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Chapter 11 - In which one person talks rather a lot, and something unexpected happens
“What happens to the world, if all the heroes lose?”
(Jack Kirby – Captain America 211)
Riley looked at the defeated man in front of him. Some might have called him delicate; others, weedy. Certainly he was not at his best, here in a U.S. army detention centre, eating army rations and being questioned by army officers twice his size. His proper setting was in a grand mansion somewhere in New England, or in the more sophisticated areas of Manhattan, sipping vintage French wine and exchanging gossip… Merrimac Winthrop Lodge, the last Minister for Magic of the old order in the U.S.
The assault had gone surprisingly well. The Boston ministry compound had been stormed almost at once. Resistance had been unconcentrated and feeble; according to what M. Lodge was now saying, the Ministry had set up no defences, believing to the last that the Pentagon would simply not attack. What magical defences there were had been efficiently overcome thanks to the Pentagon’s researches and the anti-magic magic supplied by their British allies. Elsewhere in the country, there were some focuses of heavy fighting, especially in the Midwest, where some Ministry outposts had turned out to have resolute commanders and able supporters; but even if these people managed to escape and regroup elsewhere, the issue had been really decided. The worst they could do was to provide nuisance value. The centre of the sorcerous old world of America was, as it had always been, in Massachusetts; and with the seizure of the Ministry and the unresisted confiscation of the Salem Academy and its grounds, it had been broken. All that was left now was for the Pentagon to take over its operations and effectively undertake the management of magical affairs in the United States.
“This is the paper,” said Winthrop Lodge, pushing a neat piece of headed notepaper towards Riley. “My formal resignation. Once you have this, even the International Council of Wizards cannot make any trouble for… my successor, whoever they are.”
“You should not give it to me, sir,” answered the young officer. “I’m too junior.”
“I just want to get it over and be done with it, Captain, you understand? I wanted it over. I stopped believing in the Ministry a long time ago…”
“Surely, sir…”
“I have never felt that this whole business would end well. I certainly did not expect the Federal Government to step in and close the show down, but I have always known that the Ministry was rotten and could not be –“
“Perhaps,” said a burly older man, entering the tent, “you could give that paper to me… Mr. Minister.”
“Perhaps I could… General”
General Jack Bauer was in a fairly peculiar position. Wearing only two stars on his collar, he was not really senior enough to be, ordinarily, at the head of a military operation that involved major national interests; on the other hand, as a Squib from a wizarding family, he was by far the best qualified high officer to understand and deal with magical issues in his country. Indeed, the Pentagon had originally unhesitatingly nominated him as future Minister for Magic; until he had managed to convince them that, as a Squib and a member of a decidedly marginal family, he could not command the authority and respect for the job. Then they limited themselves to putting him in charge of operations and asking him to recommend a successor. Ex-Minister Winthrop Lodge and he knew each other vaguely; and he knew enough, at least, to appreciate that, when Winthrop Lodge spoke of decay at the Ministry, he was not only making apologies.
“As I am in charge here, I am the appropriate person to take care of this. Though, you know, you should have written it on parchment.”
A slight smile crossed the tired middle-aged civilian’s face. “Blame your procurement corps, General. They could get me neither parchment nor a proper quill.”
“Well, we’ll get it done in proper form later. Now the priority is to debrief you, sir. You were saying that you felt the Ministry was rotten? By the way, this -” and he pointed to a stout Chinese-American NCO who had just appeared, notebook in hand – “is Sergeant Cheung. He’ll be taking notes, and when a transcript is made, you will be at liberty to check it for accuracy before you sign it.”
“I appreciate that, General… but what I would like to know is what my status here is. Am I a prisoner, a detainee, what?”
“Currently, you are under arrest. I don’t think it will ever progress further… if we were to do anything about you, it would entail getting up some sort of case that a Grand Jury could hear, and I can just imagine them sitting through a case about magic. Besides, I can’t see that you have committed any crime. No, we’ll just question you and a few others to find out how the Ministry worked, and then I guess most of you will be set free. A better question would be, what will your status be then? Because I don’t mind telling you that an eye will be kept on you.”
“I guess that’s understandable. Well, I don’t mind doing anything the Government requires, so long as I get to be free afterwards and forget about the whole ghastly mess.
“I came to office intending to do my duty. The first day of a Minister is always terribly exciting… the ceremony is magnificent. I hope you will keep it?”
“Who knows, Minister. Anyway?”
“Well… I can’t be sure when the gilt came off for me. Perhaps I had never been sure of the Ministry in the first place. As I grew up, all of us young blades tended to treat it like a venerable joke. And we let it be known that we thought so. There was a time, in fact, when the Ministry was so unpopular… you recall the Seventies, Bauer?”
“Not the politics. I was only a kid at the time.”
“Well, you may remember that that was when The Salem Advertiser and the London Prophet used to run an anti-Ministry story every second day. We were all terribly conscious that the Ministry was fussy and corrupt, and we were all such confident little rebels. Of course, it did not occur to us to question the fact that it was that corrupt old order with all its crimes on its head that allowed our parents to send us to Salem and feel like the centre of the universe. Oh, we were all such bright little revolutionaries, with all our ideas clear in our heads. We were for the poor and the downtrodden and the excluded, and we were going to create a new politics and a new heaven and a new earth…
As the questioning went on, Merrimac Winthrop Lodge’ sense of grievance and anger became clearer and more outspoken; not against the Federal Government or the Pentagon, but against his own Ministry… and against himself.
“Looking back, Jack Bauer, what strikes me is how certain of our place we were. We were going to change the world… sure, after all we were all purebloods at Salem. We felt one with the oppressed of the world, and our parents were high lords and Ministry leaders. I guess that what we really meant was that we were the ones to put the world to rights – we were the future masters – and at some level we knew it, but we would not admit it to ourselves.
“Well, you may remember 1978 and the Great Tea Trolley Disaster. At the time there was a general feeling that this was really the end of the road, that the Ministry had boobed once too often… The Witangemot itself booted out twenty-seven of the worst offenders, and replaced them with freelance critics from outside and fifteen of us kid straight out of Salem. That was how I first got in.
“Two years later, I was Minister.
“If you tell the story now, of course it all looks wrong. Of course nobody in their senses would believe that a kid my age would be promoted straight to the Witangemot and then to the top job. Of course it would look like manipulation. But at the time, you know, Jack Bauer, we just felt that it was the revolution come… we had spent so many hours just thinking of how we were going to change the world, that when we were translated from our school to the Witangemot, it felt neither strange nor alien. I guess we would have been disappointed if we had not made it.
“We were so full of ourselves. We were the fresh new wave. We never stopped to think that thousands of wizards and witches neither less wise nor less clever than ourselves were around at the time, none of whom had ever had the chances we had, and many of whom perhaps deserved them more than we did. I cannot say, after all, that we were particularly clever or outstanding in any way… I am thinking back now, and, you know, being Minister does mean that you get to meet a huge amount of people… you can evaluate them. You get to see a lot of duds, but you also meet the real Masters of the age. And comparing with those I’ve known, I cannot say that there was any person in our little circle of Salem rebels whom I would honestly regard as first-rate. And to be fair, I do not think that any of us particularly thought so. We just thought we were new, you see – full of fresh new ideas, just because we were young. And we thought that we were taking over the whale, when in fact the whale was taking over us.
“It is hard to tell where these things begin, General. And I guess you will have seen this sort of stuff in your own life – I mean, the Army is a bureaucracy, after all. A bureaucracy among other things. A man – a group of men – come in, all eager to change everything. Then they find that something they had wanted to do will not work, that something else has a different effect from what they expected, that another measure is not worth the trouble it will cause. Before you know it, they are inside the system, not outside, and they are thinking like other members.” Jack Bauer, who was listening intently and without visible reaction, nevertheless found himself reacting to this.
“Ever since I realized my failure, I have been giving a lot of thought to how it happened. I let myself be taken over, for one thing. When I was 22, I had a sound scepticism about the Ministry and all its works. I had learned to despise it from the papers, and it would have been much better if I had remembered how I felt all the time. But when you are promoted to the Witangemot, you start taking an interest in how things are done. Your early scepticism just does not get a look-in. You suddenly are looking at things in a whole new way… and it never occurs to you that the system is just making use of you.
“There was an implicit flattery in my position that just overcame all my judgment. Besides, I had no substance. I had lived so far just by copying what everyone else said. Everyone agreed that the Ministry was corrupt and incompetent, so I learned to talk like everyone else talked. So I developed this sceptical attitude to the Ministry… well, it would have been some use if it had not been all imitative. I had learned to treat it as something to be distrusted, but that was all newspaper articles and imitating our elders. It just had nothing to do with reality – and when I was inside the Witangemot in reality, I just never associated what I was doing with the tales of corruption and incompetence I had read.
“And then a lot of the stuff we had all been talking was a lot less radical than it seemed. It had all emanated from the Press and our parents, and they all were in the loop. A lot of reforms that sounded big in our mouths turned out to change nothing at all of what was really corrupt – the network of relationships and friendships and informal contacts and mutual self-promotion. Indeed, a lot of reforms only made sense within that framework. In the end, a lot of what you do ends up tying you to it.
“I guess the first time I really betrayed myself was when I took part in the Salem Play.”
“The Salem Play?”
“Yeah. A public re-enactment of the famous Salem witch-hunt. As a comedy, you know! showing Muggles as cruel clowns who always somehow manage to kill their own and miss the real wizards and witches. There are scenes where you are all supposed to laugh… wizards walking invisible and making sarcastic comments among scenes of torture.”
“And it </>was hilarious, too” went on Lodge with the shadow of a smile. “It was meant to make you laugh, and it did. Every year the Witangemot had a sort of jamboree where all important American wizards were invited… The ‘Salem Play’ always was the centrepiece of the celebrations. People crowded to watch it. They would repeat aloud all their favourite lines. They knew it by heart! It just reinforced in everyone’s mind the sense of how much cleverer they were than Muggles, how much they could disregard them.”
“You mean that you… Look, Lodge, everyone knows that many innocent people were murdered under form of law in Salem… You mean that you used that as a centrepiece for a national holiday?”
“Yes,” said the ex-Minister with a twisted, yet somehow fawning smile, “sick, isn’t it? I mean, I’m trying to explain to you how we lived and thought. We just thought we were invincible. We had just lost touch with reality… with common sense.”
Silence briefly fell. Jack Bauer seemed to have run out of questions, but the truth is that he had been stunned by the cruelty of it all – and as much as the cruelty, by the vulgarity. He was not surprised, now, to remember how his magical parents kept strictly away from Ministry families in their town.
Then the interrogation began again. This time Lodge was given less time to describe his own personal evolution, and pressed more closely on the Ministry’s organization and functions. That, after all, was what the questioners wanted to know. Yet, as the questioning went on, Merrimac Winthrop Lodge’ sense of grievance and anger became clearer and more outspoken; not against the Federal Government or the Pentagon, who had just taken his job away but against his own previous employers. He described the single offices, their managers, and their activities, with contempt. He seemed to know nothing good about any employee. He had been Minister for two decades, and it was clear that he felt nothing more than used as a front and encouraged to take part in all manners of corruption.
“It sort of makes you think,” said General Bauer to Riley Finn as they talked over the case, later. “This guy has been at the core of it for twenty years. He always seems to have taken part in whatever it is that they were doing at the time, and yet now he is angry about it. He describes it as a racket and a ramp, and he does not feel that he owes it any loyalty. It’s all like each time he found it easier to say ‘yes’.”
“I can see that, I think,” answered Finn. “You have a weak guy, a sociable guy – see how he kept talking? He likes to be with people, likes company. So when he is with his Ministry mates, he is not thinking of what they are doing together. Then he goes home at night, thinks about it, and gets sick. And then the next morning he does it all again.”
“You make it sound like an addiction.”
“With respect, General, I think it is. So many things are addictive without being chemical drugs... I think in this case the guy just hid away his guilt feelings because he needed to be where he was, until we smashed his world in and left him with no protection against having to face his behaviour. Then, when we questioned him, he was too intelligent not to think about the work he had really been doing.”
“Intelligent, but weak.”
“Yessir, I would say that.”
Riley did not tell General Jack Bauer about his own experience with addiction, and Bauer did not ask. But he had noticed something more than merely analytical about the young officer’s musings.
………………………………………………………………………………………………..
As the questioning went on, a nasty suspicion was making his way through Lodge’s mind. At first he had taken Bauer and Finn’s need to know how the Ministry worked and what it was supposed to do at face value; but he began to notice a certain trend, a certain overtone, in the questions – as if they did not envisage shutting it all down and starting again.
He did not want to believe it. Surely, after all he had been telling them, they must realize that to take over the Ministry as it was would be the same as to hire a houseful of scorpions? He decided to tackle the issue, and led a discussion of the Justice Office and its misdeeds to an inevitable conclusion:
“…like Jimmy Cavan and his merry men, who never stayed in jail long enough to try their prisoner suits on. I will not say that all the people who started in the Justice Office were all corrupt, but it was a good career idea to be. Good judges always ended up leaving the office, because they found their sentences overturned by colleagues for no good reason. Sometimes they might even go to Ministry functions and find villains they had sentenced the previous week, chatting amiably to Ministry top brass. You need not be afraid to lose good men when you sack the lot and start again.”
“Hmmm. I don’t think we’re quite going to do that, you know.”
“You’re not?”
“We shall have to make use of the existing Ministry facilities.”
A jolt seemed to go through Lodge’s limbs, as if he had touched live electricity. His face was horrified.
“You mean you are going to keep the Ministry as it is? Same employees, same facilities?”
“Mostly, yes. Of course, it will be necessary to weed some out…”
“General, you must be mad. You must sack everyone. And I mean everyone. And if you want to be certain of your organization, you must move the whole thing to California. Or to Salt Lake City. Even Washington DC would not be safe… better than nothing, but.”
“You sound serious.”
“I am as serious as I know how to be. If you want anything about your ‘new Ministry’ to work, you have to take it away from the New England aristocracy. Otherwise they will take it away from you. Believe me, I know what I am saying.
“I am one of them myself, Jack Bauer. You know what my mind is doing right now? It is racing through all the ways that you can run around a few leaders and get them to do what we want, and considering the men and the means in the various departments – and the relationships, who is whose friend, cousin, brother, sister. These count for more than any personnel chart. Believe you me, you will find papers turning up in hands that never ought to have held them, or, even worse, people will know of those papers and you will never be able to find out how they knew. If you are moving against someone, they will have their defences in place before you have completed your plans. And you will find yourself passing measures you had not wanted to achieve ends you did not desire.
“Start your own bureaucracy, Jack Bauer. Hire people who will be loyal to you. Don’t keep on this inbred lot, who are loyal only to themselves.”
“We cannot do that, Lodge. It would cost more than the Government budgeted for this operation, and right now we are feeling rather budget conscious. We have to take the Ministry over as a going concern.”
“You’ve got to be joking! General, Jack Bauer, you tell them that unless they start over again from the start, they have absolutely no hope!”
Bauer and Riley Finn exchanged a bitter look. “I’m afraid that’s policy, Lodge. It has been decided above our heads. The United States simply don’t have the funds to start it over again. We have been ordered to make use of what’s available.”
Lodge’s shoulders fell, and he shook his head weakly. “In that case,” he said slowly, as if the words were being dragged out of him, “you won’t be making use of it; it will be making use of you. In that case, Bauer, you have wasted your whole effort, down to the price of the last bullet.”
Because Bauer was the commander, he could not say to Lodge that he agreed. He had strenuously argued to at least move the new Ministry headquarters to California, only to be overruled on grounds of cost. Given the state of the Federal budget – and let’s not even consider the States – that was simply a luxury that could not be afforded. He could only put on a determined face – one that failed to reassure Merrimac Winthrop Lodge. “We’ll just have to see about that. There is plenty that can….” And his voice stopped, as a soldier entered almost without knocking.
General Jack Bauer’s glare almost incinerated him. “I’m sorry, General, sir,” said the young enlisted man, practically quivering. “It was urgent. General, sir, I really think you should attend to this. It has the highest priority.”
“Awright,” growled the older man, angrily, “hand it to me.” He took the message, read it.
He went white.
He turned to his prisoner. “Lodge. What do you know about American or other operations in England? Ministry or otherwise? Legal or illegal?”
Lodge answered with a bewildered air: “You will have to be a bit more specific, I’m afraid. That’s a lot of ground to cover. Something happened?”
“Something happened all right. Dismissed!” – this to the soldier, who saluted, turned and left. “All right, let’s break down the question into manageable parts. What operations did your own Ministry have in Britain?”
Almost two hours later, a slightly confused Lodge had been taken through all the legal Ministry operation; a list of known operatives; a list of suspected illegal operations by Americans; ditto by non-Americans; and any and all non-American operating in England for any reason the Ministry knew of. By the side of General Bauer, Sergeant Cheung had been stolidly taking notes. When the questioning stopped, he handed them over to his chief; and Bauer went through them with an increasing dissatisfied air. Finally, he turned to Lodge.
“All right, Lodge. I can see nothing here that could help us, so I’ll ask you directly. Four hours ago, Cornelius Fudge disappeared from his apartments without a trace. Do you know anything that could help us find out how and why it happened?”
Lodge’s jaw dropped.
(Jack Kirby – Captain America 211)
Riley looked at the defeated man in front of him. Some might have called him delicate; others, weedy. Certainly he was not at his best, here in a U.S. army detention centre, eating army rations and being questioned by army officers twice his size. His proper setting was in a grand mansion somewhere in New England, or in the more sophisticated areas of Manhattan, sipping vintage French wine and exchanging gossip… Merrimac Winthrop Lodge, the last Minister for Magic of the old order in the U.S.
The assault had gone surprisingly well. The Boston ministry compound had been stormed almost at once. Resistance had been unconcentrated and feeble; according to what M. Lodge was now saying, the Ministry had set up no defences, believing to the last that the Pentagon would simply not attack. What magical defences there were had been efficiently overcome thanks to the Pentagon’s researches and the anti-magic magic supplied by their British allies. Elsewhere in the country, there were some focuses of heavy fighting, especially in the Midwest, where some Ministry outposts had turned out to have resolute commanders and able supporters; but even if these people managed to escape and regroup elsewhere, the issue had been really decided. The worst they could do was to provide nuisance value. The centre of the sorcerous old world of America was, as it had always been, in Massachusetts; and with the seizure of the Ministry and the unresisted confiscation of the Salem Academy and its grounds, it had been broken. All that was left now was for the Pentagon to take over its operations and effectively undertake the management of magical affairs in the United States.
“This is the paper,” said Winthrop Lodge, pushing a neat piece of headed notepaper towards Riley. “My formal resignation. Once you have this, even the International Council of Wizards cannot make any trouble for… my successor, whoever they are.”
“You should not give it to me, sir,” answered the young officer. “I’m too junior.”
“I just want to get it over and be done with it, Captain, you understand? I wanted it over. I stopped believing in the Ministry a long time ago…”
“Surely, sir…”
“I have never felt that this whole business would end well. I certainly did not expect the Federal Government to step in and close the show down, but I have always known that the Ministry was rotten and could not be –“
“Perhaps,” said a burly older man, entering the tent, “you could give that paper to me… Mr. Minister.”
“Perhaps I could… General”
General Jack Bauer was in a fairly peculiar position. Wearing only two stars on his collar, he was not really senior enough to be, ordinarily, at the head of a military operation that involved major national interests; on the other hand, as a Squib from a wizarding family, he was by far the best qualified high officer to understand and deal with magical issues in his country. Indeed, the Pentagon had originally unhesitatingly nominated him as future Minister for Magic; until he had managed to convince them that, as a Squib and a member of a decidedly marginal family, he could not command the authority and respect for the job. Then they limited themselves to putting him in charge of operations and asking him to recommend a successor. Ex-Minister Winthrop Lodge and he knew each other vaguely; and he knew enough, at least, to appreciate that, when Winthrop Lodge spoke of decay at the Ministry, he was not only making apologies.
“As I am in charge here, I am the appropriate person to take care of this. Though, you know, you should have written it on parchment.”
A slight smile crossed the tired middle-aged civilian’s face. “Blame your procurement corps, General. They could get me neither parchment nor a proper quill.”
“Well, we’ll get it done in proper form later. Now the priority is to debrief you, sir. You were saying that you felt the Ministry was rotten? By the way, this -” and he pointed to a stout Chinese-American NCO who had just appeared, notebook in hand – “is Sergeant Cheung. He’ll be taking notes, and when a transcript is made, you will be at liberty to check it for accuracy before you sign it.”
“I appreciate that, General… but what I would like to know is what my status here is. Am I a prisoner, a detainee, what?”
“Currently, you are under arrest. I don’t think it will ever progress further… if we were to do anything about you, it would entail getting up some sort of case that a Grand Jury could hear, and I can just imagine them sitting through a case about magic. Besides, I can’t see that you have committed any crime. No, we’ll just question you and a few others to find out how the Ministry worked, and then I guess most of you will be set free. A better question would be, what will your status be then? Because I don’t mind telling you that an eye will be kept on you.”
“I guess that’s understandable. Well, I don’t mind doing anything the Government requires, so long as I get to be free afterwards and forget about the whole ghastly mess.
“I came to office intending to do my duty. The first day of a Minister is always terribly exciting… the ceremony is magnificent. I hope you will keep it?”
“Who knows, Minister. Anyway?”
“Well… I can’t be sure when the gilt came off for me. Perhaps I had never been sure of the Ministry in the first place. As I grew up, all of us young blades tended to treat it like a venerable joke. And we let it be known that we thought so. There was a time, in fact, when the Ministry was so unpopular… you recall the Seventies, Bauer?”
“Not the politics. I was only a kid at the time.”
“Well, you may remember that that was when The Salem Advertiser and the London Prophet used to run an anti-Ministry story every second day. We were all terribly conscious that the Ministry was fussy and corrupt, and we were all such confident little rebels. Of course, it did not occur to us to question the fact that it was that corrupt old order with all its crimes on its head that allowed our parents to send us to Salem and feel like the centre of the universe. Oh, we were all such bright little revolutionaries, with all our ideas clear in our heads. We were for the poor and the downtrodden and the excluded, and we were going to create a new politics and a new heaven and a new earth…
As the questioning went on, Merrimac Winthrop Lodge’ sense of grievance and anger became clearer and more outspoken; not against the Federal Government or the Pentagon, but against his own Ministry… and against himself.
“Looking back, Jack Bauer, what strikes me is how certain of our place we were. We were going to change the world… sure, after all we were all purebloods at Salem. We felt one with the oppressed of the world, and our parents were high lords and Ministry leaders. I guess that what we really meant was that we were the ones to put the world to rights – we were the future masters – and at some level we knew it, but we would not admit it to ourselves.
“Well, you may remember 1978 and the Great Tea Trolley Disaster. At the time there was a general feeling that this was really the end of the road, that the Ministry had boobed once too often… The Witangemot itself booted out twenty-seven of the worst offenders, and replaced them with freelance critics from outside and fifteen of us kid straight out of Salem. That was how I first got in.
“Two years later, I was Minister.
“If you tell the story now, of course it all looks wrong. Of course nobody in their senses would believe that a kid my age would be promoted straight to the Witangemot and then to the top job. Of course it would look like manipulation. But at the time, you know, Jack Bauer, we just felt that it was the revolution come… we had spent so many hours just thinking of how we were going to change the world, that when we were translated from our school to the Witangemot, it felt neither strange nor alien. I guess we would have been disappointed if we had not made it.
“We were so full of ourselves. We were the fresh new wave. We never stopped to think that thousands of wizards and witches neither less wise nor less clever than ourselves were around at the time, none of whom had ever had the chances we had, and many of whom perhaps deserved them more than we did. I cannot say, after all, that we were particularly clever or outstanding in any way… I am thinking back now, and, you know, being Minister does mean that you get to meet a huge amount of people… you can evaluate them. You get to see a lot of duds, but you also meet the real Masters of the age. And comparing with those I’ve known, I cannot say that there was any person in our little circle of Salem rebels whom I would honestly regard as first-rate. And to be fair, I do not think that any of us particularly thought so. We just thought we were new, you see – full of fresh new ideas, just because we were young. And we thought that we were taking over the whale, when in fact the whale was taking over us.
“It is hard to tell where these things begin, General. And I guess you will have seen this sort of stuff in your own life – I mean, the Army is a bureaucracy, after all. A bureaucracy among other things. A man – a group of men – come in, all eager to change everything. Then they find that something they had wanted to do will not work, that something else has a different effect from what they expected, that another measure is not worth the trouble it will cause. Before you know it, they are inside the system, not outside, and they are thinking like other members.” Jack Bauer, who was listening intently and without visible reaction, nevertheless found himself reacting to this.
“Ever since I realized my failure, I have been giving a lot of thought to how it happened. I let myself be taken over, for one thing. When I was 22, I had a sound scepticism about the Ministry and all its works. I had learned to despise it from the papers, and it would have been much better if I had remembered how I felt all the time. But when you are promoted to the Witangemot, you start taking an interest in how things are done. Your early scepticism just does not get a look-in. You suddenly are looking at things in a whole new way… and it never occurs to you that the system is just making use of you.
“There was an implicit flattery in my position that just overcame all my judgment. Besides, I had no substance. I had lived so far just by copying what everyone else said. Everyone agreed that the Ministry was corrupt and incompetent, so I learned to talk like everyone else talked. So I developed this sceptical attitude to the Ministry… well, it would have been some use if it had not been all imitative. I had learned to treat it as something to be distrusted, but that was all newspaper articles and imitating our elders. It just had nothing to do with reality – and when I was inside the Witangemot in reality, I just never associated what I was doing with the tales of corruption and incompetence I had read.
“And then a lot of the stuff we had all been talking was a lot less radical than it seemed. It had all emanated from the Press and our parents, and they all were in the loop. A lot of reforms that sounded big in our mouths turned out to change nothing at all of what was really corrupt – the network of relationships and friendships and informal contacts and mutual self-promotion. Indeed, a lot of reforms only made sense within that framework. In the end, a lot of what you do ends up tying you to it.
“I guess the first time I really betrayed myself was when I took part in the Salem Play.”
“The Salem Play?”
“Yeah. A public re-enactment of the famous Salem witch-hunt. As a comedy, you know! showing Muggles as cruel clowns who always somehow manage to kill their own and miss the real wizards and witches. There are scenes where you are all supposed to laugh… wizards walking invisible and making sarcastic comments among scenes of torture.”
“And it </>was hilarious, too” went on Lodge with the shadow of a smile. “It was meant to make you laugh, and it did. Every year the Witangemot had a sort of jamboree where all important American wizards were invited… The ‘Salem Play’ always was the centrepiece of the celebrations. People crowded to watch it. They would repeat aloud all their favourite lines. They knew it by heart! It just reinforced in everyone’s mind the sense of how much cleverer they were than Muggles, how much they could disregard them.”
“You mean that you… Look, Lodge, everyone knows that many innocent people were murdered under form of law in Salem… You mean that you used that as a centrepiece for a national holiday?”
“Yes,” said the ex-Minister with a twisted, yet somehow fawning smile, “sick, isn’t it? I mean, I’m trying to explain to you how we lived and thought. We just thought we were invincible. We had just lost touch with reality… with common sense.”
Silence briefly fell. Jack Bauer seemed to have run out of questions, but the truth is that he had been stunned by the cruelty of it all – and as much as the cruelty, by the vulgarity. He was not surprised, now, to remember how his magical parents kept strictly away from Ministry families in their town.
Then the interrogation began again. This time Lodge was given less time to describe his own personal evolution, and pressed more closely on the Ministry’s organization and functions. That, after all, was what the questioners wanted to know. Yet, as the questioning went on, Merrimac Winthrop Lodge’ sense of grievance and anger became clearer and more outspoken; not against the Federal Government or the Pentagon, who had just taken his job away but against his own previous employers. He described the single offices, their managers, and their activities, with contempt. He seemed to know nothing good about any employee. He had been Minister for two decades, and it was clear that he felt nothing more than used as a front and encouraged to take part in all manners of corruption.
“It sort of makes you think,” said General Bauer to Riley Finn as they talked over the case, later. “This guy has been at the core of it for twenty years. He always seems to have taken part in whatever it is that they were doing at the time, and yet now he is angry about it. He describes it as a racket and a ramp, and he does not feel that he owes it any loyalty. It’s all like each time he found it easier to say ‘yes’.”
“I can see that, I think,” answered Finn. “You have a weak guy, a sociable guy – see how he kept talking? He likes to be with people, likes company. So when he is with his Ministry mates, he is not thinking of what they are doing together. Then he goes home at night, thinks about it, and gets sick. And then the next morning he does it all again.”
“You make it sound like an addiction.”
“With respect, General, I think it is. So many things are addictive without being chemical drugs... I think in this case the guy just hid away his guilt feelings because he needed to be where he was, until we smashed his world in and left him with no protection against having to face his behaviour. Then, when we questioned him, he was too intelligent not to think about the work he had really been doing.”
“Intelligent, but weak.”
“Yessir, I would say that.”
Riley did not tell General Jack Bauer about his own experience with addiction, and Bauer did not ask. But he had noticed something more than merely analytical about the young officer’s musings.
………………………………………………………………………………………………..
As the questioning went on, a nasty suspicion was making his way through Lodge’s mind. At first he had taken Bauer and Finn’s need to know how the Ministry worked and what it was supposed to do at face value; but he began to notice a certain trend, a certain overtone, in the questions – as if they did not envisage shutting it all down and starting again.
He did not want to believe it. Surely, after all he had been telling them, they must realize that to take over the Ministry as it was would be the same as to hire a houseful of scorpions? He decided to tackle the issue, and led a discussion of the Justice Office and its misdeeds to an inevitable conclusion:
“…like Jimmy Cavan and his merry men, who never stayed in jail long enough to try their prisoner suits on. I will not say that all the people who started in the Justice Office were all corrupt, but it was a good career idea to be. Good judges always ended up leaving the office, because they found their sentences overturned by colleagues for no good reason. Sometimes they might even go to Ministry functions and find villains they had sentenced the previous week, chatting amiably to Ministry top brass. You need not be afraid to lose good men when you sack the lot and start again.”
“Hmmm. I don’t think we’re quite going to do that, you know.”
“You’re not?”
“We shall have to make use of the existing Ministry facilities.”
A jolt seemed to go through Lodge’s limbs, as if he had touched live electricity. His face was horrified.
“You mean you are going to keep the Ministry as it is? Same employees, same facilities?”
“Mostly, yes. Of course, it will be necessary to weed some out…”
“General, you must be mad. You must sack everyone. And I mean everyone. And if you want to be certain of your organization, you must move the whole thing to California. Or to Salt Lake City. Even Washington DC would not be safe… better than nothing, but.”
“You sound serious.”
“I am as serious as I know how to be. If you want anything about your ‘new Ministry’ to work, you have to take it away from the New England aristocracy. Otherwise they will take it away from you. Believe me, I know what I am saying.
“I am one of them myself, Jack Bauer. You know what my mind is doing right now? It is racing through all the ways that you can run around a few leaders and get them to do what we want, and considering the men and the means in the various departments – and the relationships, who is whose friend, cousin, brother, sister. These count for more than any personnel chart. Believe you me, you will find papers turning up in hands that never ought to have held them, or, even worse, people will know of those papers and you will never be able to find out how they knew. If you are moving against someone, they will have their defences in place before you have completed your plans. And you will find yourself passing measures you had not wanted to achieve ends you did not desire.
“Start your own bureaucracy, Jack Bauer. Hire people who will be loyal to you. Don’t keep on this inbred lot, who are loyal only to themselves.”
“We cannot do that, Lodge. It would cost more than the Government budgeted for this operation, and right now we are feeling rather budget conscious. We have to take the Ministry over as a going concern.”
“You’ve got to be joking! General, Jack Bauer, you tell them that unless they start over again from the start, they have absolutely no hope!”
Bauer and Riley Finn exchanged a bitter look. “I’m afraid that’s policy, Lodge. It has been decided above our heads. The United States simply don’t have the funds to start it over again. We have been ordered to make use of what’s available.”
Lodge’s shoulders fell, and he shook his head weakly. “In that case,” he said slowly, as if the words were being dragged out of him, “you won’t be making use of it; it will be making use of you. In that case, Bauer, you have wasted your whole effort, down to the price of the last bullet.”
Because Bauer was the commander, he could not say to Lodge that he agreed. He had strenuously argued to at least move the new Ministry headquarters to California, only to be overruled on grounds of cost. Given the state of the Federal budget – and let’s not even consider the States – that was simply a luxury that could not be afforded. He could only put on a determined face – one that failed to reassure Merrimac Winthrop Lodge. “We’ll just have to see about that. There is plenty that can….” And his voice stopped, as a soldier entered almost without knocking.
General Jack Bauer’s glare almost incinerated him. “I’m sorry, General, sir,” said the young enlisted man, practically quivering. “It was urgent. General, sir, I really think you should attend to this. It has the highest priority.”
“Awright,” growled the older man, angrily, “hand it to me.” He took the message, read it.
He went white.
He turned to his prisoner. “Lodge. What do you know about American or other operations in England? Ministry or otherwise? Legal or illegal?”
Lodge answered with a bewildered air: “You will have to be a bit more specific, I’m afraid. That’s a lot of ground to cover. Something happened?”
“Something happened all right. Dismissed!” – this to the soldier, who saluted, turned and left. “All right, let’s break down the question into manageable parts. What operations did your own Ministry have in Britain?”
Almost two hours later, a slightly confused Lodge had been taken through all the legal Ministry operation; a list of known operatives; a list of suspected illegal operations by Americans; ditto by non-Americans; and any and all non-American operating in England for any reason the Ministry knew of. By the side of General Bauer, Sergeant Cheung had been stolidly taking notes. When the questioning stopped, he handed them over to his chief; and Bauer went through them with an increasing dissatisfied air. Finally, he turned to Lodge.
“All right, Lodge. I can see nothing here that could help us, so I’ll ask you directly. Four hours ago, Cornelius Fudge disappeared from his apartments without a trace. Do you know anything that could help us find out how and why it happened?”
Lodge’s jaw dropped.