Most of the time, Berliner stood alone at a glass counter, drafting the blueprints for his perfect apartment or reading non-fiction books about mapmaking and the Age of Exploration. He discovered that if he was knowledgeable about the maps, he didn’t have to be nice to the customers. His favorite maps, the Edge of the World maps, sold well.f
Berliner worked in the shop for a year and a half, trying to forget the problems in his past. He learned the names of the map collectors. He occasionally dated a girl for a few weeks or a few months. He visited Kraus in prison. For a long time, nothing happened to him and he started to believe that all the excitement in his life had already passed; that, like a star athlete, the drama of his life took place entirely in his youth. But then, on a quiet Saturday morning in June, Molly Metropolis walked into his shop.
Molly was only sixteen during The City of Chicago vs. Marie-Hélène Kraus, and though she had appreciated the sensationalism of the trial, she hadn’t focused on the specific details of the case until her first year at U of C, when she took a freshman seminar called “Modern Law and Fiction.” She studied Kraus’s case during her second week as a college student and it made a dramatic impression on her. Her obsession with the case led her to the Situationists, to Antoine/Antoinette Monson, to Berliner. She fixated on it for the rest of the semester and wrote about it for her final paper. After she decided to leave U of C to pursue a career as a singer, she sold all of her textbooks and trashed all of her notes, except for the ones about Kraus’s case. During the thirteen months between dropping out and being signed by Harmony Records, her first record label, Molly continued to research the New Situationists. When Harmony dropped her without putting out an album, she decided to take her New Situationist research to the next level. She mined her old school contacts, canvassing poli-sci and architecture majors about the New Situationists. She read in a Chicago Tribune article that the “last member of the New Situationists” was living in Chicago, working at a store selling old maps.
Once Molly found Berliner, she didn’t waste any time. Molly walked into the cartography shop wearing a pair of huge sunglasses and a black T-shirt with a very, very deep V-neck that showed off chunks of her rhinestone-encrusted bra. Though she wasn’t yet famous, she already looked like a mega-watt pop star on a morning stroll. Without a glance at the maps on the wall, she sauntered over to Berliner’s counter. Berliner knew exactly what she wanted. Since the trial, he had warded off journalists, historians, and the fanboys and fangirls of the New Situationist movement. Berliner wanted to show Molly the door but, true to form, she refused to walk through it.
In our interviews, Berliner was often hostile, coldly detached, frustrated, monosyllabic, nicotine-deprived, or unwilling to answer questions without providing a reason for his unwillingness. In short, he was the opposite of everything an interviewer hopes their subject will be. So, when I asked him about the early months of his collaboration with Molly Metropolis, I expected we would play our usual game of frustration and reluctance. I was wrong. He put away a cigarette without smoking it and said, “We’re finally going to talk about Metro? I was beginning to think you didn’t give two shits about the person who is responsible for everything.”g
The first story Berliner told me about Molly was delightfully characteristic: “The first thing she said to me, I mean as she was shaking my hand, was that her name was Molly Metropolis and she was going to be a pop star. ‘But that doesn’t matter right now,’ she said. ‘What matters is you.’ I knew immediately she was referring to the [New Situationists]. At that time, there were only two things people talked to me about, and I could tell immediately that she didn’t want to buy a map. Of course, in a way, I was wrong about that. She had me make her dozens of maps.”
When Berliner met her, Molly hadn’t completely evolved into the public figure she eventually became, but she was a primordial version of that figure. She dressed in metallic clothing and directed the people around her like they were members of her staff. She also refused to take no for an answer; two days after Berliner told Molly he didn’t want to work with her, she came back to the cartography shop and propositioned him again. Work with her, and she would give Berliner the money to build his apartment. Berliner cautiously asked her how she knew about his apartment and she told him that she had followed him to the Chicago Public Archives where his sometimes-girlfriend, Nina Johnson, worked and had discussed it with her. Molly later confessed to Berliner that this was a lie; she had actually visited Kraus several times in prison, winning Kraus’s trust, and learning about the apartment from her. Not wanting to betray her new friend, Molly blamed Johnson. Berliner had unfortunately broken up with the confused archivist on the weight of Molly’s lie. Berliner made a point to find Johnson and apologize once he learned the truth, and managed to salvage the relationship, somewhat.h
“Molly loved secret histories. She also loved contradicting accounts of the same historical events. She liked ambiguities. She liked answerless questions. She told me that she was investigating the world that traditional maps hide from us,” Berliner said. “She said she felt like she had been walking down the street blindfolded, but she didn’t know she was wearing a blindfold. One day, she realized the blindfold was there and she pulled it off, but the place she saw was so unfamiliar that she couldn’t recognize it without a guide. And I was supposed to be that guide.
“That’s how she talked. She wasn’t crazy, not in any of the ways people thought she was, and she wasn’t an idiot. She had looked up all these papers David Wilson wrote as a graduate student, about philosophy and architecture, and she thought the New Situationists were hiding a secret agenda, something more secret than the subway bombings. She thought the group, the bombing, everything was incidental to — or at least, concurrent with — some greater secret goal. She didn’t think I knew what it was, she thought it had been kept at ‘the highest levels of the New Situationists.’ I asked her how she knew I wasn’t at the highest level and she said, ‘I understand how the New Situationists worked. If you had been at the highest level, you never would’ve let anybody know your name.’ ”
Berliner told Molly Metropolis he would think about working with her, but before he could agree to divulge anything about the New Situationists, he needed to check with the only higher-up he still talked to. The next day, he took the train to the Dwight Correctional Center for an unscheduled visit. He brought Kraus an expensive new bra, cigarettes, nail polish, and a croissant from her favorite bakery. They exchanged a few pleasantries, but Berliner was anxious to ask her about the New Situationists. He asked her if she thought the New Situationists possibly had a “secret agenda.” Without batting an eyelash, she told him that it was very possible. Kraus told Berliner about a side of the New Situationists he hadn’t seen. The president had often ranted about creating a brotherhood of politicians and lobbyists who would eventually control Chicago’s infrastructure. The New Situationists were ambitious and slightly delusional, Kraus told Berliner, so of course they had secret plans. The president was always very secretive; Kraus had often been excluded from meetings. “Probably,” she joked, “they wanted to take over the world.”i Also, Kraus pointed out, they were incredibly well funded for an anarchist movement — suspiciously well funded.