gums.

‘Forget it!’ Bate said, trying to sit up in the chair. Bloody sadist. Any excuse to use the pliers. The whole profession was a racket. He jerked the armrest up and a tray of instruments clattered to the floor. The dentist gaped behind his plastic visor. Bate would have punched his lights out, but the nurse came running.

‘Sergeant Bate’ — bitch had been eavesdropping — ‘please, you must get a grip on yourself. Or we’ll…’

Or we’ll what? Call the police?

He calmed down. Even made an apology of sorts.

‘How would you feel if he told you your gums were shot?’

‘You’re putting words in my mouth,’ Dr Borkholder protested.

Then the nurse prepared the syringe and they gave him an injection and pulled out a wisdom tooth, bottom, left. He felt no pain. It should rather have hurt, he thought afterwards, then the sound might have been less sickening, the splintering in his head like a door being battered down as the dentist worked the pliers back and forth, twisting the roots out of the bone.

‘So what’s this crap about fish?’

‘Page 76.’

It was Bate’s turn at the window. He was sitting back to front in the same pose as Klopper, sitting that way to feel what it felt like to be Klopper. He heard Klopper leafing behind him. All ears, that was the secret.

A little yellow card, with the proposed date of Bate’s next extraction scribbled on the back of it, fell out of the magazine. Klopper put it in his pocket and began to read aloud:

‘ The flesh of the fugu fish contains one of the deadliest toxins found in nature, and yet it is eaten everywhere in Japan. Some gourmets regard it as the ultimate gastronomic experience . Trust the bloody Japs. In 1986, two hundred and sixty people died from eating fugu, but many cases go unreported, and the actual number of fatalities is much higher. What is the appeal of this deadly delicacy? ’

‘The appeal,’ said Bate, who had already read the next paragraph, ‘is (a) it tastes amazing, and (b) it makes you irresistible to chicks.’

The bedsprings creaked. Bate pricked up his ears and tried to picture what Klopper was up to. A soft thud. Klopper dropping the magazine on the floor. More creaking. Klopper making himself comfortable.

‘Take your shoes off the bed,’ Bate said, without looking round.

‘Piss off.’

He glanced over his shoulder and saw Klopper’s shoes at attention on the carpet, his toes squirming in his socks.

The fire had been the Captain’s idea. When Klopper thought about it afterwards, that was always the first thing that came into his mind. The two of them had brought the evidence to the farm on the back of the bakkie, wrapped in plastic and covered with a groundsheet and a load of firewood, just to be safe. The plan was to bury it in the veld behind the windbreak, but the wood gave the Captain the idea for the fire. ‘What’s buried can always be dug up again,’ he said. ‘But what goes up in smoke is gone for good.’

One of the constables was waiting for them at the house. It was Voetjie, the one with the limp. The Captain told him to offload half the wood at the end of the stoep, where they usually made the braai, and call them when he was finished. Then they took the cooler bag out of the cab and went to wait inside.

They were drinking beer at the kitchen table when Voetjie came to the door to say it was done. You’d think he was a bloody servant, Klopper thought, you’d never say he was one of us.

Voetjie climbed on the back of the bakkie and they drove out towards the bluegums. Then it occurred to the Captain that a fire might look suspicious out there and so they circled back to the dam. From down in the dip they could see the roof of the farmhouse on the ridge in the distance, glaring like a shard of mirror in the dusk.

When they untied the groundsheet Voetjie didn’t bat an eyelid, and Klopper guessed that he’d already sniffed out what was concealed underneath it. The two of them dragged the bundle off the tailgate, stretched it out on the ground next to an overgrown irrigation ditch, and piled logs over it. It was like building a campfire, Klopper thought.

The Captain himself sloshed diesel over the pyre. At the last minute, he bent down, jabbed a forefinger through the plastic and tore it open. He gazed through the gash as if he was trying to read something in the dark. Then he stepped back and struck a match.

Klopper kept watch while Bate ate his lunch at the dressing table on a sheet of newspaper. ‘When we leave,’ Klopper said, ‘I don’t want a crumb left behind to show that we were here.’ All Bate could manage was ice cream. The Sputnik Café downstairs was out of tubs, which would have been more convenient, so he had to settle for a Neapolitan slab. He ate it from left to right, which happened to be the order of his preference — chocolate, strawberry, vanilla. He spooned it into the right-hand side of his mouth, away from the tender hole, but it made his teeth ache.