Millennium 02 - The Girl Who Played with Fire
Page 16
“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
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?
CHAPTER 10
Monday, March 14–Sunday, March 20
The journeys to and from Ersta were time-consuming and a hassle. In the middle of March Salander decided to buy a car. She started by acquiring a parking place, a much greater problem than buying the car itself.
She had a space in the garage beneath the building in Mosebacke, but she did not want anyone to be able to connect the car to where she lived on Fiskargatan. On the other hand, several years before she had put herself on a waiting list for a space in the garage of her old housing association apartment on Lundagatan. She called to find out where on the list she was now and was told that she was at the top. And not only that—at the end of the month there would be a spot free. Sweet. She called Mimmi and asked her to make a contract with the association right away. The next day she started hunting for a car.
She had the money to buy whatever Rolls-Royce or Ferrari she wanted, but she was not remotely interested in anything ostentatious. Instead she went to two dealers in Nacka and came away with a four-year-old burgundy Honda automatic. She spent an hour going over every detail, including the engine, to the salesman’s exasperation. On principle she talked the price down a couple of thousand and paid in cash.
Then she drove to Lundagatan, where she knocked on Mimmi’s door and gave her a set of keys. Sure, Mimmi could use the car if she asked in advance. Since the garage space would not be free until the end of the month, they parked on the street.
Mimmi was on her way to a date and a movie with a girlfriend Salander had never heard of. Since she was made up outrageously and dressed in something awful with what looked like a dog’s collar round her neck, Salander assumed it was one of Mimmi’s flames, and when Mimmi asked if she wanted to come along she said no thanks. She had no desire to end up in a threesome with one of Mimmi’s long-legged girlfriends who was no doubt unfathomably sexy but would make her feel like an idiot. Anyway, Salander had something to do in town, so they took the tunnelbana together to Hötorget, and there they parted.
Salander walked to OnOff on Sveavägen and made it with two minutes to spare before closing time. She bought a toner cartridge for her laser printer and asked them to take it out of the box so that it would fit in her backpack.
When she came out of the shop, she was thirsty and hungry. She walked to Stureplan, where she decided on Café Hedon, a place she had never been to before or even heard about. She instantly recognized Nils Bjurman from behind and turned right around in the doorway. She stood by the picture window facing the pavement and craned her neck so that she could observe her guardian from behind a serving counter.
The sight of Bjurman aroused no dramatic feelings in Salander, not anger, nor hatred, nor fear. As far as she was concerned, the world would assuredly be a better place without him, but he was alive only because she had decided that he would be more useful to her that way. She looked across at the man opposite Bjurman, and her eyes widened when he stood up. Click.
He was an exceptionally big man, at least six foot six and well built. Exceptionally well built, as a matter of fact. He had a weak face and short blond hair, but overall he made a very powerful impression.
Salander saw the man lean forward and say something quietly to Bjurman, who nodded. They shook hands and Salander noticed that Bjurman quickly drew his hand back.
What sort of guy are you and what business do you have with Bjurman?
Salander walked briskly down the street and stood under the awning of a tobacconist shop. She was looking at a newspaper headline when the blond man came out of Café Hedon and without looking around turned left. He passed less than a foot behind Salander. She gave him a good head start before she followed him.
It was not a long walk. The man went straight down into the tunnelbana station at Birger Jarlsgatan and bought a ticket at the gate. He waited on the southbound platform—the direction Salander was going anyway—and got on the Norsborg train. He got off at Slussen, changed to the green line towards Farsta, and got off again at Skanstull. From there he walked to Blomberg’s Café on Götgatan.
Salander stopped outside. She studied the man the blond hulk had come to meet. Click. Salander saw immediately that something sinister was going on. The man was overweight and had a narrow, untrustworthy face. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he had a mousy moustache. He wore a denim jacket, black jeans, and high-heeled boots. On the back of his right hand he had a tattoo, but Salander could not make out the design. He wore a gold chain around his wrist and was smoking Lucky Strikes. His gaze was glassy-eyed, like someone who got high too often
. Salander also noticed that he had a leather vest on under his jacket. She could tell he was a biker.
The giant did not order anything. He seemed to be giving instructions. The man in the denim jacket paid close attention but did not contribute to the conversation. Salander reminded herself that one day soon she should buy herself a shotgun mike.
After only five minutes the giant left Blomberg’s Café. Salander retreated a few paces, but he did not even look in her direction. He walked forty yards to the steps to Allhelgonagatan, where he got into a white Volvo. Salander managed to read his licence plate number before he turned at the next corner.
Salander hurried back to Blomberg’s, but the table was empty. She looked up and down the street but could not see the man with the ponytail. Then she caught a glimpse of him across the street as he pushed open the door to McDonald’s.
She had to go inside to find him again. He was sitting with another man who was wearing his vest outside his denim jacket. Salander read the words SVAVELSJö MC. The logo was a stylized motorcycle wheel that looked like a Celtic cross with an axe.
She stood on Götgatan for a minute before heading north. Her internal warning system had suddenly gone on high alert.
Salander stopped at the 7-Eleven and bought a week’s worth of food: a jumbo pack of Billy’s Pan Pizza, three frozen fish casseroles, three bacon pies, two pounds of apples, two loaves of bread, a pound of cheese, milk, coffee, a carton of Marlboro Lights, and the evening papers. She walked up Svartensgatan to Mosebacke and looked all around before she punched in the door code of her building. She put one of the bacon pies in the microwave and drank milk straight from the carton. She switched on the coffee machine and then booted up her computer, clicking on Asphyxia 1.3 and logging in to the mirrored copy of Bjurman’s hard drive. She spent the next half hour going through the contents of his computer.
She found absolutely nothing of interest. He seemed to use his email rarely; she discovered only a dozen brief personal messages to or from acquaintances. None of the emails had any connection to her.