Stieg Larsson - The Girl who played with Fire

“And if you didn’t have to worry about the cutbacks, what else could you offer him?”

“The ideal for patients like Holger Palmgren, of course, would be if I could offer him a full-time personal trainer. But it’s been quite a while since we had resources like that in Sweden.”

“Hire one.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hire him a personal trainer. Find the best you can. Please do it first thing tomorrow. And make sure he has everything he needs in the way of technical equipment. I’ll see to it that the funds are available by the end of the week to pay for it.”

“Are you pulling my leg, young lady?”

Salander gave Dr. Anders Sivarnandan her hard, steady look.

Johansson braked and pulled her Fiat over to the curb outside Gamla Stan tunnelbana station. Svensson opened the door and slipped into the passenger seat. He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek as she drew away behind a bus.

“Hello, you,” she said without taking her eyes off the traffic. “You look so serious. Has something happened?”

Svensson sighed as he fastened his seat belt.

“No, nothing major. A little problem with the manuscript is all.”

“What problem?”

“Two months till the deadline. I’ve done only nine of the twenty-two confrontations we planned. I’m having trouble with Björck at the Security Police. The bastard is on long-term sick leave and he’s not answering his home telephone.”

“Is he in hospital?”

“Don’t know. Have you ever tried getting information out of Säpo? They won’t even admit that he works there.”

“Did you try his parents?”

“Both dead. He’s not married. He has a brother who lives in Spain. I just have no idea how to get hold of him.”

Johansson glanced at her partner as she navigated across Slussen to the tunnel leading to Nynäsvägen.

“Worst-case scenario, we jettison the section on Björck. Blomkvist insists that everyone we’re planning to expose must have a chance to comment before being hung out to dry.”

“But it would be a shame to miss out on a representative of the Security Police who runs around with prostitutes. What are you going to do?”

“Find him, of course. How are you doing? Nervous?”

He poked her carefully in the side.

“Actually, no. In two months I have to defend my dissertation and become a full-fledged doctor, and I feel as cool as a cucumber.”

“You know the subject backwards. Why be nervous?”

“Look behind you.”

Svensson turned and saw an open box on the backseat.

“Mia – it’s printed!” he said in delight. He held up a copy of the bound thesis.

From Russia with Love

Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Society’s Response

by Mia Johansson

“It wasn’t going to be ready until next week. Damn… we’re going to have to crack open a bottle when we get home. Congratulations, Doctor!”

He leaned over and kissed her again.

“Calm down. I won’t be a doctor for another two months. And keep your hands under control while I’m driving.”

Svensson laughed. Then he turned serious.

“By the way, fly in the ointment and all that… you interviewed a girl named Irina P. about a year ago.”

“Irina P., twenty-two, from St.Petersburg. She first came here in 1999 and has made some return trips. What about her?”

“I ran into Gulbrandsen today. The policeman involved in the Södertälje brothel investigation. Did you read last week that they’d found a girl floating in the canal there? There were headlines in the evening papers. It was Irina P.”

“Oh no. That’s horrible.”

They drove in silence past Skanstull.

“She’s in my thesis,” Johansson said at last. “I gave her the pseudonym Tamara.”

Svensson turned to the interview section of “From Russia with Love” and leafed through it to find “Tamara.” He read with concentration as Mia passed Gullmarsplan and the Globe Arena.

“She was brought here by somebody you call Anton.”

“I can’t use real names. I might get criticism for it during my oral exams, but I cannot name the girls. It would put them in real, mortal danger. And obviously I can’t identify the johns either, since they could work out which of the girls I had talked to. So in all the case studies I only use pseudonyms.”

“Who’s Anton?”

“His name is probably Zala. I’ve never been able to pin down who he is, but I think he’s a Pole or a Yugoslav and that’s not his real name. I talked with Irina P. four or five times, and it wasn’t until our last meeting that she told me his name. She was trying to straighten out her life and get out of the business, but she was certainly really afraid of him.”

“I’m just wondering… I ran into the name Zala a week or so ago.”

“Where was that?”

“I confronted Sandström – the john who’s a journalist. A complete bastard.”

“In what way?”

“He’s not a real journalist. He does advertising newsletters for various companies. And he has sick fantasies about rape that he’d get off on with that girl…”

“I know. I was the one who interviewed her.”

“But did you know that he did the text for a brochure about sexually transmitted diseases for the Public Health Institute?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I confronted him last week. He totally lost it when I laid out all the evidence and asked why he uses teenage prostitutes from the East to live out his rape fantasies. Gradually I got some sort of explanation out of him.”

“And what was it?”

“Sandström had gotten into a situation where he wasn’t just another customer. He also ran errands for the sex mafia. He gave me the names he knew, including this Zala. He didn’t say anything specific about him, but it’s not a common name.”

Johansson glanced at him.

“Do you know who he is?” Svensson said.

“No. I’ve never been able to identify him. He’s just a name that crops up now and then. The girls all seem terrified of him, and none of them was willing to tell me anything else.”

Dr. Sivarnandan stopped in his tracks on his way into the dining room when he caught sight of Palmgren and Salander. They were bent over their chessboard. She came once a week now, usually on Sundays. She always arrived at around 3:00 and spent a couple of hours playing chess with Palmgren. She left around 8:00 in the evening, when it was time for him to go to bed. The doctor had observed that she did not treat him as you would an invalid – on the contrary, it looked like they were squabbling all the time, and she did not mind Palmgren waiting on her, fetching her coffee.

Dr. Sivarnandan could not make her out, this peculiar young woman who took herself for Palmgren’s foster daughter. She had a very striking look about her and she seemed to treat everything around her with suspicion. She appeared to have no sense of humour at all. Or the ability to carry on a normal conversation. And when he asked what kind of work she did, she somehow contrived not to give him an answer.

A few days after her first visit she had come back with a bundle of documents which declared that a nonprofit foundation had been established with the sole purpose of assisting the care centre with Palmgren’s rehabilitation. The chair of the trustees of the foundation was a lawyer in Gibraltar. There was another lawyer mentioned, also with an address in Gibraltar, and an accountant by the name of Hugo Svensson with an address in Stockholm. The foundation was to make available funds of up to 2.5 million kronor, which Dr. Sivarnandan could dispose of as he wished, but with the exclusive object of giving the patient Holger Palmgren every possible care and facility towards full recovery. Sivarnandan had only to request the necessary funds from the accountant.