Victor Warlove

Victor Warlove is an Under-Secretary in the Department of Overseas Aid whose genial manner disguises a hard-headed commitment to political and commercial expediency. In conversations with Timothy Gedye and Tony Kafka, he turns ethical objections into jokes, treats pressure as a tool for managing dissent, and presses for action when Kafka’s loyalties begin to shift. His lunches make the machinery of influence look comfortable, repetitive, and almost absurdly ordinary.

Identity and Introduction

Warlove is introduced as Tony Kafka’s host at the Mastaba Club, where Kafka leaves the dining room to answer a telephone call. The description makes Warlove’s physical presence part of the scene’s comedy: he is short and very stout, including in the head, and wears a Harris tweed suit so hairy that it might be sheared for a matching rug. His official position is more consequential than his appearance suggests. He is an Under-Secretary in the Department of Overseas Aid, a title that places him inside government, while the narrative pointedly leaves the true reach of his work open to debate.

At the table with Warlove is Timothy Gedye, whose tall, thin, immaculate appearance offers a deliberate visual contrast. Their exchange is polished and indirect, full of allusion and carefully managed understatement. Warlove’s hostly ease—pouring wine and trading literary references—makes the conversation resemble ordinary club business, even as the men assess Kafka’s state of mind and discuss what should be done about him.

The Politics of Expediency

Warlove’s governing argument emerges when Kafka challenges the moral basis of the trade. Warlove claims that his side can know it is right because its opponents are wrong, then uses that premise to justify either trading with none of them or trading with all of them. The choice, he says, is to trade with everyone, because their superiors would do the same if they were not constrained by the polite conventions of bodies such as the United Nations. In this reasoning, equal treatment stands in for ethical judgment: if every side is dealt with, he suggests, no particular wrong has been done.

His genial delivery is crucial to the argument. Warlove claims to have won a school prize for Religious Knowledge, then abruptly moves from moral justification to the prospect of business in Uzbekistan, a country he admits he barely remembers visiting. The transition turns an ethical challenge into a sales pitch. He smiles like a benevolent uncle and refills Kafka’s glass, making the ease of the performance clash with the seriousness of the question Kafka has raised.

This scene sits beside a different account of the same political logic: an online text about arms sales to Iran and Iraq, and the diversion of profits to the Contras, frames the operators behind those transactions as effectively invisible despite acting against their countries’ laws. The account’s satirical fairy-tale voice exposes how patriotic language can make unlawful conduct seem acceptable. Warlove’s lunch-table argument is not proof that he personally directed those transactions, but it dramatizes the kind of reasoning that allows political interests to displace moral responsibility.

Managing Kafka

Warlove and Gedye discuss Kafka as a colleague whose commitment has weakened. At their first lunch, Gedye describes a faint sense that Kafka’s heart may no longer be in the work; Warlove calls him a valuable colleague and remarks that many American counterparts have changed since the September 11 attacks. Later, Warlove asks whether there was trouble in Yorkshire the previous night. Kafka answers that it is under control, but privately recognizes that the men may know about the incident without knowing what he himself is thinking.

When Kafka insists on discussing right and wrong, Warlove initially treats the subject as an unwelcome diversion. His joking reference to pressure, and his attempt to move the conversation back to plans, reveal the practical limits of his affability: he can entertain dissent as long as it does not obstruct the work. The repeated lunches sharpen that impression. The same diners occupy the same places, the same waiters follow the same routes, and the same soup appears again, as if the club were running on a loop. Within this ritualized setting, Warlove’s political business seems less like an interruption of ordinary life than one of its established routines.

Pressure, Action, and Characterization

At the later lunch, Gedye says that ordinary pressure will not work in this case. Warlove counters that policemen can be compromised through what he calls the “three vee test”: venery, venality, or vanity. He assumes that one of these weaknesses can be found in almost anyone, and suggests that a special relationship links the American woman and the Yorkshire man. When Gedye says Kafka is due to travel to the United States to meet Joe and discuss his concerns about Ash-Mac’s, Warlove recognizes that the meeting may no longer happen—and that Kafka’s changed outlook could be useful to them.

The conversation then darkens. Gedye warns that someone might seek immunity by giving evidence, and that Kafka’s disclosures could harm not only Ashur-Proffitt but Gedye, Warlove, and their superiors. Warlove asks whether Gedye is proposing action and whether it will make matters all right. After Gedye names Hoblitt as reliable, Warlove approves him as a rock who passes all three tests, adding that he may pass several more. Gedye agrees to proceed. The exchange strongly implies a plan to deal with the threat Kafka poses, but the evidence here does not specify what action follows or establish its outcome.

Warlove’s defining contradiction is therefore between manner and method. He is sociable, self-deprecating, and fond of clever language; he is also willing to reduce ethical choices to convenient formulas and to treat a colleague’s doubts as a problem to be managed. The repeated lunch, with its identical soup and practiced courtesies, gives that contradiction a setting: beneath the ritual of civility, Warlove helps turn political influence into routine business.