Radio Praha

Illustration by Steve Cavallo

In the beginning, there was only smoke. Smoke alone, smoke curling into smoke, swirling over itself, bodying forth from nowhere into nowhere. And by its own curl, its own turn and swirl over, around, through itself, there appeared the first cigarettes.

History arises from the smoke, and not the smoke from history.

I have never been able to tell a tale at a party, or have a joke come off as anything but stilted. The problem is, smoke gets in my eyes. I become fascinated by the forms it takes as it wafts about. I get confused and I digress, and there is no end to it. So if I am to tell you the story of Peter Eastaboga, you must keep this in mind. There is a beginning, and there is a middle, but what is the end?

There is a bar in Prague, in old Vinohrady, where expatriates of a certain type are to be found. It is not reviewed in any of the guidebooks and has never been mentioned in the English language newspaper (or, for that matter, in any of the Czech dailies). It is the sort of place you hear about from a friend of a friend. Practically everyone in Prague, in the Czech Republic, in Central Europe, smokes like there’s no tomorrow. Prague itself smokes, from thousands of ancient furnaces burning cheap lignite coal, from the exhausts of automobiles. I do not smoke. I never have. Most of the time, I don’t mind dying so much, but smoking kills you in a particularly gruesome way. But smoke is why I go to U Mlhy. For the smell. It is a smoky, smoky joint. I never claimed to be a consistent man.

Smoke is also my job. I am a consultant for Briar-Greerson, the American, British, and Dutch agency that handles the advertising for Phillip Morris in Central Europe. After college, I got the hell out of the Midwest, first to Seattle, where a friend of my father gave me my first job in the marketing end of advertising. From there, I began a looping spiral of the United States, taking most of my twenties to reach escape velocity. To California, then St. Louis, then to New York, where I was on the team that introduced Heartland Cigarettes to the “American working woman.” Since I come from redneck stock, I knew exactly what to do. Tractor pulls, beauty shops, bowling alley taverns—you name it, I got our name on the walls, the ashtrays, the cocktail coasters.

After Heartland was established, Briar-Greerson offered me the job in the Czech Republic. I took them up on it, and got the hell out of the entire Heartland.

I am the Marlboro Man. I think of new ways to get the guy into the faces, and the psyches, of good Czech citizens. I am the one who sells the shops their signs, the signs that have the shop names written in very small type under the big red letters, in English, “Come to Marlboro Country.” I am the person who finds new places to put up illegal billboards. In public parks? Why not? Officials can be bribed. In a widow’s meager yardlot? Why not? The rent we pay her, practically nothing to us, doubles her pension. I am the one who buys air time between the American shows, dubbed into Czech, that fill Prague television. I place the ads on Kiss 98 FM, nejlepSi hudba from the sixties to the nineties. It’s an incredibly easy job, and it gives me plenty of time to spend in taverns and kavarnas. That is how I ended up finding the U Mlhy.

For practical purposes, you can divide the ex-pats in Prague into three classes. First, there is the bohemian crowd, “bohemian” with a small “b,” please. These are the hippies, artists, small-time journalists, and wannabe writers. They crowd places such as the FX Café or the Globe Coffeehouse, up in Holesovice. Then there is the international business community, who visit the deracinated, neon-lit hotel bars and pubs of the Nové Město. These groups interact a great deal more than you might expect. The ex-pat hucksters need the feel of romantic legitimacy, since they are not making the kind of salaries they would back home. “At least I’m in Kafka’s Prague,” they tell themselves. The hippies need real jobs every once in a while in order to buy dope. Both groups know enough Czech to order from the menus, and that is all.

And finally, there are… the others. We are the bleed from the first two groups, the droplets from the hard squeeze. The malcontents, the disappointed, the marginal, the hardpan scratchers. This is where you’ll find the one-man importer-exporters who run their business out of seedy apartments. Here is the cheap dope the hippies are forever searching for, and never manage to find. Here are the mid-level business people who either don’t care for the power lunch or for whom it would do more harm than good. Somehow or another, usually through necessity, we have managed to learn the language. The U Mlhy collects us like old cobweb. There is no spider anymore, but you’re stuck, nonetheless.

The waiter said that Peter Eastaboga lost his wife in childbirth just before the Revolution. And he killed a man, too, said the waiter, a man who was once highly placed in the KGB. They say it was because of a drug deal, but it was over a woman. I know this because he told me himself, the waiter said.

I think he is a little crazy since his wife died. He comes in here and talks to his wine glass.

He does what?

He talks to his wine glass. And he smokes like few men I have ever seen. One off the tip of the other.

At the U Mlhy, you heard such stories about Peter Eastaboga. You sat down in the old furniture and listened to its joints creak as you settled. The chairs were upholstered in faded ruby reds and vermilions, tattered, with the frames of the chairs poking out like bones. The tables were mismatched with each other and with the chairs; they were coated three layers thick with battered lacquer. You took out a novel, probably a detective story, and began to read. But then someone you knew, or at least someone who was familiar to you, would come in. He’d look at you, raise an eyebrow. You’d motion with your head to the chair across the table, and he’d sit down. He would light a cigarette, pull the ashtray across the scratched tabletop. You’d set down your book, open faced, beside you, as if you meant to take it up again in a moment. Then the other would breathe out, and begin to talk.

“Summer’s coming. It’s gonna be hot as hell.”

“Um hmm.”

“The Smíchovské Nadraži metro terminal is air conditioned, you know.”

‘You could go there for lunch. Bring a parek v rolicku. Get out of the sun.”

“I have to be in Hrádec Králové tomorrow. Meeting a guy about a load of snake anti-venom from Azerbaijan, if you can believe it.”

“They have poisonous snakes there?”

“Adders, I guess. Eastaboga would know. Haven’t seen him in a while, though.”

And then you would hear about Peter Eastaboga, who, during one civil war or another, ran a load of medical supplies to the Caucasus and traded them for Mushm textiles to sell to upscale rug shops in the States.

Or the time Eastaboga got the chief hit man for the Warsaw mafia out of a jam with his boss’s wife.

“He got offered exclusive rights to freight-forward Czech cigarettes to Warsaw. Exclusive. But he turned it down. Said he couldn’t stand the dirty drag you get from a Petra.”

“You don’t have to smoke them,” the hit man told him. “Just make money off of them.”

“ ‘I don’t trade in things I wouldn’t use myself. It’s my only principle.’ That’s exactly what Eastaboga said. That guy, the hit man, he comes in here sometimes, and he told me this himself. Jesus Christ, I’d go out of business in a day with that kind of principle.”

One night, early in the evening, U Mlhy was empty except for me. The waiter, the one who told me about Eastaboga losing his wife and killing a man, was taking a break at my table, and smoking Petra cigarettes. Eastaboga, whoever the hell he is, is right, I thought, Petras are the foulest blend of shag this side of Shanghai. I offered the waiter a Marlboro Light 100, and he took it, looked at it philosophically, so I gave him the whole pack.

He lit one, and pointed with his lighter. “Is it good, your book?” he asked me in Czech.

“It’s about a man and a horse,” I told him.

“How do you think Sparta will do on Friday?”

“I don’t care about football. But don’t they always win?”

“Sometimes not,” he said. “Depends. I have some money on them for Friday, though. They play Boby in Brno. Those Moravians throw smoke bombs and plum brandy on the field and shout ‘vitejte v peklu,’ welcome to hell, so the bookies think Sparta will be intimidated, but I have faith in them.”

“How many crowns of faith do you have in them?” I asked.

“A thousand crowns of faith.”

“Your wife is not going to be happy if hell wins.”

“Don’t tell me about that.” The waiter puffed contemplatively on the Marlboro Light. “But I have for you that crystal you wanted. Do you think you can pay for it tonight?”

The waiter’s brother-in-law was a master carver at Chřibská, a glassworks north of Prague in the Ližicke Mountains, and he and the waiter did a side business with pirated goblets and bottles. I’d agreed to buy a few items. I didn’t really need any, but they were ridiculously cheap and of good quality—at least the waiter’s samples had been. I was thinking of sending them back to the States as gifts.

“Let’s see it, then,” I said. He snubbed out his cigarette, unfinished, and went into the back behind the bar. While he was gone, a man came in, dripping wet. It had been threatening to rain all day, and obviously the downpour had begun while I was in U Mlhy. The man folded his umbrella and took off his coat. For a moment, we made eye contact.

“Dobry vecer,” he said, then added in English. “Well, if you like rain.”

“Dobrý den,” I nodded. He went to a corner and found a seat.

The waiter returned with his arms full of crystal.

We quibbled about the price, I more for form’s sake than anything else. While we were dickering, the man in the corner got up and drew closer. I glanced at him, and his eyes were on the glass. It seemed almost as if he were being drawn to it. The waiter glanced at him uncomfortably, but when the man remained silent, the waiter returned to dealing with me. When we’d settled on a price, the other man was sitting at the next table. I bought a set of goblets, but turned down a garishly engraved decanter that the waiter insisted should go with the glasses.

“I am parting a family.” The waiter shook his head ruefully as he took my money. “This is a sin against heaven.”

“See you in hell, then,” I told him.

“Bring Marlboro Lights,” he said, and took the remaining glass away.

After he’d gone, the man at the next table nodded to one of my goblets. “May I?”

“Sure.”

He picked it up and turned it under the single light bulb that dangled on black electric cord from the roof of the pub.

“Sklárny Chřibská,” he said. “These are seconds, you know, though you can barely see the imperfections. They’d ordinarily go back to the furnace.”

I shrugged. “My relatives expect the cheap stuff from me,” I said.

“Oh, this is good stuff” the man said. “Just not the best. He’s even got the 1414 seals put on them.”

“What do they mean?”

“The year the glassworks was founded.” He carefully set the glass back with its mates. “That decanter you turned down was pretty ugly. You have a good eye.”

“Thanks. Would you like to join me? We’ll have some wine in these and break them in,” I said. It wasn’t a pun in the Czech.

“Sure.”

When he told me his name was Peter Eastaboga, I must have looked surprised, because he laughed and shook his head. “That fucker’s been telling tales again,” he said in English, and nodded toward the waiter.

“Not just him,” I said.

“No,” he said. “I suppose not.”

We shared a bottle of wine and then another. My Czech began deteriorating, and Eastaboga switched over to English for my benefit. I asked him if it were true that he was former CIA and he said yes, that was so, but he’d given that up in 1989, after Havel’s Velvet Revolution. “What the hell else was I going to do? Run a bureau in some cocaine swamp?”

“It wouldn’t be Praha.”

“Yes, beautiful old broken Praha,” he said, and smiled, almost to himself. He swirled the lees of his glass and drained it, then took a long drag on one of my Marlboros. Smoke coursed through the bare bulb light and into the room’s dark corners. “And there was a woman.”

Her name was Marta Plášilová. I didn’t find this out the first night I spent with Peter Eastaboga, but there were many others—a summer and an autumn’s worth. I don’t know why he took to me—maybe it was because I let him talk without judging him, or really saying very much at all. This was no virtue on my part. He chain smoked Marlboro reds and every breath was words made visible, every story was a cloud of smoke. It took the shape of the U Mlhy; it hung in our clothes, got in the wrinkles of my skin. It was the smoke that fascinated me.

In the scheme of things before 1989, Marta didn’t amount to much. She was from Hradec Králové, a city northeast of Prague. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother worked in a museum, but neither were party members—and so not nomenklatura—and it seemed a miracle when Marta was admitted to Charles University in Prague to study German and Russian.

But, of course, there was no such thing as a miracle in the socialist worker’s paradise of Czechoslovakia, and soon she found that the State had plans for her that didn’t include literature and that she had better do what they wanted. Marta went to work for the state security forces soon after she graduated and during the 1980s, she and Eastaboga were in the same game, only on different sides.

“She was a little thing,” Peter told me. “Dark and all gathered in on herself, like a lump of coal. But there was something intense… like a flame smoldering around her. Like all that darkness gathered so tight it started to burn.”

She wasn’t a diplomatic cocktail circuit spy, but neither was Peter.

“She started as a low-level courier, using her German and Russian. She blended into cities. But pretty soon even her blockhead bosses started noticing how… deviously she thought. How she never got noticed, much less suspected or caught. She was running counteroperations against us when I first had anything to do with her. She’d found out this Škoda electrical engineer that old Barney Hines had recruited back in 1979. He was a good source. Highly placed for technical data. Marta turned that guy like winter turns a leaf and he was feeding us bullshit for three years before we finally figured it out. I met the guy again not long ago. Took him a while to work his way back from Siberia, but she kept him from being disappeared forever when he stopped being useful.”

Marta and Peter played cat-and-mouse for several more years. During that time, someone finally got a picture of her, and he caught a glimpse of her once as she was making a drop at the Náměsti Míru metro station.

“I thought of her as this spider that was always lurking behind everything that frustrated me,” said Peter. “Sometimes it seemed like this whole place—Praha—was her web. Was her. You can bet I fantasized about Marta Plášilová. But there wasn’t really anything evil about her. She was just talented at what she did. Incredibly patient. Underneath everything else, she was still this lawyer’s daughter from Hradec Králové. She actually believed in justice.”

While she was working the counteragent at Škoda, she found out the real project that was going on there—the project about which the CIA had heard strange rumors that had led them to try to penetrate the Škoda Electronics Cooperative in the first place.

“It was the early eighties and they were still working with vacuum tubes. Maybe if the integrated circuit hadn’t come along in the West, we would have found the same thing out. But maybe not. In the blackbox division, they were using master glass blowers—mostly indentured dissidents, you know: ‘work for us and we won’t turn your family out of the panelak’—to run the manufacturing. Those guys were producing tubes the likes of which the rest of the world’s never seen, let me tell you. We got hold of a few and they were beautiful, even to an untrained eye. I remember showing one to this engineer friend of mine who teaches at Caltech and him just shaking his head in wonder.

“ ‘Exquisite. Perfect. But what’s the point?’ That’s what he said.”

“And that’s what we were wondering.”

“And then one night I was sitting in here, in the U Mlhy—over there at that corner table. All of a sudden, my light was blocked. I looked up, and there was Marta Plášilová. Marta Plášilová where there’d been empty air. She sat down right across from me and told me the answer to the vacuum tube puzzle.”

He took a cigarette drag, coughed. “They say I’m the one who turned Marta Plášilová. But that’s bullshit. Marta turned herself.”

“She was the deepest we ever penetrated the Czechs, as far as I know. Even then, I had my suspicions about the people back in DC. We’d had too many good agents suddenly gone east for their health. You understand that the human intelligence guy is the operative, and his foreign contact is the agent, right? Anyway, nobody but me knew exactly who she was. I felt like I was running two operations, one against the Czechs, and one to keep Washington confused.”

Electrostatics, crystal interaction with the atomic weak force, fractals, and chaos—the Czech scientists had a lot of theories, but they really had no idea exactly how what they’d stumbled on worked.

“Marta had a satchel with her that night at the U Mlhy,” Peter told me. “And she took a radio out of it. At least it was this box that looked like an old-fashioned radio from the fifties maybe. The word the Czechs used for it was the same as ours. Then she turned it on.”

It was as if the world dissociated around them. The air, the space around the radio itself, bent, like a television screen that’s lost its vertical hold. Peter tried to stand up, but there was no up to stand into. Every movement put him back in his seat.

“What the fuck are you doing, Miss Plášilová?” he said.

And then, as Marta adjusted the dial on the radio, shapes began to coalesce about them. And voices. One voice that he recognized. His own. But his own doubled, trebled. Repeating a sentence that had a cadence, but no sense to it. Because in each of the doublings of the sentence, a slight variation was made.

What the fuck what the hell what is it what are you doing what Marta are you Marta Plášilová?

He dropped the cigarette he was smoking and it tumbled endlessly toward the floor, curving, trailing smoke—smoke and reimposed smoke until it hung like a gray knot in the air, with a tiny red center, throwing sparks.

Marta twisted the tuning knob on the radio very slightly and the world came into focus; the cigarette fell.

“Look around,” Marta told him.

The U Mlhy was still. Smoke hung in the air. Smoke hung in the air and did not move. The waiter was frozen in the middle of wiping the bar. An overturned glass of beer was caught in the midst of sloshing. There was a buzzing, monotone note that was a single moment of conversation and noise, a single note of dissonance.

“It’s just you and I,” Marta said. “For as long as we want to be together.”

The Caltech engineer that Peter trusted told him that as near as he could figure, the device created an interference pattern across possible worlds generated within a specific chunk of space-time. It caused those worlds to fill in on top of one another instead of radiating off to wherever such things go.

“You could tune in to the immediate future, and make it cancel out itself,” said Peter. “The radio made a little bubble around itself and inside that bubble, you were outside of the time and space the rest of us have to live in. Until the batteries wore down.”

“And were the batteries in or out of our common time?” I asked him.

He smiled, shook his head. “That was what the Czechs couldn’t figure out. It was like the batteries flickered. So the radio eventually ran down. Marta found all that out. Marta found out everything, and told me.”

She did it for all the women from Hradec Králové who weren’t nomenklatura. All the useful and talented people without connection or power who always seemed to be the ones doing the sacrificing for the progress of the state.

“Think of how they will use this if they solve the battery problem,” she said. “They’ll have a thousand years in the blink of an eye. Generations of people working for men like… for men like the ones I work for.”

“Her eyes were dark and burning when she told me this,” Peter said. “We were in this sad little safe apartment over in Nové Butovice that we used to meet in. It was up on the tenth floor of a crumbling-down panelak. The only thing you could see out the window was more panelaks.

“That was the day when she first kissed me. She just jumped me. She’d been so distraught and worried about what would happen to her parents if she got caught, and I was trying to be something like a brother to her. I never even saw the passion, and then it was completely there. It was everything that she was. That we were. That’s the way she was. She wouldn’t chance doing anything unless it mattered completely.”

“I have to fight them,” Marta had said to Peter as they became lovers. “I have to do this because I know what it is like to have a life that you live and to have another life that you want with all your heart.”

Nothing ever got fixed in Prague and what got done was done badly back then. Chunks of old building cornices fell on pedestrians and timber scaffolding was erected to shield the sidewalks. The trams creaked and flashed through the streets as they’d done since before the Second World War, wearing the steel rails down a bit more with each passage. There was no such thing as progress. Panelak skyscraper cities of cheap concrete were caving in and falling apart fifteen years after being built. Times were difficult and the stores were empty. Peter and Marta loved one another amidst the decay.

“Once a week or so, she would use her clearance to get into the room where they kept the radio. She’d just turn it on and walk out with it, right under the guards’ noses. She had all the keys. And she’d meet me, usually in Nové Butovice. We’d both get into the radio’s field.”

The radio didn’t actually form a bubble. The shape was more like a three-dimensional wave form—it stretched out farther in some directions than others, depending on how the vacuum tubes were configured at the time. When the radio was “tuned out,” occurrences would pile up on top of itself, like they did when Marta first showed Peter the radio. It was like a black hole’s event horizon—only it would be crossed as soon as the radio operator turned the knob to get “in tune.” The act of tuning seemed to carry through, to get completed in all possible worlds. So far, nobody had tried to take their hand off the knob in mid-turn.

The Czechs were working on making bigger radios that were not portable but that could create a field larger than a room. They’d only managed to make one other. It was enormous—it took up two stories at the Škoda plant—but it only gave them about double the containment space. There were theories that two radios used in unison might exponentially strengthen the signal—maybe even create a wavy pattern as big as a city. But nobody had any idea what would really happen when two radios were nested together.

“Marta became very different when we made love in the radio’s field,” Peter said. “So did I. I hadn’t let myself have too many feelings for a long time. I don’t know if I ever had very many to begin with. But now we were two spies who were in a place that was totally secure, completely safe for that moment—and that moment could last for hours.

“I’ll never forget that little pallet bed in the Nové Butovice panelak. It wasn’t much more than a piece of foam rubber with some sheets on it. That white pallet with her pale skin against it and her dark hair—she wore her hair cropped short, like a boy’s. Every time she was with me it could be the last, and we came to each other desperately. I’ve never felt like anything mattered so much to me, because it mattered so much to her.

“We did our spook business too, of course. She’d tell me what she’d learned. And then I’d give her the duplicate, recharged batteries, and she would go. She’d be back five seconds after she left. That was how long it took for me to come inside radio time with her and then to leave her there after we were done.”

The Department of Defense went to work on three tubes that Marta got out for them, and pretty soon Peter knew they were the real McCoy, that Marta wasn’t running some convoluted operation on him. But the DOD techies couldn’t go any further. There was something that their glass makers were doing, something that the defense engineers couldn’t duphcate. They couldn’t make a working radio.

Things began to fall apart. The East was going down, and Somebody in the KGB wanted very much for the battery problem to be solved. If it could be, the inevitable might be forestalled, the system saved. And then it finally dawned on that Somebody that he had all the time in the world. All he had to do was put his engineers into the second, big radio’s field. They could work on smaller devices until the big one’s batteries wore down. Then they could quickly put in a fresh set and drop back out of time to work some more. The work could progress at a miraculous pace! Why not?

There was the worry about the “nesting problem” of having a separate radio within a radio field. There was the one theory of exponential strengthening. And there was the theory that the two radios would cancel one another out—and cancel out all the futures within the scope of either. And there was the fact that nobody had any goddamn idea what would actually happen when they tried the experiment.

But these were not exactly the children of high officials who would be at risk, after all. And besides, they were only Czechs and not Russians.

All that would be necessary was good security: a rotating shift of guards, and a political officer who was familiar with the project to oversee them. This political officer would be the one to turn the knob, to tune them in. It should be someone proven, but expendable. Marta Plášilová drew the assignment.

“I remember the day she told me about this,” Peter said. “We were lying naked on the pallet. I offered her the chance to get out of there, to come to the West.”

“And what would I do there in America?” she asked me. “Surf in California?”

“Why not?” I said. “There are places in the world that are not so gloomy.”

She just shook her head. “But I am gloomy,” she said. She pouted and I kissed her bunched-up lips and cradled her in my arms. “I don’t want to take my gloom to a strange, bright place. I want Praha to become a bright place and I will lose my gloom with her.”

“It is bright now,” I said to her. “Here in this part of Praha.”

“Yes, here with you, my love. This is enough happiness for me.”

“A moment? Less than a moment?”

“It will have to do.”

“But I drew her to me and I held her and we made love again. Not yet, I thought. The gloom can wait a while. Not yet.”

Peter and I had been drinking red wine when he told me of this. He dipped his fingertips in the wine and rubbed one finger lightly about the rim of his glass. The glass was crystal, and it sang a single, pure note.

“Did I tell you? She smelled like rain. Whenever we were together like that, she always smelled like rain.”

Marta did not defect. There was never really any chance that she would. She went ahead with the radio experiment.

“We planned it all out very carefully. She had me believing that we could pull off the ultimate spook trick and subvert the entire project. Some of the engineers and glass makers were already Marta’s agents—they’d given us good intelligence—and some of them had strong potential for becoming agents. Nearly all of them had a grudge against the state that Marta had ferreted out. Given time, Marta told me that she could get some hold on all of them. She could have, probably.

“I thought that she would age a year or so, and then she would be in control inside the radio, and I would get to see her again. See her in practically no time. She had me believing. She was a hell of an operative. But I think she knew from the start that this was a typical project of the Czechoslovakian government.”

On the night when they turned on a radio inside another radio’s field, Peter was at the U Mlhy. It was a different pub back then—no foreigners except for the occasional spy. He sat in his usual corner.

“I looked at my watch. I wore one back then. I counted the time. And then, everything lurched. The world folded and unfolded, like a giant had stepped on reality and crushed it down for a second, and then everything had sprung back up out of the distortion when the giant took its foot off.

“I remember this drunk next to me staring at his glass of liquor and saying ‘Bad belorovka. Very bad belorovka.’ But it wasn’t the belorovka. I knew what it was. Something fucked up. Something went really, really wrong.”

Nothing ever got fixed in Prague and what got done was done badly back then. There was no such thing as progress.

Everyone who knew how to make the tubes vanished in the experiment. Peter dug as deeply as he could into the matter without completely exposing himself. Nobody had ever been able to duplicate the tubes, in the East or West.

He still has contacts that will tell him of any developments. There have been none.

1989 came and the rot finally got into the Eastern Bloc’s skeleton and all the eternal monuments to the inevitable dialectic crumbled and collapsed like so many panelaks that had reached the age of fifteen. A playwright dissident became president, and nobody got shot, at least in Prague.

Peter quit the CIA. He moved into a place in Dejvice, into Vaclav Havel’s old neighborhood. He started an export business, using some of the glassworks connections he’d made following up on how the vacuum tubes might have been produced. Eventually he’d come to specialize in Bohemian crystal. And then he moved into more exotic goods that paid extremely well and were questionably legal. He didn’t seem to care.

This was when the legend began to grow. Peter Eastaboga could get anything for you, and nobody could intimidate him. He didn’t take foolish chances, but there was something about him… you knew he had a craziness about him that you didn’t want to fuck with.

They say he tracked down an ex-KGB colonel and shot him dead in a dacha outside of Moscow. Some said it was over a drug deal, but others who were closer to Peter Eastaboga said it truly was because that man had had a hand in killing a woman Eastaboga loved.

He traveled many places, but he returned to Prague. There were certain seasons, certain months of the year when he was always to be found in the city.

One night I stayed late at the U Mlhy paying back the waiter for a football bet I’d made with him—American football, which, not surprisingly, the waiter knew better than I did. We were behind the bar, in the storeroom, and Peter perhaps thought I’d gone home already. I emerged from the back room to find him staring into a gorgeously formed goblet. In its center was one brilliant cut-glass chandelier crystal. He breathed smoke across the lip of the glass and a bit of it curled over and flowed down and around the crystal.

He didn’t notice as I came up beside him, and watched the prism hues play across his face. He was speaking in a low, clear voice.

“Yes,” he said. “How’s the reception? Can you hear me tonight—”

And I looked into the glass myself, and I saw Marta Plášilová.

I saw her as if she were a projection from the crystal into the smoke. Curved in body, as if she were an image on a little television set with vertical hold problems. Her tiny form was broken into facets, her flint eyes shining as she smiled and nodded. He was right. She seemed very dark and, at the same time, on fire.

He took another drag off his cigarette and that was when he noticed me. Without a word, he motioned me to sit down beside him. He continued to speak to her for a few moments. He told her about the rain and all the umbrellas without people to hold them that had been blowing down the streets when he’d gone to the Kotva Department Store at Náměsti Republiky in the afternoon.

“I thought of the pensioner ladies walking home without their umbrellas, all grumbling about how we need a good strong state again to keep the rain away.”

Marta smiled, but she was fading, distorting in the smoke and light. She must have realized what was happening, because she held out her hand. It almost seemed as if she touched the side of the glass. Peter reached down and touched his finger to the other side.

And then she was gone.

“You saw her?” he said.

I nodded.

“It only works with certain very old crystal,” he told me. “I can’t hear her. It’s like a window… into wherever she is. She can hear me, though. I’m sure of it. I’ve told her how things have changed. How Praha is getting brighter.”

“How did you ever figure out how to… contact her?” I asked him.

“Reflections,” he said. “Old spies notice reflections. It was how we tailed people, how we saw to make exchanges. You never lose the skill. It wasn’t long after the experiment when I first saw her. I would pass a window, and catch a glimpse of her. Distorted, spread out, and always moving away, flowing away like water on the glass. Always on gloomy days, with fog. But I knew it was her. I’d know Marta Plášilová anywhere. So I came up with the idea of using the best-made glass, the best in the world. And smoke to catch the image. He smiled sadly, with a kind of pride. “It worked. You saw. Sometimes it works.”

We walked out into the chill of early morning, and I pulled my long coat tight around me. It was October.

“I only get good reception on certain days in certain months. I think that she’s tuned out most of the time. I think she’s on the event horizon, where everything’s happening on top of itself. That radio field is wound into Prague. Woven into the city. It’s only here that I’ve ever seen her. But who knows? Whatever happened when they turned both radios on, it’s still going on. Like the field has flowed up into time in the same way that it shapes itself in space. But I can predict it now. I know those days when she can appear. I know them by heart.”

“Do you think… she can get back? Into our time?”

“I think that they accidentally solved the battery problem,” Peter said. “I don’t think she’s ever coming back.”

For some reason, I didn’t take the tram back to where I lived in Libeň at Náměsti Míru, but instead walked with him through the maze of tunnels under the National Museum and up to the top of Wenceslas Square. We stood under the tail end of the statue of the old king’s horse and Peter lit a smoke. It was the last he had, and he crumpled the empty pack and put it back into his coat pocket.

“There is also the distinct possibility that I’m completely crazy,” Peter said. He was speaking in Czech now. “But you saw her?”

“I saw her.”

“Do you suppose that you and I are both crazy?”

“I don’t know. It’s surely possible,” I said.

The sky began to lighten behind us and the Castle glinted darkly on the western hill across the Vltava River.

“I was good at my job, but I didn’t care about it.” Peter turned to gaze at the Castle; he did not look at me. “I loved her so much,” he said. “Do you think that a man can do one thing that matters, and that thing will be enough?”

“Enough to start a legend?”

“I don’t care about that.”

“No. You loved her. You love her still.”

“I don’t know why she loved me.”

“I think you had a very strong belief stored up and waiting. Maybe she knew she would need that belief someday.”

“I thought I was insane, but I can’t stop looking into the crystal. There isn’t any reason to go back to sanity even if I am crazy.”

He finished his cigarette, dropped the stub to the concrete and crushed it with the toe of his shoe.

‘You know, my friend from Caltech came over here. I showed him the crystal trick and he couldn’t see a thing.”

“No?”

“I wonder how it is that you do? Who are you?”

I took a pack of Marlboro reds from my own pocket and handed them to Peter Eastaboga.

“I’m just a guy who’s good at watching smoke,” I told him in English. “It’s practically my only skill.”

He nodded and opened the new pack of cigarettes. He took one from the pack, lit it, and held it in his mouth. We shook hands. Then he took the cigarette into his hand and breathed out gray smoke into the gray dawn.

“Well, good morning.”

“Good morning, Peter.”

He turned from me and walked down the hill, past the McDonalds and toward the Old City, the Stare Město. I knew he would keep smoking and walking and cross the Vltava and climb up through the Malá Strana and make his way on foot to his apartment in Dejvice where she would never be waiting for him. And would always be waiting for him. On the other side of his fine old crystal.

I know these things. I am the Marlboro Man.