The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

by David Lagercrantz

  She became obsessed by the idea, and also by phones. She began to follow her older brothers around the apartment, keeping her distance. Her eyes were fixed on their hands as they fiddled with their mobiles and keyed in security codes. But above all she noticed how sometimes they forgot their phones on tables and chests of drawers, and in less conspicuous places like the top of the television or next to the toaster or the electric kettle in the kitchen. Occasionally there would be a comic interlude when the brothers could not find their mobiles and argued and rang each other, and then swore even more when the mobiles were set to silent and they had to track down the muted buzzing.

  She was beginning to realize that these farces were a big chance for her. She had to seize opportunities when they arose, though she knew how much was at stake. It was not only a matter of the family’s honour. She was also putting her father’s and her brothers’ financial futures at risk. Those three bloody factories would be a heaven-sent windfall and make them all prosperous. If she thwarted that, the consequences would be dire, and it did not surprise her that the snare was being pulled tighter.

  A poison spread throughout the apartment, and now it was no longer just self-righteousness and greed that shone in her older brothers’ eyes. They were beginning to be afraid of her. Sometimes they forced more food on her because Qamar, it was said, liked his women to have curves, and it would not do for her to become too thin. She was not allowed to become impure, and definitely not free. They watched over her like hawks.

  She might have resigned herself to the situation and given up. But then things came to a head one morning in the middle of that September two years ago. She was eating her breakfast and Bashir, the oldest brother, was fiddling with his mobile.

  —

  Malin took a sip of her red wine at the makeshift bar in the Fotografiska Museum. Blomkvist had left her happy and upbeat, yet now she was looking like a withered flower, her fingers buried in her long hair.

  “Hello there,” he said quietly. The presentation was still going on.

  “Who was calling?” she asked.

  “Just my sister.”

  “The lawyer?”

  Blomkvist nodded. “Did something happen?”

  “No, not really. I just had a word with Leo.”

  “It didn’t go well?”

  “It was great.”

  “So why are you looking so glum?”

  “We said all sorts of nice things. How wonderful I was looking, how fantastic he’d been on stage, how much we’d missed each other—blah, blah, blah. But I could tell right away that something was different.”

  “In what way different?”

  Malin hesitated. She looked right and left, as if to be sure that Mannheimer was not within earshot.

  “It felt…empty,” she said. “As if they were all empty words. He seemed troubled to see me here.”

  “Friends come, friends go,” Blomkvist said in a kind tone.

  “I know, and I can survive without Leo, for heaven’s sake. But still, it bothered me. We were, after all…for a while we were really…”

  Blomkvist chose his words carefully. “You were close.”

  “We were. But it wasn’t just that we’ve grown apart. It felt weird somehow. For instance, he says he got engaged to Julia Damberg.”

  “Who?”

  “She used to be an analyst at Alfred Ögren. She’s pretty, gorgeous even, but not the sharpest pencil in the box. Leo never liked her that much. He used to say she was childish. I can’t get my head around them suddenly getting engaged.”

  “Tragic.”

  “Stop that!” she spat. “I’m not jealous, if that’s what you think. I’m…”

  “Yes?”

  “Puzzled. Confused, to be honest. Something strange is going on.”

  “You mean something more than his planning to marry the wrong woman?”

  “You’re not right in the head, Blomkvist. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “I’m only trying to understand.”

  “Well, you can’t understand,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because”—she hesitated, fumbling for words—“because I’m not there myself yet. There’s something I have to check first.”

  “I wish you’d stop being so goddamn enigmatic!”

  Malin looked at him in alarm.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “I’m the one who should be sorry,” she said. “I’m making a bit of a meal of it.”

  Blomkvist made an effort to sound sympathetic. “So, tell me, what’s going on?”

  “I keep coming back to that time he was sitting in his office, in the middle of the night. Something doesn’t add up. To begin with, Leo must have heard me when I came back from the lift, because he suffers from hyperacusis.”

  “From what?”

  “Extreme sensitivity to sound. He hears incredibly well, the softest footstep, a butterfly fluttering by. I can’t imagine how I forgot about it. But when that chair squeaked before he started speaking today and he had that agitated reaction, it all came back to me. What do you think, Mikael, shall we push off? I can’t stand all this buy-and-sell talk,” she said, and drained her glass of wine.

  —

  Faria Kazi was waiting to be called for questioning again, but she was not dreading it as much as she thought she would. Twice already she had not only told them about the bullying and abuse in the maximum security unit, but she had also managed to lie. It wasn’t easy. The police kept pushing her about Lisbeth Salander.

  Why had Salander been in her cell? What part had Salander played in the drama? Faria wanted to shout out: It was Salander and not Alvar Olsen who saved me! But she kept her promise. She thought it would be best for Salander. When was the last time anyone had stood up for her? She could not remember.

  Once again she recalled the breakfast at home in Sickla when her brother Bashir had been sitting next to her, tapping on his mobile and drinking tea. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining out there in a world which was off-limits to her. The days when the family had subscribed to a morning newspaper were long gone, and it was even longer ago that their father would have the P1 morning news programme on the radio. The family had cut itself off from society.

  Bashir looked up from his tea.

  “You know why Qamar’s taking his time, don’t you?”

  She looked out at the street.

  “He’s wondering if you’re a whore. Are you a whore, Faria?”

  She didn’t answer. She never replied to questions like that.

  “This little shit of a heretic has been looking for you.”

  Now she could not help herself. “Who would that be?”

  “Some traitor from Dhaka,” Bashir said.

  Maybe that should have made her angry. Jamal was no traitor. He was a hero, a man who had risked his life for a better, more democratic Bangladesh. But she felt nothing but elation. It was hardly surprising that she had thought about Jamal night and day—she was locked up with nothing to do. But he was free and no doubt going to seminars and receptions all the time. He could easily have met another woman who was far more interesting than she was. Now, with Bashir spitting out his insults, she knew that Jamal wanted to see her again, and in her barricaded world this was greater than anything.

  She wished she could be alone with her joy, but she did not let down her guard. The merest hint of a blush might be fatal. A stammer or a nervous look might betray her. So she kept her mask in place:

  “A traitor?” she said. “Who cares about a traitor?”

  She got up from the table. Only later did she realize her mistake. In trying to pretend that she was uninterested she had over-played her hand. But in the moment it felt like a victory, and once she had recovered from the shock she became more focused than ever.

  She was obsessed with getting hold of a phone. Her determination must have shown—Bashir and Ahmed watched her every move, and no mobiles or keys were now left lying around. The days passe
d and October came. One Saturday evening their home filled with visitors and noise and movement. It took her a while to understand what was happening. No-one had bothered to tell her that the family was celebrating her engagement. Nobody seemed especially happy. But at least her prospective husband was not present—Qamar was having problems with his visa. There seemed to be others missing too, people who had fallen out of favour or who had distanced themselves from the brothers’ beliefs. All of this highlighted the family’s growing isolation. But Faria was concentrating instead on the faces of the guests. Could anyone help her?

  As always, the likeliest person was Khalil. He was sixteen years old now and spent most of his time sitting around, looking nervously at her. Before, when they had lived in Vallholmen and shared a room, they often lay awake late at night talking, to the extent that it was possible to talk with him. In those days, soon after their mother had died, he had not yet started running around the city for hours on end. But already he was different. He was taciturn and what he liked most of all was to sew and draw. Often he said that he longed to go back home—to a country he had no memory of.

  She considered asking him to help her run away there and then, under the cover of the party. But her nerves failed her and so she went to the toilet. It was while she was sitting there, by now used to being constantly on the lookout, that she spotted a mobile high up on the dark-blue towel cupboard. At first she could not believe her luck. It was Ahmed’s—she recognized the photo on the lock screen, Ahmed showing off with a huge grin on his face, sitting on a motorbike which did not even belong to him. Her heart pounded and she tried to remember—she had watched him so carefully—how Ahmed had keyed in his code. It was like an L-shape, maybe one, seven, eight, nine? Wrong. She tried a new combination. That didn’t work either and suddenly she became afraid. What if she locked it? She heard footsteps and voices outside. Were they waiting for her? Her father and brothers had been keeping an eye on her throughout the party, and really she should go out now, leaving the phone where she had found it. But she gave it one more try and—it ran through her like a shock—she got in. Terrified, she stepped into the bathtub, it was the place furthest from the door. Then she dialled Jamal’s number, which by now she knew as well as her own name.

  The ring tone was like a foghorn in the mist, distress signals on a dark sea, and suddenly there was a rustling in the receiver. Somebody was picking up. She closed her eyes and listened anxiously for sounds from the hall, ready to hang up at any second. But then she heard his voice and his name and she whispered:

  “It’s me. Faria Kazi.”

  “Oh, Faria!”

  “I have to be quick.”

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  The very sound of his voice made her throat catch. She thought of asking him to call the police, but no, she did not dare. She said simply:

  “I need to see you.”

  “That would make me very happy,” he said.

  All she wanted to do was shout: Happy? I’m in heaven! “But I don’t know when I can,” she said.

  “I’m always at home. I’m renting a small apartment on Upplandsgatan. I spend most of my time reading and writing. Come whenever you can,” he said, and then he gave her an address and a door code.

  She deleted the number from Ahmed’s call history, placed the phone back on the cupboard, and walked out past all the relatives and family friends and into her room. There were people standing in there too. She asked them to leave and they did so with embarrassed smiles. Then she lay down under the covers and made up her mind to run away, whatever the cost. That is how it started, both the happiest and the worst time in her life.

  —

  Malin Frode and Mikael Blomkvist walked behind the audience, past the display table in the entrance, and out into the sunshine. They passed the ships moored at the wharf and looked up at the massive rock on the other side of the roadway running behind the museum and the quayside. For a long time they did not speak. It was roasting hot. Blomkvist had shaken off his irritation, but Malin again seemed to have other things on her mind.

  “Interesting, what you said about his hearing.”

  “Yes?” She sounded distracted.

  “Seger, the psychologist who was shot on that hunt all those years ago, wrote his thesis on the impact of our hearing on our self-esteem,” Blomkvist said.

  “Was that because of Leo, do you think?”

  “No idea. But it doesn’t sound like your average research topic. How did Leo’s extreme sensitivity to sound manifest itself?”

  “We might be in a meeting and I’d see him suddenly sit up and cock his head for no apparent reason. Soon afterwards someone would come into the room. He always picked up on that before the rest of us. Once I asked him about it and he dismissed it. But later, at the end of my time at the firm, he told me that his hearing had been a burden all his life. He said he’d been useless at school.”

  “I thought he was top of his class,” Blomkvist said.

  “So did I. But during his first school years he couldn’t sit still. If he’d been from a more ordinary family he probably would have been moved into a class for special needs. But he was a Mannheimer and all sorts of resources were thrown at the problem. They discovered that his hearing was exceptional and that was why he couldn’t bear to be in a classroom; the slightest buzzing or rustling disturbed him. It was decided that he should be privately educated, and that would have helped him develop into the boy with the sky-high I.Q. you read about.”

  “So he was never proud of his good hearing?”

  “I don’t know…maybe he was ashamed of it on the one hand, but also used it to his advantage.”

  “He must have been good at eavesdropping.”

  “Did that psychologist write anything about exceptionally sensitive hearing?”

  “I haven’t gotten hold of his thesis yet,” Blomkvist said. “But he did write somewhere that an evolutionary asset during one particular era can become a liability during another. In a forest in the age of hunting and gathering, someone with good hearing would be the most alert and therefore the most likely to find food. In a major city full of noise, that same person would risk confusion and overload. More recipient than participant.”

  “Is that what he wrote: more recipient than participant?”

  “As far as I remember.”

  “How sad.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “That’s Leo in a nutshell. He was always the onlooker.”

  “Apart from that week in December.”

  “Apart from that. But you think there’s something dodgy about that shooting in the forest, don’t you?”

  He detected a new curiosity in her voice and took it as a good sign. Perhaps she would tell him more about what was so strange that time she saw Mannheimer late at night in his office.

  “It’s beginning to interest me,” he said.

  —

  Leo Mannheimer never forgot Carl Seger. Even as an adult, he could still feel a sudden, sharp sense of loss at 4:00 on a Tuesday afternoon, the time he always went to Seger’s consulting rooms, and he sometimes had conversations with him in his head, as if he were talking to an imaginary friend.

  Yet Mannheimer did get better at coping with the world and its sounds, just as Seger had predicted. Often his hearing and his perfect pitch were an asset—certainly when he played music. For a long time he did little else but play his piano and dream of becoming a jazz pianist. In his late teens he even had a recording offer from Metronome. He turned it down because he didn’t think the material he had was strong enough yet.

  When he began his studies at the Stockholm School of Economics, he thought of them as no more than an interlude. As soon as he had put together some better pieces, he would make his record and become a new Keith Jarrett. But the interlude ended up being his life and he was never quite sure how. Was he afraid to fail and to disappoint his parents? Or was it the bouts of depression, which came as regularly as the seasons?
>
  Mannheimer remained a bachelor, and that was no easier to understand. People were curious about him. Women were drawn to him. But he was not so easily drawn to them—in the company of others he yearned for the peace and quiet of home. However, he had genuinely loved Madeleine Bard.

  And that was odd too, since they seemed not to have much in common. He did not think he had simply fallen for her looks, still less her wealth. She was different—that’s how he would always see it—with her bright-blue eyes which seemed to harbour a secret, and the streak of nostalgia which sometimes flashed across her beautiful face.

  They got engaged, and for a while lived together in his apartment on Floragatan. At the time, he had just inherited his father’s shares in Alfred Ögren Securities and Madeleine’s parents—who set store by such things—saw him as an excellent catch. The relationship was not without its complications. Madeleine wanted to give dinner parties, one after the other. Leo resisted as far as he could and they would fight for hours about it. Sometimes she even locked herself in the bedroom and cried. Nevertheless, it could have been a good marriage. He was convinced of that. He and Madeleine loved each other with fire and passion.

  Yet disaster struck, and that probably only went to show that he had been deluding himself all along. It happened in August at a crayfish party at the Mörners’ place out in the archipelago, on Värmdö. The atmosphere had been strained right from the start. He was feeling gloomy and found the guests loud and boring. He withdrew into himself, which sent Madeleine into social overdrive. She bounced around among the guests, gushing about how everything was “fantastic, really wonderful, it’s amazing how beautifully you’ve decorated the place, and what a fabulous piece of property. I’m soooo impressed. We’d move out here in a second…” But it was nothing out of the ordinary that evening, just a part of the charade that is life.