“We’re in kind of a hurry,” she said. “The screws want to send me away, have you heard? So we have to come to a decision right now. We like you, Faria. You’re a looker, and we like beautiful girls. But we like your brothers too. They’ve made a very generous offer, and now we’d like to know…”
“I don’t have any money,” Faria said.
“A girl can pay in other ways, and we have our preferences, our own currency, don’t we, Tine? I’ve got something for you, Faria, which might make you a little more cooperative.”
Again Benito’s hand went to her pocket and she gave a broad smile. A smile that contained an icy certainty of victory.
“What do you think I’ve got here?” she said. “What could it be? It’s not my Keris, so you don’t need to worry about that. But it’s still something valuable to me.”
She pulled a black object from her pocket with a metallic click. Faria could not breathe. It was a stiletto knife. She went so rigid with terror that she had no time to react when Benito grabbed her by the hair and forced her head back.
Slowly the blade came closer to her throat until it was pointed at her carotid artery, as if Benito was demonstrating where to make the deadliest cut. Benito hissed and spat about atoning for one’s sins in blood and making the family happy again. Faria felt the sweet perfume in her nostrils and inhaled a breath which was sour with tobacco, as well as something stale, sickly. She was incapable of any further thought and shut her eyes, and so did not understand why a sudden flutter of alarm had spread through the cell. But then she realized that the door behind her had opened and closed again.
Someone else was in the room. At first, Faria could not make out who. But from the corner of her eye she saw Salander. She looked strange, vacant and lost in thought, as if she didn’t know where she was. She didn’t even flinch when Benito came towards her.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” she said.
“Goddamn right you are. Who the hell let you in?”
“The girls you left out there. They didn’t make much of a fuss.”
“Idiots! Can’t you see what I have here,” Benito hissed, brandishing her stiletto.
Salander glanced at the knife but did not react to that either. She looked absently at Benito.
“Fuck off, you slut, or I’ll cut you up like a pig.”
“I’m afraid you won’t have time for that,” Salander said.
“You don’t think so?”
A wave of hatred rippled through the cell and Benito lunged towards Salander, knife raised. Faria never understood what happened next. A punch was thrown, an elbow jabbed, and it was as if Benito had run into a wall. Paralyzed, she fell onto her face on the concrete floor, not even breaking her fall with her hands. And then there was silence; only the freight train clattering by outside.
CHAPTER 6
June 18
Malin Frode and Blomkvist were leaning against the headboard. Blomkvist ran his fingertips across her shoulders and said:
“What happened to send Leo into such a state?”
“Have you got any decent red wine? I could use it.”
“I’ve got some Barolo, I think,” he said, and dragged himself off to the kitchen.
When he came back with the bottle and two glasses, Malin was gazing out the window. Rain was still falling over Riddarfjärden. A light mist lay over the water and there were sirens in the distance. Blomkvist poured the wine and kissed Malin on the cheek and mouth. As she began to talk, he pulled the duvet over them again.
“You know that Alfred Ögren’s son Ivar is now the C.E.O., even though he’s the youngest of the children. He’s only three years older than Leo and the two of them have known each other since they were small. But they’re not exactly friends. In fact, they hate each other.”
“How come?”
“Rivalry, insecurity, you name it. Ivar knows Leo is cleverer and can see right through his blustering and lies, and he’s got a complex, not just an intellectual one. Ivar spends his time eating out at expensive restaurants, and even though he’s not yet forty he already looks like a bloated old man, whereas Leo’s a runner and on a good day could pass for twenty-five. On the other hand, Ivar’s more enterprising and forceful, and then…”
Malin pulled a face and drank some wine.
“And then what?”
“I’m embarrassed about this: that I was a part of it. Ivar could be a decent enough guy, maybe a bit full of himself, but OK. Other times he was a nightmare and it was terrible to witness. I think he was afraid that Leo would take over. Many people, even some on the board, wanted that. During my last week at the company—it was before I saw Leo that night—the three of us had a meeting. We were supposed to be discussing my successor, but inevitably we got onto other topics and, you know, Ivar was irritated right from the word go. I’m sure he picked up on the same thing I did. Leo was ridiculously happy, as if he were floating above everything. Besides, he had hardly been in to work all week and Ivar ripped into him, calling Leo a moralizing idler and a wimp. At first Leo took it well. He just smiled. That drove Ivar crazy and he started saying the most terrible things: racist slurs, like Leo was a gyppo. It was so absurd that I thought Leo would ignore the idiot. But he leaped up from his chair and grabbed Ivar by the throat. It was crazy. I threw myself at Leo and pulled him to the floor. I remember him muttering, ‘We’re better, we’re better,’ until finally he calmed down.”
“What did Ivar do?”
“He didn’t move from his chair, just stared at us in shock. Then he leaned forward, looking shamefaced, and apologized. After that he left and there I was on the floor with Leo.”
“And what did Leo say?”
“Nothing, as far as I remember. It was a pretty fucked-up way to behave.”
“But wasn’t it fucked-up to call him a gyppo?”
“That’s Ivar for you. When he gets upset, he becomes a monster. He could just as well have called him a creep or a pig. I think he’s inherited that narrow-mindedness from his father. There’s a whole lot of prejudiced crap in that family, and that’s what I mean when I say I’m embarrassed. I should never have been working at Alfred Ögren.”
Blomkvist nodded and drained his glass. Probably he should have asked a few more questions, or said something to comfort Malin, but he said nothing. Something was weighing on his mind, and at first he could not grasp it. Then it came to him that Salander’s mother, Agneta, had come from a family of Gypsies on her father’s side. Blomkvist seemed to recall that Salander’s name had been listed in registers which had later been made illegal.
“You don’t suppose…” he said at last.
“What?”
“…that Ivar actually sees himself as superior?”
“I’m sure he does.”
“I mean racially superior.”
“That would be odd. Mannheimer’s as blue-blooded as they come. What are you suggesting?”
“I’m not sure.”
Malin looked wistful, and Blomkvist kissed her shoulder. He knew exactly what he needed to check. He would have to go a long way back in time, to the old church records if necessary.
—
Salander had landed quite a punch—possibly it was too hard. She knew it before Benito collapsed, even before she hit her, by the ease of her movements, by the unopposed force. By the way anyone who does explosive sports knows that the more effortless the action, the closer it comes to perfection.
She had swung a right at Benito’s windpipe with surprising precision, and in rapid succession elbowed her twice in the jaw. Then she took a step to one side, and not only to make room for the fall. She needed to size up the situation. So she watched as Benito collapsed without protecting herself with her hands and smacked into the floor, chin first. Salander heard the crunch of breaking bones. It was better than she had hoped for.
Benito lay motionless on her stomach, her face twisted stiffly into a grimace. She gave no sound, not even of breathing. Nobody would shed fewer tears
for Benito than Salander, but her death would be an unlooked-for complication. Besides which, Tine Grönlund was standing there right next to her.
Grönlund was no Benito. She seemed more of a natural follower, someone who needed to be told what to do. But she was tall and sinewy and fast, and her punch had a long reach which was hard to handle, especially when it came from the side, as now. Salander only half parried it. Her ears rang and her cheek burned and she readied herself for another round. But there wasn’t one. Instead of launching an assault, Grönlund simply stared at Benito lying on the floor. Things were not looking good down there.
It was not only the blood coming out of her mouth and running into red, claw-like trickles along the concrete floor, it was her whole twisted body and face. Benito looked like a case for long-term care—if not worse.
“Benito, are you alive?” Tine croaked.
“She’s alive,” Salander said, without being entirely sure.
She had knocked out people before, both in the ring and outside it, and there had almost always been some whimpering or movement pretty much straightaway. Now there was nothing, only a silence which seemed amplified by the quivering nervousness in the air.
“What the fuck—she’s completely lifeless,” Tine hissed.
“You’re right, she’s not looking too good,” Salander said.
Tine muttered a threat and looked ready to launch an attack. Then she stormed out, arms flailing. Salander remained impassive and stood her ground, her eyes on Faria. Faria sat on the bed in a blue shirt which was too big for her, arms clasped around her knees, and looked at Salander in bewilderment.
“I’m going to get you out of here,” Salander said.
—
Palmgren was at home in Liljeholmen in his medical bed. He was thinking about his conversation with Salander. He was sorry that he still couldn’t answer her question. He was feeling too wretched and unwell to find the documents himself. He had pain in his hips and legs and was quite unable to walk, even with his walker. He needed help with almost everything and aides came to his home. Most treated him like a five-year-old and did not seem to like their work, or even old people in general. Sometimes, but not often—he had his pride—he regretted having so flatly turned down Salander’s offer to pay for qualified private care. Only the other day he had asked one of them, Marita—who was young and stern and always looked disgusted when she had to get him out of bed—whether she had any children.
“I don’t want to talk about my personal life,” she snapped at him.
So he was suspected of prying when he was only trying to be polite! Old age was degrading, an attack on one’s integrity. That is how he saw it, and just a moment ago, when he needed to be changed, he had been reminded of Gunnar Ekelöf’s poem “Waterlilies.”
He had not read it since he was a young man. But still he remembered it well, maybe not word for word, but most of it. The poem was about a man—presumably the poet’s alter ego—who wrote what he called a preface to his own death. He wanted his last trace to be a clenched fist rising through a pond of water lilies, words bubbling to the surface.
Palmgren had been feeling so miserable that this poem seemed to offer the only hope left to him—defiance! His condition would undoubtedly worsen, and soon Palmgren would be lying in bed like a cabbage, and probably lose his mind as well. All he had to look forward to was death. But that did not mean he had to accept it—that was the message and consolation offered by the poem. He could clench his fist in protest. He could sink to the bottom, proud and rebellious, raging against the pain, the incontinence, the immobility, all the humiliation.
His life was not exclusively misery. He still had friends and above all he had Salander. And Lulu, who would soon arrive to help him find the documents. Lulu was from Somalia. She was tall and beautiful, with long plaited hair. Her expression was so sincere that it gave him back some measure of self-esteem. It was Lulu who had the last shift at night, putting on his morphine patches and then his nightshirt and bedding him down. Even though she still made mistakes in Swedish, her questions were genuine. And they were not fatuous platitudes in the plural such as: “Are we feeling a little better now?” She asked him for suggestions on what she should study and learn, for stories about what Palmgren himself had done in his life, for his thoughts. She saw him as a human being, not some old carcass with no history.
These days Lulu was one of the highlights in his life, and the only person he had told about Salander and his visit to Flodberga. It had been a nightmare. Just seeing that high prison wall started him trembling. How could they put Salander in a place like that? She had done something fantastic, after all. She had saved a child’s life. Yet she found herself among the worst female offenders in the country. It was plain wrong. And when he saw her in the visitors’ room, he was so upset that he had not watched his words as he usually did.
He asked about her dragon tattoo. He had always wondered about it, and indeed he belonged to a generation that had no understanding of tattooing as an art form. Why embellish yourself with something that never goes away, when we constantly change and evolve?
Salander’s answer was short and concise, and yet more than enough. He felt touched by it, and kept babbling on nervously and randomly. He must have gotten her thinking about her childhood, which was idiotic, especially since he himself hardly knew what he was talking about. What was the matter with him? It was not just down to his age and poor judgment. A few weeks earlier he had had an unexpected visit from a woman called Maj-Britt Torell, a bird-like elderly lady who had once been a secretary to Dr. Johannes Caldin, the head of St. Stefan’s psychiatric clinic in Uppsala at the time when Salander had been a patient there. Torell had read newspaper articles about Salander and had decided to go through the boxes of case notes she had taken responsibility for when Caldin died. She was careful to point out that she had never before breached doctor-patient confidentiality. But in this case there were special circumstances, “as you know. It was dreadful how that girl was treated, wasn’t it?” Torell was anxious to hand over the papers, to make the truth known.
Once Palmgren had thanked Torell, said goodbye and read through the notes, despair came over him. It was the same sorry old tale: psychiatrist Peter Teleborian had strapped Salander down in his treatment room and subjected her to serious abuse. There was nothing new in the documents, as far as he could tell, but he might be mistaken. It had taken only a few careless words at the prison to get Salander going. Now she knew that she had been part of a government-sponsored study. She said other children had been involved, both in the generation before her and later. But she had not managed to find the names of the people behind it all. Great efforts appeared to have been made to keep them off the Internet and out of all archives.
“Could you take another look and see if you can find anything?” she had said on the phone. He certainly would, as soon as Lulu came to help him.
—
A burst of spluttering and spitting could be heard coming from the floor, and even before Faria could make out any sounds she recognized them as curses and threats. She looked down at Benito. The woman lay with her arms spread wide. No part of her body was moving, not even a finger, nothing apart from her head which she raised a couple of inches off the ground, and her eyes, which stared sideways up at Salander.
“My Keris is pointed at you!”
The voice was so muffled and hoarse that it was barely human. In Faria’s mind, the words flowed together with the blood that trickled from Benito’s mouth.
“The dagger’s pointed at you. You’re dead.”
This was nothing short of a death sentence. For a moment Benito seemed to be recovering some ground, but Salander did not look at all concerned. She said, as if she had hardly been listening, “You’re the one who looks dead.”
Then, Salander was listening out for noises in the corridor and it was as if Benito was no longer a factor. Faria heard heavy, quick steps approaching. Somebody was rushing towards her cell, a
nd the next moment voices and swearing could be heard outside, and then: “Out of the fucking way!” The door flew open and Warden Olsen stood on the threshold. He was in his usual blue guard’s shirt, short of breath. He had obviously been running.
“My God, what the hell’s happened here?”
He looked from Benito on the floor to Salander, and then to Faria Kazi on the bed.
“What the hell has happened?” he said again.
“Look there on the floor,” Salander said.
Olsen looked down and spotted the stiletto lying in a runnel of blood just by Benito’s right hand.
“What the fuck…?”
“Exactly. Someone got a knife past your metal detector. So what happened is that the staff at a major prison lost control and failed to protect a prisoner under threat.”
“But that…that…” Olsen muttered, beside himself now and pointing at Benito’s jaw.
“It’s what you should have done a long time ago, Alvar.”
Olsen stared at Benito’s smashed-up face.
“My Keris is pointed at you. You’re going to die, Salander, die,” Benito spat, and at that Olsen felt true panic set in. He pressed the alarm on his belt and shouted for backup, then turned to Salander.
“She’s going to kill you.”
“That’s my problem,” Salander said. “I’ve had worse jerks threaten me.”
“There is nobody worse.”
Footsteps could be heard in the corridor. Had those shitheads been nearby all along? It would not surprise him in the least. He felt a violent rage bubble up within him, and he thought about Vilda and the threats; in fact the entire unit, which was a disgrace. He looked at Salander again and remembered her words: what he should have done a long time ago. He knew he needed to do something. He had to recover his dignity. But there was no time. His colleagues, Harriet and Fred, crashed into the cell and stood as if paralyzed. They too saw Benito lying on the floor and heard the oaths being uttered, but now it was impossible to make sense of what she was trying to say. Fragments of words, only Ke or Kri, in Benito’s evil rant.
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