Stieg Larsson - The Girl who played with Fire

Blomkvist invited her to his cabin. He made coffee and they sat on the porch outside for several hours, talking. It was the first time they had talked at length since her return.

Blomkvist could not resist asking: “What did you do with the stuff in Martin’s basement?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“I cleaned it up myself. I burned everything that would burn. I had the house torn down. I couldn’t live there, and I couldn’t sell it and let someone else live there. For me all its associations were with evil. I’m planning another house to take its place, a small cabin.”

“Didn’t people raise their eyebrows when you had the house torn down? It was quite luxurious and modern.”

She smiled. “Dirch Frode put about the story that there was so much damp in the foundation that it would be more expensive to rebuild than to take it down.” Frode was the family’s lawyer.

“How is Frode getting on?”

“He’s going to be seventy soon. I’m keeping him busy.”

They had lunch together, and Blomkvist realized that Harriet Vanger was sitting there telling him the most intimate and private details about her life. When he asked her why, she thought for a moment and said that there really was no-one else in the whole world with whom she could be so open. Besides, it was hard not to open her heart to a kid she had babysat all of forty years ago.

She had had sex with three men in her life. First her father and then her brother. She had killed her father and run away from her brother. Somehow she had survived and met a man with whom she had created a new life for herself.

“He was tender and loving. Dependable and honest. I was happy with him. We had a wonderful twenty years together before he became ill.”

“You never remarried? Why not?”

She shrugged. “I was the mother of two children in Australia and the owner of a big agricultural business. I could never get away for a romantic weekend. And I’ve never missed sex.” They sat quiet for a while. “It’s late. I should be getting back to the hotel.”

Blomkvist made no move to get up.

“Do you want to seduce me?”

“I do,” he said.

He stood up and took her hand, leading her into the cabin and up to the sleeping loft. Suddenly she stopped him. “I don’t really know how. This is not something I do every day.”

They spent the whole weekend together and then one night every three months after the magazine’s board meetings. It was not a relationship that could be sustained. She worked around the clock and was very often travelling, and every other month she was in Australia. But she had come to value her occasional rendezvous with Blomkvist.

Mimmi made coffee two hours later as Salander lay naked and sweaty on top of the bedclothes. She smoked a cigarette and watched Mimmi through the doorway. She envied Mimmi’s body. She was impressively muscled. She worked out at a gym three evenings a week, one of them doing Thai boxing or some sort of karate shit, and this had given her body an awesome shape.

She was just delicious. Not beautiful like a model, but genuinely attractive. She loved to provoke and flirt. When she dressed up for a party she could get anyone whatsoever interested in her. Salander did not understand why Mimmi cared about a goose like her. But she was glad she did. Sex with Mimmi was so dramatically liberating that Salander just relaxed and enjoyed it, taking what she wanted for herself and giving in return.

Mimmi came back and put two mugs on a stool beside the bed. She crawled onto the bed and leaned over to nibble at one of Salander’s nipples.

“They’ll do,” she said.

Salander said nothing. She looked at Mimmi’s breasts. Mimmi’s breasts were small too, but they looked completely natural on her body.

“If I’m going to be honest, Lisbeth, you look fantastic.”

“That’s silly. My breasts don’t really make any difference one way or the other, but at least I’ve got some now.”

“You’re so hung up about your body.”

“You’re one to talk, working out like an idiot.”

“I work out like an idiot because I like to work out. It’s a kick, almost as good as sex. You ought to try it.”

“I do some boxing.”

“Bullshit – you boxed once a month max. And mostly because you got a buzz out of smacking those snotty guys around. That’s not the same as working out to feel good.”

Salander shrugged. Mimmi sat straddling her.

“Lisbeth, you’re so obsessed. You should know by now that I like having you in bed not because of how you look but because of the way you act. I think you’re sexy as hell.”

“You too. That’s why I kept coming back.”

“Not for love?” Mimmi said, pretending to be hurt.

Salander shook her head.

“Are you seeing somebody?”

Mimmi hesitated a moment before she nodded.

“Maybe. In a way. Possibly. It’s a little complicated.”

“I’m not snooping.”

“I know, but I don’t mind telling you. It’s someone at the university who’s a little older than me. She’s been married twenty years, but her husband travels a lot, so we get together when he’s not around. Suburbs, villa, all that. She’s a closet dyke. It’s been going on since last autumn and it’s getting a bit boring. But she’s really luscious. And then I hang out with the usual gang, of course.”

“I was just wondering whether I could come and see you again.”

“I’d really like to hear from you.”

“Even if I disappear for another six months?”

“Just keep in touch. I’d like to know if you’re dead or alive. And in any case I’ll remember your birthday.”

“No strings?”

Mimmi sighed and smiled.

“You know, you’re a dyke I could imagine living with. You’d leave me alone when I wanted to be left alone.”

Salander said nothing.

“Apart from the fact that you’re not really a dyke. You’re probably bisexual. But most of all you’re sexual – you like sex and you don’t care about what gender. You’re an entropic chaos factor.”

“I don’t know what I am,” Salander said. “But I’m in Stockholm now and pretty bad at relationships. In fact, I don’t know one single person here. You’re the first person I’ve talked to since I got home.”

Mimmi studied her with a serious expression.

“Do you really want to know people? You’re the most secretive and unapproachable person I know. But your breasts really are luscious.” She put her fingers under one nipple and stretched the skin. “They fit you. Not too big and not too small.”

Salander sighed with relief that the reviews were satisfactory.

“And they feel real.”

She squeezed the breast so hard that Salander gasped. They looked at each other. Then Mimmi bent and gave Salander a deep kiss. Salander responded and threw her arms around Mimmi. The coffee was left to get cold.

At around 11:00 on Saturday morning, a car drove into Svavelsjö between Järna and Vagnhärad – the community consisted of no more than fifteen buildings – and stopped in front of the last building, about 500 feet outside the village proper. It was a tumbledown industrial structure that had once been a printing factory but now had a sign over the main door identifying it as Svavelsjö Motorcycle Club. There was no other car in sight. Nevertheless the driver looked around carefully before he got out of his car. He was huge and blond. The air was cold. He put on brown leather gloves and took a black sports bag from the trunk.

He was not worried about being observed. It would be impossible to park close to the old printing factory without being seen. If any police or government unit wanted to keep the building under surveillance, they would have to equip their people with camouflage and telescopes and dig them in at the far end of a field. Inevitably that would be talked about by the villagers, and three of the houses were owned by Svavelsjö MC members.