The old Soviet Intourist Hotel was the only place foreign oil execs were allowed to stay, a five-storey brute on Neftchiler Prospekt, oilmen’s avenue. The lack of facilities didn’t keep anyone away – middlemen, warlords, oil execs. Reps for BP, Amoco, Pennzoil, Unocal. Then mercenaries from the US and Afghanistan fighting in Azerbaijan’s war with Armenia who added to the squeeze and the ratio of guns to guests. The US, Turkish and Russian embassies were all in the hotel itself. The UK embassy was in the offices of BP down the road, which told you all you needed to know. Azeri security services had the hotel wired from top to bottom. If you needed to talk to a politician you could say their name in an empty room and they’d turn up an hour or so later. People chained cases to their wrists to move down corridors. No one left the place. Deliveries of paper and whisky came in each morning. If you were curious about what the world looked like you could open your curtains and gaze across the derelict rigs crumbling into the sea.

I may have been the only one to get out and about. Daily, mid-afternoon, I’d walk past boomtown Baku, dutifully checking reflections in the windows of Bulgari and Armani to see if I’d been followed, but also spying on the shops themselves – capitalism as impossible dreams. I’d walk through Bibi-Heybat, a suburb where the first-ever oil well had been drilled, to an industrial zone called Black City where refinery chimneys coloured the sky grey with smoke. Offshore rig platforms looked like churches floating on air, the spires of the drilling towers hazy in mist. Someone told me they’d sunk seven ships to form the foundation for the offshore platform, one of which was the first oil tanker, Zoroaster. I admired the scale of the gesture, like a sacrifice, and the historical link it created. Once upon a time the burning gas just leaked from the ground and Azerbaijan was known as the shrine of fire, a place of Zoroastrian pilgrimage.

When the weather was good, I’d walk to a spot on the coast from which you got a glimpse of Neft Daslari – Oil Rocks – a town on stilts in the sea with two thousand rust-bitten drilling platforms joined by a network of bridges. That particularly day was clearer than most, and I was trying to make out what remained. I didn’t notice the tall, elegant Russian approaching, cigar in hand.

I was sure I hadn’t been followed, yet I could see no reason for someone else to be there. And he seemed content to appear as if he had sought me out. It was Vishinsky, although I didn’t know that then.