Read Online Children of Light by Robert Stone - Free Book Online Page A

They had agreed it was remote, that the Night of the Long Knives was unlikely to come in that very month of that very season as if only to engulf their children. Luck rarely ran that hard. Yet, he thought, someone’s luck would run out there. Sometime, sooner or later, someone and their children, traveling in that country, would awaken in the night out of luck.
    For the moment, it was a phantom terror. He was not afraid for himself or for the kids, not really. His long-term apprehensions were serious ones; for his parents too old to run away again, his married sister and her boys, old friends of all colors with complacent styles or dangerous politics. So many of the people who had shared his youth—in Houghton, Durban, the Cape—had become politically involved and he could only imagine the lives engagement imposed on them.
    He was a rich doctor in Los Angeles, a world away; a Hollywood shrink, a cliché Married to an actress whose name would be vaguely familiar in Pietermaritzburg or Maclear or Aliwal North.
    Then it struck him how happy, how joyful he was to be going away. He lit another cigarette and watched the twinkling dory lights.
    He stood and smoked and considered the petty emotional squalor which was his present stock-in-trade. So aroused was he that it took him some little time to understand that the true source of his excitement—his happiness, in fact—was that he would be getting away from her. From her closely reasoned madness, her nightmare undersea beauty and deluded eyes.
    He was startled from this insight by the sound of a woman’s laughter.The laughter was so loud and confident and heedless, so alien to his lonely despair that it surprised him to anger. Looking up the slope, he saw in the fairy glow of the patios a blond woman with her back toward him. She was seated on one of the low, tiled walls that surrounded the whirlpool baths and she appeared to be naked. So far as he could make out, she was wide-shouldered and slim-waisted, attractive in the latest of California styles, the style which was orthodoxy on that production. The girls all looked a bit alike to Lionel. Drawing nearer, he saw that there were two men sitting chest deep in the whirlpool on which the woman rested.
    Inadvertently, Lionel had blundered into the director’s compound. He began to back away along the path he had followed but, uncannily, one of the men spotted him in the darkness. He heard his name called. He recognized the man as Walter Drogue. The woman was Drogue’s wife, Patty.
    “Lionel,” Drogue called to him. “
Bienvenidos!
Come over and have a drink.”
    Lionel trudged self-consciously toward the patio. At his approach, Patty rose from the edge of the Jacuzzi and hastily draped herself in a burgundy-colored beach robe. The second man in the tub got to his feet and climbed for dry land, making no attempt to cover his nakedness. He was an elderly man, grizzly of chest and scrotum, his frame slack and emaciated. He took a chair and observed Lionel’s approach with black gypsy eyes, watchful and expressionless.
    The director stayed where he was in the tub, smiling contentedly. He was deeply tanned. His dark hair, moistly pasted to his forehead like Napoleon’s in a cognac ad, was worn short, shaven about his neck and ears in an almost military fashion.
    “Lionel,” Drogue declared, “you and Patty know each other.”
    “Of course,” Lionel said. “Good evening.”
    “Hi,” Patty said, raising her amber eyes to him.
    “This is my father, Walter senior,” Drogue told his guest, indicating the naked old man, who had taken a chair beside Patty Drogue. “He’ll be with us for the next ten days. Dad, this is Lionel Morgen, Lee Verger’s husband.”
    Walter Drogue senior was a man from the mists of legend, a contemporary of Walsh and Sturges and Hawkes. The introduction of this celebrated figure did not put Lionel any more at ease. He felt offended by old Drogue’s nakedness. Drogue senior did not offer his