Stieg Larsson - The Girl who played with Fire

“So how did you end up beating him?”

“People with this disease can in fact be injured just like anyone else. Forget that Niedermann seems to have bones of concrete. But when I whacked him with a plank on the back of his head he dropped like a rock. He was probably concussed.”

Berger looked at Eriksson.

“I’ll call Mikael,” Eriksson said.

Blomkvist heard his mobile go off, but he was so stunned that he did not answer until the fifth ring.

“Hi, it’s Malin. Paolo Roberto thinks he’s identified the giant.”

“That’s good,” Blomkvist said absentmindedly.

“Where are you?”

“That’s hard to say.”

“You sound funny.”

“Sorry. What did you say?”

Eriksson summed up Paolo Roberto’s story.

“Follow up on it,” Blomkvist said, “and see if you can find him in some database. I think it’s urgent. Call me on my mobile.”

To Eriksson’s surprise, he disconnected without even saying goodbye.

Blomkvist was standing at that moment by a window, looking out at a magnificent view that stretched far from Gamla Stan towards Saltsjön. He felt numb. There was a kitchen off the hall to the right of the front door. Then there was a living room, an office, a bedroom, and even a small guest room that seemed not to have been used. The mattress was still in its plastic wrapper and there were no sheets. All the furniture was brand-new, straight from IKEA.

What floored Blomkvist was that Salander had bought the pied-à-terre that had belonged to Percy Barnevik, a captain of industry. The apartment was about 3,800 square feet and worth twenty-five million kronor.

Blomkvist wandered through deserted, almost eerily empty corridors and rooms with patterned parquet floors of different kinds of wood, and Tricia Guild wallpaper of the type that Berger had at one time coveted. At the centre of the apartment was a wonderfully bright living room with an open fireplace, but Salander seemed never to have had a fire. There was an enormous balcony with a fantastic view. There was a laundry room, a sauna, a gym, storage rooms, and a bathroom with a king-size bath. There was even a wine cellar, which was empty except for an unopened bottle of Quinta do Noval port – Nacional! – from 1976. Blomkvist struggled to imagine Salander with a glass of port in her hand. An elegant card indicated that it had been a moving-in present from the estate agent.

The kitchen contained all manner of equipment, with a shiny French gourmet stove with a gas oven as the focus. Blomkvist had never before set eyes on a La Cornue Château 120. Salander probably used it for boiling tea water.

On the other hand he admired with awe the espresso machine on its own separate table. She had a Jura Impressa X7 with an attached milk cooler. The machine looked barely used and had probably been in the kitchen when she bought the apartment. Blomkvist knew that a Jura was the espresso equivalent of a Rolls-Royce – a professional machine for domestic use that cost in the neighbourhood of 70,000 kronor. He had an espresso machine that he had bought at John Wall, which had cost around 3,500 kronor – one of the few extravagances he had allowed himself for his own household, and a fraction of the grandeur of Salander’s machine.

The refrigerator contained an open milk carton, some cheese, butter, caviar, and a half-empty jar of pickled gherkins. The kitchen cupboard contained four half-empty jars of vitamins, tea bags, coffee for an ordinary coffeemaker, two loaves of bread, and a packet of crispbreads. On the kitchen table was a bowl of apples. There were three ham pies and a fish casserole in the freezer. That was all the food he found in the apartment. In the trash under the counter next to the stove he saw several empty packages for Billy’s Pan Pizza.

The arrangement was all out of proportion. Salander had stolen several billion kronor and bought herself an apartment with space for an entire court. But she only needed the three rooms she had furnished. The other eighteen rooms were empty.

Blomkvist ended his tour in her office. There were no flowers anywhere. There were no paintings or even posters on the walls. There were no rugs or wall hangings. He could not see a single decorative bowl, candlestick, or even a knickknack that had been saved for sentimental reasons.

Blomkvist felt as if someone were squeezing his heart. He felt that he had to find Salander and hold her close.

She would probably bite him if he tried.

Fucking Zalachenko.

Then he sat down at her desk and opened the folder with Björck’s report from 1991. He did not read it all, but skimmed through it, trying to absorb the essentials.

He booted up her PowerBook with the 17-inch screen, 200 GB hard drive, and 1,000 MB of RAM. It was empty. She had wiped it. That was ominous.

He opened her desk drawer and found a 9 mm Colt 1911 Government single-action with a fully loaded magazine, seven rounds. It was the pistol Salander had taken from the journalist Sandström, though Blomkvist knew nothing about that. He had not yet reached the letter S on the list of johns.

Then he found a DVD marked BJURMAN.

He stuck it into his iBook and watched its contents with horror. He sat in stunned silence as he saw Salander beaten up, raped, almost murdered. The film seemed to have been made with a hidden camera. He did not watch it all but skipped from one section to the next, each worse than the last.

Bjurman.

Salander’s guardian had raped her, and she had documented the event to the final detail. A digital date showed that the film had been recorded two years earlier. That was before he met her. Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

Björck and Bjurman together with Zalachenko in the seventies.

Zalachenko and Salander and a Molotov cocktail made from a milk carton in the early nineties.

Then Bjurman again, now her guardian, having replaced Palmgren. The circle had been closed. Bjurman had attacked his ward. He had treated her as a mentally ill, defenceless girl, but Salander was anything but defenceless. She was the girl who at the age of twelve had gone to war with a hit man who had defected from the GRU, and she had crippled him for life.

Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.

He thought back to the time when he had come to know her in Hedestad. It must have been a matter of months after the rape. He could not recall that she had hinted by so much as a single word that any such thing had happened to her. She had not revealed much at all about herself. Blomkvist could not guess what she had done to Bjurman – but she had not killed him. Oddly enough. Otherwise Bjurman would have been dead two years ago. She must have been controlling him in some way and for some purpose that he could not begin to understand. Then he realized that he had the means of her control right there on the desk. The DVD. As long as she had that, Bjurman was her helpless slave. And Bjurman had turned to the man he supposed was an ally. Zalachenko. Her worst enemy. Her father.

Then a whole chain of events. Bjurman had been shot first, then Svensson and Johansson.

But how? What could have made Svensson such a threat?

And suddenly he knew what must have happened in Enskede.

Blomkvist found a piece of paper on the floor beneath the window. Salander had printed out a page, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it away. He smoothed it out. It was from Aftonbladet ’ s online edition about the kidnapping of Miriam Wu.

He did not know what role Wu had played in the drama – if any – but she had been one of Salander’s very few friends. Maybe her only friend. Salander had given her old apartment to her. Now she was lying in the hospital, badly beaten.