‘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.
The Reader’s Digest lay open beside him, pinned flat by an ashtray, and he read as he ate, glancing up at himself from time to time in the dressing-table mirror.
‘This fugu stuff is so dangerous you have to get a licence to cook it.’
‘Come off it.’
‘It says here: Only qualified chefs are allowed to prepare fugu dishes. The training is long and arduous, and at the end of it the candidates have to pass a stringent examination. Identifying and excising the poisonous parts of the fish is an exact science. But mistakes still happen, even in the best establishments.’
When the ice cream was finished they changed places and Klopper ate his Russians and chips. The sausages had burst open into gnarled shapes in the cooking oil. Deep-fried organ meat, he thought, something a Jap might like. He wiped them in the smear of tomato sauce congealing on the waxed paper. He looked at Bate in the mirror while he chewed.
‘I suppose you still hungry?’
‘I could do with a steak.’
‘I should of got you some of that fish.’
‘Fugu.’
‘And chips, no salt and vinegar.’
The burning had taken longer than they anticipated. Klopper and the Captain sat on a ruined wall, drinking beer and watching the light fade on the water, or squatted in the flickering shadows, tending the fire. Klopper had imagined it would be over in half an hour, that they would be back at the house in time to watch Due South on television. But at seven o’clock it was still burning fiercely. When they ran out of logs the blaze died down at last, and then a jumble of angular shapes became visible in the cinders. Folders and files. Dockets and statements. The covers of the duty books, with their leather-bound corners, the thick boards of the minute-books and logbooks, the tightly bound spindles of invoices and receipts. The knuckle-bones of rubber stamps. The Captain poked around with the end of a stick and layers of blackened leaves came away from the spines. Inexplicably, in the heart of the fire, new white pages unfolded. They should have torn the covers off the books first and shredded the paper. Stirred up by the stick, a black-edged sheet spiralled up on the smoke and fluttered down next to the Captain’s boot. The words were still legible, the handwriting recognisably his own.
The Captain tossed the keys to Voetjie. ‘Looks like we’re going to need the rest of that wood. And bring the cooler bag, and the grille from the stoep. We’ll eat here.’
As soon as they were alone, the Captain began to speak. He told Klopper that his wife had left him. He thought she was having an affair with some Sandton desk jockey, something to do with computers, software. What was he supposed to do now? He was lonely, he was living on takeaways, he had to get a girl in to wash his shirts. His voice thickened and Klopper thought he was going to cry, but he just went on speaking, and he didn’t shut up until they saw the headlights coming back down the track.
While Voetjie and Klopper built the bonfire up again, carefully laying the logs on the smouldering papers, the Captain made a smaller fire at the edge of the water. Then they braaied the chops and the wors. When the meat was done the Captain cut the wors into pieces with his pocket knife and speared some of it onto a polystyrene tray for Voetjie, who went to sit on the tailgate of the bakkie to eat. The other two ate their share straight from the grille.
All this time the bonfire went on burning, with the pages wavering in it like ashen palms, burning and burning.
Sixteen hundred hours, Klopper thought, and wiggled his toes.
‘Tell me something, Bate: if these fugu fishes are so poisonous, how come they don’t poison themselves? Hey?’
Bate looked at the street. It seemed cold and grey, but that was because the glass was tinted. A scrap of his training floated into his mind: Surveillance. In certain circumstances, you see better out of the corner of your eye. Something to do with the rods and cones. There was some story about listening too… you heard better… with your mouth open. The cavity of your mouth created a sort of echo chamber. The best attitude to adopt when you thought the enemy was near: turn your face away from him, look at him out of the corner of your eye and keep your mouth open. Bate opened his mouth tentatively. It hurt. He opened wider, and wider, driving the pain from the empty socket up into his ear, into his temple, into the top of his skull. He turned his head slowly until he could see Klopper on the bed from the corner of his eye.
‘What the hell are you doing now?’
Once during the meal the wind shifted and blew the smoke over them. It was bittersweet, compounded of leather and ink and sealing wax. For some reason it made Klopper aware of the meat in his mouth, of its texture, the fibres parting between his teeth, the taste of blood on his tongue, but he took a mouthful of beer and swallowed, and it went down. Soon the wind shifted again and carried the smoke out over the water.
‘This is the bit I really don’t understand. They call it the philosophy of the fugu-eaters…’
‘Hang on,’ said Klopper, ‘here he comes.’
‘Listen to this: He who eats fugu fish is stupid… but he who does not eat fugu fish is also stupid. What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Beats me.’
Bate went to stand behind the chair and they both looked at the man in the street, a man they knew from photographs, coming towards them in the flesh.