Immediately, Taer looked for a staircase to the basement and found another steel door with a little keypad lock. She entered the same combination she used to enter the Urban Planning Committee headquarters and the door opened. She descended into darkness.
Taking pictures with her phone as she went, Taer descended on stairs made of rotting wood. She kept one hand on the brick wall to steady herself, and in the other held her cell phone, with her flashlight app activated. Just before she reached the bottom of the staircase, the stairs changed to concrete and tile. Her hand, moving blindly along the wall, bumped into a light switch. She flicked it, and with a loud hum, the lights turned on. Taer was in a train station in disrepair, decorated with signage from the 1950s, plaques that said in fat, black letters “NO SMOKING. NO SPITTING” and “WATCH OUT: DO NOT LEAN OVER THE PLATFORM.” She kicked up clouds of dust and she walked across the floor of cracked tile, arranged in a formless white and green mosaic. Coughing from the dust, lighting her way and taking pictures, Taer found a single incongruous item: a plaque made of plastic, lightly backlit by an LED lamp, designed to look like one of the ’50s plaques, but which clearly had been affixed to the wall of the station more recently. It said “PLAQUES TOURNANTES TROIS” in the same black lettering.
Taer only spent a minute or two exploring the station before a dim beam of light suddenly broke the darkness, emanating from the tunnel beyond. She froze, then scrambled out of the pathway of the light. She waited. The light intensified quickly, and she heard the screech and chug of an approaching train. Had Taer stayed, all her mysteries would’ve been solved, but she was terrified. She ran.
On the long ride from the airport back to the Urban Planning Committee headquarters, during which she anxiously transferred between Metra trains and L trains and buses in case someone was following her, Taer tried to call Nix and Berliner several times. Neither of them answered their phones. Taer’s mind reeled with the memory of the unknown train’s bright light, and she spent about an hour in a coffee shop near the headquarters, writing furiously in her journal. Her notes from this writing session were penned so sloppily as to be almost unreadable. As if she was trying to get her hand to move as fast as her racing mind, she neglected to finish sentences and ignored the lines on the paper. As she wrote page after page, she returned several times to a single thought, first expressed as: “I bet Molly got on that train.” By the end of the hour, she had dropped all speculation: “Molly got on that train.”
Taer walked to the headquarters still dazed, where she was surprised to find Berliner in his kitchen, icing a fresh wound on the back of his head. While he and Nix were walking through an alley shortcut between the Urban Planning Committee headquarters and the nearest liquor store, someone jumped them from behind and knocked Berliner unconscious. When he came to, Nix was gone.
Taer panicked. She called Nix’s cell phone about fifty times; Nix never answered. Eventually, the phone stopped ringing and went straight to Nix’s voice mail. Crying in fear and frustration, Taer wanted to call the police and report Nix missing, but Berliner stopped her. He had a different way to help Nix, which involved revealing a secret he’d been keeping from Taer since she had found him.
Because Berliner knew how important Molly’s pop star career was to her and her ideals, when Molly didn’t show up for the sound check on January 9, Berliner immediately assumed she had been taken against her will. He believed nothing would’ve made Molly Metropolis give up her position of power.
Berliner suspected Ali and Peaches had kidnapped her. He stole his grandmother’s gun and quickly found the New Society in a downtown apartment that Zavos owned, on the seventh floor of the Anne De Zoet building in a posh area of Chicago called River North. While Nix frantically searched through boutique clothing stores and Molly’s dancers rehearsed during sound check without her, Berliner stormed the headquarters of the Society of Children of the Atomic Bomb.
Actually, “storming” isn’t the right word to describe Berliner’s actions. It’s not as though he burst through the doors of the apartment complex with a double-barreled shotgun in his arms and a S.W.A.T. team at his back. The doorman, Ray Mitchell, opened the door for him and called up to number seven to see if Ali was in. She told Ray to send Berliner up. Berliner allowed the doorman to put his coat, with his gun and his map sketchpad in the pocket, in the apartment complex’s coat check, where he assumed his items would be safe. He was worried that if he brought them up to the apartment, Ali, Peaches, and their compatriots would overpower him and take them.
Peaches greeted Berliner at the door, checked him for weapons or papers and, finding nothing, invited him inside. Berliner noticed the wooden flooring and the chic, minimalist furnishings and décor. He sat in the living room on a brown leather sofa, a seat which afforded him a great view of the downtown skyline. One of the younger members of the New Society brought them glasses of white wine, then lingered in the corner during Peaches and Berliner’s conversation. Berliner never saw a New Society member older than Ali; they gave the collective impression of malleable young cult members.
Berliner declined to drink the wine and refused to stay on the couch. He believed Molly was tied up in a closet somewhere. Peaches allowed him to go through every nook and cranny of the apartment. He spent a full hour searching, even looking for secret panic rooms (and later he acquired blueprints from the city, the building’s management, and the building’s security company to make sure he hadn’t missed anything). No Molly to be found.
Instead, resting on a nightstand in the fourth bedroom, he saw the circular purple quartz necklace Davis always wore. This discovery rattled Berliner; he didn’t want to believe that a woman he’d trusted had betrayed him so thoroughly. He decided not to mention his discovery to the New Society and test Davis’s loyalty at another time — a test that, as previously described, ultimately led to Taer’s involvement in his investigation of Molly’s disappearance.
When Berliner was satisfied Molly wasn’t stuffed in a closet somewhere, Peaches asked him to leave. In the lobby, Berliner reclaimed his own jacket in a huff. He was so upset that he didn’t realize until he was out in the snow that both his gun and his sketchpad of maps had been taken out of his pockets. Ray Mitchell, as Berliner should’ve assumed, was on Ali’s payroll. Berliner was unable to reclaim his stolen items.
Once he brought Taer up to speed, they decided to go back to Michigan and talk to Davis. Berliner hoped he could force Davis to reveal where the New Society had taken Nix. Taer stopped weeping and accessed a quiet, aggressive rage. She dressed in her thickest pair of jeans and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and pulled her hair into a tight bun on the top of her head. During those hours after Nix’s abduction, Berliner said Taer was numb and inconsolable.
“She was really freaking out, but silent, which was unlike her,” Berliner said. “All that intensity she had — she just channeled it into making Gina’s kidnapping into this solvable problem. She’d seem fine, totally in control, then just burst into tears in a second. And yell at me if I tried to comfort her. She was so, so aggressive.”
Berliner and Taer traveled by train to Davis’s parents’ house. Davis’s father George answered the door. He led them to the living room, where the uncomfortable couches and lack of side tables exemplified the house’s overall uninviting quality. Davis was reading, slumped in an armchair. George quickly left for the evening, believing his daughter’s ex-boyfriend had come for a visit with his new girlfriend. George wanted to give his daughter space and avoid overhearing any awkward details.