The guests ate tiny squares of black-market chocolate, smoked their after-dinner cigarettes, and drank the last inches of a bottle of Armagnac. Then everyone walked out onto the terrace, where the rising wind made a disaster of the women’s dresses. No one seemed to care in the least; they were all too drunk to feel the chill. Varian stood at the terrace railing and looked down into the garden, at the shapes of the men and women drifting along the twisted garden paths like shadow puppets against a moon-illuminated sky.
