The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

by David Lagercrantz

  At midnight he gave up and took himself off to a quiet room with a book, Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues. He was a little surprised to find it on the shelves, and it meant the party ended up being fun for him after all. He dreamed his way into the jazz clubs of New Orleans and Chicago in the 1930s, and scarcely paid any attention to the shrieking and snaps-drinking songs coming from next door.

  Shortly after 1:00 a.m. Ivar Ögren stepped into the room, drunk as he always was at parties, dressed in a ridiculous black hat and a brown suit which strained across his midriff. Leo put his hands over his ears in case Ivar should shout or make some other foul racket, as he often did.

  “I’m taking your fiancée out in a rowing boat,” Ivar said.

  Mannheimer protested: “You’ve got to be joking. You’re drunk.” It did no good, but Ivar did at least put a life vest on Madeleine, as a concession. Mannheimer went onto the veranda and stared at the red jacket as it vanished over the water.

  The sea was calm. It was a clear summer’s night and there were stars in the sky. Ivar and Madeleine talked softly in the boat. Not that it made any difference, Mannheimer could hear every word anyway. It was just silly chatter. A new, more vulgar Madeleine was emerging, and that hurt. Then the boat disappeared further out and not even he could hear what they were saying. They were away for a few hours.

  By the time they returned, all the other guests had gone. It was beginning to get light and Mannheimer was standing on the shore with a lump in his throat. He could hear the boat being pulled up onto the shore and Madeleine coming unsteadily towards him. On the way home in a taxi, a wall seemed to rise between them and Mannheimer knew exactly what Ivar had said out there on the water. Nine days later, Madeleine packed her bags and left him. On November 21 that year, as snow fell over Stockholm and darkness settled over the country, she announced her engagement to Ivar Ögren.

  Mannheimer came down with something that his doctor described as a partial paralysis.

  Once he had recovered, he went back to the office and congratulated Ivar with a brotherly hug. He was at the engagement party and the wedding, and said a friendly hello to Madeleine whenever he bumped into her. He put on a cheerful face every damn day and gave the impression there was a lifelong bond of friendship between him and Ivar which could withstand any trials. But deep inside his thoughts were quite different. He was planning his revenge.

  Ivar, for his part, knew that he had won only a partial victory. Mannheimer was still a threat and a rival for the top job at Alfred Ögren. He made plans to crush Mannheimer once and for all.

  —

  Up on Hornsgatspuckeln Malin stopped for no apparent reason. It was far too hot to linger in the sunlight, but there they stood, uncertain, while people passed them and a car hooted in the distance. Malin said no more about her meeting with Mannheimer. She looked down towards Mariatorget.

  “Listen,” she said. “I need to go.”

  She gave him a distracted kiss, dashed down the stone steps to Hornsgatan and across to Mariatorget. Blomkvist stood in the same spot, hesitating. Then he took out his mobile and rang Erika Berger, his close friend and Millennium’s editor-in-chief.

  He told her that he would not be coming to the office for a few days. They had just put the July issue to bed. It would soon be Midsummer, and for the first time in years they had been able to afford two summer temps, which would help reduce their workload.

  “You sound miserable. Has anything happened?” Berger said.

  “There’s been a serious assault in Lisbeth’s unit at Flodberga.”

  “That’s too bad. Who was the victim?”

  “A gangster. It’s a pretty ugly business, and Lisbeth witnessed it.”

  “She usually knows what to do.”

  “Let’s hope so. But…could you help me with something else? Can you ask someone at the office, ideally Sofie, to go to the Stockholm City Archives tomorrow and get hold of the personal files of three people? If anyone asks, she can say we’re entitled to them on the basis of rights of public access to official records.”

  He gave Berger the names and national identity numbers, which he had made a note of on his phone.

  “Old Mannheimer,” Berger muttered. “Isn’t he dead and buried?”

  “Six years ago.”

  “I met him a couple of times when I was little. My father knew him vaguely. Has this got anything to do with Lisbeth?”

  “Possibly.”

  “In what way?”

  “I honestly don’t know. What was the old man like?”

  “Hard to say, given my age at the time, but he did have the reputation of being a bit of an old devil. Still, I remember him being quite nice. He asked me what kind of music I liked. He was good at whistling. Why are you interested in him?”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that too,” Blomkvist said.

  “OK, suit yourself,” Berger said and started to tell him something about the next issue and advertising sales.

  He was not really listening. He ended the call abruptly and continued up Bellmansgatan. He passed the Bishops Arms and walked down the steep cobbled street to his front door and up to his attic apartment. There he sat down at his computer and resumed his search online while downing a couple of Pilsner Urquells.

  His main focus was the accidental shooting in Östhammar, but he did not learn much more. He knew from experience that it was always difficult to find fresh information on old criminal cases. There were no digital archives that he could access—they were protected for public policy reasons—and, according to the record retention policy of the Swedish National Archives, files on preliminary court investigations were deleted after five years. He decided to go up to Uppsala district court the following day and have a hunt in their records. Afterwards, he could perhaps drop by the main police building there, or find some retired detective inspector who might remember the case. He would have to play it by ear.

  He also called Ellenor Hjort, the woman who had been engaged to Carl Seger. He realized at once that this topic was closed as far as she was concerned. She did not want to talk about Seger. She remained polite and accommodating, but said she could not bring herself to look into it any further: “I hope you understand.” Then she changed her mind and agreed to meet Blomkvist the following afternoon, not because of his old reporter’s charm or even her curiosity as to what he was looking for, but rather because of his bold gamble in dropping Leo Mannheimer’s name.

  “Leo,” she burst out. “My God! It’s been far too long. How is he?”

  Blomkvist said that he did not know. “Were you close to him?”

  “Oh yes, Carl and I were very fond of that boy.”

  After ending the call, he tidied up the kitchen and wondered if he should call Malin to try to tease out what she was puzzling over. Instead, he showered and got changed. Just before six he left his apartment and walked down to Zinkensdamm to meet his sister at Pane Vino.

  CHAPTER 9

  June 19

  She would deal with it. Martin did not need to worry, she said. It was their fourth phone conversation that day and she did not betray her impatience this time either. But as she hung up she muttered “wimp” and went through the kit that Benjamin, her loyal friend and assistant, had put together for her.

  Rakel Greitz was a psychoanalyst and an associate professor of psychiatry, known for a number of things but primarily for her sense of order. She was massively efficient and that had not changed since she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Now she had to start taking clinical cleanliness very seriously indeed, and she was positively manic about it. Every speck of dust vanished as if by magic and no tables or sinks were as clean as the ones she had come into contact with. She was seventy years old and ill, yet she was permanently on the go.

  Today the hours had flown by in a flurry of feverish activity. It was now 6:30 p.m. and much too late; she should have taken action right away. But it was always the same. Martin Steinberg was far too timid and she was glad sh
e had ignored his advice. Already that morning she had gotten to work on her contacts with the telephone companies and the home care providers. Still, a great deal could have happened since then. That old fool could have had a visitor and disclosed whatever it was he knew or suspected. Although the operation was a risk, it was the only option. There was too much to lose. Too many things had gone wrong in the agency she had been running.

  She squirted her hands with alcogel and went into the bathroom. She smiled into the mirror, if only to prove that she could still look happy. As Greitz saw it, what had happened had a silver lining. She had lived for so long in a tunnel of sickness and pain that what she now had to do gave her life an enhanced reality, a renewed sense of ceremony. Greitz had always enjoyed the feeling of vocation, of a higher purpose.

  She lived alone in a 1,162-square-foot apartment on Karlbergsvägen, in the Vasastan district of Stockholm. She had just finished a cycle of chemotherapy and, all things considered, was not feeling too bad. Her hair was sparser and thinner, but most of it was still there. The cold cap she had worn had worked. She was still good-looking, tall, slim and upright, with clean features and a natural authority which had been hers since she had graduated in medicine from the Karolinska Institute.

  She did have those flames on her throat, but although the birthmark had caused her all sorts of difficulties when she was young, she had come to appreciate it. She bore it with pride and even if nowadays she always wore a turtleneck, it was not because she felt shy or ashamed. It so happened that this style perfectly suited her reserved personality—dignified, never over-dressed. Greitz could still wear coats, skirts and trouser suits she had had made when she was young, and they had never needed altering. There was something cool and severe about her, and it was perhaps because of this that everybody made an extra effort in her presence. She was capable and quick, and she knew the value of loyalty to both ideas and people. She had never disclosed any professional secrets, not even to Erik, her late husband.

  She went onto the balcony and looked towards Odenplan. Her right hand resting on the railing was steady. She turned back into the apartment and tidied up a little more. She took out a brown-leather doctor’s bag from a cupboard in the hall and packed it with the items from Benjamin. Then she went back into the bathroom, this time to put on some make-up, and selected a cheap-looking black wig. She smiled again. Or perhaps it was a twitch. In spite of her experience, she suddenly felt nervous.

  —

  Blomkvist and his sister were at one of the outside tables at Pane Vino on Brännkyrkagatan. They had ordered truffle pasta and red wine, talked about the summer and the heat, and had shared their holiday plans. Giannini succinctly gave her brother some more information on the situation at Flodberga. And then at last she got on to the real reason for wanting to see him.

  “Sometimes, Mikael, the police are such idiots,” she said. “How familiar are you with the situation in Bangladesh?”

  “I wouldn’t say ‘familiar,’ but I do know a bit about it.”

  “Well, you’ll be aware at least that the predominant religion is Islam. According to the constitution, however, it’s a secular state which guarantees freedom of the press and freedom of speech. In theory that sounds perfectly feasible.”

  “But it isn’t really working, that I know.”

  “The government is under pressure from Islamists and has enacted legislation which prohibits any statement liable to offend religious sensibilities. You can stretch ‘liable’ to cover pretty much anything if you try hard enough. The laws have also been interpreted strictly and a string of writers have been sentenced to long prison terms. But that’s not the worst.”

  “The worst is surely that the law has legitimized the attacks on those writers.”

  “The law has put wind in the Islamists’ sails. Jihadists and terrorists have begun systematically to threaten, harass and murder dissidents, and very few of the perpetrators are prosecuted. The website Mukto-Mona has been particularly hard hit. Their objective is to promote freedom of expression, enlightenment and an open secular society. Quite a number of bloggers have been murdered, around thirty I think, and others have been threatened and named on death lists. Jamal Chowdhury was one of them. He was a young biologist who on occasion wrote about the theory of evolution for Mukto-Mona. Chowdhury was officially condemned to death by the country’s Islamist movement and fled to Sweden with the help of Swedish PEN. For a long time it seemed as if he could breathe easy again. He was depressed, but slowly he got better, and then one day he went to a seminar about the religious oppression of women at Kulturhuset.”

  “And that’s where he met Faria Kazi.”

  “Good, I see you’ve done your homework,” Giannini said. “Faria was sitting at the back of the room and she is—one can safely say—a very beautiful woman. Jamal couldn’t take his eyes off her and after the seminar he approached her. That was the start of not only a romance but also a tragedy, a modern Romeo and Juliet.”

  “In what sense?”

  “Faria and Jamal’s families are on opposite sides of the struggle. Jamal supported a free and open Bangladesh, while Faria’s father and brothers lined up with the country’s Islamists, especially once Faria had been promised against her will to Qamar Fatali.”

  “And who is that?”

  “A fat gentleman of forty-five or so who lives in a large house in Dhaka with a lot of servants. He not only owns a small textile business, but he also finances a number of qawmi in the country.”

  “Qawmi?”

  “Koranic schools which exist outside government control. There’s evidence to suggest that young jihadists receive their ideological training in some of them. Qamar Fatali already has a wife his own age but this spring he became enthralled by photographs of Faria and wished to have her as his second wife. As you can imagine, it wasn’t straightforward for him to get an entry visa to come and visit his prospective bride, and he became increasingly frustrated.”

  “Besides which, Jamal came onto the scene.”

  “Indeed, and Qamar and the Kazi brothers found themselves with at least two reasons to kill him.”

  “So Jamal didn’t take his own life, is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything yet, Mikael. I’m giving you some background—a brief account of what Lisbeth and I talked about. Jamal became the enemy, a Montague, if you like. Jamal was also a practising Muslim, but more liberal, and like his parents—both university professors—he believed human rights should be fundamental in any society. That was enough to make him an enemy of Qamar and the Kazi family. His love for Faria made him a private threat too, not only to the honour of her father and brothers but also to their financial prospects. There were clear motives to have him removed and Jamal realized early on that he was playing for high stakes. But he couldn’t avoid the risk. He writes about it in a diary found after the tragedy—which the police have had translated from Bengali and is referred to in the preliminary investigation into Jamal’s death. Can I read you a bit?”

  “Please do.”

  Blomkvist drank his Chianti while Giannini got the police report out of her briefcase and leafed through the bundle of papers.

  “Here,” she said. “Listen to this.”

  Ever since I had to watch my friends die and was forced to leave my homeland, it was as if the world became shrouded in ashes. I could no longer see any colour. There was no point in living.

  “That last sentence was later used to support the argument that he committed suicide in the tunnelbana,” she said. “But there’s more.”

  I still tried to find things to do and, one day in June, I went to listen to a debate in Stockholm on religious oppression. I wasn’t expecting much. Everything meaningful from my past now seemed irrelevant, and I couldn’t understand why the imam on stage still believed there was so much to fight for. I had given up. I’d plunged into a grave. I felt like I too had been killed.

  “He’s a bit melodramatic,” Giannini said ap
ologetically.

  “Not at all. Jamal was young, wasn’t he? We all write like that when we’re young. He reminds me of our poor colleague Andrei. Go on.”

  I thought I was dead and lost to the world. But then I saw a young woman in a black dress at the back of the hall. She had tears in her eyes and was so beautiful that it hurt to look at her. Life awakened in me again. It came back like an electric shock and I knew I had to speak to her. In some way I knew that we belonged together and that it was I and no-one else who could comfort her. I walked over and said something banal. I thought I had messed it up, but she smiled. We went out onto the square—as if we’d always known we would go out onto the square—and then we walked down a long pedestrian street past the parliament.

  “Well, I won’t continue. Jamal never could bring himself to discuss with anyone what happened to his friends on Mukto-Mona. But with Faria the story came streaming out—he tells her everything, that’s clear from the diary. After they’ve walked for a little more than half a mile, Faria says she has to rush off, takes his business card and promises to call soon. But she never does. Jamal waits and becomes desperate. He finds Faria’s mobile number on the Internet and leaves a message. He leaves four, five, six messages. Still no response. Then, a man phones Jamal and snarls at him, tells him he should never get in touch again. ‘Faria despises you, you shit,’ the man says, and that breaks Jamal. But after a while he becomes suspicious and does some investigating. He doesn’t grasp the full picture: that her father and brothers have taken Faria’s mobile and computer and that they’re checking her e-mails and calls and keeping her a prisoner in the apartment. But soon he understands that something is very wrong and he goes to see Imam Ferdousi, who says that he too is worried. Together they contact the authorities, but they don’t get any help. Nothing happens, not one single thing. Ferdousi visits the family himself, but is shown the door. Jamal is ready to turn the world upside down. But then…”