The Long Road to Damascus

Chapter 9: Your old men shall dream dreams...

"So that's it, then," Alastor Moody said flatly, not for the first time. "There's no other possible answer. There's a Death Eater at the Ministry."

He glared in turn at Albus Dumbledore and Arabella Figg, who both sat in high leather-upholstered armchairs opposite his desk, and then down again at the deal-topped surface of his desk. The three letters lay before him in a neat row, and behind them in a second row lay their copies, aligned in their neat ranks like a small parchment regiment. The third copy, deformed as it had previously been, looked almost like its original now, though it had taken Albus almost an hour of painstaking work to get it that way.

"Well, really, Alastor! It's not as if we haven't known as much for ages."

"We had no *proof*," Alastor growled. "Suspected, yes! Oh we may have suspected! - but we lacked proof. Now we *know.*" Alastor sucked in a deep breath and surveyed the web of anti-surveillance charms that arced across the ceiling and walls and underfoot across the deep-pile carpet. "There's no other possible explanation - assuming, of course, Albus, that your spy is telling us the truth."

"I am sure of it," Albus said, rather too firmly, and Alastor grunted skeptically, hearing clear as words the doubts his colleague was so obviously suppressing.

"Actually," Arabella said, with an air of maddening superiority. "It doesn't matter whether he's lying: the proof still stands. Ida remembers Trimble checking the file out very clearly, and she made a note in her log that without returning it. She was intending to have a brief word with him today."

Alastor winced involuntarily, stricken by a sudden and very vivid memory of Ida's notion of a 'brief word'.

"And the file was back on the shelf first thing this morning."

"That's what I said." Alastor was clearly feeling difficult today.

"And it hadn't been altered at all?"

"Ida was sure of it," Arabella said confidently.

"Quite sure?"

"Certain. She was quite emphatic on the subject. You know dear Ida - if she had had the least suspicion that someone might have been tampering with her files, she wouldn't rest until she'd hunted down the person responsible. She is a most .... conscientious ... archivist."

"Ouch," Alastor muttered.

"Oh, of course," Albus said. He considered himself most fortunate to have hired Irma, whom he had found to be easily the least stringent of the siblings, rather than Ida, who had charge of the Ministry archives, or Ivy, who ruled the Arcane Records Office with a rod of iron. The Pince triplets were rightly legendary in the Wizarding world for their extreme devotion to duty almost as much as for their sheer sadistic creativity in dealing with wrongdoers.

Moody bent over the six letters again. "What about the copies? Are they accurate?"

Arabella took her glasses off and started to polish them, wiping the lenses in small clockwise circles, and then passed them across to him. "The first two are exact, to the least detail. You may check for yourself if you wish."

Alastor refused the glasses with a wave of his hand. "There's no need, Arabella, no need. I am quite happy to take your word for it."

Arabella polished the lenses again, anticlockwise this time, and donned the glasses once more. "And just when I thought you could no longer surprise me," she said absently.

Alastor pretended not to hear her. "And the third letter - I suppose that's our stumbling-block."

"You'll have to ask Albus about that, dear. I'm afraid I rather left that one to him."

"Of course ... transfiguration always was your blind spot." There was a touch of malice in the words, but Arabella smiled blithely at him, seemingly oblivious to his tone.

"And there speaks someone who once transfigured his own feet into cabbages."

"Yes ... well ... That *was* some time back. Anyway, the third letter. What did you think, Albus?"

"Accurate, as far as I can tell. My spy seems to have been interrupted midway through, so parts of it are indistinct, though I've done my best to reconstruct it." Albus sounded a little uncertain, and Alastor gave him a suspicious look.

"Or," he said with heavy emphasis, "he could have left it deliberately vague to conceal some alteration or other to the original." He scratched his stubbly chin with a loud rasping sound. "You're a trusting man, Albus. This ... spy ... of yours wouldn't be the first to take advantage."

Albus looked even more unhappy. It was Arabella who answered.

"Not necessarily, dear. I did some little experiments when I got this ... and the appearance is quite consistent with a straightforward transfiguration spell being interrupted midway." She took off her glasses, and began to polish them again. "Not, of course," she said sweetly, "that that rules out foul play."

"I supose that's as good as we'll get," Alastor growled. He picked up his wand again, and added yet another layer to the containment spells surrounding the three of them. "All right, spit it out, man. Who *is* this wonder-child of yours?" Albus was looking unhappy, he noted, and the blue eyes lacked their customary assurance. His suspicions deepened, and he cast a glance at Arabella, who so far had said nothing on the subject. She met his eye for the briefest instant, and gave him a very slight one-shouldered shrug.

[Aha!] he though. [So you have your doubts too]. "Well?" he asked. "I'm all agog."

Albus looked across at Arabella, who nodded, very slightly.

"His name's Severus Snape. He graduated from Hogwarts in 1974."

For a few seconds, Moody was actually struck dumb, but five seconds' grace did nothing to temper his eventual reaction.

"*What?*"

"That's right," Arabella said briskly. "Severus Snape, who *just happens* to be the second son of Tiberius Snape and grandson of the notorious Caligula Snape."

"And you ... trusted ... him," Alastor said blankly. "Albus! You have got to be out of your mind! You are prepared to trust a *Snape*, of all people? Of all the cretinous, moronic, idiotic-"

"I did take precautions, Alastor."

Moody gave a sarcastic snort of laughter. "Precautions! Against a member of one of the most devious families the Wizarding world has known! And what kind of 'precautions' would those have been, exactly?"

"A Sneakoscope, and Veritaserum. And of course, Arabella was here with me."

Moody glanced enquiringly at Arabella. "Well?"

"Well ... it's feasible. He *could* be genuine."

Alastor made a small sound somewhere between a sigh and a grunt. "Albus ... are you quite sure you've done the right thing here?" Arabella's expression, he noticed, had become even more impassive than before.

"You weren't there, Alastor. You didn't see the state he was in."

"So you fell for the same old sob-story about a change of heart. Really, Albus!"

Albus sighed. "Fawkes trusted him, Alastor ... and you know Fawkes's judgement."

"Yes, I know Fawke's judgement ... but I also know a thing or two about that family - and they're as nice a bunch of low-down cheating, lying, murderin' bastards as I ever hope to meet in the line of duty." He sighed heavily. "Albus ... let me tell you a little bit of family history."

"I prefer not to judge people by their families, Alastor."

"Well, that's as maybe," Alastor said bluntly. "But you've still got to know."

He glanced between his two companions: Albus, looking shrunken and unhappy; Arabella, remote and thoughtful, her own reactions kept a careful blank.

"The Snapes," he began. "Well, they've been a Slytherin family for generations - long as we've had records, unless I'm much mistaken - though recently there's been an increasing tendency to choose Durmstrang over Hogwarts. And they've been dark Wizards for just as long. Not all of them, maybe, but a large enough proportion to give them two aisles to themselves in the Aurors' archives." He sucked in a hissing breath, and once more glanced between Albus and Arabella.

"Every modern dark uprising, they've had a hand in it," he said with something that sounded like satisfaction. "They were the [only] British family to follow Madam Vasuki in a big way, and then Grindelwald - well, we know of at least four, and I'll bet we didn't get them all. Including, incidentally, your lad's grandfather. They didn't do so well there-" (Arabella gave a tight little smile at that.) "-and after the war, the family started to go downhill. Lots of casualties, and most of the family fortune was confiscated. Your lad's dad went into commerce, and did well. Nothing illegal, they say, but I don't believe in the tooth fairy either. Whatever side of the law he was on, what I've heard about some of his business practices was pretty unethical, if not outright illegal."

"This is all very nice, Alastor dear, but isn't it a little off the point?"

Alastor gave Arabella a sharp look, and flushed slightly. "Give me time, 'Bella, I'm coming to it. Well, by the time Voldemort came out, there was only the one left." A pause, perfectly timed without conscious thought to dramatic effect, and only spoiled a little by Arabella's derisive smile. "Tiberius Caligula, your boy's father. And true to form - well, he was right up there with the first generation of Voldemort supporters - with the likes of Konstantin Dolohov and the Bulstrode twins.

"We didn't pay him a lot of attention at first. You remember - it all started very suddenly, and we simply didn't have the resources to deal with every young Slytherin from a bad family-"

"-And nor should you," Albus said firmly.

"You're being naive again, Albus. The snake may change its skin, but it can't change its heart," Alastor said heavily. Arabella gave him a sudden, tight smile, and he coughed awkwardly. "Present company excepted, of course."

"Of course," Arabella murmured innocently. "If you could resume your fascinating narrative-?"

"Yes. Well. It was three years before we started getting suspicious of old Tiberius, and then it took fully three months to get the evidence. I was in charge of that." Alastor's voice was rueful. "And if I had known ... well, I'd have hauled him in on suspicion immediately, and looked for the evidence later. It'd have been early July 1972 when I got the warrant. Got there and the place was in an uproar. He was dead. Poisoned."

A long silence followed this pronouncement, broken only by the quiet humming of the massed dark detectors behind Alastor's head.

"[Most] interesting," Arabella murmured. "So who-?"

"I'm coming to that," Alastor growled. "We turned that house upside down that day, and we didn't find a thing. Gave up about midnight and turned in, leaving young Bertram Bundy as guard. And that was my second big mistake of the day.

"By morning, he'd had his throat cut - right from ear to ear - and Tiberius's wife had gone. As clear an admission of guilt as if she'd left the bottle in the dustbin. She left her two younger children behind to face the music, too. They'd have been about fourteen and sixteen years old, I believe."

"She [abandoned] them?" Arabella sounded perplexed. "Now that [does] surprise me. When I knew her-"

"It's what happened."

"And how did the children take it?" Albus asked.

Alastor suppressed a sigh. Pitiful. Pitiful and predictable, that Albus would think straight away of the child. "The boy - your Severus - was half frantic. He kept screaming at us that he didn't believe it, that we were lying - even tried to attack a colleague of mine bare-handed. We had to stun him in the end, before he could do himself any damage. His elder brother had walked out on the family a year before after some kind of row. He knew nothing about the whole affair - or so he said. As for the girl-" A pause. Alastor seemed to be choosing his words with care. "Well, she was a wrong 'un, for starters. She was smiling like a cat that got the cream, and revelling in all the commotion. I'd not be surprised if she'd had a hand in helping her ma do the deed."

"But you found no proof."

"No. Never. We never caught up with Kezia Snape, we never got proof of her guilt, we never got any of the children to cooperate with us, we never caught the irregularities in Tiberius's business dealings. The whole thing was an out-and-out failure."

Alastor's voice rang with wounded pride, with all the humorous bitterness of one who tells tales against himself. The words 'And it still rankles' hung unspoken in the air.

"So that's that," he said finally. "That's the kid you've got spying for you. What do you think of him now?"

"No less than I thought of him before. You didn't see him, Alastor. You didn't speak to him. He wasn't like - that."

"You're a trusting man, Albus," Alastor growled. "I've been trying to knock sense into you for years - and so's Arabella - but you've a skull thicker than a troll's and twice as impenetrable."

"Ah! Flattery," Albus said lightly. "I've always considered it one of my finest qualities."

Alastor slumped in his seat, his hands balling into white-knuckled fists. "Arabella," he said, only slightly plaintively. "You knew the case. You tell him."

"I didn't, actually."

"You didn't?"

"You forget, Alastor - this was back in 1972." There was a brittle quality in Arabella's voice that made Albus look sharply at her. "Mulligan died in March, and Barty Crouch was just beginning to assert his authority. Don't you remember all the 'new broom' propaganda? I was already being eased out by July." Arabella hesitated momentarily, looking down at the glasses on her lap. "After all, my record isn't exactly clean, is it?"

"The hell it isn't!" Alastor exploded, rocketing to his feet and leaning his clenched knuckles on the deal-topped desk. "Arabella - Arabella, listen! Mulligan destroyed all those records back in 1945, just after you disappeared - all of them. There is not a *shred* of evidence to connect you with Grindelwald or the Todeskinder." Alastor's voice rose, echoing off the baffles that soundproofed the room so that the harsh German consonants echoed and bounced around the room. "I was there, Arabella. I saw him do it."

There was a sudden deathly silence, and Alastor was caught motionless, hulking over his desk as if he were a raptor, and the table his prey, as if he had been arrested in mid-pounce and suddenly did not know how to proceed. Albus looked from Arabella to Alastor, and then back again, noting how Arabella seemed to have shrunken in her seat until she seemed child-sized, almost lost its huge leather expanse, her narrow shoulders hunched together. The dark detectors seemed suddenly to be terribly, terribly still, as if they too were unsure of themselves.

"There's no need to shout, Alastor," Arabella said, and her voice was quite steady. "It's hardly relevant to the present situation."

Alastor sat down, shamefaced.

"You're right, of course," he muttered. "Shouldn't have brought it up. Ancient history, y'know. Not important."

Albus glanced between them again. Arabella seemed to have regained her poise, and was polishing her glasses with an unusually intent air; Alastor, seated once more behind his desk, was studying very intently the marks his knuckles had made in the leather top of the table, as if they were tea leaves or crystal balls, or some other of the omens he so despised.

Albus glanced between them once more, remembering unbidden one of the so many seemingly arbitrary incidents that had somehow jolted him back to life in the unsettled days followed Grindelwald's fall.

* * *

It had been one of the Hit Wizards who had called for him, a young behemoth named Telemachus Flint whose neck was as broad as his head, striding through the Hospital Wing of the Ministry Building in an attempt to look businesslike and military, but succeeding only in looking uncomfortably out of place. Albus had been sitting up in bed at the time, in a vain attempt to do the Daily Prophet crossword. He had still felt weak and drained, unable even to hold the quill steady long enough to complete the clue. Flint's entry had been a welcome interruption.

"Mister Mulligan requests your presence, sir."

Telemachus was clearly still so new to the job as to eschew all small talk in the line of duty. He had waited motionless while Albus hoisted himself out of the bed and put on the long grey robe that was lying over his chair, while he put on shoes, and argued with the Duty Mediwitch who insisted that he wasn't going anywhere, while a Senior Mediwitch was called to pronounce on whether or not he should be allowed out. He had not even broken his self-imposed silence when Dumbledore had finally been allowed to leave and had begun to walk slowly beside him, along the short corridor that led to Mulligan's office. At the office door he had withdrawn, leaving him there without a word of farewell.

Albus had already raised his hand to knock when he heard voices raised within.

"All of them-!"

"My dear Moody, you are making yourself ridiculous. I assure you, no-"

"All of them, I said. Or I'll do it myself."

Albus had hesitated for a moment, and then pushed the door open, feeling, obscurely, that his presence might be needed.

Moody had his back to him, leaning over Mulligan's desk, and as Dumbledore entered, he saw him slide his wand back inside the pocket of the dark grey trenchcoat he always wore. Then he turned on his heel and left, stalking past Dumbledore as if he had not noticed him.

"Ah. Albus, do sit down."

Mulligan, unusually, had sounded flustered, and his cheeks seemed uncommonly pink. As Albus had sat down he noticed that Mulligan's desk was littered with ashes, and its leather surface was charred and scorched, as if a large quantity of parchment had been burnt there. Mulligan had run his fingers through his had, a surprising, nervous gesture for one who had endured a world war without qualms.

"Albus, has the world gone mad today?" he had asked, his voice slightly peevish."First my finest deep cover operative somehow manages to go AWOL - out of the Ministry's high-security suite, no less - and now this!" he indicated the mess on his desk. "Really, one would think that we had not just ended a major war. What has come over my staff today I do not know." Mulligan's voice had risen slightly slightly, reminding Albus forcibly of an elderly spinster. "Albus, if you plan to take off back to that school of yours, *do* tell me in advance, won't you?"

* * *

He sighed, and returned from his reminiscences. "So," he said, as much to break the silence as anything else. "How do we proceed from here?"

Alastor glanced at him sharply as he spoke. "We have to assume that the data in the letters is known, and plan accordingly," he said thoughtfuly.

"What about Severus? Will that not compromise-?"

"Of course it won't, dear," Arabella said. "All you need do is let it be known that dear Ida was suspicious, and leave it at that. Though it is better," she added severely, "if you can do the thing without letting your suspicions be known."

Alastor had been staring down at the letter again. "The Ministry is my problem," he said at length. "I'll get my colleagues in the Internationals onto it. As to the Ministry's spy - now that we know he exists - well, leave that to me."

"Alastor, dear-"

"I know. It's more your pidgeon than mine, but that can't be helped. Unfortunately most of your old colleagues never took to me."

"Oh, really? And why would that be?" There was a tone of mock innocence in Arabella's voice that almost made Alastor growl, and caused Albus to hide a discreet smile.

"Because I prefer my friends honest. That's why."

"Alastor, dear, which of us was it who accused Albus of being naive again?"

Alastor snorted and looked down, busying himself with sorting the six letters into two neat piles. "As for *your* spy, Albus – well, I strongly advise you to drop him – immediately – but since I doubt I've a hope of persuading you, I'm warning you again. You watch your back with that one. We can't do without you."

Albus nodded, rather more meekly than was his wont. There really was nothing convincing he could have said. His uncertainty rose again, increased exponentially by Alastor's insistence. Had he been mistaken in his judgement? Had young Severus had a hand in Quentin Trimble's death?

"That is all very well, Alastor dear, but we really haven't *got* anyone else."

"Well, that's as maybe - but he's still a Snape. You trust people like that at your own peril."

"Alastor, really! Do you have even the sense you were born with?"

Alastor gave Arabella an irked look, bringing his hand down with more force than was strictly necessary on his desk. "What's the matter now, woman?" he growled.

"All those things he told Albus ... you are remembering, aren't you, that I've not yet found so much as a single inaccuracy in it?"

"Means nothing. You simply haven't found the lies yet."

"So ... you don't mean to investigate any of those alleged Death Eaters," Albus said, sounding more dismayed than Alastor had ever heard him.

"I'm onto it already - but I need proof, don't I? I'm not making any arrests on the word of a Snape."

"Alastor, dear, I'm afraid you're still missing the point here. I told you I hadn't found any inaccuracies in that information."

"Well?"

"Well ..." The glasses came off, a corner of the cardigan was pressed into service to polish their lenses. "Not only is every single veriafiable detail accurate, but of those facts we cannot check, I did not find a single internal discrepancy of the smallest type." A small, tight smile. "You choose your spies well, Albus. This one is uncommonly precise in his facts."

"Your inference being?"

"Well ..." Arabella's hands stilled, the deceptively innocent glasses resting unheeded in her lap. "Either every single contact I possess is in the service of Voldemort, and has been for many many years - and believe me or not, it is a possibility that I am carefully considering - or Albus's spy is telling him the truth, about everything."

"Hmmm. Still. You be careful, Albus. Voldemort would give his eye teeth to have your head on a plate. Make sure that spy of yours isn't playing the traitor with you."

And to that, really, there was nothing left that could be answered.

"Yes, Alastor," Albus said meekly.