The Ghost Network

by Catie Disabato

  When questioned that evening, Kraus told the arresting officers, senior detectives, and the District Attorney that she would give them everything she knew, then claimed to know very little. Kept in an interrogation room for twelve hours, her jaw swollen and aching, she repeated the same facts over and over again: she didn’t know the names or faces of any New Situationists, except David Wilson and Nicolas Berliner; Berliner and Wilson didn’t participate in planning the bombing and were completely unaware of the plans; she didn’t participate in planning the bombing but did what her superiors told her; she didn’t know the names of her superiors; she didn’t know the faces of her superiors; she didn’t know what they wanted; she didn’t know where they were. She ate three peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, drank three cans of Diet Coke, and took four bathroom breaks. She waited until the eighth hour of her interrogation to ask to speak to an attorney.

  The Chicago Tribune sent the manifesto they received to the CPD and published it alongside the report of the bombings. The CPD arrested Wilson and Berliner. Wilson lawyered up immediately and refused to say anything except “I didn’t have anything to do with that.” Panicking, Berliner talked a lot, but the more he said the more it became clear to the detectives and the DA that he had no information. Berliner’s mother and grandmother provided an alibi, as did the classmate who had stayed up with him past 4 a.m., playing Halo 2 over the Internet. Wilson had spent the night at his girlfriend’s apartment, which had a doorman and security cameras. The detectives wanted to charge both Berliner and Wilson anyway, but the DA decided to focus on Kraus.

  The Grand Jury proceeding that anticipated Kraus’s criminal trial was something of a surprise in the hubbub it caused. The DA, the defense attorneys, the judge, and the court reporters all expected Wilson to refuse to speak, and to serve some jail time as a result. No one expected Berliner to do the same, but sometime between his arrest and the Grand Jury, Berliner got with the New Situationist program. He sat stone-faced and unspeaking in the witness stand. The judge called a recess; Berliner’s attorney took him into a small conference room in the building, and Dana and Raulson both begged Berliner to talk. He refused to speak even to them. The judge cut him some slack, due to his age and because she considered him a victim of sexual assault (statutory rape). Berliner spent the next five months in a juvenile detention facility; he was released the day he turned eighteen.

  Kraus pleaded not guilty to her one count each of involuntary manslaughter and property destruction, against her lawyer’s wishes. The jury found her guilty on both counts. The judge sentenced her to life in prison, without the possibility of parole for twenty-five years. In her ten years of incarceration so far, she’s agreed only to two interviews, the aforementioned one with Anna Kirkpatrick, during which she expressed remorse for the life she took but excitement that the city took the opportunity to “better the property” she had damaged by building an improved new station. The second interview, actually a series of interviews, was with me, toward the end of the assembling of this book. She spoke to me because Berliner negotiated the meeting.

  When I asked her if she felt remorse for killing a security guard, she snapped, “Yes, obviously. I’m not a murderer.”

  “But, you admit to killing someone?”

  “If you don’t mean to kill someone, you aren’t a murderer, not in your heart. My violence accidentally caused a person’s death. That’s unfortunate, I have nightmares, I’ve cried, but I’m not a murderer.”

  She also told me the article about her in Vanity Fair, written by Nancy Jo Sales, and the movie based on that article, directed by Sofia Coppola, are both “complete bullshit.” However, she did like that she was played by Jennifer Lawrence in the movie, even though Lawrence looks nothing like Kraus.

  During our conversations, Kraus barely spoke about the New Situationists. Although I now know more about the New Situationists than anyone outside the membership ever has, except Molly Metropolis, the organization remains a mystery to me. Berliner says he still doesn’t know the names of the New Situationists’ leaders. He wouldn’t give me the names of any of the members, or even describe them using pseudonyms. He insisted that he could only speak about people who were already “out in the open,” and he told me that I was lucky the person he was the most “emotionally involved” with was already identified, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to talk about the New Situationists at all. If someone other than Kraus had been arrested, this book couldn’t exist.

  Everything Berliner did admit, the details of his induction party for example, he ran by his “higher-up” before he told me. “So, the New Situationists still exist?” I asked him.

  “Yes and no,” Berliner said vaguely, as was typical in the conversations we had about the group: “There were a few projects in motion when the group disbanded, I didn’t even know about them during the real days, or until the whole thing with Cait, but a skeleton crew, myself included, has to keep them going now. They’re not the kinds of things we’d want to stop in the middle.”

  “Can you tell me about any of these projects?”

  “Not really.”

  “You can’t tell me anything at all? Do they take place in Chicago?”

  “I really can’t say.”

  “Is someone keeping you from talking? Threatening you in some way?”

  “No. When I said ‘can’t’ before, I meant ‘won’t.’ ”

  “Are they paying you anything to keep quiet?” I asked.

  “They are paying me to work, and I keep quiet because I want to.”

  “How much are they paying you?”

  “I won’t say.”

  Berliner delivered all these refusals to speak with a schoolboy smirk, smoking cigarettes and looking very pleased with himself.

  “So, no new projects, no new members?” I asked.

  “No new projects,” he said, “But as for members, I might say Taer was a member. Before she died. And, after everything happened, we asked Nix if she wanted to join so we could look after her. We offered her a job.”

  “When you say we,” I asked, “do you mean to imply that you have become a decision-making member of the New Situationists?”

  “I really won’t say,” he said.

  When I asked Nix about her membership in the group, she said, “I didn’t need their help, but I did need a job and the money’s good.”

  “Are you still working for them?” I asked.

  “I am and I’m not,” she said.

  “Talking to me right now, is that working for them?”

  “They’re not paying me for this, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’m wondering if the New Situationists condone you and Nick speaking to me,” I said.

  “They aren’t in charge of who we talk to. I mean, they aren’t in charge of who I talk to, they aren’t in charge of who Nick talks to anymore. They aren’t like that anymore. We’re just kind of … keeping some projects going. We’re kind of a skeleton crew.”

  “Did they tell you to say that? Nick used the same phrase, ‘skeleton crew.’ ”

  “That doesn’t come from them, Nick and I talk all the time. He said it to me once, I think.”

  “And you don’t know who any of them are?” I asked.

  “No, and I don’t care. Like I said, the money’s good. And legal. I had my lawyer make sure. Basically the New Situationists don’t exist anymore. Berliner says everyone really fell apart after Kraus was arrested. Don’t believe him when he implies that they’re still some big thing. He just wants them to be. He can’t give anything up.”

  Taking into account my interviews with Berliner and Kraus, and the hostile tone of the letter I received from David Wilson when he rejected my request for an interview, I believe the New Situationists are masters of smoke and mirrors, and not much else. A group of young people got together, wanted to change the world, and latched onto the pseudo-academic ramblings of another man who’d wanted to change the world and failed. People consider them important and
powerful only because of the firm devotion of all members to keep quiet, despite the personal consequences Kraus suffered. They have the appeal of a secret society. Berliner, an isolated teenager, was particularly susceptible to the charms of hidden knowledge. They taught him to make screen prints and how to draw maps, and then put him to work creating new secret cartographies. But if someone from the New Situationists decided to talk, I think the New Situationists would turn out to be less powerful than most people think they are. The silence and secrecy makes them special, but there is nothing behind the curtain but a few angry children and a poorly planned terrorist event.

  Berliner obviously still harbors a deep sentimental attachment to both Kraus and the New Situationists. He agreed to speak with me only if I promised to include the following quote he prepared:

  “The death in the L bombing was accidental and not considered a ‘casualty necessary to the betterment of their cause,’ as Marie-Hélène Kraus’s prosecuting lawyer argued. The plan was to make a revolution without bloodshed. Marie-Hélène Kraus is a killer but she isn’t a murderer. She isn’t morally corrupt.”

  Berliner visits Kraus weekly at the Dwight Correctional Center, a maximum security prison for female violent offenders about an hour and a half outside of Chicago. He drives to the jail every Saturday, bringing with him a carton of cigarettes, nail polish, the cashmere cardigans from Nordstrom that Kraus likes best, and any magazines or books she requested the previous week. He doesn’t use his car for any other purpose; he bought it just to see her. Even though he’s taken other lovers, Berliner still considers himself Kraus’s boyfriend. They plan to get married as soon as she makes parole. I believe one of the main reasons Berliner agreed to speak with me at all was to lobby on Kraus’s behalf.

  In Davis’s parents’ lakeside home, Davis finished recounting Berliner’s early years. Taer asked if they could open a third bottle of wine. Davis told her to go ahead, and flicked a lighter over and over again, to light another cigarette. With the new bottle of wine open and poured, Taer pushed Davis to move ahead to the parts of the story with Molly Metropolis.

  Davis snapped back at her, “There’s some important stuff that comes before that, but I can skip it if you’re going to be a such a bitch about it.”

  “Sorry,” Taer responded. “I’m just anxious.”

  “Whatever,” Davis said.

  “Sorry,” Nix echoed. “Do you want some water or something?”

  “I’m fine,” Davis said, “The next thing you need to know about Nick, is he has this apartment. He thought it up sometime after Kraus went to jail, but before he met Molly. It’s this weird, incredible place. He had it built after he went to juvie and got out, then Kraus went to jail. He said he was really solitary and sad all the time. I started calling it his ‘Blue Period,’ just as a joke. He didn’t like that at all.”

  In the years following the New Situationists’ unraveling, Berliner designed an apartment for him and Kraus to share when she finished her long prison sentence.c The apartment was a fantasy from Kraus and Berliner’s sex life—the perfect erotic space; they designed it together as a kind of ongoing foreplay. Berliner drew his blueprints of this perfect apartment based on his memory of their conversations. He started saving money, but with his low-paying job he knew it would be a stretch to complete the project before Kraus was paroled. Then he met Molly Metropolis and she offered to build it for him.

  In 2006, when Molly and Berliner met, Molly had dozens of projects in the conceptual stages mostly relating to her music career (her albums, her General Council, The Ghost Network—none of them had names yet) and she wanted Berliner, the only accessible former member of the New Situationists, to help her with her cartography projects. Berliner initially refused. The secrets of the New Situationists needed to stay secret, Berliner told her, but Molly already knew enough about the music industry to know that for the right reasons, almost everyone would open up. Molly found out (perhaps by visiting Kraus in prison) that Berliner was trying to build an apartment, and offered to fund the project in exchange for his secrets.

  So, Berliner agreed to work with Molly Metropolis. A few weeks later, Kathy J. purchased a song Molly wrote (“Love Me Sweet,” an album cut on Kathy’s pop debut One of the Boys) and she used that money to buy a warehouse space in Old Town. A month later, Berliner began aggressive renovations.

  Though Berliner’s design evoked the rooms and flow of an apartment, it was more like a Situationist drawing than a real living space. He didn’t include any hallways in the design, just a series of rooms that opened into other rooms, like a beehive. The front room, a narrow rectangle, had mirrors and a kitchen-like space. The middle area was a labyrinth of interconnected rooms. Some of them had no windows and only one door. You had to walk through the rooms in a particular order to make it to the huge back room, which was the bedroom and living area. Berliner also designed a bed built into the wall, twice the size of a king bed. The floors were dark wood; the walls were painted eggshell white. Berliner found the exact molding that Kraus had enjoyed as a child.

  Molly made only one mark on Berliner’s apartment. On Berliner’s original blueprint, there were two rooms labeled bathroom. Molly changed the smaller room from a bathroom to a walk-in closet. During construction, Molly checked in with the progress frequently and attentively, to make sure the contractors were following the blueprints to the letter, but Molly never visited the apartment after it was completed. Perhaps she didn’t want to violate Berliner’s private space or perhaps she didn’t want to insert herself into his sex life.

  The first time Davis visited the apartment, she thought construction had only recently been completed. The rooms still smelled like paint. In the strange front room, a silver refrigerator stood next to a seven-foot-tall mirror, which leaned precariously against a wall. Berliner had been there at least once—he had beer and water in the fridge—but the place felt unlived in. They drank a few beers sitting on the floor, against the wall across from the mirror. According to Davis, she kept looking at herself accidentally.

  She asked for a tour and Berliner led her through the maze of middle rooms—“Thank god I was drunk the first time,” Davis said, “or else I would’ve probably freaked out”—into the back bedroom. They immediately went to the bed. Experiencing a transferred reverence for the space, Davis tried to be quiet as she and Berliner copulated. From the scrubbed walls and waxed floors she thought Berliner wanted quiet awe. She kept her eyes closed and her hands to herself. According to Berliner, the sex that day was mediocre. In fact, Berliner’s fantasy was the opposite of Davis’s assumption. His sexual excitement didn’t come from the pure space, but the violation of it—specifically Davis’s (or any female visitor’s) violation of it.

  Once he explained what he wanted, Davis was more than happy to oblige. “He liked things like cracked tile, broken light fixtures, all kinds of stuff,” Davis said. “Sometimes he’d tell me what to break. Once, while he was asleep, I cut up all the curtains with a knife, then woke him up to show him what I’d done. He really liked that.”

  Once, in a fit of anger and sexual excitement, she used a chair to punch a hole in the wall, then threw the chair at the bedroom window where it broke the glass, then hung in the frame for a few seconds before tumbling to the sidewalk. That night, she and Berliner had their most passionate sexual experience and most emotionally revealing post-coital conversation. They talked about music, and Davis told Berliner about her childhood in rural Ohio, where her parents kept bees.

  The downside of Berliner’s unusual predilection was that it required costly upkeep. Berliner had the walls repainted monthly and a cleaning crew came to wash the floors and windows every week. He had a close relationship with his contractor, who often repaired dented walls, chipped plaster, or scratched molding. When Davis realized how intensely Berliner kept up his apartment, she had to confront the fact that she probably hadn’t been the first lover to visit. She was right; Berliner also occasionally brought home a librarian wh
o worked at the Chicago city archives, but their encounters were sporadic.

  In the early days of their relationship, Davis couldn’t find her way around the apartment to save her life; Berliner had to walk her everywhere, to the fridge to get water, to the front door to go home in the morning, even to the bathroom. By the time their relationship was deteriorating, Davis could move from the front of the apartment to the back with her eyes closed. She had found the secret second bedroom buried in a dead-end, and she slept there when she was angry with Berliner.

  Davis spoke to Taer and Nix about these patterns of their relationship disdainfully, regretfully, but like Berliner, without shame. Despite their odd sex life, Davis never felt shy about the details. For her, it didn’t even feel transgressive. “In a certain sense, I never really could ‘get it up’ for him, you know? I mean, it just felt like normal sex in a strange place, to me. But it wasn’t supposed to feel like normal sex, it was supposed to be some new merging of person and architecture in a way that was supposed to open up the world. That’s how he told me I should feel about it, but I never did. Not really.”

  Berliner was also shameless but for a different reason; he doesn’t mind, even likes, even revels in, being abnormal.

  Davis talked and smoked for close to three hours with very few interruptions from Nix and Taer. They polished off two more bottles of wine in the last hour and although they were all drunk, Davis’s hands remained steady and her footsteps straight and even.

  When Davis finished explaining her breakup with Berliner, no one said anything for almost twenty seconds, until Taer broke the silence.

  “Well,” Taer lisped drunkenly, “I feel like I’m not going to be able to digest all this until tomorrow morning.”

  “For sure,” Davis replied.