It was almost 5 p.m. Bryant would be getting thirsty.

The Rocks had a four-leaf clover in neon above blacked-out windows. Inside it was dim, cramped, walls painted black between mirrors. The space was divided equally between a square dance floor and a darker, UV-lit bar area with stools around barrels. Clientele were nearly all students, starting to trickle in wearing miniskirts beneath fake fur-lined parkas. You could be pretty much anywhere.

Irish pubs were lucky places. The Guinness sign served as a beacon for intelligence agents around the world, looking for corruptible locals and homesick Westerners. My favourites included McGettigan’s in Jumeira, The Blacksmiths in Moscow, Molly Bloom’s in Tel Aviv – high times, career-defining recruits. You found CEOs and construction workers democratically levelled by alcoholism; local men and women estranged from their own kind for whatever reason, offered refuge by Celtic tat. And locals drinking with Westerners were halfway recruited already. You found prostitutes and pickpockets, just occasionally an actual pint of Guinness. In short, everything you could want.

The young man behind the bar noticed me as soon as I came in. He was tall, muscled beneath a white T-shirt, with sharp eyes and a quick smile, the bearing of someone running things.

‘Hello,’ he said in English.

‘Evening,’ I replied, happy to play the foreigner.

‘American?’ he said.

I laughed. ‘Do I not look Russian?’

‘Your clothes don’t look Russian.’

‘English.’

‘Pint of beer?’ His English was good. Good English in a place like this usually signalled frustrated ambitions. Fixer material.

‘You read my mind.’

My beer came in a frosted glass with a puck of ice in the bottom. The barman welcomed me to Kazakhstan. I imagined him in a country at war, where his combination of charm and street knowledge would come into its own. I tipped well and hoped I did not play a part in his life.

A guy beside me with a ponytail was busy on his phone. I saw Twitter, checked his handle, then looked him up on my own phone. He was Dimash Nurtas, a guitarist. Some of his tweets were in English, mostly about music, some politics: retweets about a pro-democracy demonstration by students in Uzbekistan. He had a few international followers.

‘Twitter working?’ I said. ‘I couldn’t get it.’

‘With a VPN.’

‘Which do you recommend?’

‘Cloudflare.’

‘A lot of people using that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do people get angry about the restrictions?’

‘Everyone.’

I leaned back against the bar and watched the room. Too early for the dancefloor, but the music was loud. It was Western in style – electronic beats, bassline – with lyrics in Russian and sometimes Kazakh. I tried to hear the lyrics, gauge what the youth of Kazakhstan were dreaming of.

‘Been in Astana long?’ the barman asked when I got my next drink.

‘I’ve just got here.’