puff 529 Mon 27th

Review
Lis Tomlins and Twinset
Downstage Sun 26th

It was packed. Lisa is popular in Wellington. I sat nest to a lady from Upper Hutt whose daughter had gone to school there with Lisa. The daughter was with her mates in the front row in seats that they had booked when bookings opened. It was a reunion of Lisa fans and I was pleased to be part of it. A good audience for Downstage, a change perhaps from the lot from Eastbourne or Khandallah.

It started at seven on a Sunday night and finished before nine-thirty and the audience seemed happy about that.

Christopher Yeabsley was on the organ except when Lisa herself played at one stage. Lisa was mostly on vocal bur sometimes on ukulele. Daniel Yeabsley was on bass and wind instruments. Paul Hosking was pretty darned good on drums.

Lisa was dressed for the gig. She shouted out to her drag queen dresser-fashion guide and the dress-up thing along with her ukelele playing and magic tricks that did not work were part of the comic thread of the night the rest coming from a kind of dumbed down jive talk from Daniel of the twins.

So they worked the audience well. Daniel and Lisa knew who was there and spent a fair bit of time being funny, Daniel making bebop jokes for those from the Cuba Street clubs and Lisa being back at school with the folks from the valley.

The first half drifted along with as much comedy as music. Lisa is so infectious and attractive onstage that she can say a lot of things, at one stage talking about herself being described as a musical slut. Daniel is pretty cool really and he can get away with the dumb bebob thing, especially with the Wellington crowd. But there were one or two hints of music.

And then the seconf half smoked. It was so good. Christopher Yeabsley was a revelation. The bass in the act maily came from runs on the keys and I could not get what he was doing out of my head. Hosking did all that was required of a drummer in an evening of jazz and more. Daniel called time on being a jazz comic and started to play. And Lisa showed us what she is capable of, a voice going into jazz in clever and sometimes intoxicating ways. You keep waiting for her to throw another frill, another variation into things and just when you think that that is all there is to give she shares a bit more.

Way to go Downstage! A full house, a happy audience and a serving of fine music.

Monday 27th
Rangitaanenuirawa

Kaupapa koorero moo te raa nei
He waahi nui o Rangitaane i ngaa waaa o mua

Rangahau
I moohio koe ko Rongotea, he waahi Raupo, he waahi ngahere hoki mai i a Himatangi ki te awa o Oroua. Ka tapa teenei waahi i a Turi te rangatira o te waka Aotea. He rahi ngaa ika me ngaa manu i kite ai i a Turi ki Rongotea. Rau rangatira Rangitaane, he waahi Rangitaane teenei! Rongotea!

Subject of the day
Important places of Rangitaane in days gone by

Analysis.
Rongotea, the area of swamp and bushland from Himatangi to the Oroua River, was named by Turi , captain of the Aotea canoe. Turi found ample supplies of fish and bird in Rongotea.
Rau rangatira Rangitaane, he waahi Rangitaane teenei! Rongotea!

www.manawatunz.co.nz/.../Manawatu%20Rural%20Touring%20Map.pdf

Isis: the days of the voles
9
No nets
In Vegas, Paullie reckoned, it was bettter to do breakfast than to do lunch. He'd never quite sorted out the lunch thing in America.

Paullie had breakfast with one or two people that he knew.

He heard at last about a surprise high wire act, in fact it was to be an act done off a helicopter. And that was all.

Paullie started calling people he knew.

The thing was so secret, the clans involved were so tight.There was a wall around this whole business that could not be breached.Noone knew who the trapeze act were or where they were staying.

The people in Vegas knew a man was coming. They did not know that he would come from Bogota.

The Man by the Fountain in Bogota did not manage people as much as he managed cutouts.

I isolate you and I control you he said to the panther in its cage.

The Tramp started to follow the Don at a distance more and more as he left the pub and walked home.

Something was bugging the Don though. Of this the Tramp was sure.There was a tone about the Don's mutterings and rantings. The Tramp felt these things.

A call came from the man by the fountain to the man on the ground in Reno.

As he listened the man n Reno could hear parakeets in the background and he knew the man in Bogata was standing by his birdcage. This was a good sign, the birdcages being points of peaceful eflection for the man when he steped aside from the fountain area.

Esme wondered out loud whether the Tramp was Simon's real father.

Sam and Paullie had a text relationship, a txt thing. Sam could text as he was talking. A multitasker so long as one task was verbal free association.

Paullie liked texting people because you didn't have to look at them while you were telling them things. Or hear them as you did on the phone.

Sam had fallen into it as a way of gossip. And they had to be answered straightaway.

Paullie, like his son Simon, was a good listener. Sam went on. Paullie sifted it all and thought about who to call.

The Senator's people knew that their man was becoming controversial. That was part of the planning. Get noticed now.

It never seemed to occur to them that there was a risk in getting noticed.

Talking about a troop free zone above Kuwait was bound to upset someone.

Las Vegas was upgrading. No longer a gangster hangout, no longer even a crass boom town Vegas was starting to become a serious centre. The President was due to open a wing at Nevada Memorial Hospital at the beginnning of the summmer, philharmonic orchestras were now playing where gaudy popstars once strutted,

Vegas was nearly a credible place.

The minder knew one of the senator's people.He worked the twins in one room and the phone in another.Giselle, the senator's wife was in on the act smehow but Jimmy couldn't figure it.

At last a timeframe was worked out, an actual timetable even. When he had declared the place open Jake would wave and the helicopter pilot would set the twins' end of things in motion.

And at the end of the trapeze show the senator would thank the twins in some way.

More cutouts.

The Senator's people kept talking.The Trapeze Twins went out for burgers. And shakes. They were chaperoned by the Minder and a couple of hard lookers who had come from out of town just to walk around Vegas with a couple of acrobats.

The big day came. It was hot and dry with just a litle wind. What else could it be? This was Vegas. The buildings shimmered in the heat as the day dawned and the pools began to glisten.

At twelve noon exactly the senator stepped out, with his entourage onto the top of the new building. The television camera crews moved to catch his part of the action. Paulie had got himself into the crowd near Jake and he was caught by the camera in the wide shot.

The helicopter hovered with a rope ladder dangling. The twins had got onto the chopper two hours earlier and they had gone to another rooftop to wait. It was a big helicopter and the minder came as well. The three of them were in the back compartment which had several lockers and storage compartments.

Down on the ground the covers came off a ramp. A man proceeded to sweep the ramp with a lot of attention to detail.

A caped figure came out of the helicopter and started to descend the ladder. It was one of the twins. He waved at the senator. The senator waved back. The other twin came down the ladder and they began a routine. At one point they both waved at the senator and again he waved back.

A motorbike revved up below and the cameras followed it towards the ramp. On screen there wad cutting from the senator to the helicopter to the motorbike. There were wide shots of the helicopter and closeups of the twins.

A shot from the open door of the helicpter killed the senator.

The helicopter started to bank away.

Paullie watched, taking photos with his moblile phone and texting to Sam as the scene unfolded.

The man from Reno came out of nowhere in his chopper.

He blasted the trapeze helicopter with the rocket launcher.

The twins fell off the ladder onto the roof.

Debris fell all around.

And that made the six o'clock news.

Paullie got the twins out. He told them that their lives were in danger and that they would just have to trust him. And they did just that as as most people did with Paullie. They went down the lift to the basement of the building. Paullie got his Stutz from the adjacent building. The twins were impressed with the car.

The FBI stepped in along with local law enforcement.

The senator's people were looking at options.They had been noticed.

The Stutz stood outside a motel. There were cacti about. And tumbleweeds. And dust.

Inside Paullie made it clear to the twins that he would take them no further without a splitting of the up front payment. He would use a private banker who would get the money into accounts in the UK. Half to the accounts of North Oxford Investigations and half to an account set up for the twins.

They did the transactions by phone.

The man in Reno booked out of the Motel. It was three days after the shooting. He had used the phone book to find out how many motels there were in Reno and then he had worked out their total space. He flew to Miami. And on to Bogota via the Caribbean.

Paullie tried punting. North Oxford was a kind of homecoming for him but of course it was something that he could never do. Home was in the transatlantic ether. Up there with other popstars that he knew. Where he belonged. The Don regarded Paullie as an unexplained phenomenon. Paullie, of course, classified the Don in entertainment terms- he was like a character off the set of a Noel Coward play.

There was a phone call from a country near the Caucasus to a man in Bogata.

Edmond the Tramp lurked about the covered market. He saw the Aussie. David Walker was in fact, getting off his bike after a long ride in the country. Today the Geelong Transformer was a fisherman complete with a rod and wading boots on the carrier of his bicycle.

There was a phone call from a public box near to a layby in North Oxford to a man in Bogata.

It was a time of realisation, all round. For Simon at Isis Investigations the basic objective, the return of the twins hhad been achieved. As for the reasons for the events that had transpired or even the identities of the people responsible Simon felt that he knew less than he did at the beginnng of the case.

The Roma or whoever they were, the folk who lived on highways and byways had helped to set the whole thing up. For another group or for a fee. Or for a favour somewhere out there in the night, perhaps all the way back into the Urals.

Simon and his firm had been part of the set up, a vehicle for transmitting false information to the police or whoever. The Don was a conduit to Five and Six, the boathouse was bugged by some agency or another. Isis Investigations was a leaky ship.

As for who wanted the Senator dead and gone and then who paid for it, that was anyone's guess. There had to be an answer somewhere out there but Simon was not about to get on top of he question let alone the answer. It was a maze of cutouts, the whole thing. Who killed Jake the Senator? Jimmy the Minder. And who killed Mr Jimmy? Another minder no doubt and that person might themselves have been disposed of by another minder...

As for finding what to do next that was easy for Simon and Sam. There was a big, fat amount deposited into the firm account from somewhere in the Caribbean. Sam and Simon owed Paullie for this. He had got the money off the twins and all of the transfers had gone through. But once again Isis Investigations had been paid through the back door just as it had been in the Case of the Murdered Pole.

Paullie was actually waiting for the day when someone came in the door much as Raymond Chandler started his Philip Marlowe novels, described a case to Simon whereupon Simon Lodge-Philip Marlowe named a fee which, after a certain amount of argy bargy usually got paid. But perhaps that just showed how long Paullie had been out of North Oxford. Or that he read too many books in this particular genre.

They all had lunch at the Joiner's Arms. Paullie checked his answering service back in the States and there was a message from an FBI agent asking him to call. Sam had a funny call from her relation in Jamaica. Something about a numbers man he'd once known in Guatemala with the nickname of Do-the-Math. This dude had come in from Nevada not long after Sam's earlier call. There was talk in the island bars about this guy...

A few hours after lunch one of the Trapeze Twins arched an eyebrow at the other. They were at Heathrow. The other smiled, stood up and lead the way to the Budapest bound counter. Paullie was at the other end of the counters bound for New York where he had a little business to take care of.

Around the same time Sam began a long conversation, partly with Simon and partly with herself, about global intrigue, about how she must get back to Paullie in the morning as there was a photo of the second helicopter that he'd sent from Vegas on his mobile phone, something she wanted to follow up and did Simon know that mobiles were actually quite sinister things wwhen you considered privacy rights and on.

Much later in the day Simon went for a walk along the Isis by himself. He sat and thought for a while.

Something did not fit. Actually nothing much was neatly fitting into anything else. He felt like withdrawing into the river world, like copying Edmond the Tramp for a while. It was all too complex and too far away from any kind of resolution.

He thought about getting up and going home to bed. He'd sat by the river long enough. When he thought about it maybe the odd corpse had floated by unnoticed except for the occasional involuntary shudder that came over him as he sat. He thought again about losing himself in the life of the river, in the days of the voles...

Later that night Esme and Bella left a set of photographs and stencils on the door of the Boathouse for Simon or Samantha to find...

Julio, the man with the private zoo was feeding the pigeons. He paused momentarily as though someone was calling for his attention even though it was very quiet except for the cooing of the birds...



.

The End