150 AMERICAN SPY
and ties. American disco music blared incessantly from several speakers,
so loud that you could barely hear the person seated next to you. Between
courses, rather than sweeping the breadcrumbs off the table with an
elegant, old-school table crumber, waiters nearly blew us out of our heavy
wooden chairs with modern handheld vacuums, sucking up everything off
the table with a noisy flourish.
Although it was not easy, I never ceased trying to impress my wife
with my insider’s knowledge of Belgrade’s fine-dining scene. When the
first McDonald’s opened in Belgrade, the entire first batch of employees
had to be fired, since they were unwilling or unable to implement the fun-
damental practice of being polite to customers. I learned this from the
local McDonald’s rep, who also told me that McDonald’s hired a second
crew and immediately whisked them out of the country for a few weeks of
basic customer service training. Brainwashing, American-style. After that,
McDonald’s became our favorite restaurant, since it was the only smoke-
free place in town, with friendly service to boot. You could even get ice.
A waiter at another “upscale” state-run restaurant once told Stacy, after
she’d asked repeatedly for some ice for her warm Coke, “Dosta je hladna,”
meaning “Is cold enough.” (For the record, Belgrade has changed drasti-
cally since our time there, and it is now a worthwhile tourist destination, as
is the rest of the former Yugoslavia.)
When Stacy joined me in Belgrade, I was typically working ten- or eleven-
hour days at the station. This was often followed by late-night or weekend
SDRs prior to reading or marking signal sites, casing future meeting and
signal sites, or conducting on-the-street agent meetings. I would return
home late, reeking not of perfume but of Belgrade itself: the heavy, misty
yellow air was dangerously polluted thanks to a million people burning soft
coal and garbage at the same time. Belgrade’s residents would toss their
smoldering coal embers into large garbage dumpsters, yielding a nasty
burnt garbage smell that permeated the entire city. When blended with the
aforementioned soft coal smog, the results were gag inducing, especially
for those of us walking the streets late at night. Meanwhile, in the winter
the streets were covered with “permaslime,” the name we gave to the dirty,