by Tony Daniel
Smoke
I n 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?
Prague and Smoke
There is a bar in Prague, in old Vinohrady, where expatriots 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’s gave me my starting 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 workingwoman.” 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 yard lot? Why not? The rent we pay her, practically nothing to us, doubles her pension. I am the one who buys airtime between the American shows, dubbed into Czech, that fill Prague television. I place the ads on Kiss 98 FM,nejlepši hudba from the sixties to the nineties. It’s an incredibly easy job, and it gives me plenty of time to spend in taverns andkavarnas . 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 smallb , 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 Mesto. 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 midlevel businesspeople 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 an old cobweb. There is no spider anymore, but you’re stuck, nonetheless.
A Foggy Night
The waiter said that Peter Eastaboga lost his wife in childbirth just before the Revolution. And he killed a man, too, said the waiter; he killed 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 frame 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 Smichovské Nádrazi metro terminal is air-conditioned, you know.”
“You could go there for lunch. Bring aparek v rolicku. Get out of the sun.”
“I have to be in Hradec Králové tomorrow. Meeting a guy about a load of snake antivenin 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 Muslim 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 right 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 Chribská, 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 a black electric cord from the roof of the pub.
“Sklárny Chribská,” 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.”
“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.”
The Woman at the End of History
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 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 was a party member—and so notnomenklatura —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 workers’ 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 somethingintense . . . 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 got wise to how . . .deviously she thought. How she never gotnoticed , 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 Námestí 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. Washer . 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 lead them to try to penetrate the Škoda Electronics Cooperative in the first place.
“It was the early eighties, and they were still working withvacuum 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 glassblowers—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 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.”
Spies & Lovers
“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 D.C. We’d had too many good agents suddenly gone east for their health. You understand that the human intelligence guy is theoperative , and his foreign contact is theagent , 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 noup 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.