… off to see Gaston!
‘… My phone’s ringing,’ I think to myself.
Just as I’m heading back to the changing room at the gym, where I spend a little time with my friends every day. I quicken my pace, unlock my locker in a hurry and pick up the phone. There’s a number on the screen, but I have no idea who it is…
‘Kuchyňka speaking?’
‘Ah, hello. My name is Muška (June 2002, Jiří Muška, somewhere in America), and Mr Glock is standing right here beside me. You know who I mean, don’t you?’
I feel a little flutter of nerves, and in an instant my mind is racing: someone must be playing a joke on me. Surely this can’t be happening…
But the voice on the other end goes on. ‘Did you write a book about Glock pistols?’ This time I answer, ‘Yes, that’s right.’
And Mr Muška continues. ‘Well, there you are. I’m standing here with Mr Glock, and we’re calling you! We’d like to invite you to meet him in person in Austria. What do you say?’
‘Well, that’s incredible! Are you serious?!’ I reply, still in a fog, with one half of my mind refusing to believe it and the other already touring the Glock factory…
‘Yes, we are!’ Mr Muška goes on. ‘We’re in the United States at the moment, but we’ll be back in a week. Mr Glock and I were thinking we could meet in Klagenfurt sometime in July, and he would be kind enough to show you around his firearms empire.’
While Mr Muška explains the situation, I finally have a little time to collect myself. With my voice no longer quite so shaky, I can assure him that it would be an enormous honour to meet Mr Glock and see the place where the world’s finest pistols are made.
Mr Muška continues: ‘Mr Glock is telling me now that once we’re back in Austria, he’ll suggest a date when we could meet. So I’ll arrange a time with him sometime next week and call you with the exact date for our meeting, OK?’
‘Absolutely, of course! I’d be delighted, and I’ll look forward to your call!’
‘OK, we’re agreed, then! I’m glad I managed to get hold of you. Speak to you soon.’
‘Thank you so much! I’ll look forward to it! Goodbye!’
That week and a bit felt like an eternity. I kept wondering whether I would hear from anyone at all, whether Mr Muška really would call. But I must also admit that I was terribly excited! And we all know how time passes when you feel like that. It simply crawls… I never let my phone out of reach, not even for a moment. There was nothing else I could do but trust that it was all for real and that he would call.
And he did!
During our call, Mr Muška explained exactly when and where we would meet, including the date. He gave me a brief outline of the day we would spend with Mr Glock, and also told me what an ordeal it had been to find my contact details in the first place. The phone number printed in the book no longer worked—which was true, because I had changed mobile providers, and back then, remembering that this was still 2002, you couldn’t take your existing number with you. As it happened, though, one of Mr Muška’s employees was dating a young woman from neighbouring Starovice, a village about a kilometre from Hustopeče, and she knew me! So there it was again: a little coincidence and another stroke of that proverbial luck… He also told me how he had stumbled across my book, Glock, in the Luxor bookshop in Prague and bought every copy they had. He was just starting to do business with Mr Glock at the time, so he wanted him to sign it. What’s more, it had been written by a Czech, and the connection with the Austrian firearms company interested him. At that point, he had no idea that I had written the book without any contact whatsoever with Mr Glock or his factory. Which was why Mr Glock was so surprised when Mr Muška presented it for him to sign.
‘I don’t know this book. No, no, this book isn’t one of ours!’
And that is the roundabout route by which my first book about Glocks found its way to Mr Glock himself. Yes, it was Mr Muška who set in motion a collaboration with Glock in Austria and its Czech representatives that has now lasted almost a quarter of a century.
It was Tuesday, 2 July, and at around five in the morning I set off from Hustopeče for Velden in southern Austria. I had studied the route through Vienna thoroughly beforehand and considered it the biggest ‘traffic hurdle’ on the whole journey of roughly five hundred kilometres… Let me remind you once again that this was 2002: Austria had already introduced the euro, but otherwise the world still felt more like the nineties! So don’t be surprised that I was rather overwhelmed by it all. And then there was the fact that I was on my way to meet Glock. Yes, the very man who had created the Glock pistol and was among the richest people on the planet… That really doesn’t help settle your nerves! I was just an ordinary lad from Moravia who had yet to learn much about the world. Still, I’d made it through Vienna without any trouble, so perhaps I could manage the rest.
We were supposed to meet on the northern outskirts of Klagenfurt at two o’clock. But since I reached the area at around eleven in the morning, I drove past Klagenfurt and went straight to Velden, where Mr Glock lived. Of course, I didn’t ring his doorbell and announce, ‘Well, here I am.’ Velden is a picturesque little town about the same size as my hometown, Hustopeče. It lies on the shores of the beautiful Wörthersee lake, and that was where I parked. It was lovely. Everything was clean and tidy, with an enchanting backdrop of lakeside hotels and private villas. I went for a stroll along the shore. It was July, too, with the holiday season in full swing and activity all around. The time I spent admiring Velden flew by. I still had time to eat a substantial snack from home in the car. I should mention that it was my second one already. I’d eaten the first just outside Vienna: a small reward for making it through the city and, above all, out again without any trouble and in the right direction. I hadn’t even finished eating when the phone rang. First, Mr Muška gave me a little ‘telling-off’ for being in Velden rather than Klagenfurt, but then he explained that if I entered Klagenfurt from the south, we could meet at the first petrol station on my side of the road. When I arrived, he was already waiting for me with his wife. We only had time to say hello—it was actually the first time we had met—but with the clock ticking, we got into our cars and headed to the meeting place, Glock’s legal offices.
We drove through a few streets and parked in the courtyard of a fairly large two-storey building. It was an older but handsome place with high ceilings, as I discovered as soon as we went inside. A tall, good-looking man in a grey suit and pale blue shirt came to greet us at the fully glazed entrance doors. This wasn’t Mr Glock yet. He took us upstairs to a large office with a large conference table, about a metre and a half wide and five metres long. All the furniture was dark wood. Our host arranged for coffee to be brought in and seated us at that slab of timber, which covered several square metres. Mr Muška was chatting warmly with him when the tall wooden doors opened and Mr Glock walked in! …
