CHAPTER 5
Wednesday, January 12–Friday, January 14
Äppelviken felt unfamiliar, even foreign, when for the first time in eighteen months
Salander turned into the drive in her rented Nissan Micra. From the age of fifteen
she had come twice a year to the nursing home where her mother had been since
“All The Evil” had happened. Her mother had spent ten years at Äppelviken, and it
was where she finally died at only forty-six, after one last annihilating cerebral
haemorrhage.
The last fourteen years of Agneta Sofia Salander’s life had been punctuated by small
cerebral haemorrhages which left her unable to take care of herself. Sometimes she
had not even been able to recognize her daughter.
Thinking about her mother always pitched Salander into a mood of helplessness
and darkness black as night. As a teenager she had cherished the fantasy that her
mother would get well and that they would be able to form some sort of
relationship. That was her heart thinking. Her head knew that it would never
happen.
Her mother had been short and thin, but nowhere near as anorexic-looking as
Salander. In fact, her mother had been downright beautiful, and had a lovely figure.
Just like Salander’s sister, Camilla.
Salander did not want to think about her sister.
For Salander it was an irony of fate that she and her sister were so dramatically
dissimilar. They were twins, born within twenty minutes of each other.
Lisbeth was first. Camilla was beautiful.
They were so different that it seemed grossly unlikely that they could have come
from the same womb. If something hadn’t gone wrong with her genetic code,
Lisbeth would have been as radiantly beautiful as her sister. And probably as crazy.
From the time they were little girls Camilla had been outgoing, popular, and
successful at school, while Lisbeth had been ungiving and introverted, rarely
responding to the teachers’ questions. Camilla’s grades were very good; Lisbeth’s
never were. Already in elementary school Camilla had distanced herself from her
sister to the point that she would not even take the same route to school that
Lisbeth took. Teachers and friends noticed that the two girls never had anything to
do with each other, never sat next to each other. From the age of eight they had
been in separate classes. When they were twelve and “All The Evil” happened, they
had been sent to different foster homes. They had not seen each other since their
seventeenth birthday, and that meeting had ended with Lisbeth getting a black eye
and Camilla a fat lip. Lisbeth did not know where Camilla was living now, and she
hadn’t made any attempt to find out.
In Lisbeth’s eyes Camilla was insincere, corrupt, and manipulative. But it was
Lisbeth whom society had declared incompetent.
She zipped up her leather jacket before she walked through the rain to the main
entrance. She stopped at a garden bench and looked around. On this very spot
eighteen months ago, she had seen her mother for the last time. She had paid an
unscheduled visit to the nursing home when she was on her way north to help
Blomkvist in his attempt to track down a serial killer. Her mother had been restless
and didn’t seem to recognize Salander. She held on tight to her hand and looked at
her with a bewildered expression. Salander was in a hurry. She loosened her
mother’s grip, gave her a hug, and rode away on her motorcycle.
The director of Äppelviken, Agnes Mikaelsson, greeted her warmly and took her to a
storeroom where they found the cardboard box. Salander hefted it. Only five or six
pounds. Not much in the way of an inheritance.
“I had a feeling you’d come back someday,” Mikaelsson said.
“I’ve been out of the country,” Salander said.
She thanked her for saving the box, carried it back to the car, and left Äppelviken
for the last time.
Salander was back in Mosebacke just after noon. She put her mother’s box
unopened in a hall closet and left the apartment again.
As she opened the front door a police car drove slowly past. Salander warily
observed the presence of the authorities outside her building, but when they
showed no sign of interest in her she put them out of her mind.
She went shopping at H&M and KappAhl department stores and bought herself a
new wardrobe. She picked up a large assortment of basic clothes in the form of
pants, jeans, tops, and socks. She had no interest in expensive designer clothing, but
she did enjoy being able to buy half a dozen pairs of jeans at one time without a
second thought. Her most extravagant purchases were from Twilfit, where she
chose a drawerful of panties and bras. This was basic clothing again, but after half
an hour of embarrassed searching she also settled on a set that she thought was
sexy, even erotic, and which she would never have dreamed of buying before. When
she tried them on that night she felt incredibly foolish. What she saw in the mirror
was a thin, tattooed girl in grotesque underwear. She took them off and threw
them in the trash.
She also bought herself some winter shoes and two pairs of lighter indoor shoes.
Then she bought a pair of black boots with high heels that made her a couple of
inches taller. She also found a good winter jacket in brown suede.
She made coffee and a sandwich before she drove the rental car back to its garage
near Ringen. She walked home and sat in the dark all evening on her window seat,
watching the water in Saltsjön.
Mia Johansson cut the cheesecake and decorated each slice with a scoop of
raspberry ice cream. She served Berger and Blomkvist first before she put down
plates for Svensson and herself. Eriksson had resolutely resisted dessert and was
content with black coffee in an old-fashioned flowered porcelain cup.
“It was my grandmother’s china service,” said Mia when she saw Eriksson
examining the cup.
“She’s scared to death that a cup is going to break,” Svensson said. “She takes it out
only when we have really important guests.”
Johansson smiled. “I spent several years with my grandmother when I was a child,
and the china is almost all I have left of her.”
“They’re really beautiful,” Eriksson said. “My kitchen is one hundred percent IKEA.”
Blomkvist didn’t give a damn about flowered coffee cups and instead cast an
appraising eye on the plate with the cheesecake. He pondered letting his belt out a
notch. Berger apparently shared his feelings.
“Good God, I should have said no to dessert too,” she said, glancing ruefully at
Eriksson before taking up her spoon with a firm grip.
It was supposed to be a simple working dinner, in part to cement the cooperation
they had agreed on and in part to continue to discuss plans for the themed issue.
Svensson had suggested that they meet at his place for a bite to eat, and Johansson
had served the best sweet-and-sour chicken Blomkvist had ever tasted. Over dinner
they put away two bottles of robust Spanish red, and Svensson asked if anyone
would like a glass of Tullamore Dew with their dessert. Only Berger was foolish
enough to decline, and Svensson got out the glasses.
It was a one-bedroom apartment in Enskede. Svensson and Johansson had been
going out for a few years, but had taken the plunge and moved in together a year
ago.
The group gathered at around 6:00 p.m., and by the time dessert was served at 8:30
not a word had been said about the ostensible reason for the dinner. But Blomkvist
did discover that he liked his hosts and enjoyed their company.
It was Berger who finally steered the conversation to the topic they had all come to
discuss. Johansson produced a printout of her thesis and placed it on the table in
front of Berger. It had a surprisingly ironic title—“From Russia with Love”—an
homage, of course, to Ian Fleming’s classic novel. The subtitle was “Trafficking,
Organized Crime, and Society’s Response.”
“You have to recognize the difference between my thesis and the book Dag is
writing,” she said. “Dag’s book is a polemic aimed at the people who are making
money from trafficking. My thesis is statistics, field studies, law texts, and a study
of how society and the courts treat the victims.”
“The girls, you mean.”
“Young girls, usually fifteen to twenty years old, working class, poorly educated.
They often have unstable home lives, and many of them are subjected to some form
of abuse even in childhood. One reason they come to Sweden is that they have been
fed a pack of lies.”
“By the sex traders.”
“In this sense there is a sort of gender perspective to my thesis. It’s not often that a
researcher can establish roles along gender lines so clearly. Girls—victims; boys—
perpetrators. Apart from a handful of women working on their own who profit
from the sex trade, there is no other form of criminality in which the sex roles
themselves are a precondition for the crime. Nor is there any other form of
criminality in which social acceptance is so great, or which society does so little to
prevent.”
“And yet Sweden does have tough laws against trafficking and the sex trade,”
Berger said. “Is that not the case?”
“Don’t make me laugh. Several hundred girls—there are no published statistics,
obviously—are transported to Sweden every year to work as prostitutes, which in
this case means making their bodies available for systematic rape. After the law
against trafficking went into effect, it was tested in the courts a few times. The first
time was in April 2003, the case against that crazy brothel madam who had a sex
change. And she was acquitted, of course.”
“I thought she was convicted.”
“Of running a brothel, yes. But she was acquitted of trafficking charges. The thing
was, the girls who were the victims were also the witnesses against her, and they
vanished back to the Baltics. Interpol tried to track them down, but after months of
searching it was decided that they were not going to be found.”
“What had become of them?”
“Nothing. The TV show Insider did a follow-up and went over to Tallinn. It took the
reporters exactly one afternoon to find two of the girls, who were living with their
parents. The third girl had moved to Italy.”
“The police in Tallinn, in other words, weren’t very effective.”
“Since then we have actually won a couple of convictions, but in each case they
were men who had been arrested for other crimes, or who were so conspicuously
stupid that they couldn’t help but be caught. The law is pure window dressing. It
isn’t enforced. And the problem here,” Svensson said, “is that the crime is
aggravated rape, often in conjunction with abuse, aggravated abuse, and death
threats, and in some instances illegal imprisonment as well. That’s everyday life for
many of the girls who are brought, wearing miniskirts and heavy makeup, to some
villa in the suburbs. The thing is that a girl like that doesn’t have any choice. Either
she goes out and fucks dirty old men or she risks being abused and tortured by her
pimp. The girls can’t run away—they don’t know the language, they don’t know the
law, and they don’t know where they could turn. They can’t go home because their
passports have been taken away, and in the case of the brothel madam the girls
were locked in an apartment.”
“It sounds like slave labour camps. Do the girls make any money at all?”
“Oh yeah,” Johansson said. “They usually work for several months before they’re
allowed to go back home. They’re given between 20,000 and 30,000 kronor, which
in Russian money is a small fortune. Unfortunately they’ve often picked up heavy
alcohol or drug habits and a lifestyle that means the money will run out very
quickly. This makes the system self-sustaining: after a while they’re back again and
return voluntarily, so to speak, to their torturers.”
“How much money is this business turning over annually?” Blomkvist asked.
Mia glanced at Svensson and thought for a moment before she responded.
“It’s very hard to give an accurate answer. We’ve calculated back and forth, but
most of our figures are necessarily estimates.”
“Give us a broad brush.”
“OK, we know, for example, that the madam, the one convicted of procuring but
acquitted of trafficking, brought thirty-five women from the East over a two-year
period. They were all here for anything from a few weeks to several months. In the
course of the trial it emerged that over those two years they took in two million
kronor. I have worked out that a girl can bring in an estimated 60,000 kronor a
month. Of this about 15,000, say, is costs—travel, clothing, full board, etc. It’s no life
of luxury; they may have to crash with a bunch of other girls in some apartment
the gang provides for them. Of the remaining 45,000 kronor, the gang takes
between 20,000 and 30,000. The gang leader stuffs half into his own pocket, say
15,000, and divides the rest among his employees—drivers, muscle, others. The girl
gets to keep 10,000 to 12,000 kronor.”
“And per month?”
“Suppose a gang has two or three girls grinding away for them, and they take in
around 150,000 a month. A gang consists of two or three people, and that’s their
living. That’s about how the finances of rape look.”
“And how many of them are we talking about… if you extrapolate?”
“At any given time there are about a hundred active girls who are in some way
victims of trafficking. That means the total income in Sweden each month would
be around six million kronor, around seventy million per year. And that’s only the
girls who are victims of trafficking.”
“That sounds like small change.”
“It is small change. And to bring in these relatively modest sums, around a hundred
girls have to be raped. It drives me mad.”
“That sounds like an objective researcher! But how many creeps are living off these
girls?”
“I reckon about three hundred.”
“That doesn’t sound like an insurmountable problem,” Berger said.
“We pass laws and the media gets outraged, but hardly anyone has actually talked
to one of these girls from the East or has any idea how they live.”
“How does it work? I mean, in practice. It’s probably fairly difficult to bring a
sixteen-year-old over here from Tallinn without anyone noticing. How does it work
once they arrive?” Blomkvist asked.
“When I started researching this, I thought we were talking about an incredibly
well-run organization with some form of professional mafia spiriting girls
unnoticed across the borders.”
“But it’s not?” Eriksson said.
“The business is organized, but I came to the conclusion that we’re talking about
many small and badly organized gangs. Forget the Armani suits and the sports cars
—the average gang is half Russians or Balts and half Swedes. The gang leader is
typically forty, has very little education, and has had problems all his life. His view
of women is pure stone age. There’s a clear pecking order in the gang and his
associates are often afraid of him. He’s violent, frequently high, and he beats the
shit out of anyone who steps out of line.”
Salander’s furniture from IKEA was delivered at 9:30 in the morning three days
later. Two extremely robust citizens shook hands with blond Irene Nesser, who
spoke with a sprightly Norwegian accent. They began at once, shuttling the boxes
up to the apartment in the undersized elevator, and spent the day assembling
tables, cabinets, and beds. Irene Nesser went down to Söderhallarna market to buy
Greek takeout for their lunch.
The men from IKEA were gone by midafternoon. Salander took off her wig and
strolled around her apartment wondering how she was going to like living in her
new home. The kitchen table looked too elegant to be true. The room next to the
kitchen, with doors from both the hall and the kitchen, was her new living room,
with modern sofas and armchairs around a coffee table by the window. She was
pleased with the bedroom and sat down tentatively on the Hemnes bedstead to
test the mattress.
She sat at the desk in her office, enjoying the view of Saltsjön. Yes, this is a good
setup. I can work here.
What she was going to work on, though, she didn’t know.
Salander spent the rest of the evening unpacking and arranging her belongings. She
made the bed and put the towels, sheets, and pillowcases in the linen closet. She
opened the bags of new clothes and hung them in the closets. In spite of all she
had bought, it filled only a fraction of the space. She put the lamps in place and
arranged the pots and pans, the crockery, and the cutlery in the kitchen cupboards
and drawers.
She looked critically at the empty walls and realized that she was going to have to
find some posters or pictures. A vase for flowers wouldn’t hurt either.
Then she opened her cardboard boxes from Lundagatan and put away books,
magazines, clippings, and old research papers that she probably should have
thrown away. Without any regret, she discarded her old T-shirts and socks with
holes in them. Suddenly she found a dildo, still in its original box. She smiled wryly.
It had been one of those freaky birthday presents from Mimmi. She had entirely
forgotten that she had it and had never even tried it. She decided to rectify that
situation and set the dildo on her bedside table.
Then she became serious. Mimmi. She felt a pang of guilt. She had been with
Mimmi fairly regularly for a year and then left her for Blomkvist without a word of
explanation. She had not said goodbye or told her she was thinking of leaving the
country. Nor had she said goodbye to Armansky or told the girls in Evil Fingers
anything at all. They must think she was dead, or else they had simply forgotten
about her—she had never been a central figure in the group.
She realized at that moment that she had not said goodbye to George Bland on
Grenada either, and she wondered whether he was walking on the beach looking
for her. She remembered what Blomkvist had told her about friendship being based
on respect and trust. I keep squandering my friends. She wondered whether Mimmi
was still around, whether she should try to get in touch with her.
She spent most of the evening and a good part of the night sorting papers in her
office, installing her computers, and surfing the Net. She did a swift check of her
investments and found that she was better off than she had been a year earlier.
She did a routine check of Bjurman’s computer but found nothing in his
correspondence that gave her reason to think that he was not toeing the line. He
seemed to have scaled back his professional and private activities to a semi-vegetative state. He seldom used email, and when he surfed the Internet he mostly
went on porn sites.
She did not log off until around 2:00 in the morning. She went into the bedroom
and undressed, flinging her clothes over a chair. In the bathroom mirror she looked
at herself for a long time, examining her angular, asymmetrical face, her new
breasts. And the tattoo on her back—it was beautiful, a curving dragon in red,
green, and black. During the year of her travels she had let her hair grow to
shoulder length, but at the end of her stay on Grenada she had taken a pair of
scissors to it. It still stuck out in all directions.
She felt that some fundamental change had taken place or was taking place in her
life. Maybe it was having access to billions of kronor and not having to think about
every krona she spent. Maybe it was the adult world which was belatedly pushing
its way into her life. Maybe it was the realization that, with her mother’s death, her
childhood had come to an end.
During the operation on her breasts at the clinic in Genoa, a ring in her nipple had
to be removed. Then she had done away with a ring from her lower lip, and on
Grenada she had taken the ring out of her left labium—it had chafed, and she had
no idea why she had let herself be pierced there in the first place.
She yawned and unscrewed the stud she had had through her tongue for seven
years. She put it in a bowl on the shelf next to the sink. Her mouth felt empty.
Apart from the rings in her earlobes, she had now only two piercings left: a ring in
her left eyebrow and a jewel in her navel.
At last she crept under her new duvet. The bed she had bought was gigantic; she
felt as if she were lying on the edge of a soccer field. She pulled the duvet around
her and thought for a long time.
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