Last Song Sung

by David A. Poulsen

  “I was older than the rest, and I’d already been successful in business, though mostly by accident,” he began. “I got into the movie theatre business as a high school student, working as an usher and doorman at the Capitol, one of the great old Famous Players houses. It was at the corner of Bank Street and Queen Street. I loved the movie business, and I especially loved the theatres themselves — all of them are gone now, but it was a grand age. My family had money, and I guess maybe to keep me from indulging my other passion of the time — radical dissidence — they bought three smaller independent theatres in the city. I ran them, but it wasn’t the same. The romance of the great old movie palaces was gone. I decided to move in the other direction. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were starting to make noise in the U.S. I wanted to be that guy in Canada.”

  He stopped talking then and took several deep breaths.

  “More water, Mr. Gervais?” I was worried that it was too taxing for him and that he might not say anything more. But after a minute or two, he shook his head and began again.

  “I knew a guy named Calvin Bush. He was at Carleton for a while studying political science, but after a year or so he dropped out. Still went to some classes even though he was no longer registered, dropped a fair amount of acid, and sometimes spent entire days listening to Dylan and Guthrie and Pete Seeger. I remember spending one afternoon at his place smokin’ dope and listening to Like a Rolling Stone over and over for hours.

  “I made the mistake of introducing him to a young woman I knew. It was something I would forever regret. I’d met Ellie when she was performing at Le Hibou, and I wanted to help move her career along. I knew I couldn’t do that. Bush swore he could … had all these amazing contacts in the business. That was bullshit, but Ellie and I, we didn’t know that. He became her agent. Bush had a friend named Cameron Laird, and the three of us hatched an idea for a folk club. Laird was going to run the place. Bush saw himself as this music genius who could recognize talent that nobody else noticed. He told us he knew about Dylan when the guy was still a student at the University of Minnesota and nobody’d heard of him. That was likely more BS, but that was Bush. He was going to be out there finding all this talent and introducing it onstage at the TM. Of course, neither Bush nor Laird had any money, which is why I must have looked attractive to them. It was my money that set up The Tumbling Mustard. I leased the building, paid for all the renos, and bought a damn good sound system. Then Laird brought in another guy, a guy from Egypt.”

  “Fayed,” I said, wanting to speed up the story. It was all interesting background, but I wanted him to get to Ellie Foster and what had happened to her. And I wanted to get there before the cops arrived. I wasn’t sure he’d keep talking or that the cops would allow it once they were on the scene — at least not with Cobb and me present.

  I knew that showing my impatience would be rude and might even stop the story altogether. I glanced at Cobb, who was alternating between watching Tomlinson and paying attention to what Gervais was saying. He seemed fine with the pace of the telling.

  “Yes, Fayed.” The old man nodded. “He actually had some money — not a lot, but he was willing to put what he had into the coffee house. So we brought him into the partnership. I didn’t like him much. He was an intense, pompous bully, and he had almost no interest in the music. He said he was a businessman and he saw The Tumbling Mustard as a business opportunity. More bullshit.”

  Gervais’s speech had slowed and his eyes were half closed. I thought he was ready to stop, didn’t have the strength to go on. But he gathered himself with a couple of deep breaths and continued.

  “I stayed in the background. I still had the theatres, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to mix the two. Or maybe I wasn’t quite ready to turn my back completely on the real world. We opened the TM in the late summer of 1964, and it was clear pretty fast that we weren’t all on the same page. I was excited about the music, but Laird and Fayed were about anything but. The only good thing that happened was that one of the first acts we booked was Ellie. Bush conveniently forgot that it was me who had introduced him to Ellie. It was like he had discovered her. He kept saying she’d be the next Baez. Or maybe he said she’d be bigger than Baez, I forget. Thing is, for once he was right. She was our first … maybe our only sold-out house.” He smiled at the memory.

  “She was that good?” Cobb asked.

  “She was that good,” Gervais stated, his voice the strongest it had been since he’d started talking. “And then everything changed. Ben Tomlinson had read about the coffee house opening in the paper, and he came to us, said he’d volunteer until we determined if the place could be profitable. Then we could talk about wages. That seemed fair, and we were glad to have him. I wanted a doorman because I thought having one gave theatres class and would do the same thing for a folk club. Ben was that person, and at first he did a wonderful job. But slowly he became less interested in the place as a folk club. He and Fayed started scheming … the TM became a home for the counterculture element. I was part of it, too — a bunch of us standing around plotting the overthrow of the capitalist world. But slowly the three — Tomlinson, Fayed, and Laird — took over the running of the coffee house, and then they took over everything else. I went along — willingly, by the way. I don’t want to give the impression I was coerced or forced to do something I didn’t want to do. I was right there. But the part I have regretted every day since is that I brought Ellie with me.”

  “What about Bush?” Cobb asked.

  “He was there, too, but he was on the fringes. He wasn’t smart enough to be a player.”

  “Bush represent any other musicians?” Cobb asked.

  “None that I knew of.”

  He paused. A beat, then another. “It wasn’t long until the TM was nothing more than a clubhouse for a group of dissidents. But we weren’t Hoffman or Rubin or anybody that mattered. We were just some fucked-up punks. The three of them — Fayed, Laird, and … him” — his eyes flicked in the direction of Ben Tomlinson — “they didn’t merely want to protest or march or write angry poetry. They wanted to pursue violent means to achieve their goals, whatever they were.”

  He paused again, shook his head. “No, that’s wrong. They had goals. Fayed, as I said, was Egyptian and pissed off at the role Canada, specifically Pearson, had played in the Suez Crisis.” He looked up at me. “You know about the Suez?”

  I nodded and pointed my chin at Cobb. “We do, sir, yes.”

  Gervais turned his head in the direction of Tomlinson’s body splayed out on the floor, the pool of blood beneath him still spreading, despite Cobb’s efforts to at least slow the bleeding. “It was him,” Gervais said, voice filled with contempt, “who came up with the plan to assassinate the prime minister on one of the biggest days of this country’s political history — the unveiling of Canada’s new flag.”

  “February 15, 1965,” I said.

  “That’s right. He said it would be Canada’s Kennedy moment.” The voice was growing weaker, the cadence slower.

  “Let me help, sir,” I said. “Ellie Foster did something to undermine the plan.”

  Gervais shook his head, his eyes now filled with tears. “They thought she did. But it was me.” He raised a hand, I think to tap himself on the chest to emphasize the point he was making. But the hand slumped back down before he completed the gesture.

  He stopped talking and looked like he was struggling again, swallowed a couple of times. Cobb looked back at Tomlinson, and I looked at my watch. Eleven minutes since my call to 911. I thought I could hear the first hint of sirens in the distance.

  “Would you like more water, Mr. Gervais?” I asked again.

  He licked his lips, shook his head one more time, and spoke again.

  “I overheard Fayed talking to someone on the phone. I remember him saying that the red in the new flag would be very appropriate on that day. I thought at first it was a joke, but one
night after we’d closed up and I was there by myself, I stumbled across five high-powered rifles, a bunch of ammunition, and some explosives. They’d kept all that stuff hidden away right there at The Tumbling Mustard. That pissed me off. And I was worried about Ellie. It was like Tomlinson controlled her, and I was afraid she might be mixed up in whatever it was they were planning. And she was.”

  The sirens told us the first responders, cops or the ambulance or both, were getting closer. The old man was barely able to talk anymore. Cobb told him to rest, that we’d find out what happened to Ellie later. But Gervais shook his head stubbornly.

  “Just a little more,” he insisted. “Most of it I’m guessing, you know. The fuck-up with the armoured car was another one of his schemes.” It was like the old man couldn’t bring himself to say Tomlinson’s name anymore. No longer a man determined merely to stand up to his oppressor, his eyes, his voice radiated loathing.

  “Ellie was part of that thing. She told me later she even fired the gun they’d given her, just shot in the air, but I could see the whole thing had been exciting to her, at least at first. Bush was killed that night, and another punk they recruited for that deal got shot. He wasn’t hurt all that badly, but he got scared — or maybe he got smart — and took off. I don’t even remember his name. Probably has a nice life somewhere in New Brunswick. You’d think that night would have told them that this man couldn’t plan a three-car parade, let alone devise a plot to kill the prime minister. But he was like Manson; they all followed along.

  “After I found the weapons, I tipped off the RCMP about what they were planning. Anonymous phone call. I didn’t give the cops any names, but I told them as much as I knew about the plot. I wasn’t part of the actual plan, but I went to Parliament Hill that day anyway. You never saw so many cops and military. Only an idiot would have thought they could pull it off. You see, this wasn’t going to be some suicide bombing or shooting. They wanted to get away with it and believed they would — well, until they saw all the RCMP, the cops, the soldiers. They finally realized it wasn’t going to work. There was nowhere within a couple of miles of Parliament Hill that they’d be able to set up rifles. They’d have been arrested in seconds.”

  “You did that, sir. You did the right thing.” I knew it sounded patronizing, but I felt bad that he blamed himself for so much of what had happened.

  He shook his head, more vigorously this time. “Bullshit! The right thing would have been to tell them it was me who gave away their scheme.” He hesitated, had a coughing spasm before he resumed. “But I didn’t. I’m a coward. I’ve let him run my life out of fear … a coward.”

  This time it was Cobb who spoke. “You weren’t a coward today, sir.”

  The sirens announced that the police and ambulances had arrived. I knew the cops wouldn’t rush the house, not right away, not until they knew the situation.

  “I better get them in here … for him,” I said.

  “No need to hurry,” Cobb said. “He’s dead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I realized my shaking had slowed some, but now as I looked at Tomlinson, I began shaking harder again. The phone rang. I guessed it was the cops.

  “Don’t answer it,” Gervais said. “Not yet.”

  He coughed again, wiped spittle from his mouth. “Ellie finally realized this thing was all so goddamn wrong. For a while she was just depressed, but then she came out of it, at least enough to leave, wanted to get back to her career. That pig on the floor wasn’t about to allow that. He wanted to do something dramatic, something spectacular, after the failed Parliament Hill plan. To show the others that the next time he planned something as big and as crazy as the Pearson thing, he could pull it off. And, most of all, he wanted revenge because he still thought it was Ellie who gave it up to the cops. They could have just taken her, but instead they killed those innocent men. Fayed and Tomlinson were in the car. Laird in the club. When Ellie and the other two went out into the alley, Laird went out the front door, stood on the street, and lit a smoke. That was the sign. Like a goddamned B movie. You know what happened after that.”

  “Do you know who the shooter was, Mr. Gervais?”

  “Oh, yeah” — his eyes glanced again at the figure on the floor — “he shot both of them.”

  He looked back at me as I nodded. I started to ask him about the most important part — what had happened to Ellie after that. He looked at me, and his eyes, still moist with tears, wrinkled a little. He knew this was the part that mattered most to Cobb and to me.

  “Fayed panicked, maybe realized he had thrown in with a crazy person, and soon after he fled back to the U.S., I heard California. I never heard from him or about him again. Laird disappeared, too, not long after.”

  It was Cobb who spoke next. Like me, he wanted to hear the end of the story. “You and Ellie stayed with him. Why?”

  “At first she was literally a prisoner. Tied up all the time … she was in one room of this little house Tomlinson rented on Bayswater. It was like when someone is taken hostage in the Middle East.… Laird hadn’t left yet and him and Tomlinson, they brought her food and water — they didn’t starve her, and they took her to the bathroom. They never left me alone with her — maybe they didn’t trust me, I don’t know. The only time they ever talked to her was to try to get her to admit she’d ratted them out. Of course, she never did. Finally Tomlinson decided to change things … decided he wanted her. Maybe he always had.

  “He swore he’d turn her in for her part in the armoured car fiasco, then kill her child if she didn’t go along with what he wanted. Ellie became a slave to that man. Sexually, psychologically — I guess in every way possible, really. She couldn’t leave, at least not at first, because she believed — we both did — that he meant what he said. And even if we murdered the bastard — and believe me, we talked about it — he told us he had people in place who would kill Ellie’s daughter if anything happened to him. I guess we thought we really couldn’t take the chance. Ellie stayed to save her daughter.

  “She was writing songs during that time; I gues it was the one thing that felt normal … that felt right to her. Tomlinson even encouraged it. He had this insane scheme: one day he’d bring her back, make up this story that he’s rescued her, and then she’s start perming again, and recording, and he’d make all this money. It was crazy. But he was crazy. And that was our lives — Ellie writing and the two of us planning, scheming, and working on our exit strategy.” His mouth formed a small smile.

  “But then,” he gestured at his wheelchair. “This happened.”

  I looked at Cobb, who was sitting next to Tomlinson, still pressing down on the wound, now using his Eastern Electric windbreaker and a blanket from the couch to try to stanch the flow of blood.

  “What happened?”

  “Car accident. Right in front of the old Capitol Theatre. Ironic, eh? Broken back. Paraplegic.” His voice was flat as he said the words.

  “I’m sorry … I — we didn’t know. We thought you were in the wheelchair because of an illness.”

  “Oh, I have that too. But I’ve been in a wheelchair a long time. Long before my more recent … challenge. The bad part of the accident was it kind of made our escape a whole lot tougher. But Ellie wasn’t a quitter and I guess I wasn’t either, so we kept planning, figuring how we could get away and protect Ellie’s daughter. We were just waiting for the right time. But there never was a right time. Finally we had pretty much decided to make our move. I don’t know if Tomlinson suspected something or what, but one day he called us into the kitchen and showed us a photo of Ellie’s little girl. It was clearly taken in the yard of the people who were raising her. He didn’t say anything other than, ‘isn’t she a lovely girl’ and stuff like that. But if it was meant to scare the hell out of us, it worked. We didn’t know what to do.

  “One day we’d both be ready to call hi
s bluff and take off. But the next day we’d be thinking what if he wasn’t bluffing? Eventually Ellie stopped writing, and it was like she began to fade away. It wasn’t long after that she became ill. Tomlinson refused to let her see a doctor. Instead we moved out here to this place, and he concocted the story about his invalid father, and Ellie, his sister. I guess there was no real reason for people not to believe it. Ellie died a few months after we moved here. She’s buried not far from the back of the house.”

  It was quiet again for a long minute.

  “And you still stayed,” Cobb said. “You didn’t even try to escape with …” Cobb looked at the wheelchair as his voice trailed off.

  “Escape to what? My family was gone. My parents had both died quite young; I had no brothers or sisters. So what was left … some institution? Besides, Ellie’s out there,” he pointed his chin toward the back of the house. “I know it sounds strange, but I wanted to be here.”

  I thought about Kennedy and his compulsion, his fixation with a dead girl. While his was for a different reason — he was trying to find a killer — the two obsessions were similar … and equally sad. A man wanting to be near where the woman he loved was buried.

  “And he let you stay,” I said.

  “He let my money stay. My parents were gone, and they left me pretty well off. My money bought this place and paid for the life we lived. My money and a few … enterprises he had going, criminal stuff, I don’t know the details. Besides, I was harmless,” Gervais said bitterly. “Gutless. He knew that, and kept me around for the money and to do the things he didn’t want to, the bookkeeping and and all that. I knew his books were as phony as he was, but I didn’t care.” There were tears now, flowing unchecked. He didn’t raise a hand to wipe them away.

  “And now I’ll finally be with her.” He pointed to his abdomen. “Pancreatic. We’ll finally be together without him, and it took this to make it happen.”