The Girl who played with Fire m(-2

by Stieg Larsson

  Just as Blomkvist got to him he turned and gave him a powerful backhand across the face. Blomkvist was completely unprepared. He tumbled headlong down the steps.

  Salander heard Blomkvist’s stifled cry and almost stopped. What the hell is going on? But when she turned she saw Lundin only a hundred feet from her. He’s faster. Shit, he’s going to catch me.

  She turned left and ran up several steps to the terrace between two buildings. She reached a courtyard that did not present the least cover and ran as fast as she could to the next corner. She turned right and realized just in time that she would be heading into a blind alley. As she reached the end of the next building she saw Lundin arrive at the top of the steps to the courtyard. She kept running – out of his sight – for another few yards and dived headfirst into a rhododendron bush alongside the building.

  She heard Lundin’s heavy footsteps, but she could not see him. She held her breath, pressing herself into the soil beneath the bush.

  Lundin passed her hiding place and stopped. He hesitated for ten seconds before jogging around the courtyard. A minute later he came back. He stopped at the same place as before. This time he stood still for thirty seconds. Salander tensed her muscles, poised for instant flight if she were discovered. Then he moved again, passing less than six feet from her. She listened to his steps fade away across the courtyard.

  Blomkvist felt pain in his neck and jaw as he got laboriously to his feet, feeling dizzy. He tasted blood from a split lip.

  He made his way unsteadily to the top of the steps and looked around. He saw the man with the ponytail running a hundred yards further down the street. The man stopped and peered between the buildings, and then ran across Lundagatan and climbed into the Dodge van. The vehicle sped off towards Zinkensdamm.

  Blomkvist walked slowly along the upper part of Lundagatan, looking for Salander. He could not see her anywhere. There was not a living soul. He was astonished how desolate a street in Stockholm can be at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning in March. After a while he went back to the front door of Salander’s apartment building on lower Lundagatan. As he passed the car where the attack had taken place he stepped on a key ring. He bent to pick it up and saw a shoulder bag under the car.

  Blomkvist stood there a long time, waiting, unsure what to do. At last he tried the keys in her door. They did not fit.

  Salander stayed under the bush for fifteen minutes, moving only to look at her watch. Just after 3:00 she heard a door open and close and footsteps making for the bicycle shed in the courtyard.

  When the sound died away she raised herself slowly to her knees and peered out of the bush. She looked steadily at every nook and cranny in the courtyard, but she saw no sign of Lundin. She walked back to the street, prepared to turn tail at any moment. She stopped at the top of the wall and looked out over Lundagatan, where she saw Blomkvist outside her apartment building. He was holding her bag in his hand.

  She stood perfectly still, hidden behind a lamppost when Blomkvist’s gaze swept over the stairs and the wall. He did not see her.

  Blomkvist stood outside her door for almost half an hour. She watched him patiently, without moving, until finally he gave up and headed down the hill towards Zinkensdamm. When he was gone she began to think about what had happened.

  Kalle Blomkvist.

  She could not for the life of her imagine how he had sprung up out of nowhere. Apart from that, the attack was not difficult to account for.

  Carl Fucking Magnus Lundin.

  Lundin had met the hulk she had seen talking to Bjurman.

  Nils Fucking Slimebag Bjurman.

  That piece of shit has hired some diabolical alpha male to get me out of the way. And I made it crystal clear to him what the consequences would be.

  Salander was seething inside. She was so enraged that she tasted blood in her mouth. Now she was going to have to punish him.

  PART 3. Absurd Equations

  March 23 – April 3

  Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities.

  (a + b) (a − b) = a2 − b2 + 1

  CHAPTER 11

  Wednesday, March 23 – Maundy Thursday, March 24

  Blomkvist took his red pen and in the margin of Svensson’s manuscript drew a question mark with a circle around it and wrote “footnote.” He wanted a source reference inserted.

  It was Wednesday, the evening before Maundy Thursday, and Millennium was more or less closed down for Easter week. Nilsson was out of the country. Karim had gone to the mountains with her husband. Cortez had come in to deal with telephone messages for a few hours, but Blomkvist sent him home since nobody was calling. Cortez left smiling happily, on his way to see a new girlfriend.

  Svensson had not been around. Blomkvist sat in the office alone, plodding through his manuscript. The book was going to be twelve chapters and 288 pages long. Svensson had delivered the final text of nine of the twelve chapters, and Blomkvist had been over every word and given the hard copy back with requests for clarification and suggestions for reworking.

  Svensson was a talented writer, and Blomkvist confined his editing for the most part to marginal notes. During the weeks when the manuscript had been growing on his desk they had disagreed about only one paragraph, which Blomkvist wanted to delete and Svensson fought tooth and nail to keep. It stayed in.

  In short, Millennium had an excellent book that would very soon be off to the printer. There was no doubt that it would make dramatic headlines. Svensson was merciless in his exposure of the johns, and he told the story in such a way that nobody could fail to understand that there was something wrong with the system itself. It was journalistic work of the type that should be on the endangered species list.

  Blomkvist had learned that Svensson was an exacting journalist who left very few loose ends. He did not employ the heavy-handed rhetoric typical of so much other social reporting, which turned texts into pretentious trash. His book was more than an exposé – it was a declaration of war. Blomkvist smiled to himself. Svensson was about fifteen years younger, but he recognized the passion that he himself had once had when he took up the lance against second-rate financial reporters and put together a scandalous book. Certain newsrooms had not forgiven him.

  The problem with Svensson’s book was that it had to be watertight. A reporter who sticks out his neck like that has to either stand behind his story 100 percent or refrain from publishing it. Right now Svensson was at 98 percent. There were still a few weak points that needed more work and one or two assertions that he had not adequately documented.

  At 5:30 p.m. Blomkvist opened his desk drawer and took out a cigarette. Berger had decreed a total ban in the office, but he was alone and nobody else was going to be there that weekend. He worked for another forty minutes before he gathered up the pages and put the chapter on Berger’s desk. Svensson had promised to email the final text of the remaining three chapters the following morning, which would give Blomkvist a chance to go through them over the weekend. A summit meeting was planned for the Tuesday after Easter when they would all sign off on the final version of the book and the Millennium articles. After that only the layout remained, which was Malm’s headache alone, and then it would go to the printer. Blomkvist had not sought bids from different printers; he would entrust the job to Hallvigs Reklam in Morgongåva. They had printed his book about the Wennerström affair and had given him a damn good price and first-rate service.

  Blomkvist looked at the clock and decided to reward himself with another cigarette. He sat at the window and stared down on Götgatan. He ran his tongue over the cut on the inside of his lip. It was beginning to heal.

  He wondered for the thousandth time what really had happened outside Salander’s building early on Sunday morning.

  All he knew for certain was that Salander was alive and back in Stockholm.

  He had tried to reach her every day since then. He had sent emails to the address she had used more than a year ago. He had walked up and
down Lundagatan. He was beginning to despair.

  The nameplate on the door now read SALANDER-WU. There were 230 people with the surname Wu on the electoral roll, of whom about 140 lived in and around Stockholm, none of them on Lundagatan. Blomkvist had no idea whether she had a boyfriend or had rented out the apartment. No-one came to the door when he knocked.

  Finally he went back to his desk and wrote her a good old-fashioned letter:

  Hello, Sally,

  I don’t know what happened a year ago, but by now even a numbskull like me has worked out that you’ve cut off all contact. It’s for you to decide who you hang around with, and I don’t mean to nag. I just want to tell you that I still think of you as my friend, that I miss your company and would love to have a cup of coffee with you – if you felt like it.

  I don’t know what kind of a mess you’ve got yourself into, but the ruckus on Lundagatan was alarming. If you need help you can call me anytime. As you know, I am deeply in your debt.

  Plus, I have your shoulder bag. When you want it back, just let me know. If you don’t want to see me, just give me an address to mail it to. I promise not to bother you, since you’ve indicated clearly enough that you don’t want anything to do with me.

  Mikael

  As anticipated he never heard a word from her.

  When he had got home the morning after the attack on Lundagatan, he opened the shoulder bag and spread the contents on the kitchen table. There was a wallet with an ID card, about 600 kronor, 200 American dollars, and a monthly travel card. There was a pack of Marlboro Lights, three Bic lighters, a box of throat lozenges, a packet of tissues, a toothbrush, toothpaste, three tampons in a side pocket, an unopened pack of condoms with a price sticker that showed they were bought at Gatwick Airport in London, a bound notebook with stiff black A4 dividers, five ballpoint pens, a can of Mace, a small bag with makeup, an FM radio with an earphone but no batteries, and Saturday’s Aftonbladet.

  The most intriguing item was a hammer, easily accessible in an outside pocket. However, the attack had come so suddenly that she had not been able to make use of it or the Mace. She had evidently used her keys as brass knuckles – there were still traces of blood and skin on them.

  Of the six keys on the ring, three of them were typical apartment keys-front door, apartment door, and the key to a padlock. But none of them fit the door of the building on Lundagatan.

  Blomkvist opened the notebook and went through it page by page. He recognized Salander’s neat hand and could see at once that this was not a girl’s secret diary. Three-quarters of the pages were filled with what looked like mathematical notations. At the top of the first page was an equation that even Blomkvist recognized.

  (x3 + y3 = z3)

  Blomkvist had never had trouble doing calculations. He had left secondary school with the highest marks in math, which in no way meant, of course, that he was a mathematician, only that he had been able to absorb the content of the school’s curriculum. But Salander’s pages contained formulas of a type that Blomkvist neither understood nor could even begin to understand. One equation stretched across an entire double page and ended with things crossed out and changed. He could not even tell whether they were real mathematical formulas and calculations, but since he knew Salander’s peculiarities he assumed that the equations were genuine and no doubt had some esoteric meaning.

  He leafed back and forth for a long time. He might as well have come upon a notebook full of Chinese characters. But he grasped the essentials of what she was trying to do. She had become fascinated by Fermat’s Last Theorem, a classic riddle. He let out a deep sigh.

  The last page in the book contained some very brief and cryptic notes which had absolutely nothing to do with math, but nevertheless still looked like a formula:

  (Blond Hulk + Magge) = NEB

  They were underlined and circled and meant nothing to him. At the bottom of the page was a telephone number and the name of a car rental company in Eskilstuna, Auto-Expert.

  Blomkvist made no attempt to interpret the notes. He stubbed out his cigarette and put on his jacket, set the alarm in the office, and walked to the terminal at Slussen, where he took the bus out to the yuppie reserve in Stäket, near Lännersta Sound. He had been invited to dinner with his sister, Annika Blomkvist Giannini, who was turning forty-two.

  Berger began her long Easter weekend with a furious and anxiety-filled two-mile jog that ended at the steamboat wharf in Saltsjöbaden. She had been lazy about her hours at the gym and felt stiff and out of shape. She walked home. Her husband was giving a lecture at the Modern Museum and it would be at least 8:00 before he got home. Berger thought she would open a bottle of good wine, switch on the sauna, and seduce him. At least it would stop her thinking about the problem that was worrying her.

  A week earlier she had had lunch with the CEO of the biggest media company in Sweden. Over salad he had set forth in all seriousness his intention to recruit her as editor in chief of the company’s largest daily newspaper, the Svenska Morgon-Posten. The board has discussed several possibilities, but we are agreed that you would be a great asset to the paper. You’re the one we want. Attached to the offer was a salary that made her income at Millennium look ridiculous.

  The offer had come like a bolt of lightning out of a clear blue sky, and it left her speechless. Why me?

  He had been oddly vague, but gradually the explanation emerged that she was known, respected, and a certifiably talented editor. They were impressed by the way she had dragged Millennium out of the quicksand it had been in two years earlier. The Svenska Morgon-Posten needed to be revitalized in the same way. There was an old-man atmosphere about the newspaper that was causing a steady decline in the new-subscriber rate. Berger was a powerful journalist. She had clout. Putting a woman – a feminist no less – in charge of one of Sweden’s most conservative and male-dominated institutions was a provocative and bold idea. Everyone was agreed. Well, almost everyone. The ones who counted were all on his side.

  “But I don’t share the basic political views of the newspaper.”

  “Who cares? You’re not an outspoken opponent either. You’re going to be the boss – not an apparatchik – and the editorial page will take care of itself.”

  He hadn’t said it in so many words, but it was also a matter of class. Berger came from the right background.

  She had told him that she was certainly attracted by the proposal but that she could not give him an answer immediately. She was going to have to think the matter through. But they agreed that she would give them her decision sooner rather than later. The CEO had explained that if the salary offer was the reason for her hesitation, she was probably in a position to negotiate an even higher figure. A strikingly generous golden parachute would also be included. It’s time for you to start thinking about your pension plan.

  Her forty-fifth birthday was coming up. She had done her apprenticeship as a trainee and a temp. She had put together Millennium and become its editor in chief on her own merits. The moment when she would have to pick up the telephone and say yes or no was fast approaching, and she did not know what she was going to do. During the past week she had considered time and again discussing the matter with Blomkvist, but she had not been able to summon up the nerve. Instead she had been hiding the offer from him, which gave her a pang of guilt.

  There were some obvious disadvantages. A yes would mean breaking up the partnership with Blomkvist. He would never follow her to the Svenska Morgon-Posten, no matter how sweet a deal she or they could offer him. He did not need the money now, and he was getting on fine writing articles at his own pace.

  Berger liked being editor in chief of Millennium. It had given her a status within the world of journalism that she considered almost undeserved. She had never been the producer of the news. That was not her thing – she regarded herself as a mediocre writer. On the other hand, she was first-rate on radio or TV, and above all she was a brilliant editor. Besides, she enjoyed the hands-on work of editing
, which was a prerequisite for the post of editor in chief at Millennium.

  Nevertheless, she was tempted. Not so much by the salary as by the fact that the job meant that she would become without question one of Sweden’s big-time media players. This is a once-in-a-lifetime offer, the CEO had said.

  Somewhere near the Grand Hotel in Saltsjöbaden she realized to her dismay that she was not going to be able to turn the offer down. And she shuddered at the thought of having to tell Blomkvist.

  Dinner at the Gianninis’ was, as always, mildly chaotic. Annika had two children: Monica, thirteen, and Jennie, ten. Her husband, Enrico, who was the head of the Scandinavian arm of an international biotech firm, had custody of Antonio, his sixteen-year-old son from his first marriage. Also at dinner were Enrico’s mother Antonia, his brother Pietro, his sister-in-law Eva-Lotta, and their children Peter and Nicola. Plus Enrico’s sister Marcella and her four kids, who lived in the same neighbourhood. Enrico’s aunt Angelina, who was regarded by the family as stark raving mad, or on good days just extremely eccentric, had also been invited, along with her new boyfriend.

  At the dining-room table, abundant with food, the conversation went on in a rattling mixture of Swedish and Italian, sometimes simultaneously. The situation was made more annoying because Angelina spent the evening wondering out loud – to anyone who would listen – why Annika’s brother was still a bachelor. She also proposed a number of suitable solutions to his problem from among the daughters of her friends. Exasperated, Blomkvist finally explained that he would be happy to get married but that unfortunately his lover was already married. That shut up even Angelina for a while.

  At 7:30 Blomkvist’s mobile beeped. He’d thought he had shut it off and he almost missed the call as he dug it out of the inside pocket of his jacket, which someone had hung on the coatrack in the hall. It was Svensson.

  “Am I interrupting something?”