CHAPTER 22
Tuesday, March 29–Sunday, April 3
On Tuesday morning Salander accessed the police criminal register and looked up
Alexander Zalachenko. He was not listed, which was not surprising, since as far as
she knew he had never been convicted of a crime in Sweden and was not even in
the national database.
When she had accessed the criminal register she used the identity of
Superintendent Douglas Skiöld of the Malmö police. She got a mild shock when her
computer suddenly pinged and an icon in the menu toolbar started blinking to
signal that someone was looking for her in the ICQ chat programme.
Her first impulse was to pull the plug and shut down. Then she thought about it.
Skiöld had not had the ICQ programme on his machine. Very few older people did.
Which meant that someone was looking for her. And there were not many
alternatives to choose from. She clicked on ICQ and typed the words:
>
Salander hesitated. First Blomkvist and now Plague. Was there no end to all the
people coming to her rescue? The problem with Plague was that he was a 350-pound recluse who communicated almost exclusively via the Internet and made
Salander look like a miracle of social skills. When she didn’t answer, Plague typed
another line:
Lisbeth disconnected from ICQ and sat down on the sofa to think. Ten minutes
later she sent an email to Plague’s hotmail address.
Prosecutor Richard Ekström, leader of the preliminary investigation, lives in Täby.
He’s married with two children and has a broadband connection to his house. I
need access to his laptop or home computer. I need to read him in real time.
Hostile takeover with mirrored hard drive.
She knew that Plague himself seldom left his apartment in Sundbyberg, so she
hoped he had cultivated some pimply teenager to do the field work. There was no
need to sign the message. She got an answer fifteen minutes later.
How much are you paying?
10,000 to your account + expenses and 5,000 to your assistant.
I’ll be in touch.
On Thursday morning she had one email from Plague containing an FTP address.
Salander was amazed. She had not expected a result for at least two weeks. Doing a
hostile takeover, even with Plague’s brilliant programme and his specially designed
hardware, was a laborious process that required slipping bits of information into a
computer one kilobyte at a time until a simple piece of software had been created.
How rapidly it could be done depended on how often Ekström used his computer,
and then it should normally take another few days to transfer all the data to a
mirrored hard drive. Forty-eight hours was not merely exceptional, it was
theoretically impossible. Salander was impressed. She pinged his ICQ:
She thought for a moment and then transferred 30,000 kronor to Plague’s account
via the Internet. She did not want to frighten him off with excessive amounts. Then
she made herself comfortable on her Verksam IKEA chair and opened Ekström’s
laptop.
Within an hour she had read all the reports that Inspector Bublanski had sent to
Ekström. Salander suspected that, technically, reports like these were not allowed
to leave police headquarters. It proved once again the theory that no security
system is a match for a stupid employee. Through Ekström’s computer she gleaned
several important pieces of information.
First, she discovered that Armansky had assigned two of his staff to join Bublanski’s
investigative team without remuneration, which in practice meant that Milton
Security was sponsoring the police hunt for her. Their assignment was to assist in
the arrest of Salander by all possible means. Thanks a lot, Armansky. I’ll remember
that. She frowned when she discovered which employees they were. Bohman she
had taken for a straight arrow, and he had been perfectly decent in his behaviour
towards her. Hedström was a corrupt nobody who had exploited his position at
Milton Security to swindle one of the company’s clients.
Salander had a selective morality. She had nothing at all against swindling the
company’s clients herself—provided they deserved it—but if she had accepted a job
with a confidentiality agreement in it, she would never have broken it.
Salander soon discovered that the person who had leaked the information to the
media was Ekström himself. This was evident from an email in which he answered
follow-up questions about both Salander’s psychiatric report and the connection
between her and Miriam Wu.
The third significant piece of information was the insight that Bublanski’s team did
not have a single lead as to where they should look for Salander. She read with
interest a report on what measures had been taken and which addresses had been
put under sporadic surveillance. It was a short list. Lundagatan, obviously, but also
Blomkvist’s address, Miriam’s old address at St. Eriksplan, and Kvarnen, where they
had been seen together. Fuck, why did I have to involve Mimmi? What a mistake
that was.
On Friday Ekström’s researchers had also found the link to Evil Fingers. She guessed
that would mean more addresses being visited. She frowned. So the girls in the
group would vanish from her circle of friends too, even though she had had no
contact with them since her return to Sweden.
The more she thought about all this, the more confused she became. Ekström was
leaking all kinds of bullshit to the media. His objective was clear. He was building
publicity and doing the groundwork for the day when he would issue a charge
against her.
But why hadn’t he leaked the police report from 1991, which had led her to be
locked up at St. Stefan’s? Why keep that story hidden?
She went into Ekström’s computer again and pored over his documents. When she
was finished she lit a cigarette. She had not found a single reference to the events
of 1991 on his computer. It was strange, but the only explanation was that he didn’t
know about the police report.
For a moment she was at a loss. Then she glanced at her PowerBook. This was
precisely the kind of thing that Kalle Fucking Blomkvist could sink his teeth into.
She rebooted her computer to access his hard drive and created the document
[MB2].
Prosecutor E. is leaking information to the media. Ask him why he didn’t leak the
old police report.
That should be enough to get him going. She sat patiently and waited two hours
for Blomkvist to get online. He read his email and it took fifteen minutes before he
noticed her document and another five minutes before he replied with the
document [Cryptic]. He didn’t bite. Instead he insisted that he wanted to know who
murdered his friends.
That was an argument that Salander could understand. She softened a bit and
answered with [Cryptic 2].
What would you do if it was me?
Which was intended as a personal question. He replied with [Cryptic 3]. It shook
her.
Lisbeth, if it’s true that you’ve really gone over the edge, then maybe you can ask
Peter Teleborian to help you. But I don’t believe you murdered Dag and Mia. I hope
and pray that I’m right.
Dag and Mia were going to publish their exposés of the sex trade. My theory is that
could have been the reason for the murders. But I have nothing to go on.
I don’t know what went wrong between us, but you and I discussed friendship
once. I said that friendship is built on two things—respect and trust. Even if you
don’t like me, you can still depend on me and trust me. I’ve never shared your
secrets with anyone. Not even what happened to Wennerström’s billions. Trust me.
I’m not your enemy. M.
Blomkvist’s reference to Teleborian at first made her furious. Then she realized that
he was not trying to start a fight. He had no idea who Teleborian was and had
probably only seen him on TV, where he came across as a responsible,
internationally respected expert.
But what really shook her was the reference to Wennerström’s billions. She had no
idea how he had wormed out that information. She was absolutely certain that she
had made no mistakes and that nobody in the world could know what she had
done.
She read the letter over several times.
The reference to friendship made her uncomfortable. She didn’t know how to
respond to it.
A short time later she created [Cryptic 4].
I’ll think about it.
She disconnected and went to her window seat.
Salander had exhausted her supply of Billy’s Pan Pizza as well as the last crumb of
bread and rind of cheese. For the last three days she had survived on a packet of
instant oats that she had bought on impulse with the vague idea that she ought to
eat more nourishing food. She discovered that half a cup of oats with a few raisins
and a cup of water turned into an edible portion of hot cereal after a minute in the
microwave.
It was not only the lack of food that got her on the move. She had someone to look
after. Unfortunately that was not something she could do while holed up in her
apartment. She went to her wardrobe and took out the blond wig and Irene
Nesser’s Norwegian passport.
Fröken Nesser did exist in real life. She was similar in appearance to Salander and
she had lost her passport three years earlier. It came to be in Salander’s hands
thanks to Plague, and she had used Nesser’s identity when necessary for almost
eighteen months.
Salander took the ring out of her eyebrow and put on makeup at the bathroom
mirror. She dressed in dark jeans, a warm brown sweater with yellow trim, and
walking boots with heels. She took out a Mace canister from her small supply. She
also found her Taser, which she hadn’t touched in a year, and plugged it in to
charge. She put a change of clothes in a shoulder bag. And at 11:00 on Friday night,
nine days after the murders, Salander left her apartment in Mosebacke.
She walked to McDonald’s on Hornsgatan. It was less likely that any of her former
colleagues from Milton Security would run into her there than at the one near
Slussen or at Medborgarplatsen. She ate a Big Mac and drank a large Coke.
Then she took the number 4 bus across Västerbron to St. Eriksplan. She walked to
Odenplan and found herself outside Bjurman’s apartment building on
Upplandsgatan just after midnight. She did not expect the apartment to be under
surveillance, but she saw a light in the window of an apartment on the same floor,
so she walked on towards Vanadisplan. The light was off when she came back an
hour later.
She went up the stairs on tiptoe without turning on the light in the stairwell. With
the aid of a Stanley knife she cut the police tape that sealed the apartment. She
opened the door without a sound.
She turned on the hall lamp, which she knew could not be seen from the outside,
and switched on a pen torch to light her way to the bedroom. The venetian blinds
were closed. She played the beam of light over the bloodstained bed. She recalled
that she had been very close to dying in that bed and suddenly had a feeling of
deep satisfaction that Bjurman was forever out of her life.
The reason for her visit to the crime scene was to get two pieces of information.
First, she didn’t understand the connection between Bjurman and Zala. She was
convinced there had to be one, but she hadn’t been able to find it from anything
she found in Bjurman’s computer.
Second was an inconsistency that kept gnawing at her. During her nighttime visit a
few weeks earlier she noticed that Bjurman had taken documentation about her
out of the file box where he kept all his guardianship material. The pages that were
missing were part of his brief from the agency which summarized Salander’s
psychological state in the most concise terms. Bjurman no longer had any need of
these pages, and it was possible that he had cleared out the file and thrown them
away. On the other hand, lawyers never throw away documents relating to an
unfinished case. And yet these papers had once been in the file box relating to her,
and she had not found them in his desk or anywhere near it.
She saw that the police had removed the files that dealt with her case, as well as
some others. She spent more than two hours searching every inch of the apartment
in case the police had missed anything, but eventually she came to the conclusion
that they had not.
In the kitchen she found a drawer which contained various keys: car keys, as well
as a general key to the building and a padlock key. She quietly went up to the attic
floor, where she tried all the padlocks until she found Bjurman’s storage unit. In it
was some furniture, as well as a wardrobe full of old clothes, skis, a car battery,
cardboard boxes of books, and some other junk. She discovered nothing of interest,
so she went back downstairs and used the general key to get into the garage. She
worked out which was his Mercedes, but a brief search turned up nothing of value
there either.
She did not bother to go to his office. She had been there only a few weeks earlier,
around the time of her previous visit to his apartment, and she knew that for the
past two years he had hardly used it.
Salander returned to Bjurman’s apartment and sat on his living-room sofa to think.
After a few minutes she got up and went back to the key drawer in the kitchen.
She studied the keys one by one. One set belonged to front-door and dead-bolt
locks, but another key was rusty and old-fashioned. She frowned. Then she raised
her eyes to a shelf above the kitchen counter, where Bjurman had put about
twenty seed packets, seeds for an herb garden.
He has a summer cabin. Or an allotment somewhere. That’s what I missed.
It took her three minutes to locate a receipt, six years old, in Bjurman’s account
book showing that he had paid for work on his driveway, and it took another
minute to find an insurance policy for a property near Stallarholmen outside
Mariefred.
At 5:00 in the morning she stopped at the twenty-four-hour 7-Eleven at the top of
Hantverkargatan up by Fridhemsplan. She bought an armful of Billy’s Pan Pizzas,
some milk, bread, cheese, and other staples. She also bought a morning paper with
a headline that fascinated her.
Wanted woman fled country?
This particular paper did not, for some reason, name her. She was referred to
instead as the “26-year-old woman.” The article stated that a source within the
police claimed that she might have escaped abroad and could now be in Berlin. The
police had apparently received a tip that she had been seen in Kreuzberg at an
“anarcho-feminist club” described as a hangout for young people associated with
everything from terrorism to antiglobalization and Satanism.
She took the number 4 bus back to Södermalm, where she got off at
Rosenlundsgatan and walked home to Mosebacke. She made coffee and had a
sandwich before she went to bed.
• • •
She slept until late in the afternoon. When she woke she took stock and decided
that it was high time she changed the sheets. She spent the evening cleaning her
apartment. She took out the trash and collected newspapers in two plastic bags
and put them in a closet in the stairwell. She washed a load of underwear and T-shirts and then a load of jeans. She filled the dishwasher and turned it on. Then she
vacuumed and mopped the floor.
It was 9:00 p.m. and she was drenched with sweat. She turned on the faucet in the
tub and poured in plenty of bubble bath. She lay back and closed her eyes and
brooded. When she woke up, it was midnight and the water was cold. She got out,
dried off, and went back to bed. She fell asleep almost immediately.
On Sunday morning Salander was filled with rage when she booted up her
PowerBook and read all the stupid things that had been written about Miriam Wu.
She felt miserable and guilty. Wu’s only crime was that she was Salander’s …
acquaintance? Friend? Lover?
She didn’t quite know which word would describe her relationship with Mimmi,
but she realized that whichever one she chose, it was probably over. She would
have to cross one more name off her already short list of acquaintances. After all
the shit written in the press, she could not imagine that her friend would want to
have anything to do with that psychotic Salander woman ever again.
It made her furious.
She committed to memory the name of Tony Scala, the journalist who had started
it all. She also resolved one day to confront a nasty columnist pictured in a checked
jacket whose article had made repeated jocular references to Mimmi as an “S&M
dyke.”
The number of people Salander was going to have to deal with was growing. But
first she had to find Zala.
What would happen when she found him she didn’t know.
Blomkvist was woken by the telephone at 7:30 on Sunday morning. He stretched
out his hand and answered it sleepily.
“Good morning,” Berger said.
“Mmm,” said Mikael.
“Are you alone?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Then I suggest you take a shower and put on some coffee. You’ll have a visitor in
fifteen minutes.”
“I will?”
“Paolo Roberto.”
“The boxer? The king of kings?”
“He called me and we talked for half an hour.”
“How come?”
“How come he called me? Well, we know each other well enough to say hello. I did
an interview with him when he was in Hildebrand’s film, and we’ve run into each
other a few times over the years.”
“I didn’t know that. But my question was why is he visiting me?”
“Because … well, I think it’s better if he explains that himself.”
Blomkvist had only just showered and put on his pants when the doorbell rang. He
opened the door and asked the boxer to take a seat at the table while he found a
clean shirt and made two double espressos, which he served with a teaspoon of
milk. Paolo Roberto inspected the coffee, impressed.
“You wanted to talk to me?” Blomkvist said.
“It was Erika Berger’s suggestion.”
“I see. Talk away.”
“I know Lisbeth Salander.”
Blomkvist raised his eyebrows. “You do?”
“I was a little surprised when Erika told me that you knew her too.”
“I think perhaps it would be better if you started at the beginning.”
“OK. Here’s the deal. I came home the day before yesterday after a month in New
York and found Lisbeth’s face on every fucking newspaper in town. The papers are
writing a load of fucking crap about her. And not one of those fuckers seems to
have a good word to say.”
“You got three fucks into that outburst.”
Paolo Roberto laughed. “Sorry. But I’m really pissed off. In fact, I called Erika
because I needed to talk and didn’t really know who else to call. Since that
journalist in Enskede worked for Millennium and since I happen to know Erika, I
called her.”
“So?”
“Even if Salander went completely off her rocker and did everything the police are
claiming she did, she has to be given a sporting chance. We do happen to have the
rule of law in this country, and nobody should be condemned without their day in
court.”
“I believe that too.”
“That’s what I understood from Erika. When I called her I thought that you guys at
Millennium were after her scalp too, considering that the Svensson guy was writing
for you. But Erika said you thought she was innocent.”
“I know Lisbeth. I can’t see her as a deranged killer.”
Paolo Roberto laughed out loud. “She’s one fucking freaky chick… but she’s one of
the good ones. I like her.”
“How do you know her?”
“I’ve boxed with Salander since she was seventeen.”
Blomkvist closed his eyes for ten seconds before he opened them and looked at the
boxing champ. Salander was, as always, full of surprises.
“Of course. Lisbeth Salander boxes with Paolo Roberto. You’re in the same division.”
“I’m not joking.”
“I believe you. She told me once that she used to spar with the boys at some boxing
club.”
“Let me tell you how it happened. Ten years ago I took a job as a trainer for juniors
who wanted to start boxing down at the Zinken club. I was already established, and
the club’s junior leader thought I’d be a big draw, so I’d come in afternoons and
spar with the guys. As it turned out, I stayed the whole summer and part of the
autumn too. They ran a campaign and put up posters and all that, trying to lure the
local kids. And it did attract a lot of fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds and some a few
years older too. Quite a few immigrant kids. Boxing is a great alternative to running
around town and raising hell. Ask me. I know.”
“I believe you.”
“Then one day in the middle of summer this skinny girl turns up out of nowhere.
You know how she looks, right? She came into the club and said she wanted to
learn to box.”
“I can picture the scene.”
“There was a roar of laughter from half a dozen guys who weighed about twice as
much as she did and were obviously a whole lot bigger. I laughed too. It was
nothing serious, but we teased her a little. We have a girls’ section too, and I said
something stupid about the fact that little chicks were only allowed to box on
Thursdays or something like that.”
“She didn’t laugh, I bet.”
“No. She didn’t laugh. She looked at me with those black eyes of hers. Then she
reached for a pair of boxing gloves that somebody had left lying around. They
weren’t tied up or anything and they were way too big for her. But we weren’t
laughing any more. You know what I mean?”
“This doesn’t sound good.”
Paolo Roberto laughed again. “Since I was the instructor I went up and pretended
to jab at her, you know, for make-believe.”
“Uh-oh …”
“Right. All of a sudden she whipped out a punch that caught me smack above my
mouth. I was just clowning with her and was totally unprepared. She got in two or
three punches before I even began to block them. Anyway, she had no muscle
strength and it was like being walloped by a feather. But when I started blocking
she changed tactics. She boxed instinctively and landed a few more smacks. Then I
started blocking seriously and found out that she was quicker than a fucking lizard.
If she had been bigger and stronger I would have had a match on my hands.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“And then she switched tactics again and whacked me a good one right in the balls.
I felt that one.”
Blomkvist winced.
“Then I jabbed back and got her in the face. I mean, it wasn’t a hard punch or
anything, just a pop. Then she kicked me in the shin. Anyway, it was totally freaky. I
was three times bigger and heavier and she didn’t have a chance, but she bashed at
me as if her life was at stake.”
“You made her angry.”
“I realized that later. And I was ashamed. I mean … we had put up posters and tried
to draw in young people, and here she came and asked quite seriously to learn to
box, and ran up against a gang of guys who just stood there and made fun of her. I
would have lost it, too, if anyone had treated me that way.”
“But you might have thought twice about having a crack at Paolo Roberto!”
“Well, Salander’s problem was that her punches were worthless. So I started
training with her. We had her in the girls’ section for a couple of weeks, and she
lost several matches because sooner or later somebody would always get a punch
in, and then we had to sort of stop and carry her into the locker room because she
was so mad and started kicking and biting and slugging us.”
“That sounds like Lisbeth.”
“She never gave up. But finally she had pissed off so many girls that their trainer
kicked her out.”
“And then?”
“It was completely impossible to box with her. She only had one style, which we
called Terminator Mode. She would try to nail her opponent, and it didn’t matter if
it was just a warm-up or friendly sparring. And girls kept going home all scraped up
because she had kicked them. That was when I had an idea. I had problems with a
guy called Samir. He was seventeen and from Syria. He was a good boxer,
powerfully built and with a good jab … but he couldn’t move. He stood still the
whole time. So I asked Salander to come to the club one afternoon when I was
going to train him. She changed and I put her in the ring with him, headgear and
mouthpiece and everything. At first Samir refused to spar with her because she was
‘just a fucking chick,’ all the usual macho crap. So I told him, loud so everyone
could hear, that this was no sparring match, and I put up 500 kronor that said she
would nail him. To Salander I said that this was no training session and that Samir
would pound her in bloody earnest. She looked at me with mistrust. Samir was still
standing there babbling when the bell went off. Lisbeth went at him for king and
country and thumped him one in the face so he went down on his ass. By then I’d
been training her for a whole summer and she was starting to get some muscles
and a little power in her punch.”
“I bet your Syrian boy was happy.”
“Well, they talked about that match for months afterwards. Samir took a licking.
She won on points. If she’d had more body strength she really could have hurt him.
After a while Samir was so frustrated that he started slugging away full force. I was
dead afraid he might actually land a punch and we’d have to call an ambulance. She
took some bruises when she blocked with her shoulders a few times, and he
managed to get her on the ropes because she couldn’t stand up to the force of his
blows. But he was nowhere near hitting her for real.”
“I wish I’d seen that.”
“That day the guys in the club began to respect Salander. Especially Samir. So I
started putting her in the ring to spar with considerably bigger and heavier guys.
She was my secret weapon and it was great training. We arranged sessions so that
Lisbeth’s goal was to land five punches on various parts of the body—jaw, forehead,
stomach, and so on. And the guys she boxed with had to defend themselves and
protect those areas. It turned into sort of a prestige thing to have boxed with
Salander. It was like scrapping with a hornet. We actually called her ‘the Wasp,’ and
she became like the mascot of the club. I think she even liked it, because one day
she came to the club with a wasp tattooed on her neck.”
Blomkvist smiled. He remembered the wasp well. And it was part of the police
description of her.
“How long did all this go on?”
“One evening a week for about three years. I was there full-time during that
summer and then sporadically after that. The guy who kept up the training with
Salander was our junior trainer, Putte Karlsson. Then Salander started working and
didn’t have time to come as often, but up until last year she’d be there at least once
a month. I saw her a few times a year and did sparring sessions with her. It was
good training, and we were sweaty afterwards. She hardly ever talked to anyone.
When there was no sparring she would work the heavy bag intensely for two
hours, as if it were her mortal enemy.”
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