She bent to pick up the test, sat down at the desk and scribbled out some answers. Then she pressed the intercom button by the steel door. Olsen picked up after a long interval, sounding nervous. She said she needed to talk to him right away.
“It’s important,” she said.
CHAPTER 2
June 12
Olsen wanted to go home. He wanted to get away. But first he had to do his shift and deal with his paperwork and call his nine-year-old daughter, Vilda, to say good night. His mother’s sister Kerstin was looking after her and, as always, he had told his aunt to lock the apartment using the extra security lock.
Olsen had been head of the maximum security unit at Flodberga for twelve years and had long been proud of his position. He was a compassionate person who sided with the underdog. As a young man he had even rescued his mother from alcoholism. So it was no surprise that he joined the prison service and before long made a name for himself. But by now there was very little left of his youthful idealism.
The first major blow came early. His wife left him—and their daughter—to move to Åre with her former boss. But in the end it was Benito who robbed him of his illusions. He used to say that there is some good in every criminal. But although boyfriends, girlfriends, lawyers, therapists, forensic psychiatrists and even a couple of priests had done their utmost, there was no good to be found in Benito.
She was originally called Beatrice, and later took the name of a certain Italian fascist. These days she had a swastika tattooed on her throat, a crew cut and an unhealthy, pallid complexion. Yet she was by no means hideous to look at. She was built like a wrestler, but there was something graceful about her. Quite a few people were captivated by her imposing manner. Most were simply terrified.
Benito had—so it was rumoured—murdered three people with a pair of daggers she called Kerises, and there was so much talk about them that they became part of the menacing atmosphere in the unit. Everyone said the worst that could happen was for Benito to pronounce that she had her dagger pointed at you, because then you were sentenced to death, or already as good as dead. Most of that was bullshit, of course, but even though the knives were a safe distance from the prison, the myths surrounding them spread terror along the corridor. It was a disgrace, a major scandal. Olsen had, in effect, capitulated.
He should have been well equipped to deal with her. He was six foot four, 194 pounds, and his body was fit and toned. As a teenager he had beaten up any bastard who tried to get at his mother. But he did have one weak point: he was a single father. A year ago Benito had come up to him in the prison garden and whispered a chillingly accurate description of every passageway and set of stairs Olsen would take each morning when he dropped his daughter in class 3A on the third floor of Fridhemsskolan in Örebro.
“I’ve got my dagger pointed at your little girl,” she said.
And that was all it took. Olsen lost his grip on the unit and the decay spread down the hierarchy. He did not doubt that some of his colleagues—that coward Fred Strömmer, for instance—had become downright corrupt. Things were never worse than now, during the summer, when the prison was full of incompetent, frightened temporary staff. Tension rose in the oxygen-starved corridors. Olsen lost count of the number of times he had vowed to restore order. Yet he succeeded in doing nothing at all. The situation was not helped by the fact that the prison governor, Rikard Fager, was an idiot. Fager cared only about the façade, which was still nice and shiny, however rotten the inside.
Every afternoon Olsen succumbed to the paralyzing effect of Benito’s eyes, and in keeping with the psychology of oppression he became weaker every time he backed down, as if the blood were being drained from him. Worst of all, he was unable to protect Faria.
Faria had been sent to prison for killing her older brother: she pushed him through a large plate-glass window in the Stockholm suburb of Sickla. Yet there was no sign of anything aggressive or violent about her. Most of the time she sat in her cell and read or cried, and she was only in maximum security because she was both suicidal and under threat. She was a human wreck, abandoned by society. She had absolutely no swagger in the prison corridor, no steely look that would command respect, just a fragile beauty which drew the tormentors and sadists. Olsen loathed himself for not doing anything about it.
The only constructive thing he had attempted lately was to connect with the new arrival, Lisbeth Salander. No small task. Salander was a tough bitch and there was just as much talk about her as there was about Benito. Some admired Salander, others thought she was an arrogant little shit, and others still worried about losing their place in the hierarchy. Every muscle in Benito’s body was spoiling for a fight, and Olsen had no doubt she was collecting information on Salander through her contacts outside the prison walls, just as she had done on him and on everybody else of interest to her in the unit.
But so far nothing had happened, not even when Salander was given permission, despite her high-security classification, to work in the garden and ceramic workshop. Her ceramic vases were the worst he had ever seen. She was not exactly sociable either. She appeared to be living in a world of her own and ignored any looks or remarks that came her way, including furtive shoving and punches from Benito. Salander shook them off as if they were dust or bird droppings.
The only one she looked out for was Faria Kazi. Salander kept a close eye on her and probably understood how serious the situation was. This could lead to some sort of confrontation. Olsen could not be sure, but it was a constant anxiety.
—
Olsen was proud of the programmes he had drawn up for each inmate. No-one was automatically put to work. Each prisoner got her own schedule—depending on her individual problems and needs. Some inmates studied full- or part-time and were offered vocational guidance; others were in rehabilitation programmes and had sessions with psychologists and counsellors. Judging by Salander’s file, they should be giving her a chance to complete her education. She had not been to secondary school or even finished primary school and, except for a brief spell working for a security company, she did not seem to have held any real job. She had had a string of run-ins with the authorities, although this was her first prison sentence. In fact it would be easy to dismiss her as an idler, but that was clearly not an accurate picture. Not just because the evening papers described her as some sort of action hero. It was her general appearance, and one incident in particular, that stuck in his mind.
That episode was the only positive, surprising thing that had happened in the unit for the past year. It had taken place a few days before, in the dining hall after the early dinner. It was 5:00 p.m. and rain was falling outside. The prisoners had cleared their plates and glasses, washed and tidied the dishes, and Olsen had been sitting by himself in a chair next to the sink. He really had no business being there; he took his meals with the staff in another part of the prison and the inmates looked after the dining hall themselves. Josefin and Tine—allies of Benito’s—were given the privilege of looking after the catering. They had their own budget, ordered supplies, kept the place clean and saw to it that there was enough food for everyone. In prison, food means power, and it was inevitable that people like Benito got more while others got less. Which was why Olsen liked to keep an eye on the kitchen. The unit’s only knife was stored there too. It was not sharp and it was attached to a steel wire, but it could still cause damage. On that particular day he kept looking over at it while trying to do some work.
Olsen badly wanted to get away from Flodberga. He wanted a better job. But for a man without a college education who had only ever worked in the prison service, there were not so many options. He had signed up for a correspondence course in business administration and—with the smell of potato pancakes and jam still hanging in the air—now began to read up on the pricing of stock options in the security markets, even if he could not understand much and had no clue how to do the exercises in the teaching manual. That was when Salander came in to help herself to more food.<
br />
She was looking down at the floor and seemed sulky and detached. Since Olsen had no desire to make a fool of himself with yet another failed attempt at establishing contact, he kept working at his calculations. He was rubbing things out and scribbling revisions, and this obviously irritated her. She came closer and glowered, which embarrassed him. It was not the first time he had felt embarrassed around her. He was about to get up and go back to his office when Salander seized his pencil and scrawled some figures in his book.
“Black-Scholes equations are over-rated crap when the market is as volatile as it is now,” she said and walked off as if he didn’t exist.
—
It was later in the evening, as he sat by his computer, that he realized not only had she given the right answers to his exercises in no time at all, she had also, with a natural authority, trashed a Nobel Prize–winning model for the valuation of financial derivatives. This was different from the humiliation and defeat he normally suffered in the unit. His dream was that this would be the beginning of a connection between the two of them, maybe even a turning point in her own life where she would recognize how talented she was.
He thought for a long time about his next move. How could he boost her motivation? Then an idea came to him—an I.Q. test. There was a stack of old test papers in his office; various forensic psychiatrists had used them to assess the degree of psychopathy and alexithymia and narcissism—and whatever else—they thought Benito might be suffering from.
Olsen had tried a number of the evaluations himself and concluded that someone who solved mathematical problems as easily as Salander could reasonably be expected to do well on the test. Who knows, it might actually come to mean something to her. And so he had waited for her in the corridor at what he thought was a good time. He even imagined he could see a new openness in her face, and paid her a compliment. He felt sure he had gotten through to her.
She took the test papers from him. But then the train came clanging by, and as her body stiffened and a dark look came into her eyes, all he could do was stammer and let her turn away. He ordered his colleagues to lock the cells while he went into his office behind a massive glass door in the so-called administration section. Olsen was the only member of the staff with his own room. Its windows overlooked the exercise yard with its steel fence and grey concrete wall. It was not much larger than the cells and no more pleasant either, but it did have a computer with an Internet connection and a couple of C.C.T.V. monitors, as well as a few bits and pieces which made the room feel cosier.
It was 7:45 p.m. The cells were locked. The train was gone, racing towards Stockholm, and his colleagues were sitting in the coffee room chatting. He himself was writing in the diary he kept about life in the prison. It did not make him feel any better; his diary entries were no longer entirely truthful. He looked over at the bulletin board, at the pictures of Vilda and of his mother, who had been dead for four years now.
Outside, the garden lay like an oasis in the barren prison landscape. There was not a cloud in the sky. He looked at his watch. It was time to call home and say good night to Vilda. He was just picking up the phone when the intercom alarm went off. The display showed that the call came from cell number seven, Salander’s, which both intrigued him and made him anxious. The inmates knew they were not to disturb the staff unnecessarily. Salander had never before used the alarm. Nor did she strike him as someone quick to complain. Could something have happened?
He spoke into the intercom. “What’s the matter?”
“Come here. It’s important.”
“What’s so important?”
“You gave me an I.Q. test, didn’t you?”
“Right, I thought you’d be good at it.”
“Could you check my answers?”
Again Olsen looked at his watch. Surely to God she couldn’t have finished the test already?
“Let’s wait until tomorrow,” he said. “Then you’ll have time to go through your answers more carefully.”
“That would be like cheating, I’d have an unfair advantage,” she said.
“Fine, I’m coming,” he said after a pause.
Why had he agreed? Immediately he wondered if he was being rash. On the other hand, he would regret not going, given how badly he wanted her to find the test stimulating.
He retrieved the crib sheet from his desk’s bottom-right-hand drawer and when he was sure he looked presentable, he opened the sally port gates leading to the maximum security unit using his chip card and personal code. Walking along the corridor, he glanced up at the black cameras in the ceiling and felt along his belt. Pepper spray and truncheon, his bunch of keys and a radio, plus the grey box with the alarm button. He may have been hopelessly idealistic, but he was not naïve. Prisoners could put on an obsequious, pleading act, only to manipulate the shirt off your back. Olsen was always on his guard.
As he approached the cell door he grew more anxious. Maybe he should have brought a colleague with him, as regulations required. However intelligent Salander might be, she could not possibly have churned out the answers that quickly. She had to have a hidden agenda—he was by now convinced of that. He opened the hatch in her cell door and looked inside. Salander was standing by her desk and gave him a smile, or something close to a smile, which restored his cautious optimism.
“OK, I’m coming in. Keep your distance.”
He rolled back the locks, still prepared for anything, but nothing happened. Salander was stock-still.
“So?” he said.
“Interesting test,” she said. “Will you check it for me?”
“I have the answers here.” He waved the crib sheet, and added: “You did it really fast, so don’t be disappointed if the result isn’t great.”
He tried a tentative grin and she smiled again. But this time it made him uncomfortable. She seemed to be scrutinizing him, and he didn’t like the scheming look in her eye. Was she up to something? It would not surprise him at all if some infernal plan was being hatched. On the other hand, she was small and skinny. He was much bigger, armed and trained to deal with critical situations. There was no danger, surely.
With some apprehension he took the test papers from Salander, smiling awkwardly, and glanced through the answers while keeping a careful eye on her. Perhaps there was nothing to be concerned about after all. She looked expectantly at him, as if to say: Am I good, or what?
Her handwriting was appalling. The test papers were covered in smudged, hurried scrawls. Without lowering his guard, he compared her answers, one by one, with the crib sheet. At first he simply noted that she seemed to have gotten most of it right. Then he could not help but be utterly amazed. She had correctly answered even the most difficult questions, the ones towards the end, and he had never heard of that before. He was just about to say something effusive when all of a sudden he found himself unable to breathe.
CHAPTER 3
June 12
Salander examined Olsen with care. He seemed to be on the alert. He was tall and fit, and had a truncheon, pepper spray and a remote alarm hanging from his belt. He would probably sooner die of shame than let himself be overpowered, but she knew he had his weaknesses.
He had the same weaknesses all men had, and he was burdened with guilt. Guilt and shame—she could take advantage of both. She would hit him, put pressure on him, and Olsen would get what he deserved. She scrutinized his eyes and stomach. His abdomen was not an ideal target, it was hard and muscular. In fact it was a bloody washboard. But even abs like that can be vulnerable, so she waited and eventually got her reward.
Olsen gasped, perhaps in surprise. As he breathed out, the alertness left his body and at that precise instant Salander punched him in the solar plexus. She punched twice, hard and unerringly, and then she took aim at his shoulder, at the exact point her boxing trainer Obinze had shown her. She struck him again with a wild and brutal force.
She realized at once that she had hit her target. The shoulder was dislocated and Olsen double
d over, panting, unable even to scream. He was struggling to stay on his feet. After only a second or two he toppled and collapsed onto the concrete floor with a dull thud. Salander stepped forward. She had to make sure he would not do anything silly with his hands.
“Quiet,” she said.
It was an unnecessary command. Olsen was incapable of emitting even a squeak. The air had gone out of him. His shoulder throbbed with pain and he could see a flickering light above him.
“If you behave yourself and don’t touch your belt, I won’t hit you again,” Salander said, and snatched the I.Q. test out of his hand.
Olsen thought he could make out sounds from beyond the cell door. Was it a television in a neighbouring cell? Or some colleagues talking in the corridor? Impossible to tell; he was too dazed. He considered screaming for help. But the pain had invaded his mind, and he could not think straight. He had only a blurred vision of Salander and felt frightened and confused. His hand may have moved towards the alarm, more as a reflex than in any conscious act. But it never got there. There was another blow to his stomach and he curled up in a fetal position and gasped for air.
“You see?” Salander said quietly. “Not a good idea. But I don’t really like hurting you. Weren’t you a little hero once upon a time, who saved his mother or something? That’s what I heard. Now this unit of yours has gone to hell, and you left Faria Kazi in the lurch—again. I have to warn you, I don’t like it.”
He could think of nothing to say.
“That woman has been through enough. It’s got to stop,” she said, and Olsen nodded without really knowing why. “We’re already seeing eye to eye. Did you read about me in the papers?”
He nodded again, now keeping his hands well away from his belt.
“Good. Then you know that I stop at nothing. And I mean, nothing. But maybe we can make a deal.”
“What?” He barely managed to utter the word.
“I’ll help you get this place back into shape and make sure Benito and her sidekicks don’t come anywhere near Faria Kazi, and you…you’re going to lend me a computer.”
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye Page 2
