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.
