The Ghost Network (20 page)

She glanced out the window and saw Nix pressing all of the call buttons on the panel outside of the door. A few seconds later, Nix lunged for the door, pulled it open, and went inside. Taer thought someone working on a weekend, or even Berliner, had probably buzzed Nix in. Either way, she wasn’t worried. Nix still had the gun.

With Nix safely inside, Taer searched the building, looking for traces of Berliner. All the offices on the eighth and ninth floors were bolted.

As Taer continued down the stairs to the seventh, sixth, fifth floors, her frustration mounted. The naturally anxious part of her personality took hold and she struggled to maintain a quiet, systematic exploration of the building.

Like a terrified rat in an impossible maze, she scurried from floor to floor, sometimes lingering for several minutes, yanking on the locked doors of the offices and searching the walls for hidden doors. Sometimes she only stayed on a floor for a moment before hurrying to the next. After half an hour of racing around, Taer paused to catch her breath and meditate on her failure. She walked glumly down the stairs, dragging her hand along the dirty railing until it was smudged with black grime.

Taer didn’t realize it until she had reached street level, but the staircase she was walking down was built strangely. From the second to the tenth floors, the stairwell functioned normally, with concrete stairs connecting each level and plaster doors leading to each level’s foyer. However, at the street level, the stairwell didn’t have a door. The concrete wall continued, unbroken. There was no way to enter the building’s lobby through the stairwell. Also, the staircase didn’t stop descending when it hit the first floor. Although the elevator didn’t have a “B” button, the stairs descended into a basement level. Taer hadn’t considered a basement, even though most buildings in Chicago have one; Chicago is tornado country, and basements are where people hide from them.

As soon as Taer reached the bottom of the staircase, she knew she had found something. The door to exit the stairwell was abnormal; instead of wood and plaster, it was made of heavy steel and required a code for entry. Against the wall, there was a small keypad. She considered her obstacle for a few moments, then pulled out Berliner’s sketchpad and opened it to the page with the strange series of numbers. She punched “1142015914520205” into the keypad and, with a lurch, the door unlocked itself.

Taer stepped into a long, dim hallway. She paused, taking a moment to prop the door open with her coat, frightened she’d be trapped inside. Then she took a few tentative steps forward, cursing as a floorboard creaked under her foot. The strange basement hallway had wooden floors.

The hallway was lined with white wooden doors, all of them reminiscent of the front door of a suburban house. Between each door hung a map, sixteen in all. At the very end of the hallway, opposite the code-locked steel door, was a final wooden door, the same as the others but painted red. Taer inched toward the red door. She looked at the maps, each of them illuminated with their own small lamp, the only source of light in the hallway. Although Taer saw the similarities in the maps, she didn’t know that the type of map had a name; they were called Edge of the World maps. Popular from the mid-1500s to the mid-1600s, famous mapmakers drew Edge of the World maps as decorative alternatives to navigational cartographic maps. Their popularity arose with the excitement surrounding the news of the discovery of New Worlds. They were made to entertain while they educated, although the maps taught moral rather than scientific lessons.
^‡

On the left side of Edge of the World maps, the artist/
cartographer drew all the known continents, rendered with as accurate detail as possible. While it could be lovely, the left side of the map was perfunctory. Artists who didn’t want to take the time to draw the continents could buy stencils or just copy another person’s map. On the right side of the map, where all the action is, the water suddenly plummets over the edge of a flat earth, a giant waterfall into nothingness, the edge of the world. The real artistry of the maps was in the middle, near the edge of the falls. Guarding the edge of the world, each cartographer depicted a sea monster, or whatever creature was en vogue when the map was drawn: gluttonous whales, preening sirens, giant snakes, and krakens drawn as large as Africa. Occasionally, the cartographers would create their own monsters and give them names, like Ziphius or Steipereidur.
^§

Sometimes, the drawings showed the sea creatures crushing ships that dared to sail too close to the edge. In one of the maps that lined the hallway below the Racine building, a kraken held ten men in a single tentacle, crushing the life out of them. One particularly inventive mapmaker, Gérard Fournival, the “prodigal son of cartography,” drew two sailors cooking their dinner on the back of long-toothed whale so large they mistook it for an island. Fournival only colored the surface of the sea, so the map’s viewers could see the whale’s submerged tail covered in spikes. The whale’s similarly submerged head twisted as it looked over its monstrous shoulder with unveiled fury. The caption under that drawing, translated from Italian, reads: “In the moments before they realized their terrible mistake.”
^ǁ
Ten of the maps Taer saw in the hallway were originals from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The seven at the end
of the hallway, near the red door, were colored screen prints signed
ANTOINETTE MONSON
.

Taer crept as softly as she could down the hallway, past the Edge of the World Maps, with her back against the wall to protect herself, like she had seen in movies. She tried each of the white doors on the left side of the hallway; each one of them was locked. She didn’t want to move away from the wall to check the ones on the right. At the end of the hallway, she grabbed the brass knob on the red door and pushed it open. Luckily, she didn’t immediately step through the doorway, because the door didn’t open into another room. Instead, it opened into empty space, into nothing. The Edge of the World maps weren’t just decoration; they were a warning.

Taer cautiously peered through the doorway. The floor was a level below her. In the sunken room, a young man sat at a desk covered in papers and a large Mac desktop monitor. Nicolas Berliner was glaring at her.

Taer hadn’t often encountered violence outside of a movie screen or television set. She wasn’t well acquainted with action. As Taer teetered on the edge of the trap door, the break-in at her apartment and the gun she got out of it should’ve been at the forefront of her mind. Instead, she stared dumbly at Berliner, until, fuzzily captured by the audio recorder in Taer’s pocket, he shouted at her:

“Caitlin Taer?”

With that, she was unstuck.

“Where’s Molly Metropolis?” Taer shouted into the huge room. Her voice echoed. “Is Molly down here?”

Berliner laughed. “There’s a staircase to your left, through the door. Come down here.”

“How do I know you don’t have a gun?”

“I lost my gun.”

“Yeah, I know. At my apartment. How do I know you don’t have another one?”

“This isn’t a gangster movie. Get down here.”

Curiosity overrode caution. Taer decided to risk descending to the bottom of the big room. She found the door to her left, which opened to a staircase that descended into the office.

“You’re Nicolas Berliner, right?” Taer said, taking in the giant two-story room, enthralled with the high ceiling and at the huge painting of The Ghost Network on the wall.

“You’re Caitlin Taer.”

“Cait.”

“I’m Nick. What do you mean, ‘at my apartment’?”

“What?” Taer said.

“You said I lost my gun at your apartment, but as far as I know I’ve never been to your apartment.”

“I’m not going to make you pay for, like, my plates or anything. We don’t have to fuck around about this. You left your sketchpad, too.”

“No, listen, I’ve never been to your apartment,” Berliner said, “Someone took my gun from me. Someone took my gun and my sketchpad weeks ago.”

“Sure. You just want me to give up her notebook, or something. You can’t have it.”

“Caitlin—”

“No one calls me Caitlin.”

“Cait. I didn’t break into your apartment. Where’s Gina?”

“I’m not here with anyone.”

“I talked to Irene, I know you’re with Gina. Where is she?” Berliner asked.

“She’s at home. Can you just shut up and tell me what happened to Molly?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, too.”

“Yeah, right!”

Their argument continued, until Berliner coaxed Taer over to his computer and showed Taer an e-mail from Molly that had arrived in his inbox a few days after she disappeared:

My dearest friend,

I hate to leave you alone in the middle of a battle. I’m writing in the hope that maybe the last thing you’ll remember about me is this e-mail, and not the fact that I abandoned you in the dead of winter (both figuratively and literally).

I’ll leave you with this:

I promise that leaving now was, in fact, an act of war against the people and things we’ve been fighting (including: Ali and Peaches, the secrecy of the members of the N.S., our own personal failings and foibles). And I’ve left the means for you to pursue a similar act of war—if you choose. I hope you’ll strike as I’ve struck. Do you understand what I’m writing to you?

Berliner lamented, “Molly always liked a good rhetorical question.”

Berliner had hired several private detectives and securities experts to trace the e-mail, whose names and numbers he had conveniently forgotten by the time he acquiesced to an interview with me. The experts found that Molly had sent the e-mail from her phone; she had typed it the day she disappeared, and scheduled it to send at a later date.

“Holy shit,” Cait said several times as she was reading the letter. “I have to text Nix to come over here. She’s next door.”

“I thought you said she was at home,” Berliner said, with an alarmed tone.

“She’s searching the building next door, we didn’t know which one you were in.”

“Shit. Okay. Did you notice if anyone was following you?”

“No! Who would be following me?” Taer said.

“Can we go get Gina?”

“Why? Who was following me?”

“The people who took my gun.”
^a

Taer checked her phone, but didn’t have service in the basement, so she couldn’t call Nix. She scurried back up the stairs with Berliner, back through the long hallway with the Edge of the World maps and screen prints, through the steel door, up the building’s main staircase to the second floor, down the elevator to the lobby, and back out into the cold. Taer tried to zip her coat at the same time as she jogged between the two buildings, and Berliner shouted at her to hurry.

The door to the second building was again locked. Taer pulled out her cell phone, and called Nix, who answered with a hint of annoyance in her greeting.

“Stop bitching at me and listen,” Taer said. “Come out of the building. I’m outside. I’m with Nick.”

Nix appeared a few minutes later and Berliner greeted her.

“You motherfucker,” Nix said. “You broke into our apartment.”

“My apartment,” Taer said.

Berliner said, “I swear to god, that wasn’t me.”

“Who the fuck else is there?” Nix asked.

Berliner ushered them back to the other building, to tell them about their real enemy, a pair of young women named Ali and Peaches—who were watching them from the coffee shop across the street.

*
Details from this Saturday were pulled from Cyrus’s interviews with Nix, and a close examination of Taer’s belongings—none of her socks or gloves were in matching pairs. —CD

†
While Taer’s behavior exemplifies some of the symptoms of Seasonal Affective Disorder, she was never formally diagnosed.

‡
I retained Cyrus’s digression into the Edge of the World maps here, hoping it ramps up rather than cuts tension. —CD

§
Ziphius was probably invented by the naturalist and cartographer Conrad Gesner (sometimes spelled Konrad Gessner). Steipereidur was invented by the scientist and artist Abraham Ortelius.

ǁ
Ancient Maps and Drawings, Volume 3: The Age of Exploration
, ed. Gerard Gumpert (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 269.

a
It is telling that Berliner and Taer’s first exchange reads like a conversation between people who already know each other. Each had occupied a space in the other’s brain for weeks before they actually met. They very quickly developed a shorthand.

PART 2

“Right now I’m a songwriter, and what I do is I perform, and write verses and choruses. But I might not always do that,” Molly said. “I might cross over, not like into another genre, but into another aspect of culture entirely. I don’t like boundaries. Everybody is a complicated character. It’s like that poem from—what’s his bucket?—Walt Whitman. ‘Song of Myself.’ Like, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’ ”

–“LIVING IN MOLLY’S METROPOLIS,”
The New York Times Magazine