Stieg Larsson - The Girl who played with Fire

“We ought to call Bublanski,” he said.

“No,” Palmgren said. “Neither Bublanski nor any other authority figure has ever lifted a finger to help her. Let her take care of her own affairs.”

Armansky looked at Salander’s former guardian. He was still amazed by the improvement in Palmgren’s condition compared with when he last saw him over Christmas. He still slurred his words, but he had a new vitality in his eyes. There was also a fury about the man that Armansky had never seen before. Palmgren told him the whole story that Blomkvist had pieced together. Armansky was shocked.

“She’s going to try to kill her father.”

“That’s possible,” Palmgren said calmly.

“Or else Zalachenko might try to kill her.”

“That’s also possible.”

“So we’re just supposed to wait?”

“Dragan… you’re a good person. But what Lisbeth Salander does or doesn’t do, whether she survives or whether she dies, is not your responsibility.”

Palmgren threw out his arms. All of a sudden he had rediscovered a coordination that he hadn’t had in a long time. It was as though the drama of the past few weeks had revived his dulled senses.

“I’ve never been sympathetic towards people who take the law into their own hands. But I’ve never heard of anyone who had such a good reason to do so. At the risk of sounding like a cynic, what happens tonight will happen, no matter what you or I think. It’s been written in the stars since she was born. And all that remains is for us to decide how we’re going to behave towards Lisbeth if she makes it back.”

Armansky sighed and looked grimly at the old lawyer.

“And if she spends the next ten years in prison, at least she was the one who chose that path. I’ll still be her friend,” Palmgren said.

“I had no idea you had such a libertarian view of humanity.”

“Neither did I,” he said.

Miriam Wu stared at the ceiling. She had the nightlight on and the radio was playing “On a Slow Boat to China ” at a low volume.

The day before she had woken to find herself in the hospital where Paolo Roberto had brought her. She slept and woke restlessly and went to sleep again with no real grasp of passing time. The doctors told her that she had a concussion. In any case she needed to rest. She had a broken nose, three broken ribs, and bruises all over her body. Her left eyebrow was so swollen that her eye was merely a slit. It hurt whenever she tried to change position. It hurt when she breathed in. Her neck was painful and she was wearing a brace, just to be on the safe side. But the doctors had assured her that she would make a complete recovery.

When she awoke towards evening, Paolo Roberto was sitting next to her bed. He grinned and asked how she felt. She wondered if she looked as awful as he did.

She asked questions and he answered them. For some reason it didn’t seem at all odd that he was a good friend of Salander’s. He was a cocky devil. Lisbeth liked cocky devils, just as she detested pompous jerks. There was only a subtle difference, but Paolo Roberto belonged to the former category.

She now had an explanation for why he had suddenly sprung out of nowhere into the warehouse, but she was surprised that he’d decided so stubbornly to pursue the van. And she was frightened by the news that the police were digging up bodies in the woods around the warehouse.

“Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life.”

He shook his head and sat quietly for a while.

“I tried to explain it to Blomkvist. He didn’t really get it. But I think you might understand since you box yourself.”

She knew what he meant. No-one who hadn’t been there would ever know what it was to fight a monster who couldn’t feel pain. She thought about how helpless she’d been.

After that she had just held his bandaged hand. They didn’t speak for a long time. There was nothing more to say. When she woke up, he was gone. She wished that Lisbeth would get in touch. She was the one Niedermann had been after.

Miriam was afraid that he would catch her.

Salander couldn’t breathe. She had no sense of time, but she knew that she had been shot, and she realized – more by instinct than by rational thought – that she was buried underground. Her left arm was unusable, she couldn’t move a muscle without waves of pain shooting through her shoulder, and she was floating in and out of a foggy consciousness. I have to get air. Her head was bursting with a throbbing pain the likes of which she had never felt before.

Her right hand had ended up underneath her face, and she began instinctively to nudge the earth away from her nose and mouth. It was sandy and relatively dry. She managed to create a space the size of her fist in front of her face.

How long she had been lying there buried she had no idea. But finally she formulated a lucid thought and it gripped her with panic. He buried me alive. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. A vast weight of soil held her bound to the primal rock.

She tried to move a leg, but she could scarcely tense her muscles. Then she made the mistake of trying to get up. She pressed down with her head to try to raise herself and the pain flew like an electric charge through her temples. I can’t throw up. She sank back into muddled consciousness.

When she could think again, she felt carefully to determine which parts of her body were functional. The only limb she could move an inch or two was her right hand, the one in front of her face. I have to get air. The air was above her, above the grave.

Salander began to scratch. She pressed down on her elbow and managed to make a little room to manoeuvre. With the back of her hand she enlarged the area in front of her face by pressing the dirt away from her. I need to dig.

She discovered that she had a cavity within her fetal position, between her elbows and her knees. That was where most of the air that was keeping her alive had been trapped. She began desperately twisting her upper body back and forth and felt how the soil ran into the space beneath her. The pressure on her chest lifted a little. She could move her arm.

Minute by minute she worked in a semiconscious state. She scratched sandy earth from her face and pressed handful after handful into the cavity beneath her. Gradually she managed to free her arm so that she could shift the soil away from the top of her head. Inch by inch she enlarged the space around her head. She felt something hard and was suddenly holding a small root or stick in her hand. She scratched upwards. The soil was still full of air and not very compact.

The fox paused by Salander’s grave on the way back to his den. He had found two field mice and was feeling satisfied when suddenly he sensed another presence. He froze and pricked up his ears. His whiskers and nose were quivering.

Salander’s fingers emerged like something dead from beneath the earth. Had there been any human watching, he would probably have reacted like the fox. He was gone like a shot.

Salander felt cool air stream down her arm. She could breathe again.

It took her half an hour more to free herself from the grave. She found it odd that she couldn’t use her left hand, but mechanically went on scratching at the dirt and sand with her right.

She needed something else to dig with. She pulled her arm down into the hole, got to her breast pocket and worked the cigarette case free. She opened it and used it as a scoop. She scraped soil loose and flicked it away. And then at last she could move her right shoulder and managed to press it upwards through the earth above her. Then she scraped more sand and dirt and eventually was able to straighten her head. She now had her right arm and head above the ground. When she had released part of her upper body she could start squirming upwards an inch at a time until the ground suddenly released its grip on her legs.