CHAPTER 4
Monday, January 10–Tuesday, January 11
Salander landed at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport at noon. In addition to the flying
time, she had spent nine hours at Grantley Adams Airport on Barbados. British
Airways had refused to let the aircraft take off until a passenger who looked
vaguely Arabic had been taken away for questioning and a possible terrorist threat
had been snuffed out. By the time she landed at Gatwick in London, she had missed
her connecting flight to Sweden and had had to wait overnight before she could be
rebooked.
Salander felt like a bag of bananas that had been left too long in the sun. All she
had with her was a carry-on bag containing her PowerBook, Dimensions, and a
change of clothes. She passed unchecked through the green gate at Customs. When
she got outside to the airport shuttle buses she was welcomed home by a blast of
freezing sleet.
She hesitated. All her life she had had to choose the cheapest option, and she was
not yet used to the idea that she had more than three billion kronor, which she had
stolen by means of an Internet coup combined with good old-fashioned fraud. After
a few moments of getting cold and wet, she said to hell with the rule book and
waved for a taxi. She gave the driver her address on Lundagatan and fell asleep in
the backseat.
It was not until the taxi drew up on Lundagatan and the driver shook her awake
that she realized she had given him her old address. She told him she had changed
her mind and asked him to continue on to Götgatsbacken. She gave him a big tip in
dollars and swore as she stepped into a puddle in the gutter. She was dressed in
jeans, T-shirt, and a thin cloth jacket. She wore sandals and short cotton socks. She
walked gingerly over to the 7-Eleven, where she bought some shampoo, toothpaste,
soap, kefir, milk, cheese, eggs, bread, frozen cinnamon rolls, coffee, Lipton’s tea bags,
a jar of pickles, apples, a large package of Billy’s Pan Pizza, and a pack of Marlboro
Lights. She paid with a Visa card.
When she came back out on the street she hesitated about which way to go. She
could walk up Svartensgatan or down Hökens Gata towards Slussen. The drawback
with Hökens Gata was that then she would have to walk right past the door of the
Millennium offices, running the risk of bumping into Blomkvist. In the end she
decided not to go out of her way to avoid him. She walked towards Slussen,
although it was a bit longer that way, and turned off to the right by way of Hökens
Gata up to Mosebacke Torg. She cut across the square past the statue of the Sisters
in front of Södra Theatre and took the steps up the hill to Fiskargatan. She stopped
and looked up at the apartment building pensively. It did not really feel like
“home.”
She looked around. It was an out-of-the-way spot in the middle of Södermalm
Island. There was no through traffic, which was fine with her. It was easy to
observe who was moving about the area. It was apparently popular with walkers in
the summertime, but in the winter the only ones there were those who had
business in the neighbourhood. There was hardly a soul to be seen now—certainly
not anyone she recognized, or who might reasonably be expected to recognize her.
Salander set down her shopping bag in the slush to dig out her keys. She took the
elevator to the top floor and unlocked the door with the nameplate V. KULLA.
One of the first things Salander had done after she came into a very large sum of
money and thereby became financially independent for the rest of her life (or for as
long as three billion kronor could be expected to last) was to look around for an
apartment. The property market had been a new experience for her. She had never
before invested money in anything more substantial than occasional useful items
which she could either pay for with cash or buy on a reasonable payment plan. The
biggest outlays had previously been various computers and her lightweight
Kawasaki motorcycle. She had bought the bike for 7,000 kronor—a real bargain. She
had spent about as much on spare parts and devoted several months to taking the
motorcycle apart and overhauling it. She had wanted a car, but she had been wary
of buying one, since she did not know how she would have fit it into her budget.
Buying an apartment, she realized, was a deal of a different order. She had started
by reading the classified ads in the online edition of Dagens Nyheter, which was a
science all to itself, she discovered:
1 bdrm + living/dining, fantastic loc. nr Södra Station, 2.7m kr or highest bid. S/ch
5510 p/m.
3 rms + kitchen, park view, Högalid, 2.9m kr.
2? rms, 47 sq. m., renov. bath, new plumbing 1998. Gotlandsgat. 1.8m kr. S/ch 2200 p/
m.
She had telephoned some of the numbers haphazardly, but she had no idea what
questions to ask. Soon she felt so idiotic that she stopped even trying. Instead she
went out on the first Sunday in January and visited two apartment open houses.
One was on Vindragarvägen way out on Reimersholme, and the other on
Heleneborgsgatan near Hornstull. The apartment on Reimers was a bright four-room place in a tower block with a view of Långholmen and Essingen. There she
could be content. The apartment on Heleneborgsgatan was a dump with a view of
the building next door.
The problem was that she could not decide which part of town she wanted to live
in, how her apartment should look, or what sort of questions she should be asking
of her new home. She had never thought about an alternative to the 500 square
feet on Lundagatan, where she had spent her childhood. Through her trustee at the
time, the lawyer Holger Palmgren, she had been granted possession of the
apartment when she turned eighteen. She plopped down on the lumpy sofa in her
combination office/living room and began to think.
The apartment on Lundagatan looked into a courtyard. It was cramped and not the
least bit comfortable. The view from her bedroom was a firewall on a gable facade.
The view from the kitchen was of the back of the building facing the street and the
entrance to the basement storage area. She could see a streetlight from her living
room, and a few branches of a birch tree.
The first requirement of her new home was that it should have some sort of view.
She did not have a balcony, and had always envied well-to-do neighbours higher up
in the building who spent warm days with a cold beer under an awning on theirs.
The second requirement was that her new home would have to have a balcony.
What should the apartment look like? She thought about Blomkvist’s apartment—
700 square feet in one open space in a converted loft on Bellmansgatan with views
of City Hall and the locks at Slussen. She had liked it there. She wanted to have a
pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment that was easy to take care of. That was a
third point on her list of requirements.
For years she had lived in cramped spaces. Her kitchen was a mere 100 square feet,
with room for only a tiny table and two chairs. Her living room was 200 square
feet. The bedroom was a 120. Her fourth requirement was that the new apartment
should have plenty of space and closets. She wanted to have a proper office and a
big bedroom where she could spread herself out.
Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor,
an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter
how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted a
washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted
the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window.
Then she studied the offerings of estate agents online. The next morning she got up
early to visit Nobel Estates, the company that, according to some, had the best
reputation in Stockholm. She was dressed in old black jeans, boots, and her black
leather jacket. She stood at a counter and watched a blond woman of about thirty-five, who had just logged on to the Nobel Estates website and was uploading
photographs of apartments. At length a short, plump, middle-aged man with thin
red hair came over. She asked him what sort of apartments he had available. He
looked up at her in surprise and then assumed an avuncular tone:
“Well, young lady, do your parents know that you’re thinking of moving away from
home?”
Salander gave him a stone-cold glare until he stopped chuckling.
“I want an apartment,” she said.
He cleared his throat and glanced appealingly at his colleague on the computer.
“I see. And what kind of apartment did you have in mind?”
“I think I’d like an apartment in Söder, with a balcony and a view of the water, at
least four rooms, a bathroom with a window, and a utility room. And there has to
be a lockable area where I can keep a motorcycle.”
The woman at the computer looked up and stared at Salander.
“A motorcycle?” the thin-haired man said.
Salander nodded.
“May I know … uh, your name?”
Salander told him. She asked him for his name and he introduced himself as Joakim
Persson.
“The thing is, it’s rather expensive to purchase a cooperative apartment here in
Stockholm …”
Salander did not reply. She had asked him what sort of apartments he had to offer;
the information that it cost money was irrelevant.
“What line of work are you in?”
Salander thought for a moment. Technically she was a freelancer; in practice she
worked only for Armansky and Milton Security, but that had been somewhat
irregular over the past year. She had not done any work for him in three months.
“I’m not working at anything at the moment,” she said.
“Well then … I presume you’re still at school.”
“No, I’m not at school.”
Persson came around the counter and put his arm kindly around Salander’s
shoulders, escorting her towards the door.
“Well, you see, Ms. Salander, we’d be happy to welcome you back in a few years’
time, but you’d have to bring along a little more money than what’s in your piggy
bank. The fact is that a weekly allowance won’t really cover this.” He pinched her
good-naturedly on the cheek. “So drop in again, and we’ll see about finding you a
little pad.”
Salander stood on the street outside Nobel Estates for several minutes. She
wondered absentmindedly what little Master Persson would think if a Molotov
cocktail came flying through his display window. Then she went home and booted
up her PowerBook.
It took her ten minutes to hack into Nobel Estates’ internal computer network
using the passwords she happened to notice the woman behind the counter type in
before she started uploading photographs. It took three minutes to find out that
the computer the woman was working on was in fact also the company’s Net
server—how dim can you get?—and another three minutes to gain access to all
fourteen computers on the network. After about two hours she had gone through
Persson’s records and discovered that there were some 750,000 kronor in under-the-table income that he had not reported to the tax authorities over the past two
years.
She downloaded all the necessary files and emailed them to the tax authorities
from an anonymous email account on a server in the USA. Then she put Master
Persson out of her mind.
She spent the rest of the day going through Nobel Estates’ listed properties. The
most expensive one was a small palace outside Mariefred, where she had no desire
to live. Out of sheer perversity she chose the next most expensive, a huge
apartment just off Mosebacke Torg.
She scrutinized the photographs and floor plan, and in the end decided that it more
than fulfilled her requirements. It had previously been owned by a director of the
Asea Brown Boveri power company, who slipped into obscurity after he got himself
a much-discussed and much-criticized golden parachute of several billion kronor.
That evening she telephoned Jeremy MacMillan, partner in the law firm MacMillan
& Marks in Gibraltar. She had done business with MacMillan before. For a fee even
he thought generous he had set up P.O. box companies to be owners of the
accounts that administered the fortune she had stolen a year ago from the corrupt
financier Hans-Erik Wennerström.
She engaged MacMillan’s services again, instructing him to open negotiations with
Nobel Estates on behalf of Wasp Enterprises to buy the apartment on Fiskargatan
near Mosebacke Torg. It took four days, and the figure finally arrived at made her
raise her eyebrows. Plus the 5 percent commission to MacMillan. Before the week
was out she had moved in with two boxes of clothes and bed linens, a mattress,
and some kitchen utensils. She slept on the mattress in the apartment for three
weeks while she investigated clinics for plastic surgery, straightened out a number
of unresolved bureaucratic details (including a nighttime talk with a certain lawyer,
Nils Bjurman), and paid in advance for the rent at her old place, as well as the
electricity bills and other monthly expenses.
Then she had booked her journey to the clinic in Italy. When the treatments were
done and she was discharged, she sat in a hotel room in Rome and thought about
what to do next. She should have returned to Sweden to get on with her life, but
for various reasons she could not bear to think about Stockholm.
She had no real profession. She could see for herself no future at Milton Security. It
was not Armansky’s fault. In all probability, he would have liked her to work full-time and turn herself into an efficient cog in the company machine, but at the age
of twenty-five she lacked the education, and she had no wish to find herself
pushing fifty and still plodding away doing investigations of crooks in the corporate
world. It was an amusing hobby—not a lifetime career.
Another reason she was reluctant to return to Stockholm was Blomkvist. In
Stockholm she would risk running into Kalle Fucking Blomkvist, and at the moment
that was just about the last thing she wanted to do. He had hurt her. She
acknowledged that this had not been his intention. He had behaved rather decently.
It was her own fault that she had fallen “in love” with him. The very phrase was a
contradiction when it came to Lisbeth Fucking Bitch Salander.
Blomkvist was known for being a ladies’ man. At best she had been an amusing
diversion, someone on whom he had taken pity at a moment when he needed her
and there was no-one better available. But he had quickly moved on to yet more
amusing company. She cursed herself for lowering her guard and letting him into
her life.
When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not
been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing
on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on
his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she
did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as
bleeding to death. Fuck you. He had noticed her just as the doors closed and looked
at her with searching eyes before she turned and walked away as the train pulled
out.
She didn’t understand why he had so stubbornly tried to stay in contact with her,
as if she were some fucking welfare project he had taken on. It annoyed her that he
was so clueless. Every time he sent her an email she had to force herself to delete
the message without reading it.
Stockholm did not seem in the least attractive. Apart from the freelance work for
Milton Security, a few discarded bed partners, and the girls in the old rock group
Evil Fingers, she hardly knew anyone in her hometown.
The only person she had any respect for now was Armansky It was not easy to
define her feelings for him. She had always felt a mild surprise that she was
attracted to him. If he had not been quite so married, or quite so old, or quite so
conservative, she might have considered making an advance.
So she took out her diary and turned to the atlas section. She had never been to
Australia or Africa. She had read about but never seen the Pyramids or Angkor Wat.
She had never ridden on the Star Ferry between Kowloon and Victoria in Hong
Kong, and she had never gone snorkelling in the Caribbean or sat on a beach in
Thailand. Apart from some quick business trips when she had visited the Baltics and
neighbouring Nordic countries, as well as Zurich and London, of course, she had
hardly ever left Sweden. As a matter of fact, she had seldom been outside
Stockholm.
In the past she could never afford it.
She stood at the window of her hotel room overlooking Via Garibaldi in Rome. The
city was like a pile of ruins. Then she made up her mind. She put on her jacket and
went down to the lobby and asked if there was a travel agent in the vicinity. She
booked a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv and spent the following days walking through
the Old City in Jerusalem and visiting the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Wailing Wall. She
viewed the armed soldiers on street corners with distrust, and then she flew to
Bangkok and kept on travelling for the rest of the year.
There was only one thing she really had to do. She went to Gibraltar twice. The first
time to do an in-depth investigation of the man she had chosen to look after her
money. The second time to see to it that he was doing it properly.
It felt quite odd to turn the key to her own apartment on Fiskargatan after such a
long time.
She set down her groceries and her shoulder bag in the hall and tapped in the four-digit code that turned off the electronic burglar alarm. Then she stripped off her
damp clothes and dropped them on the hall floor. She walked into the kitchen
naked, plugged in the refrigerator, and put the food away before she headed for the
bathroom and spent the next ten minutes in the shower. She ate a meal consisting
of a Billy’s Pan Pizza, which she heated in the microwave, and a sliced apple. She
opened one of her moving boxes and found a pillow, some sheets, and a blanket
that smelled a little suspect after having been packed away for a year. She made up
her bed on the mattress in a room next to the kitchen.
She fell asleep within ten seconds of her head hitting the pillow and slept for
almost twelve hours. Then she got up, turned on the coffeemaker, wrapped a
blanket around herself, and sat in the dark on a window seat, smoking a cigarette
and looking out towards Djurgården and Saltsjön, fascinated by the lights.
The day after Salander came home was a full day. She locked the door of her
apartment at 7:00 in the morning. Before she left her floor she opened a ventilation
window in the stairwell and fastened a spare key to a thin copper wire that she
had tied to the wall side of a drainpipe clamp. Experience had taught her the
wisdom of always having a spare key readily accessible.
The air outside was icy. Salander was dressed in a pair of thin, worn jeans that had
a rip beneath one back pocket where her blue panties showed through. She had on
a T-shirt and a warm polo sweater with a seam that had started to fray at the neck.
She had also rediscovered her scuffed leather jacket with the rivets on the
shoulders, and decided she should ask a tailor to repair the almost nonexistent
lining in the pockets. She was wearing heavy socks and boots. Overall, she was nice
and warm.
She walked down St. Paulsgatan to Zinkensdamm and over to her old apartment on
Lundagatan. She checked first of all that her Kawasaki was still safe in the
basement. She patted the seat before she went up to the apartment and had to
push the front door open against a mountain of junk mail.
She hadn’t been sure what to do with the apartment, so when she’d left Sweden a
year ago, the simplest solution had been to arrange an automatic bank account to
pay her regular bills. She still had furniture in the apartment, laboriously collected
over time from various trash containers, along with some chipped mugs, two older
computers, and a lot of paper. But nothing of value.
She took a black trash bag from the kitchen and spent five minutes sorting the
junk from the real mail. Most of the heap went straight into the plastic bag. There
were a few letters for her, mainly bank statements and tax forms from Milton
Security. One advantage of being under guardianship was that she never had to
deal with tax matters—communications of that sort were conspicuous by their
absence. Otherwise, in a whole year she had accumulated only three personal
letters.
The first was from a lawyer, Greta Molander, who had served as executor for
Salander’s mother. The letter stated that her mother’s estate had been settled and
that Lisbeth Salander and her sister Camilla had inherited 9,312 kronor each. A
deposit of said amount had been made to Ms. Salander’s bank account. Would she
please confirm receipt? Salander stuffed the letter in the inside pocket of her jacket.
The second was from Director Mikaelsson of Äppelviken Nursing Home, a friendly
reminder that they were storing a box of her mother’s personal effects. Would she
please contact Äppelviken with instructions as to what she would like done with
these items? The letter ended with the warning that if they did not hear from
Salander or her sister (for whom they had no address) before the end of the year,
they would have no alternative—space being at a premium—but to discard the
items. She saw that the letter was dated June, and she took out her mobile
telephone. The box was still there. She apologized for not responding sooner and
promised to pick it up the next day.
The last letter was from Blomkvist. She thought for a moment before deciding not
to open it, and threw it into the bag.
She filled another box with various items and knickknacks that she wanted to keep,
then took a taxi back to Mosebacke. She put on makeup, a pair of glasses, and a
blond shoulder-length wig and tucked a Norwegian passport in the name of Irene
Nesser into her bag. She studied herself in the mirror and decided that Irene Nesser
looked a little bit like Lisbeth Salander, but was still a completely different person.
After a quick lunch of a Brie baguette and a latte at Café Eden on Götgatan, she
walked down to the car rental agency on Ringvägen, where Irene Nesser rented a
Nissan Micra. She drove to IKEA at Kungens Kurva and spent three hours browsing
through the merchandise, writing down the item numbers she needed. She made a
few quick decisions.
She bought two Karlanda sofas with sand-coloured upholstery, five Poäng
armchairs, two round side tables of clear-lacquered birch, a Svansbo coffee table,
and several Lack occasional tables. From the storage department she ordered two
Ivar combination storage units and two Bonde bookshelves, a TV stand, and a
Magiker unit with doors. She settled on a Pax Nexus three-door wardrobe and two
small Malm bureaus.
She spent a long time selecting a bed, and decided on a Hemnes bed frame with
mattress and bedside tables. To be on the safe side, she also bought a Lillehammer
bed to put in the spare room. She didn’t plan on having any guests, but since she
had a guest room she might as well furnish it.
The bathroom in her new apartment was already equipped with a medicine
cabinet, towel storage, and a washing machine the previous owners had left behind.
All she had to buy was a cheap laundry basket.
What she did need, though, was kitchen furniture. After some thought she decided
on a Rosfors kitchen table of solid beechwood with a tabletop of tempered glass
and four colourful kitchen chairs.
She also needed furniture for her office. She looked at some improbable “work
stations” with ingenious cabinets for storing computers and keyboards. In the end
she shook her head and ordered an ordinary desk, the Galant, in beech veneer with
an angled top and rounded corners, and a large filing cabinet. She took a long time
choosing an office chair—in which she would no doubt spend many hours—and
chose one of the most expensive options, the Verksam.
She made her way through the entire warehouse and bought a good supply of
sheets, pillowcases, hand towels, duvets, blankets, pillows, a starter pack of stainless
steel cutlery, some crockery, pots and pans, cutting boards, three big rugs, several
work lamps, and a huge quantity of office supplies—folders, file boxes, wastepaper
baskets, storage boxes, and the like.
She paid with a card in the name of Wasp Enterprises and showed her Irene Nesser
ID. She also paid to have the items delivered and assembled. The bill came to a little
over 90,000 kronor.
She was back in Söder by 5:00 p.m. and had time for a quick visit to Axelsson’s
Home Electronics, where she bought a nineteen-inch TV and a radio. Just before
closing time she slipped into a store on Hornsgatan and bought a vacuum cleaner.
At Mariahallen market she bought a mop, dishwashing liquid, a bucket, some
detergent, hand soap, toothbrushes, and a giant package of toilet paper.
She was tired but pleased after her shopping frenzy. She stowed all her purchases
in her rented Nissan Micra and then collapsed in Café Java on Hornsgatan. She
borrowed an evening paper from the next table and learned that the Social
Democrats were still the ruling party and that nothing of great significance seemed
to have occurred in Sweden while she had been away.
She was home by 8:00. Under cover of darkness she unloaded her car and carried
the items up to V. Kulla’s apartment. She left everything in a big pile in the hall and
spent half an hour trying to find somewhere to park. Then she ran water in the
Jacuzzi, which was easily big enough for three people. She thought about Blomkvist
for a moment. Until she saw the letter from him that morning, she had not
thought about him for several months. She wondered whether he was home, and
whether the Berger woman was there now in his apartment.
After a while she took a deep breath, turned over on her stomach, and sank
beneath the surface of the water. She put her hands on her breasts and pinched her
nipples hard, holding her breath for far too long, until her lungs began to ache.
Erika Berger, editor in chief, checked her clock when Blomkvist arrived. He was
almost fifteen minutes late for the planning meeting that was held on the second
Tuesday of each month at 10:00 a.m. sharp. Tentative plans for the next issue were
outlined, and decisions about the content of the magazine were made for several
months in advance.
Blomkvist apologized for his late arrival and muttered an explanation that nobody
heard or at least bothered to acknowledge. Apart from Berger, the meeting included
the managing editor, Malin Eriksson, partner and art director Christer Malm, the
reporter Monika Nilsson, and part-timers Lotta Karim and Henry Cortez. Blomkvist
saw at once that the intern was absent, but that the group had been augmented by
a new face at the small conference table in Berger’s office. It was very unusual for
her to let an outsider in on Millennium’s planning sessions.
“This is Dag Svensson,” said Erika. “Freelancer. We’re going to buy an article from
him.”
Blomkvist shook hands with the man. Svensson was blond and blue-eyed, with a
crew cut and a three-day growth of beard. He was around thirty and looked
shamelessly fit.
“We usually run one or two themed issues each year.” Berger went on where she
had left off. “I want to use this story in the May issue. The printer is booked for
April 27th. That gives us a good three months to produce the articles.”
“So what’s the theme?” Blomkvist wondered aloud as he poured coffee from the
thermos.
“Dag came to me last week with the outline for a story. That’s why I asked him to
join us today. Will you take it from here, Dag?” Berger said.
“Trafficking,” Svensson said. “That is, the sex trade. In this case primarily of girls
from the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe. If you’ll allow me to start at the
beginning—I’m writing a book on the subject and that’s why I contacted
Millennium—since you now have a book-publishing operation.”
Everyone looked amused. Millennium Publishing had so far issued exactly one book,
Blomkvist’s year-old brick about the billionaire Wennerström’s financial empire. The
book was in its sixth printing in Sweden, had been published in Norwegian,
German, and English, and was soon to be translated into French too. The sales
success was remarkable given that the story was by now so well known and had
been reported in every newspaper.
“Our book-publishing ventures are not very extensive,” Blomkvist said cautiously.
Even Svensson gave a slight smile. “I understand that. But you do have the means to
publish a book.”
“There are plenty of larger companies,” Blomkvist said. “Well-established ones.”
“Without a doubt,” Berger said. “But for a year now we’ve been discussing the
possibility of starting a niche publication list in addition to our regular activities.
We’ve brought it up at two board meetings, and everyone has been positive. We’re
thinking of a very small list—three or four books a year—of reportage on various
topics. Typical journalistic publications, in other words. This would be a good book
to start with.”
“Trafficking,” Blomkvist said. “Tell us about it.”
“I’ve been digging around in the subject of trafficking for four years now. I got into
the topic through my girlfriend—her name is Mia Johansson and she’s a
criminologist and gender studies scholar. She previously worked at the Crime
Prevention Centre and wrote a report on the sex trade.”
“I’ve met her,” Eriksson said suddenly. “I did an interview with her two years ago
when she published a report comparing the way men and women were treated by
the courts.”
Svensson smiled. “That did create a stir. But she’s been researching trafficking for
five or six years. That’s how we met. I was working on a story about the sex trade
on the Internet and got a tip that she knew something about it. And she did. To
make a long story short: she and I began working together, I as a journalist and she
as a researcher. In the process we started dating, and a year ago we moved in
together. She’s working on her doctorate and she’ll be defending her dissertation
this year.”
“So she’s writing a doctoral thesis while you …?”
“I’m writing a popular version of her dissertation and adding my own research. As
well as a shorter version in the form of the article that I outlined for Erika.”
“OK, you’re working as a team. What’s the story?”
“We have a government that introduced a tough sex-trade law, we have police who
are supposed to see to it that the law is obeyed, and we have courts that are
supposed to convict sex criminals—we call the johns sex criminals since it has
become a crime to buy sexual services—and we have the media, which write
indignant articles about the subject, et cetera. At the same time, Sweden is one of
the countries that imports the most prostitutes per capita from Russia and the
Baltics.”
“And you can substantiate this?”
“It’s no secret. It’s not even news. What’s new is that we have met and talked with
a dozen girls. Most of them are fifteen to twenty years old. They come from social
misery in Eastern Europe and are lured to Sweden with a promise of some kind of
job but end up in the clutches of an unscrupulous sex mafia. Those girls have
experienced things that you couldn’t even show in a movie.”
“OK.”
“It’s the focus of Mia’s dissertation, so to speak. But not of the book.”
Everyone was listening intently.
“Mia interviewed the girls. What I did was to chart the suppliers and the client
base.”
Blomkvist smiled. He had never met Svensson before, but he felt at once that
Svensson was the kind of journalist he liked—someone who got right to the heart of
the story. For Blomkvist the golden rule of journalism was that there were always
people who were responsible. The bad guys.
“And you found some interesting facts?”
“I can document, for instance, that a civil servant in the Ministry of Justice who
was involved with the drafting of the sex-trade law has exploited at least two girls
who came to Sweden through the agency of the sex mafia. One of them was
fifteen.”
“Whoa.”
“I’ve been working on this story off and on for three years. The book will contain
case studies of the johns. There are three policemen, one of whom works for the
Security Police, another on the vice squad. There are five lawyers, one prosecutor,
and one judge. There are also three journalists, one of whom has written articles on
the sex trade. In his private life he’s into rape fantasies with a teenage whore from
Tallinn—and in this case it’s not consensual sex play. I’m thinking of naming names.
I’ve got watertight documentation.”
Blomkvist whistled. “Since I’ve become publisher again, I’ll want to go over the
documentation with a fine-tooth comb,” he said. “The last time I was sloppy about
checking sources I ended up spending two months in prison.”
“If you want to publish the story I can give you all the documentation you want.
But I have one condition for selling the story to Millennium.”
“Dag wants us to publish the book too,” Berger said.
“Precisely. I want it to be dropped like a bomb, and right now Millennium is the
most credible and outspoken magazine in the country. I don’t believe any other
publisher would dare publish a book of this type.”
“So, no book, no article?” said Blomkvist.
“I think it sounds seriously good,” Eriksson said. There was a murmur of agreement
from Cortez.
“The article and the book are two different things,” Berger said. “For the magazine,
Mikael is the publisher and responsible for the content. With regard to the book
publication, the author is responsible for the content.”
“I know,” Svensson said. “That doesn’t bother me. The moment the book is
published, Mia will file a police report against everyone I name.”
“That’ll stir up a hell of a fuss,” Cortez said.
“That’s only half the story,” said Svensson. “I’ve also been analyzing some of the
networks that make money off the sex trade. We’re talking about organized crime.”
“And who’s involved?”
“That’s what’s so tragic. The sex mafia is a sleazy bunch of nobodies. I don’t really
know what I expected when I started this research, but somehow we—at least I—
had the idea that the ‘mafia’ was a gang in the upper echelon of society. A number
of American movies on the subject have probably contributed to that image. Your
story about Wennerström”—Svensson turned to Blomkvist—“also showed that
sometimes this is actually the case. But Wennerström was an exception in a sense.
What I’ve turned up is a gang of brutal and sadistic losers who can hardly read or
write; they’re total morons when it comes to organization and strategic thinking.
There are connections to bikers and somewhat more organized groups, but in
general it’s a bunch of assholes who run the sex business.”
“This is all made clear in your article,” Berger said. “We have laws and a police force
and a judicial system that we finance with millions of kronor in taxes each year to
deal with the sex trade … and they can’t even nail a bunch of morons.”
“It’s a tremendous assault on human rights, and the girls involved are so far down
society’s ladder that they’re of no interest to the legal system. They don’t vote. They
can hardly speak Swedish except for the vocabulary they need to set up a trick. Of
all crimes involving the sex trade, 99.99 percent are not reported to the police, and
those that are hardly ever lead to a charge. This has got to be the biggest iceberg of
all in the Swedish criminal world. Imagine if bank robberies were handled with the
same nonchalance. It’s unthinkable. Unfortunately I’ve come to the conclusion that
this method of handling the problem would not survive for a single day if it
weren’t for the fact that the criminal justice system simply does not want to deal
with it. Attacks on teenage girls from Tallinn and Riga are not a priority. A whore is
a whore. It’s part of the system.”
“And everyone knows it,” Nilsson said.
“So what do you all think?” Berger said.
“I like it,” Blomkvist said. “We’ll be sticking our necks out with that story, and that
was the whole point of starting Millennium in the first place.”
“That’s why I’m still working at the magazine. The publisher has to jump off a cliff
every now and then,” Nilsson said.
Everyone laughed except Blomkvist.
“He was the only one crazy enough to take on the job of publisher,” Berger said.
“We’re going to run this in May. And your book will come out at the same time.”
“Is the book done?” Blomkvist said.
“No. I have the whole outline but only half the text. If you agree to publish the
book and give me an advance, then I can work on it full-time. Almost all the
research is done. All that’s left are some supplementary details—actually just
checking stuff I already know—and confronting the johns I’m going to hang out to
dry.”
“We’ll produce it just like the Wennerström book. It’ll take a week to do the
layout”—Malm nodded—“and two weeks to print. We’ll complete the confrontations
in March and April and sum it all up in a final fifteen-page section. We’ll have the
manuscript ready by April 15 so we’ll have time to go over all the sources.”
“How will we work things with the contract and so on?”
“I’ve drawn up a book contract once before, but I’ll probably have to have a talk
with our lawyer.” Berger frowned. “But I propose a short-term contract from
February to May. We don’t pay over the odds.”
“That’s fine with me. I just need a basic salary.”
“Otherwise the rule of thumb is fifty-fifty on the earnings from the book after the
costs are paid. How does that sound?”
“That sounds damn good,” Svensson said.
“Work assignments,” Berger said. “Malin, I want you to plan the themed issue. It
will be your primary responsibility starting next month; you’ll work with Dag and
edit the manuscript. Lotta, that means I want you here as temporary editorial
assistant for the magazine from March through May. You’ll have to go full-time,
and Malin or Mikael will back you up as time permits.”
Eriksson nodded.
“Mikael, I want you to be the editor of the book.” Berger looked at Svensson.
“Mikael doesn’t let on, but he’s actually one hell of a good editor, and he knows
research. He’ll put each syllable of your book under the microscope. He’s going to
come down like a hawk on every detail. I’m flattered that you want us to publish
your book, but we have special problems at Millennium. We have one or two
enemies who want nothing more than for us to go under. If we stick out our necks
to publish something like this, it has to be 100 percent accurate. We can’t afford
anything less.”
“And I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
“Good. But can you put up with having somebody looking over your shoulder and
criticizing you every which way all spring?”
Svensson grinned and looked at Blomkvist. “Bring it on.”
“If it’s going to be a themed issue, we’ll need more articles. Mikael—I want you to
write about the finances of the sex trade. How much money are we talking about
annually? Who makes the money from the sex trade and where does it go? Can we
find evidence that some of the money ends up in government coffers? Monika—I
want you to check out sexual attacks in general. Talk to the women’s shelters and
researchers and doctors and welfare people. You two plus Dag will write the
supporting articles. Henry—I want an interview with Mia Johansson—Dag can’t do it
himself. Portrait: Who is she, what is she researching, and what are her
conclusions? Then I want you to go in and do case studies from police reports.
Christer—pictures. I don’t know how we’re going to illustrate this. Think about it.”
“This is probably the simplest theme of all to illustrate. Arty. No problem.”
“Let me add one thing,” Svensson said. “There’s a small minority on the police force
who are doing a hell of a fine job. It might be an idea to interview some of them.”
“Have you got any names?” Cortez said.
“Phone numbers too,” Svensson said.
“Great,” Berger said. “The theme of the May issue is the sex trade. The point we
have to make is that trafficking is a crime against human rights and that these
criminals must be exposed and treated like war criminals or death squads or
torturers anywhere in the world. Now let’s get going.”
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