CHAPTER 9
Sunday, March 6–Friday, March 11
Dr. Sivarnandan stopped in his tracks on his way into the dining room when he
caught sight of Palmgren and Salander. They were bent over their chessboard. She
came once a week now, usually on Sundays. She always arrived at around 3:00 and
spent a couple of hours playing chess with Palmgren. She left around 8:00 in the
evening, when it was time for him to go to bed. The doctor had observed that she
did not treat him as you would an invalid—on the contrary, it looked like they were
squabbling all the time, and she did not mind Palmgren waiting on her, fetching
her coffee.
Dr. Sivarnandan could not make her out, this peculiar young woman who took
herself for Palmgren’s foster daughter. She had a very striking look about her and
she seemed to treat everything around her with suspicion. She appeared to have no
sense of humour at all. Or the ability to carry on a normal conversation. And when
he asked what kind of work she did, she somehow contrived not to give him an
answer.
A few days after her first visit she had come back with a bundle of documents
which declared that a nonprofit foundation had been established with the sole
purpose of assisting the care centre with Palmgren’s rehabilitation. The chair of the
trustees of the foundation was a lawyer in Gibraltar. There was another lawyer
mentioned, also with an address in Gibraltar, and an accountant by the name of
Hugo Svensson with an address in Stockholm. The foundation was to make
available funds of up to 2.5 million kronor, which Dr. Sivarnandan could dispose of
as he wished, but with the exclusive object of giving the patient Holger Palmgren
every possible care and facility towards full recovery. Sivarnandan had only to
request the necessary funds from the accountant.
It was an unusual, if not unique, arrangement. Sivarnandan had thought hard for
several days about whether there was anything unethical about the situation. He
decided that there was not and accordingly hired Johanna Karolina Oskarsson as
Holger Palmgren’s personal assistant and trainer. She was thirty-nine, a certified
physical therapist with a degree in psychology and with extensive experience in
rehabilitation care. To Sivarnandan’s surprise her first month’s salary was paid to
the hospital in advance, as soon as her employment contract was signed. Until then
he had vaguely worried that this might be some sort of hoax.
Within a month Palmgren’s coordination and overall condition had markedly
improved. This could be seen from the tests he underwent every week. How much
the improvement was due to the training and how much was thanks to Salander,
Sivarnandan could only wonder. There was no doubt that Palmgren was making
great efforts and looked forward to her visits with the enthusiasm of a child. It
even seemed to amuse him that he was regularly pummelled at the chessboard.
Dr. Sivarnandan had kept them company on one occasion. Palmgren was playing
white and had opened the Sicilian quite correctly. He had pondered each move long
and hard. Whatever his physical handicap as a result of the stroke, there was
nothing wrong now with his intellectual acuity.
Salander sat there reading a book on the frequency calibration of radio telescopes
in a weightless state. She was sitting on a cushion, the better to be level with the
table. When Palmgren made his move she glanced up and moved her piece,
apparently without studying the board, and went back to her book. Palmgren
resigned after the twenty-seventh move. Salander looked up and with a frown
inspected the board for perhaps fifteen seconds.
“No,” she said. “You have a chance for a stalemate.”
Palmgren sighed and spent five minutes studying the board. At last he narrowed his
gaze at Salander.
“Prove it.”
She turned the board around and took over his pieces. She forced a stalemate on
the thirty-ninth move.
“Good Lord,” Sivarnandan said.
“That’s the way she is. Don’t ever play with her for money,” Palmgren said.
Sivarnandan had played chess himself since he was a boy, and as a teenager he was
in the school tournament in Åbo, and came in second. He regarded himself as a
competent amateur. Salander, he could see, was an uncanny chess player. She had
obviously never played for a club, and when he mentioned that the game seemed
to have been a variant of a classic game by Lasker, she gave him an
uncomprehending look. She had never heard of Emanuel Lasker. He could not help
wondering whether her talent was innate, and if so, whether she had other talents
that might interest a psychologist.
But he did not say a word. He could see that his patient was feeling better than he
ever had since coming to Ersta.
Bjurman arrived home late in the evening. He had spent four whole weeks at his
summer cabin outside Stallarholmen, but he was dispirited. Nothing had happened
to change his situation except that the giant had informed him that his people
were interested in the proposal and that it would cost him 100,000 kronor.
Mail was piled up on the doormat. He put it all on the kitchen table. He was less
and less interested in everything to do with work and the outside world, and he did
not look at the letters until later in the evening. Then he shuffled through them
absentmindedly.
One was from Handelsbanken. It was a statement for the withdrawal of 9,312
kronor from Lisbeth Salander’s savings account.
She was back.
He went into his office and put the document on his desk. He looked at it with
hate-filled eyes for more than a minute as he collected his thoughts. He was forced
to look up the telephone number. Then he lifted the receiver and dialled the
number of a mobile with a prepaid calling card.
The blond giant answered with a slight accent: “Yes?”
“It’s Nils Bjurman.”
“What do you want?”
“She’s back in Sweden.”
There was a brief silence at the other end.
“That’s good. Don’t call this number again.”
“But—”
“You will be notified shortly.”
Then, to his considerable irritation, the connection was cut. Bjurman swore to
himself. He went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a triple measure of
Kentucky bourbon. He swallowed the drink in two gulps. I’ve got to go easy on the
booze, he thought. Then he poured one more measure and took the glass back to
his desk, where he looked at the statement from Handelsbanken again.
• • •
Mimmi was massaging Salander’s back and neck. She had been kneading intently
for twenty minutes while Salander mainly enjoyed herself and uttered an
occasional groan of pleasure. A massage from Mimmi was a fantastic experience,
and she felt like a kitten who just wanted to purr and wave its paws around.
She stifled a sigh of disappointment when Mimmi slapped her on the backside and
said that should do it. For a while she lay still in the vain hope that Mimmi would
go on, but when she heard her pick up her wineglass, Salander rolled onto her
back.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re sitting in front of your computer all day. That’s why your back hurts.”
“I just pulled a muscle.”
They were lying naked in Mimmi’s bed on Lundagatan, drinking red wine and
feeling silly. Since Salander had resumed her friendship with Mimmi, it was as if
she couldn’t get enough of her. It had become a bad habit to call her every day—
much too often. She looked at Mimmi and reminded herself not to get too close to
anyone again. It might end with someone getting hurt.
Mimmi leaned over the edge of the bed and opened the drawer of her bedside
table. She took out a small flat package wrapped in flowered paper with a gold bow
and tossed it into Lisbeth’s lap.
“What’s this?”
“Your birthday present.”
“My birthday’s more than a month away.”
“It’s your present from last year, but I couldn’t find you.”
“Should I open it?”
“If you feel like it.”
She put down her wineglass, shook the package, and opened it carefully. She drew
out a beautiful cigarette case with a lid of blue and black enamel and some tiny
Chinese characters as decoration.
“You really should stop smoking,” Mimmi said. “But if you won’t, at least you can
keep your cigarettes in a pretty box.”
“Thank you,” Salander said. “You’re the only person who ever gives me birthday
presents. What do the characters mean?”
“How on earth would I know that? I don’t understand Chinese. I just found it at
the flea market.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“It’s just some cheap nothing, but it looked as if it was made for you. We’ve run out
of wine. You want to go out and get a beer?”
“Does that mean we have to leave the bed and get dressed?”
“I’m afraid so. But what’s the point of living in Söder if you can’t go to a bar now
and then?”
Salander sighed.
“Come on,” Mimmi said, pointing at the jewel in Salander’s navel. “We can come
back here afterwards.”
Salander sighed again, but she put one foot on the floor and reached for her
underwear.
Svensson was working late at the desk he had been assigned in a corner of the
Millennium offices when he heard the rattle of a key in the door. He looked at the
clock and saw that it was past 9:00 p.m. Blomkvist seemed surprised to find
someone still working there.
“The lamp of diligence and all that, Mikael. I’m fine-tuning the book and I lost track
of time. What are you doing here?”
“Just stopped by to pick up a file I forgot. Is everything going well?”
“Sure … Well, actually no … I’ve spent three weeks trying to track down Björck from
Säpo. He seems to have vanished without a trace. Perhaps he’s been kidnapped by
some enemy secret service.”
Blomkvist pulled up a chair and sat thinking for a moment.
“Have you tried the old lottery trick?”
“What’s that?”
“Think of a name, write a letter saying that he’s won a mobile telephone with a
GPS navigator, or whatever. Print it out so it looks official and post it to his address
—in this case that P.O. box he has. He’s already won the mobile, a brand-new Nokia.
But more than that, he’s one of twenty people who can go on to win 100,000
kronor. All he has to do is take part in a marketing study for various products. The
session will take about an hour and be done by a professional interviewer. And
then … well.”
Svensson stared at Blomkvist, openmouthed. “Are you serious?”
“Why not? You’ve tried everything else, and even a spook from Säpo should be able
to figure out that the odds of winning a hundred grand are pretty good if he’s one
of only twenty people on the list.”
Svensson laughed out loud. “You’re nuts. Is that legal?”
“I can’t imagine it’s illegal to give away a mobile telephone.”
“You really are out of your mind.”
Svensson kept laughing. Blomkvist hesitated a moment. He was actually on his way
home and seldom went to bars, but he liked Svensson’s company.
“Do you feel like going out for a beer?” he said.
Svensson looked again at the clock.
“Why not?” he said. “Gladly. A quick one. Let me leave a message for Mia. She’s out
with the girls and was going to pick me up on her way home.”
They went to Kvarnen, mostly because it was comfortable and close by. Svensson
chuckled as he composed the letter to Björck at Security Police HQ. Blomkvist
looked dubiously at his easily amused colleague. They were lucky enough to get a
table near the door. Each of them ordered a large glass of strong beer, and with
their heads together they began to drink and discuss Svensson’s book.
Blomkvist did not see Salander standing at the bar with Miriam Wu. Salander took
a step back to put Mimmi between her and Blomkvist. She looked at him from
behind Mimmi’s shoulder.
She had not been in a bar since she came back and—just her luck—she had to run
into him. Kalle Fucking Blomkvist. It was the first time she had seen him in more
than a year.
“What’s wrong?” Mimmi said.
“Nothing.”
They kept talking. Or rather, Mimmi went on with her story about a dyke she had
met on a trip to London a few years back. She had been visiting an art gallery and
the situation had gotten funnier and funnier as Mimmi tried to pick her up.
Salander nodded now and then, but as usual missed the point of the story.
Blomkvist had not changed much, she decided. He looked absurdly well—
approachable and relaxed, but with a grave expression. He was listening to what his
companion was saying, nodding now and then. It seemed to be a serious discussion.
Salander looked at Blomkvist’s friend. A man with a blond crew cut several years
younger than Blomkvist, who was talking intently. She had no idea who he was.
All of a sudden a whole group came up to Blomkvist’s table and shook hands with
him. Blomkvist got a pat on the cheek from a woman who said something everyone
else laughed at. Blomkvist looked self-conscious, but he laughed too.
Salander scowled.
“You’re not listening to what I’m saying,” Mimmi said.
“Of course I am.”
“You’re terrible company in a bar. I give up. Should we go home and fuck instead?”
“In a bit,” Salander said.
She moved a little closer to Mimmi and put a hand on her hip.
Mimmi looked down at her partner and said, “I feel like kissing you on the mouth.”
“Don’t do it.”
“Are you afraid people will think you’re a dyke?”
“I don’t want to attract attention right now.”
“Let’s go home then.”
“Not yet. Wait a while.”
They did not have long to wait. Twenty minutes after they arrived, the man
Blomkvist was with got a call on his mobile. They drained their glasses and stood
up simultaneously.
“Check it out,” Mimmi said. “That guy over there is Mikael Blomkvist. He was more
famous than a rock star after the Wennerström affair.”
“You don’t say.”
“Did you miss all that? It was about the time when you left the country.”
“I’ve heard it mentioned.”
Salander waited for another five minutes before she looked at Mimmi.
“You wanted to kiss me on the mouth.”
Mimmi looked at her in surprise. “I was just teasing.”
Salander stood on tiptoe and pulled Mimmi’s face down to her level and gave her a
long, deep kiss. When they separated there was applause.
“You’re nuts, you know that?” Mimmi said.
Salander did not get home until 7:00 in the morning. She pulled out the neck of her
T-shirt and sniffed. She thought about taking a shower but decided the hell with it,
and instead left her clothes on the floor and went to bed. She slept till 4:00 in the
afternoon, then got up and went down to Söderhallarna market and had breakfast.
She thought about Blomkvist, and about her reaction to suddenly finding herself in
the same room as him. She had been annoyed at his presence, but she also
discovered that it no longer hurt to see him. He had been transformed to a little
blip on the horizon, a minor perturbation factor in her existence. There were worse
disturbances in life.
But she wished she had had the guts to go up to him and say hello. Or possibly
break his legs. She wasn’t sure which.
Anyway, she was curious about what he was up to. She ran a few errands in the
afternoon and came home around 7:00 p.m. She booted up her PowerBook and
started Asphyxia 1.3. The icon MikBlom/laptop was still on the server in Holland. She
double-clicked and opened a copy of Blomkvist’s hard drive. It was her first visit to
his computer since she had left Sweden more than a year before. She noticed with
satisfaction that he still had not upgraded to the latest MacOS, which would have
meant that Asphyxia would have crashed and the hacking would have been
terminated. She realized that she would have to rewrite the programme so that an
upgrade would not interfere with it.
The volume on the hard drive had increased by almost 6.9 gigabytes since her
previous visit. A large part of the increase was due to PDF files and Quark
documents. The documents did not take up much room but the bitmaps did,
despite the fact that the images were compressed. Since he had returned as
publisher he had apparently archived every issue of Millennium.
She sorted the files on the hard disk by date with the oldest at the top and noticed
that Blomkvist had spent a great deal of time over the past few months on a folder
named , apparently a book project. Then she opened Blomkvist’s email and read
carefully through the address list in his correspondence.
One address made Salander jump. On January 26 Blomkvist had got an email from
Harriet Fucking Vanger. She opened the message and read a few concise lines about
a board meeting to take place at the Millennium offices. The message ended with
the information that Vanger had booked the same hotel room as last time.
Salander digested the information. Then she shrugged and downloaded Blomkvist’s
mail, Svensson’s book manuscript with the working title The Leeches and the
subtitle Society’s Support for the Prostitution Industry. She also found a copy of a
thesis entitled “From Russia with Love” written by a woman named Mia Johansson.
She disconnected and went into the kitchen to put on some coffee. Then she sat on
her new sofa in the living room with her PowerBook. She opened Mimmi’s
cigarette case and lit a Marlboro Light. The rest of the evening she spent reading.
By 9:00 she had finished Johansson’s thesis. She bit her lower lip.
By 10:30 she had finished Svensson’s book. Millennium would soon be making
headlines again.
At 11:30 she was reading the last of Blomkvist’s emails when she suddenly sat up
and opened her eyes wide.
She felt a cold shiver go down her spine.
It was a message from Svensson to Blomkvist.
In an aside Svensson mentioned that he had some tentative ideas about an Eastern
European gangster named Zala who might get a chapter all to himself—but
acknowledged that there was not much time till the deadline. Blomkvist hadn’t
answered the email.
Zala.
Salander sat motionless until the screen saver went on.
Svensson put aside his notebook and scratched his head. He gazed at the single
word at the top of the page in his notebook. Four letters.
Zala.
He spent three minutes deep in thought, drawing labyrinthine rings around the
name. Then he went and got a cup of coffee from the kitchenette. It was time to go
home to bed, but he had discovered that he enjoyed working late at the
Millennium offices when it was quiet in the building.
He had all the material under control, but for the first time since he started the
project he felt uneasy that he might have missed an important detail.
Zala.
Until that point he had been impatient to finish the writing and get the book
published, but now he wished he had more time.
He thought about the autopsy report that Inspector Gulbrandsen had let him read.
Irina P.’s body had been found in Södertälje canal. She had devastating injuries to
her face and chest. The cause of death was a broken neck, but two of her other
injuries had been judged fatal. Six ribs had been broken and her left lung
punctured. She had a ruptured spleen. The injuries were hard to interpret. The
pathologist had offered the suggestion that a wooden club wrapped in cloth had
been the weapon used. Why a killer would wrap a murder weapon in cloth could
not be explained, but the scale of the injuries was not characteristic of an ordinary
assault.
The murder remained unsolved, and Gulbrandsen had said that the prospect of
their solving the case was slender.
The name Zala had come up on four occasions in the material that Mia had
gathered over the last two years, but always on the periphery, always eerily elusive.
Nobody knew who he was and nobody could provide proof that he even existed.
Some of the girls had referred to his name being used as a threat, a terrifying
warning to those who did not toe the line. He had spent a whole week hunting for
more concrete information about Zala, asking questions of police, journalists, and
several recently developed sources with contacts in the sex trade.
He had been in touch with the journalist Sandström, whom he had every intention
of exposing in the book. Sandström had begged and pleaded for Svensson to have
mercy. He had offered a bribe. Svensson was not going to change his mind, but he
did use his advantage to pressure Sandström for information about Zala.
Sandström claimed he had never met Zala, but he had talked to him on the
telephone. No, he did not have the number. No, he could not say who had set up
the contact.
Svensson had been struck by the realization that Sandström was terrified. It was a
terror beyond the threat of exposure. He was afraid for his life. Why?
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