How Elphias Doge tried to nip Albert Runcorn's Ministry career in the bud

How Elphias Doge Tried To Nip Albert Runcorn's Ministry Career in the Bud

Elphias Doge listened to Mafalda Hopkirk in disbelief.

"What? Intern? Mafalda, if you want my opinion...."

"My dear Duke, I think I've got your opinion already. You went out of your way to give it to me. And let's suppose I agreed with you - hiring in the Traffic Department is hardly my area, is it now? I can prod a bit and press a bit, but if a man wants to do something, I can't stop him."

"Don't call me Duke," said a disgruntled Doge. Mafalda giggled.

I.

It was true that he had taken trouble to spread the word. Not only to his friends in the Ministry; he had also swallowed hard and gone to chat with Muriel Weasley. He couldn't stand the woman, but there was no more reliable channel to put a piece of gossip around. To confide a secret to Muriel Weasley was better than to print it above the fold on the front page of the Daily Prophet. And Elphias Doge thought it very important that Albert Runcorn's true character should be exposed.

Albert Runcorn must never be allowed into the Ministry. Of this he was certain. He was barely safe as a visitor.

II

"I never knew that you lectured on Muggle history,"

"Just my own experiences, Muriel. About the origins of the great wars, about the politics, about the leaders, I can't tell them much more than they can read in their own books. But I was there and I saw it happen, at least in the last two years."

"You were?"

"I just happened to be in Venice on September 8, 1943, when Italy surrendered. Italy had been allied with Germany, and when they surrendered, the Nazis just flooded the country."

"The Nazis... that's the Germans, right?"

"Yeah."

"And the Fascists were the Italians, and they were like each other, but the Nazis were nastier?"

"The Nazis were more organized. And they were out to murder an awful lot of people, right from the start. But... nastier? I was in Croatia for a while, and believe you me, the Italians... the Fascists... were just as nasty. Just give them a reason - an opportunity - to murder people, and they would, and a lot of them would enjoy it."

"Muggles. What can you expect?"

Elphias Doge's face hardened. "As much as you can expect from wizards, I would say. It wasn't because of the Nazis that I was trapped in Venice and couldn't get away; it was because of Grindelwald and his lot." And even Muriel Weasley, proof against any kind of sensitivity or tact, realized she had opened her mouth too wide. "You may remember that they were working hand in glove with Hitler - Grindelwald's people helped Hitler against the Wonderworking Rabbis and any other little wizarding problems, and Hitler gave them an inexhaustible supply of victims for their experiments with...'the food of the gods.' And you know damn well, Muriel, that this was neither the first nor the last such alliance between Dark Wizards and Muggle tyrants. There's hardly ever been a really homicidal Muggle boss without his court wizard. Where else can a really Dark wizard get such a reliable stream of... subjects?"

Muriel muttered something; Elphias looked at her harshly, and she fell silent.

"I'd been sent to Venice to help take the libraries and the magical treasuries of the Venetian Jews and Armenians away. It had been clear for months that the situation was collapsing, and that the nervous balance that the Italian wizards had been managing to keep would not last long. But events overtook us. I'd only been there a few days when the Muggle King tried to make his separate peace with the Americans - and the Germans fell over the country like a horde of locusts.

"From one day to the next, Venice and all of Italy were crawling with murderers in grey and black uniforms, and Grindelwald's creatures everywhere among them. If I'd got out then, we'd have lost all the magical treasures, and as like as not hundreds of Muggles and wizards - Jews, Armenians, Italians, you name it - would have been murdered. So I stayed till the war was over... and I got to have, shall we say, an intimate acquaintance of the alliance of the worst kind of wizards with the worst Muggles.

"Now this may surprise you, but I never have any problems telling my stories in Durmstrang. They may be all-pureblood, but they aren't likely to be misguided or worse about Hitler and his ilk. Even apart from Grindelwald, what you've got to understand is that there's hardly a family in the Continent that wasn't affected by the Nazis and their crimes. Everyone in Durmstrang has some family story about the horrors of the war - family members caught up in Nazi sweeps, Muggle friends tortured to death or simply vanished into nothing, fire and bloodshed in a hundred fashions. There just is no end to it, Muriel. And it's the same at Beauxbatons and at the Mercedarian Academy. They've all heard about it. You can't fool them.

"But I've noticed one thing, that the further away you get from the Continent, the more you get a different kind of reaction. Often it's just dumb ignorance: people who never imagined how complicated, organized bureaucratic evil can work, and who'll tell you to your face that surely you've got to be exaggerating. And then sometimes you have people who just don't want to face the facts, and who insist on not believing the evidence you lay in front of them - even your own Pensieve memories. And when this happens, you often find that it gets really nasty, because if the stories you tell aren't true, it's you who must be making them up, or at least taking someone else's lies. Get me? You are telling them a pack of lies, and of course you have to have a bad reason to do something like that. I'd got a bit of that in Hogwarts, more in Salem, and even more in the Escuela do Maranhon and in some of the Chinese academies. After a while, I got to dread the moment when I recognized the signs of loss of interest. They are always the same; they get bored, they get inattentive, and then they get hostile.

"In a situation like that, someone like Albert Runcorn can be... I mean, can seem... a relief. He certainly never seemed to doubt any of my stories. I had a few people in his Hogwarts Muggle Studies class who were really trying to be stupid for its own sake, and it was nice to find someone who not only took me seriously but was quite able to answer back the doubters. It was only after a while that the nasty feelings came creeping in.

"Muriel, Albert Runcorn liked hearing about horrors. He hardly even tried to disguise it. He could see himself in it as the torturer, the abductor, the rapist, the secret policeman, the judge and executioner. When I first started to notice it, I thought I'd try a test, see if I could draw him out. I deliberately increased the number and... quality... of the horrors; and I watched his response. I got to the point where a few students complained, asked what was the point of all these nasty stories. But Albert never did. I tell you, Muriel, his eyes shone.

"I've seen one or two of them before, in Durmstrang and other places - people to whom stories of horror and despair are occasions to laugh at the victim, people who identify with the bad guy every time, and with delight. I don't know where they come from, I don't know what makes them, I don't know why they are the way they are. I just know they fucking scare me, Muriel. Excuse the language...

"What made me more sick is that I had known his great-uncle well, and I was sure he would hate it as much as I did. And Bobby Runcorn looked a lot like Albert, too; same height, same shape of the jaw, same eyes, same long nose. Only it was all different. It was just the memory of Bobby that made Albert so obvious to me - like someone has taken all the same bits and got them all wrong. Albert has a way of staring intensely that makes you uneasy; Bobby always had laughter in his eyes. Albert's walk is threatening; Bobby's was swaggering. Just as different as heaven and earth, I don't know if I can give you the idea...

"I first met Bobby Runcorn in Venice, in that first dreadful winter when we were struggling to keep people and things away from Grindelwald's servants and their SS friends. And believe it or not, I saw him stride across St. Mark's Square as if he owned it - wearing the full uniform of a British paratrooper and three rows of ribbons on his chest! It was only after a few seconds of total disbelief that I realized that he was casting a powerful Confundus around himself/ That was the man: he could do it, so he did. He was as mad as a hatter, but man, did he ever have style!

"Bobby had come to help us, and that was his way of making himself known to the right wizards - of course he'd made sure we were exempt from the effect of his Confundus. It so happened that I was the first one to meet him, and frankly I was impressed. He was the best friend I ever had in the war, and without him I don't know how we would have managed. I lost him from sight after the war, when he went beyond the Iron Curtain to help reorganize the Eastern Ministries and protect the local wizards from Communist tyranny. It was the sort of thing he would do - show some danger and some great evil, watch Bobby walk right in (and always with that swagger and that smile). But I can see him as if it were yesterday, and it's just because Albert is so similar to him, that all his faults stand out to me like a sore tooth.

"He is a degenerate, Muriel. There's nothing else he can be called. He is simply bad news. And it breaks my heart that my old friend should find someone like that in his own family."

III

"Elphias, Elphias," said Albus Dumbledore kindly but sadly, "you will never change, A good, brave, upright lad, still looking for windmills to charge." Dumbledore had heard out the whole story from his friend, and just shaken his head.

"Did it never occur to you that it is just because, and not despite, his character, that some elements in the Ministry would want to recruit someone like Albert Runcorn?"

It took a second or two for Elphias to take in the whole meaning of what Albus had said; and when he did, he felt a ghastly frost go through him. Albus saw his reaction in his eyes, as it was taking place.

"Voldemort would never have been remotely as bad a danger, had he not appealed from the beginning to powerful and well-entrenched interests. And the Ministry, in particular, has been degenerating for a while - a long while, indeed.

"You have to remember what its roots are. It has always been a place for pureblood families to place younger or less favoured sons, people with more pride than talent or skill, more apt to be arrogant about their birth than to be good at any job they would take. It has always been to some extent a parasite. And it has always functioned on the principle of pureblood primacy. We delude ourselves that, because people like Arthur Weasley... and, to some extent, even Cornelius Fudge... are allowed to work there, that it is more representative of the community at large; but it is really much more narrow, much more inbred, and much more hostile to change and even to efficiency, than we like to think. I think myself that it is one of those things we instinctively know but hate to admit.

"Yes, you can be a dissenter - for a while. But after a while, you will find that either you let them get to you, or that you end up like Arthur Weasley, marginalized, overburdened with work, and laughed at behind his back - and increasingly even to his front. Now I think they have got at Cornelius - have you noticed how his attitude has been changing over the last few months?

"The Ministry, in short, is a perfect breeding ground for corrupt, tyrannical and vicious thinking. I'm not saying that everyone is like that, but those who are thrive and do well. And if you look at the Transport lot, you will find at least two people who have plenty of reason to want to promote anyone who looks like a prospective Death Eater."