The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

by David Lagercrantz

  Over the years he had tried just about every drug, and had had plenty of love affairs and casual relationships. But there always seemed to be something missing. Music had been his solace, though when this no longer revived his spirits, he began to wonder if he had taken the wrong path in life. Maybe he should have become a teacher. He had recently had an overwhelming experience at his old music college in Boston.

  He had been asked to lead a workshop on Django Reinhardt, and the prospect had scared him half to death. He was sure that speaking in public was beyond him, that his lack of stage presence was one of the reasons the record companies had not wanted to invest in him. But he agreed to do it anyway and set about preparing down to the last detail. He told himself he just needed to stick to his script, a lot of music and little talk. But when he stood up there in front of two hundred students, he went weak at the knees. He was shaking all over, incapable of uttering a single word, and only after what seemed like an eternity did he manage to say:

  “And there I was, thinking I’d be the cool guy coming back to my alma mater—instead I’m standing here like a complete idiot!”

  It was not even meant as a joke, more like the desperate truth. But the students laughed, so he told them about Django and Stéphane Grappelli and the Quintette du Hot Club de France. He talked about club life and its ups and downs, and about how there were so few written sources. He played “Minor Swing” and “Nuages” and variations on solos and riffs, and became bolder and bolder. All sorts of ideas came to him, some comical, some serious. He found himself saying that Django had been doomed to ruin. During the Hitler years he was at risk of being deported to a death camp for being Roma, but he was saved by a Nazi, of all people, an officer in the Luftwaffe who loved his music. He ultimately died in France on May 16, 1953, after a brain haemorrhage while walking from the railway station in Avon to his house. “He was a great man,” Dan said. “He changed my life.”

  Silence. He was in limbo.

  But then, seconds later, there was thunderous applause. The students stood up and whooped, and Dan went home astonished and happy.

  He had carried the memory with him and sometimes, even now on tour in Germany, he would make a few comments between numbers, or tell an anecdote which made the audience laugh, though it was not he who was centre stage. That often gave him more pleasure than his solos, perhaps because it was something new.

  When he did not hear from the school again, he was disappointed. He had imagined how the teachers and professors would be talking about him, saying: “Now there’s someone who can really fire up our students.” But no further invitations came and he was too proud—and too timid—to get in touch to say how happy he would be to return. He failed to grasp that this was one of his problems: that he lacked get-up-and-go. The school’s silence was painful, and afterwards he became withdrawn and performed with little enthusiasm.

  It was 9:20 p.m. on Friday, December 8, and the bar was full. The audience was better dressed and classier than usual, perhaps also less engaged. Probably finance people, he thought. He had met Wall Street types who treated him like a servant. There seemed to be a lot of wealth in the room and that depressed him. Sure, there were times when he did pretty well for himself. After the first few lean years in America, he had never gone hungry. But even when he had money, it simply ran through his fingers.

  He decided to ignore the audience and focus on the music, even though the first set felt routine. Then came “Stella by Starlight,” a tune he had played a thousand times and where he knew he could shine. He took the second-to-last solo, just before Klaus Ganz himself, and closed his eyes. The piece was in B-flat, but instead of following the two-five-one progression, he played almost entirely outside the key. By his own standards it was not the most dazzling solo. But it was not bad, and he heard someone applaud spontaneously as he began to play. When he looked up to show his appreciation, he met the eye of a young woman in an elegant red dress, wearing a sparkling green necklace. She was blond and slender, and there was something fox-like about her beautiful features. She was probably one of the money people, he thought, but there was nothing blasé or disinterested about her. In fact she was rapt, and gazing intently at him. He could not recall any woman ever having looked at him like that before, not a stranger, and certainly not an upper-class beauty. But more extraordinary was the sense of intimacy. It was as if the woman was watching a dear friend. She appeared dazed and enchanted, and towards the end of his solo she mouthed something effusive, as if she knew him. Her face was wreathed in smiles and she shook her head. There were even tears in her eyes.

  After the set she approached the stage, more reserved now. Perhaps he had hurt her feelings by not acknowledging her enthusiasm. Nervously she fingered her necklace as she looked at his hands and his guitar. She gave the impression of being puzzled, and he felt a sudden affection for her, a protective instinct. He climbed down from the stage and smiled at her. She laid a hand on his shoulder and said to him in Swedish:

  “You were incredible. I knew you played the piano, but this…this was magical. It was insanely good, Leo.”

  “My name isn’t Leo,” he said.

  —

  Salander knew that she and her sister had figured on a list kept by the Registry for the Study of Genetics and Social Environment. The organization’s existence was known to only a few, but it was part of the State Institute for Human Genetics in Uppsala, which until 1958 had been known as the State Institute for Racial Biology.

  There were sixteen other people on the list, the majority older than Lisbeth and Camilla. They had the letters M.z.A. or D.z.A. next to their names. Salander understood that M.z. stood for “monozygotic,” in other words, identical twins; D.z. stood for fraternal twins; and the letter A referred to “apart,” as in “raised apart.”

  She soon worked out that they were twins who had grown up separately in accordance with a carefully devised plan. She and Camilla, unlike the others, were labeled “D.z.—failed A.” All the rest of the twins had been separated at an early age. The results of a series of intelligence and personality tests were recorded beneath their names.

  Two names stood out: Leo Mannheimer and Daniel Brolin. They were described as mirror-image twins and quite exceptional. Their test results were consistent, and on a number of counts they were outstanding. They were said to have been born into the Gypsy community. One note, initialled M.S., said:

  Highly intelligent and extremely musical. To some extent child prodigies. But lacking initiative. Inclined to doubt and depression, possibly also psychoses. Both have suffered from paracusis, auditory hallucinations. Loners, but with an ambivalent attitude to their isolation. Perhaps drawn to it. Both speak of a strong sense of “missing something” and “an intense loneliness.” Both show empathy, neither shows signs of aggression—apart from the occasional fit of anger triggered by loud noises. Remarkable scores, even for creativity. Excellent verbal skills, yet low self-esteem, somewhat better in L., for obvious reasons, but not by as much as one would expect. Perhaps due to difficult relationship with mother, who has not bonded as we had hoped.

  That last sentence made Salander feel sick. She was not impressed by their other character assessments either, especially not the rubbish written about her and Camilla. Camilla was “very beautiful, if somewhat cold and narcissistic.” Somewhat? She remembered how Camilla had gazed at the psychologists with her doe-like eyes. It obviously turned their heads.

  Nonetheless…there were a few details in the material which could be useful and might provide her with a lead. Among other things, there was a line about “unfortunate circumstances” having required the authorities to “inform Leo’s parents in the strictest confidence.” No indication was given as to what information they had passed on. But it might have been about the project itself. That would be interesting.

  Salander had gotten hold of the documents by hacking into the computer system of the State Institute for Human Genetics and creating a bridge between the network
and the intranet of the Registry for the Study of Genetics and Social Environment. It was an advanced exercise, which had taken hours of work. She knew full well that there were not many others who could have managed to pull off that sort of hack, especially with so little preparation time.

  She had hoped to strike gold. But the parties involved must have been extremely cautious. She did not find a single name for those responsible, only initials, including H.K. and M.S. She decided that the files about Daniel and Leo were her best hope. They were incomplete—most of the material was missing or had been archived in a different way—but she was keen to study what remained.

  Someone had put a question mark next to Mannheimer’s name and then done a not very good job of erasing it.

  Daniel Brolin appeared to have emigrated, with the ambition of becoming a guitarist. He had taken a one-year course at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, financed by a scholarship, since which all contact with him was lost. He had probably changed his name.

  Mannheimer had studied at the Stockholm School of Economics. There was a later note on him: “Very bitter after breaking up with a woman of his own social class. First dreams of violence. A risk? Renewed attack of paracusis?”

  Then there was a decision—again initialled M.S.—which looked recent, announcing that the Registry was to be officially closed.

  Project 9 to be terminated. Mannheimer a cause for concern,

  it said.

  Since Salander had been in prison, unable to research Mannheimer or those around him, she had asked Blomkvist to take a closer look. He’d been hopeless lately, fussing about her like some sort of father figure. Sometimes all she’d wanted to do was tear his clothes off and pull him onto her prison mattress, just to shut him up. But as a journalist he was indefatigable and sometimes—she reluctantly admitted—he did spot things she herself had missed. Which is why she had deliberately not told him everything; Blomkvist would see more clearly if she let him investigate without his mind already being made up. She would ring him shortly and come to grips with the whole situation.

  She was sitting on a bench on Flöjtvägen in Vallholmen, her laptop connected to her mobile, and looked up at the grey-green tower blocks whose colour was changing in the sunlight. She was wearing a leather jacket and black jeans, not the right clothes for a muggy day.

  Vallholmen was often described as a ghetto. Cars burned at night. Gangs of youths roamed about and mugged people. A rapist was said to be at large, and there was often chatter in the press about a community in which nobody dared to talk to the police. But right now the place seemed idyllic. A small group of women in veils were sitting with a picnic basket on the lawn in front of the tower blocks. A couple of small boys played football. Two men stood by the front entrance, spraying water with a hose and laughing like children.

  Salander wiped a drop of sweat from her forehead and kept on working with her deep neural network. It was tough, just as she had anticipated. The video sequence from the ticket gate at Hornstull tunnelbana station was too short and too blurred, and the body was masked by other passengers coming up from the platform. And the face was at no point visible. He—it was evidently a young man—had been wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses. His head was bent forward. Salander could not even measure how broad his shoulders were.

  All she had was the distinctive splayed movement of his fingers and a jerky, dysmetric gesture of his right hand. She had no way of knowing how characteristic they were. It might have been a nervous reaction, an anomaly in his usual pattern of movement. But there was a striking spasmodic irregularity which was now being analyzed in the nodes in her network and compared to a sequence she had uploaded of a young man jogging past her on a training circuit forty minutes earlier.

  There were correlations between the patterns of movement, and that was encouraging. But it was not enough. She needed to capture the runner in a situation more comparable to the one in the tunnelbana station. Every so often, therefore, she looked up at the lawn and the paved path along which the young man had disappeared. There was no sign of him for the time being, so she scrolled through her e-mails and messages.

  Blomkvist had written to say that he had found something. She was tempted to call him, but it would be disastrous to lose her concentration now. She needed to be prepared. Occasionally she glanced over towards the path. After fifteen minutes, the young man reappeared in the distance. He was tall, had a professional runner’s gait, and was also extremely thin. But that was irrelevant to her. All she was interested in was his right arm—the irregular jerk in the upward drive and the splayed movement of the fingers. She filmed him with her mobile and got instant feedback. The correlation was less pronounced, maybe because the runner was beginning to feel fatigue, or because it had not been adequate in the first place.

  It might be a long shot, but it was still a reasonable supposition. The man in the video sequence was one of the few who were impossible to identify after Jamal Chowdhury’s death. There were obvious similarities to the young man now approaching. If her suspicions were confirmed, this would also account for Faria’s silence during questioning.

  Salander needed more video material. She stuffed her laptop into her bag, got up from the bench and called out. The runner slowed his steps and squinted at her in the sunlight. She pulled a hip flask of whisky from an inside pocket of her jacket, took a slug and staggered sideways. The young man seemed unconcerned, but he stopped and stood there panting.

  “Jesus, you can run,” Salander said, her speech slurred.

  He did not answer. He looked as though he wanted to be rid of her and get in the entrance door, but she was not going to give up so easily.

  “Can you do this?” she said, making a movement with her hand.

  “Why?”

  She had no good answer to that, so she took a step towards him:

  “Because I want you to?”

  “Are you stupid or something?”

  She said nothing. She just glared at him with dark eyes. That seemed to scare him, so she decided to press her advantage. She lurched towards him with a threatening swagger and growled, “What was that?”

  Then the man did move his hand as she wanted, either because he was scared or because he thought it was the quickest way to extricate himself. He ran off into his building without noticing that she had filmed him on her mobile.

  She stood there and looked at her laptop and watched as the nodes in her network were activated. Everything became clear. She had scored a hit, a correlation in the asymmetry of the fingers. Nothing which would stand up in court, but enough to convince her that she was right.

  She walked towards the front entrance of the building. She did not know how she would gain access, but it turned out to be easy. The door gave way with a firm shove of her shoulder and she found herself in a shabby stairwell where everything looked either broken or dilapidated. It reeked of urine and cigarette smoke and the lift was out of order. The walls were grey and covered with graffiti, visible, thanks to the dim sunlight shining into the ground floor. But there were no windows in the stairwell and few functioning lights. It was stuffy and close and the steps were covered in litter.

  Salander climbed the stairs slowly, focusing intently on the laptop balanced on her left arm. She paused on the third floor and sent the analysis of the hand motion to Bublanski and his fiancée Farah Sharif, who was a professor of computer sciences, and also to Giannini. On the fourth floor she put the laptop into her bag and looked at the nameplates. Furthest to the left was K. Kazi—Khalil Kazi. She straightened up and took a deep breath. Khalil was nothing much to worry about, but Giannini had heard that his older brothers came regularly to see him. Salander knocked at the door and heard footsteps. The door opened and Khalil stared at her, apparently no longer frightened.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Now what?”

  “I want to show you something. A film.”

  “What kind of film?”

  “You’ll see,” she said. H
e let her in. It seemed a little too easy, and soon she realized why.

  Khalil was not alone. Bashir Kazi—she recognized him from her research—stared at her disdainfully. This was going to be as much of an aggravation as she had feared.

  DECEMBER, ONE AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER

  Dan Brody was baffled. The woman simply refused to believe that he was not that Leo guy. She fiddled with her necklace and played with her hair, and said she would understand if he wanted to keep a low profile. She reminded him that she had always said he deserved better.

  “You don’t seem to understand how amazing you are, Leo,” she said. “You never have. No-one at Alfred Ögren does. And certainly not Madeleine.”

  “Madeleine?”

  “Madeleine’s a total fool. To choose Ivar over you. That’s just soooo dumb. Ivar’s a fat dickhead and a loser.”

  He thought she had a child-like way of speaking. But perhaps he was out of touch with modern Swedish. She was also nervous. There was quite a commotion around them, people pushing past to buy drinks at the bar. Klaus and the other band members came to ask if Dan wanted to tag along for dinner. He shook his head and looked again at the woman. She was standing strangely close to him. Her breasts were heaving, and he caught a whiff of her perfume. She was very beautiful. It was like a dream. A nice dream, he thought, although he was not entirely sure. He was bewildered.

  At the back of the club a glass broke. A man started shouting, and that made Dan grimace.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Maybe you and Ivar are still buddies.”

  “I don’t know an Ivar,” he said sharply.

  The woman looked at him in such despair that he regretted it. He felt that he would say anything she wanted—that he was called Leo and knew Madeleine, and that Ivar was a dickhead. He did not want to disappoint her. He wanted her to be as happy and excited as she had been during his solo.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.