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stuff. Give us blood.

    ‘So where are you?’ Oğuz asks.

    Adnan flicks on his transponder. A map of mid-Istanbul overlays Oğuz’s grinning face on his windshield. Oğuz is on the Fatih Sultan Bridge to the north. The distances are comparable; the driveware calculates traffic densities. A little jockey-programme generates odds. Oğuz’s grin widens. He likes those odds.

    ‘I’ll go five hundred euro.’

    ‘Eight hundred.’ Adnan likes those odds too. ‘And the tip.’ There is etiquette to the Ultralords of the Universe’s street races. The tip is that the loser pays the winner’s traffic fines.

    ‘Element of Air assist me!’ Adnan shouts. ‘In three. Two. One.’ He grabs the steering handset and flicks off the autodrive. Warnings blare through the car. Adnan ignores them and floors the pedal. The gas engine barely raises a note but the car leaps forward into the traffic. The self-guiding cars fluster and part like panicked chickens as Adnan piles through. There is a time to peel out from the flock. Adnan Sarioğlu laughs as he spears through the traffic. The Audi leans like a motorbike as he crosses lanes. Cars peel away like the bow-wave of a Russian gas-tanker. The game is on. Adnan feels the roar build inside him, the roar that never goes away, that is in the kick of the nanotuned gas engine of his street-sweet German car, that wells in him when Ayşe moves against him on those nights he slips home in the dark, when she murmurs so and opens to let him press inside her; but most, most in the shriek of gas hurtling down the Blue Line, under the Bosphorus, out into the world of money, that is the deal, every deal, every closing. The roar that never, never stops. In seven minutes he will take Oğuz for three hundred euro and a dozen traffic-cam fines. Tonight he will meet the manager of one of Istanbul’s fattest hedge funds. On Friday he will slap down a briefcase full of notes in front of that piss-eyed realtor in his hideous shiny little Lidl suit and set the name of Sarioğlu down by the waters of the Bosphorus. It is the game, the only game and the always game.

     
    The angel is blind and shackled by an iron band around his right foot. His eyes are blank stone orbs. He is naked and wreathed in flame, male, marvellously muscular and lithe, yet sexless. He flies by the power of his own will, arms outstretched, intent but ignorant, blind to his own blindness, straining against the single shackle. The blind angel’s left arm claws for the child. He craves it with sense other than sight.

    The second angel cradles the child away from that grasp. He too is male, defined yet kept chaste by the leg of the child. He stands on a ribbon of cloud low on an indefinite sea. He looks to the blind angel with an expression of incomprehension. The child, a sturdy lad improbably muscled, faces away. His arm is held up in a plea for help. His hair is very curly. The succouring angel looks like a prig. All the passion, all the energy, is in the blind, burning angel.

    ‘William Blake, Good and Evil Angels,’ Ayşe Erkoç says, leaning close over the print. ‘I love William Blake. I love his vision, I love the prophetic fire that burns through his art and his poetry, I love the completeness of his cosmology. I’ve studied William Blake, I’ve read William Blake, I’ve seen William Blake, in folio, and in London. On very rare, very special occasions, I’ve sold William Blake. Original William Blake. This is not William Blake. This is garbage. The paper’s all wrong, the line is like a five-year-old’s, I can smell the bleach from here and there’s a spelling error in the text. This is an offence to my professionalism.’

    Topaloğlu’s cheeks quiver in embarrassment. Ayşe thinks of them as two slabs of condemned liver. Offal propped apart by a wide, rural moustache.

    ‘I mean no insult, Mrs Erkoç.’

    ‘There’s a world - no, a universe - of difference between unclear provenance and a Grand Bazaar