When she phones in twice a week to make sure Necdet and Mustafa haven’t killed each other with the fire axes she sounds as if she is chewing a wad of gum the size of a car. Neither Necdet nor Mustafa have ever met her. ‘Either that or all that skunk you smoke is finally catching up with you. Pitching wedge, please.’
And that would also explain the floating luminous head of the suicide bomber , Necdet thinks as he picks the wedge out of the clutch of clubs in his grasp. I didn’t tell you about her because I thought that too. But I felt the heat of the djinni of the hand-drier on my face. I dried my hands on it. Traumas don’t dry hands.
Mustafa addresses the ball. He has a good lie in the centre of the corridor, well-positioned for a chip up the staircase at the end on to the return. Mustafa wiggles his ass. A flicker in the corner of Necdet’s vision makes him glance over his shoulder. Behind the glass wall is the main back-office; twenty-seven thousand square metres of dusty desks, tucked-in chairs and outdated workstations. Every monitor, as far as Necdet can see into the regress of screens, crackles with static and the ghost of a face from another universe.
The Roman Emperor Vespasian said that money has no smell. The emperor lied. Money is every breath Adnan Sarioğlu takes on the trading floor. The smell of money is the ionic charge of Özer Gas and Commodities; sweat and musk, electricity and the hydrocarbon scent of power-warmed plastics, time and tension. To beach-boy-turned-commodities-trader Adnan, money is the smell of a wetsuit worn by a woman.
The commodity pit is a cylinder at the heart of Özer’s glass tower, eight floors ringed around a central shaft and capped with a stained-glass dome that throws shards of colour across the traders ranged around the Money Tree. That is Adnan’s name for the IT core that runs from floor to ceiling, tier upon tier of suspended servers and network links, each level keyed to a specific commodity. Gas is a lowly so its traders are on the second tier, one above crude and dirty oil, and Adnan is only rarely surprised by a shard of blue or gold falling through the jungle of routers and servers and power conduits on to his face. Carbon is the highest, right up there under the dome. Carbon is exalted, carbon is pure.
Adnan Sarioğlu reaches up and slides trading screens around the branches of the Money Tree. He brings in new panes of prices, expands some, pushes others away into the recesses of the central tree. To the virtual eye of the Özer trader, the information core at the centre is dense with leaves of information, almost impenetrable in their total coverage of the global markets. Commodity trading floors, once roaring pits of open-outcry bids and buys, have all become silent as dervish monasteries now that trading information is beamed directly on to the eyeball and AI assistants murmur in the inner ear. Adnan knew the old pit of the ITB exchange only as a red-jacket junior but the roar of the traders screaming into each other’s faces shook his blood vessels, echoed in the ventricles of his heart. When the bell rang, when trading closed and he stepped out to the back office the hush hit him like a breaking wave. Now he only gets that breaker of sound on the terraces of Aslanteppe Stadium.
In the new bourse the clamour is visual. Adnan moves through a storm of information, screens and panels swooping around him like starlings on a winter afternoon. The traders are peacock bright, far from the formal colour coding of dealers, traders and back office team. Many have customized their jackets with panels of nanoweave or had them cut from whole animated fabric. Flickering flames at cuffs, hem and lapels are the thing. Others sport Heavy Metal devils, roaring dinosaurs, spinning euro signs, nudes or football team logos. Onur Bey’s bandwidth trading team has adopted the Lâle Devri tulip motif. Adnan thinks that decadent and effeminate. He wears the
And that would also explain the floating luminous head of the suicide bomber , Necdet thinks as he picks the wedge out of the clutch of clubs in his grasp. I didn’t tell you about her because I thought that too. But I felt the heat of the djinni of the hand-drier on my face. I dried my hands on it. Traumas don’t dry hands.
Mustafa addresses the ball. He has a good lie in the centre of the corridor, well-positioned for a chip up the staircase at the end on to the return. Mustafa wiggles his ass. A flicker in the corner of Necdet’s vision makes him glance over his shoulder. Behind the glass wall is the main back-office; twenty-seven thousand square metres of dusty desks, tucked-in chairs and outdated workstations. Every monitor, as far as Necdet can see into the regress of screens, crackles with static and the ghost of a face from another universe.
The Roman Emperor Vespasian said that money has no smell. The emperor lied. Money is every breath Adnan Sarioğlu takes on the trading floor. The smell of money is the ionic charge of Özer Gas and Commodities; sweat and musk, electricity and the hydrocarbon scent of power-warmed plastics, time and tension. To beach-boy-turned-commodities-trader Adnan, money is the smell of a wetsuit worn by a woman.
The commodity pit is a cylinder at the heart of Özer’s glass tower, eight floors ringed around a central shaft and capped with a stained-glass dome that throws shards of colour across the traders ranged around the Money Tree. That is Adnan’s name for the IT core that runs from floor to ceiling, tier upon tier of suspended servers and network links, each level keyed to a specific commodity. Gas is a lowly so its traders are on the second tier, one above crude and dirty oil, and Adnan is only rarely surprised by a shard of blue or gold falling through the jungle of routers and servers and power conduits on to his face. Carbon is the highest, right up there under the dome. Carbon is exalted, carbon is pure.
Adnan Sarioğlu reaches up and slides trading screens around the branches of the Money Tree. He brings in new panes of prices, expands some, pushes others away into the recesses of the central tree. To the virtual eye of the Özer trader, the information core at the centre is dense with leaves of information, almost impenetrable in their total coverage of the global markets. Commodity trading floors, once roaring pits of open-outcry bids and buys, have all become silent as dervish monasteries now that trading information is beamed directly on to the eyeball and AI assistants murmur in the inner ear. Adnan knew the old pit of the ITB exchange only as a red-jacket junior but the roar of the traders screaming into each other’s faces shook his blood vessels, echoed in the ventricles of his heart. When the bell rang, when trading closed and he stepped out to the back office the hush hit him like a breaking wave. Now he only gets that breaker of sound on the terraces of Aslanteppe Stadium.
In the new bourse the clamour is visual. Adnan moves through a storm of information, screens and panels swooping around him like starlings on a winter afternoon. The traders are peacock bright, far from the formal colour coding of dealers, traders and back office team. Many have customized their jackets with panels of nanoweave or had them cut from whole animated fabric. Flickering flames at cuffs, hem and lapels are the thing. Others sport Heavy Metal devils, roaring dinosaurs, spinning euro signs, nudes or football team logos. Onur Bey’s bandwidth trading team has adopted the Lâle Devri tulip motif. Adnan thinks that decadent and effeminate. He wears the
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