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.”