For Kraus’s benefit, Berliner recounted the story of Molly Metropolis’s visit, about her “pretentions about being famous,” and about her proposed investigation into the New Situationists’ secret agenda. Kraus told Berliner to set up a meeting between herself and Molly. She and Molly were still pretending they hadn’t met. To my knowledge, neither Kraus nor Molly ever recounted what happened during their meetings, but Molly must’ve charmed Kraus. When Berliner returned the next day, Kraus told him to go ahead and investigate with Molly. Kraus warned Berliner not to mention Molly or the investigation to David Wilson, because he would try to stop them. She insisted Berliner couldn’t use any of his old friends or contacts in the New Situationists. She also asked him to visit frequently and update her about the investigation. She wanted to see what he would find.
That night, Berliner called Molly and asked her to meet him at the corner of West Armitage and North Racine. She arrived an hour later, wearing a vintage floral jumpsuit and black stilettos with pink rhinestones. Berliner took her into the New Situationist headquarters; the rooms weren’t as impressive as they had been when Kraus took Berliner down for the first time. Berliner showed her Kraus’s old room. Molly ran her fingers along the walls and asked if they could stay the night. Berliner offered to find another room to sleep in, but Molly asked him to stay, if he could be a gentleman with her. She told him she had nightmares almost every night. Berliner slept on the couch.
The next morning, Molly and Berliner spent a few hours combing through the debris the New Situationist leadership had left behind in their haste to make the strange, secretive political group part of their past. In the giant office at the end of the hall — he still called it “The Trick” then, though later he would offhandedly call it Metro’s Room — Berliner found several filing boxes full of documents.
In the spring of 2007, Molly Metropolis signed with SDFC Records and created the General Council. She added Berliner to her personal payroll — he was her first paid staff member, ever — and christened their fledgling collaboration the Urban Planning Committee, a secret offshoot of the General Council. Molly kept her work with Berliner hidden from everyone, including her family and closest friends; taking a page out of the New Situationists’ book, she refused to even write down the name. At the top of her notebooks about the Urban Planning Committee she wrote, “Here is the Secret History of the U.P.C.”j
Molly only mentioned Berliner publicly once, to the German music news outlet Knall Producktion: “The inspiration for the General Council came from Andy Warhol’s Factory as well as the entourage of beautiful, glowing people that David Bowie always had around him, his friends, the people at his parties. But I got the name from my friend Nick Berliner, who is teaching me about architecture.”k
That summer, Molly Metropolis gave her first major live performance since signing with SDFC and receiving the benefit of their marketing department. She played during an early timeslot at Chicago’s giant summer music festival, Lollapalooza. She had no light show, no backdrop, no pyrotechnics, just a DJ, a drummer, and a jeweled keyboard she played herself. Molly came onstage in a metallic, silver bra and lace leggings.l She performed some songs that eventually found their way onto Cause Célèbrety, including an early version of her first single “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas),” which was produced by Astroman and included short bridge from the producer/rapper: “Work, work, work your body/Pop, pop, pop a Molly.” Molly also sang a Cause Célèbrety album cut called “Pop-timist,” as well as “Maps (Find Me),” but the crowd didn’t like the show. “Too synth-y,” several bloggers complained.m
After her performance, Molly hung around in the artist tent for a few hours, then left, promising to meet up with her friends and the record executives at the private SDFC after-party that night. She threw on one of her deep V-neck T-shirts, took a cab to Armitage and Racine, and descended into the basement, where Berliner was waiting for her. She hugged him and said, “I’ve left you alone for too long, my darling. I’ve missed you and the things we’re doing together.”
Molly told Berliner the details of her performance and complained about the lethargic crowd while they each had a cigarette in the “smoking room”—one of the apartments, which Berliner had redecorated with vintage leather armchairs, oil paintings of deer and buffalo, and of course, framed maps. When Molly asked Berliner what he had been up to in the weeks since they’d last seen each other, Berliner revealed his utter lack of a social life by jumping right into business talk: he had found something. Berliner and Molly went back to the huge two-story office where Berliner stored the documents.
Berliner knew the New Situationists’ record-keeping policies. They never wrote down or recorded anything about their organization on computers, instead preferring to use typewriters or hand-written notes to create archives that couldn’t be hacked and could be easily destroyed by shredding or burning. More likely than not, the two boxes of documents contained every physical record the New Situationists had ever produced, with the exception of the letter sent to the Chicago Tribune taking credit for the subway bombings, which is still languishing somewhere in an FBI evidence locker. According to Berliner, the records contained mostly letters between members. In the letters, the New Situationists mostly discussed the “most public” parts of the operation, such as Kraus’s anti-recruitment efforts.
While skimming the documents in the first box, Berliner found a letter from David Wilson to the NS’s president, which mentioned the New Situationists’ “digital and physical archives.” It seemed strange to Berliner that the New Situationists would keep any kind of official archive at all — they had preached to their membership that any archive could be compromised — so he started looking through the documents for any other references to digital records. Eventually, he found another letter from Wilson to the president, asking about the “progress of the map archives and the L project.” Berliner spent a few hours searching for the president’s response to Wilson, and he eventually found it, crumpled at the bottom of the second box of documents. The president told Wilson he had nearly completed digitizing all the necessary maps for the “L project,” and that they were only waiting for a few important maps from the early 1940s, and then they would have “a complete archive of every iteration.”n
Berliner hurried through document after document, looking for more mentions of the L or the map project. He found a few scattered remarks — one member was bored with researching historical proposals for additions to the L lines that had never been adopted, and wanted to be assigned another task; another apologized profusely to the president as he reported that a certain map the president wanted no longer existed in Chicago’s public archives — and Berliner began to understand, at least in part, what the New Situationists had done. They had collected all of the maps of the Chicago elevated train system, including both historical maps from every year the L existed, as it expanded and contracted and morphed, and maps of every addition or change to the L proposed to the Chicago Transit Authority, including those that had been rejected. Every map of the L as it had once been, every map of the L as it could’ve been but wasn’t; a full historical record of every L station and every station that was proposed but wasn’t built.
Berliner knew from the documents that the New Situationists were actively collecting maps, but he didn’t know for sure if they had acquired them all or what they did with them once they had.