The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

by David Lagercrantz

  Hilda was quiet and looked out the window.

  “Yes, and that’s why we’re here today, right?” she said. “What you said to Lotta—that Leo isn’t Leo any longer?—that sounded insane. To be honest I don’t believe it. I just don’t. Anders and Daniel Brolin, as they were then called, belonged to the Gypsy community and were from an extremely musical family. Their mother, Rosanna, was a fabulous singer. There’s an old recording of her singing Billie Holiday’s version of ‘Strange Fruit’ that tears your heart out. But she died days after the twins were born, of puerperal fever. She had never been to secondary school, but they dug up her reports from her last years in primary school. Top of the class in every subject. The boys’ father was named Kenneth and he was manic-depressive but an absolute genius on the guitar. He wasn’t an evil or callous man, just mentally unstable, and he couldn’t cope with the twins. They were put in a children’s home in Gävle, and that’s where Greitz found them and separated them almost immediately. I’d rather not know how she and Martin Steinberg went about finding families for all those twins. But when it came to Daniel and Anders, or ‘Leo,’ as he was renamed, it was especially awful.”

  “In what way?”

  “It was just so unfair. Daniel stayed on at the orphanage for a few years and then ended up with a mean, narrow-minded farmer outside Hudiksvall who was only interested in more hands on his farm. At first there was a wife but she soon disappeared, and what came after that can unquestionably be described as child labour. Daniel and his foster brothers worked their fingers to the bone from early morning till late at night. Often they weren’t allowed to go to school. Leo, on the other hand…Leo had been taken in by a prosperous and influential family in Nockeby.”

  “By Herman and Viveka Mannheimer.”

  “Exactly. It was crucial to the project that the adoptive parents should not learn anything about the children’s origins, and above all the fact that they were twins. But Herman was a hotshot, and he managed to wear down Martin Steinberg. Steinberg caved in, he cracked. That was bad enough. But it got worse. Herman began to have second thoughts. He had always disliked Gypsies and ‘loose people,’ as he called them, and without Greitz or Steinberg knowing, he asked his business partner, Alfred Ögren, for advice.”

  “I see,” Blomkvist said. “And his son Ivar found out about it too.”

  “Yes, but that was later. By which time Ivar had long been envious of Leo; people considered Leo much more promising and bright. Ivar would do whatever he could to gain the upper hand, to get Leo into trouble. It was a minefield between the families, and so my colleague Carl Seger was called in to help.”

  “But if Herman Mannheimer was such a prejudiced old fart, why had he agreed to take the boy in the first place?”

  “Herman was probably a run-of-the-mill reactionary, not fundamentally a heartless person, in spite of what happened to Carl. But Alfred Ögren…he was a swine and a true racist and strongly advised against the idea. It would probably have come to nothing except there were reports that the boy had highly developed motor skills and all sorts of other advanced abilities, and that tipped the scales. And Viveka fell in love with him.”

  “So they took him into the family because he was precocious?”

  “Probably. He was only seven months old but there were high expectations of him from an early age.”

  “His personal file says that he’s the Mannheimers’ biological son. How did they pull that one off, considering the baby was adopted so late?”

  “Their closest friends and neighbours knew the truth, but it became a matter of honour. They all knew how much it pained Viveka that she hadn’t been able to have children of her own.”

  “Did Leo know he was adopted?”

  “He found out at the age of seven or eight, when Ögren’s sons started teasing him. Viveka felt she had to tell him. But she asked him to keep it a secret—for the sake of the family’s honour.”

  “I understand.”

  “It wasn’t an easy time for the family.”

  “Leo suffered from hyperacusis.”

  “He suffered from that, and from what today we would call hypersensitivity. The world was too harsh for him, and he withdrew and became a very solitary child. Sometimes I think Carl Seger was his only real friend. At first, Carl and I and all the younger psychologists were not fully in the picture. We thought we were investigating a group of gifted children. We didn’t even know we were working with twins. We were split up so that we only ever met one sibling. But in time we came to understand and slowly we accepted it—more or less. Carl was the one who had the greatest difficulty coming to terms with the deliberate separation of the twins, probably because he was so close to Leo. The other children did not have the feeling that they had been separated from someone. But Leo was different. He didn’t know that he was an identical twin, only that he’d been adopted. He must have had an inkling, though, as he often said he felt as if he were missing one half of himself. Carl found that increasingly hard to bear. He was forever asking me about Daniel: ‘Does he feel the same way?’ ‘He’s lonely,’ I said, and I mentioned that Daniel had sometimes shown signs of depression. ‘We’ve got to tell them,’ Carl insisted. I told him we couldn’t, it would only make all of us unhappy. But Carl kept on, and in the end he made the biggest mistake of his life. He went to Rakel, and you know…”

  Hilda opened the second bottle, even though the first was not empty.

  “Rakel may give the impression of being business-like and upstanding. She’s completely fooled Leo. They’ve been in touch all these years, get together for Christmas lunch and so on. But in point of fact she’s ice cold. It’s because of her that I’m here under a false name, shaking with fear and getting drunk. She’s kept a close watch over me all these years, and when she wasn’t buttering me up, she was threatening me. She was coming over to my apartment as I was making my escape. I saw her in the street.”

  “So Carl went to her,” Blomkvist said.

  “He marshalled his courage and announced that he was going to tell the full story, whatever the cost. A few days later he was dead, shot in the woods like a hunted animal.”

  “Do you think it was murder?”

  “I have no proof. I’ve always refused to believe it, not wanting to accept that I might have been part of something that was capable of killing.”

  “But in fact you’ve suspected it all along, right?” Blomkvist said.

  Hilda was silent. She drank her rosé and stared at the floor.

  “I read the police report,” Blomkvist said. “It felt dodgy even then, and now you’ve provided a motive. I can see no explanation other than that they were all in on it—Mannheimer, Ögren, Greitz, the lot of them. They risked being identified and associated with an operation which had separated children who belonged together. They needed to eliminate the threat before their names were dragged through the mud.”

  Hilda looked frightened and said nothing.

  “It was a high price to pay, though,” she said at length. “Despite all his money and privilege, Leo was never happy. He never recovered his self-confidence. He joined the family business reluctantly, only to be given a rough ride by cretins like Ivar.”

  “What about Daniel, his brother?”

  “In some ways he was stronger, perhaps because he had no choice. All the things Leo was encouraged to be—a literate, educated, musical boy—Daniel had to become in secret, and independently, alone against the odds. But he too felt terrible. He was bullied by his foster brothers and beaten by his father. He was always made to feel like a misfit and an outsider.”

  “What became of him?”

  “He ran away from the farm and vanished off the Registry’s radar. I was fired soon afterwards, so I’m not altogether sure. The last thing I did for him was to recommend a music school in Boston. Then I heard nothing more until…”

  Blomkvist could tell from the atmosphere in the room and the way she handled her glass that something had changed.


  “Until when?”

  “One morning in December a year and a half ago. I was reading the morning paper and having a glass. The telephone rang. The Registry had given us strict instructions never to give the children our real names. But I…I suppose I was already drinking, and in any case I must have let it slip a few times, because Daniel had managed to track me down before. And here he was, calling out of the blue. He said that he had worked it all out.”

  “Worked what out?”

  “That Leo existed, that they were identical twins.”

  “Mirror-image twins, right?”

  “Yes, but I don’t think he was aware of that yet. Anyway, it didn’t make a difference, at least not at the time. He was in a terrible rage, asking if I had known. I hesitated for a long time. When I finally told him yes, he was silent. Then he said he would never forgive me and hung up. I wanted to die. I phoned the number back and got through to a hotel in Berlin, but no-one there had heard of a Daniel Brolin. I did everything I could to find him. But it was hopeless.”

  “Do you think he and Leo have met?”

  “No, I don’t believe so.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because that sort of thing always gets out. Several of our identical twins have met as adults. Nowadays, in the world of social media, someone sees a picture on Facebook or Instagram, says it looks just like so-and-so, and then the story spreads and sometimes it gets into the newspapers. It’s the sort of story journalists thrive on. But none of our twins has ever managed to piece it all together. There were always explanations at the ready and the newspapers only emphasized the sensational aspects of the meetings. No-one has looked into the whole thing properly. In fact, I can’t imagine how you got onto it. Everybody’s been scrupulously careful about confidentiality.”

  Blomkvist helped himself to some more rosé, though he did not much care for it, and wondered how to express what he wanted to say. His tone remained sympathetic.

  “I think that’s wishful thinking, Hilda. There’s reason to believe that Daniel and Leo have met. I have a friend who knows Leo well and something doesn’t add up. He”—he opted, for safety’s sake, to refer to Malin Frode as a “he”—“has studied Leo closely and is convinced that Leo has become right-handed, as I told your sister. On top of which he’s become a very proficient guitar player, apparently from one day to the next.”

  “So he’s also changed instruments!” Hilda shrank into her chair. “Are you suggesting…”

  “I’m only asking what conclusions you would draw, if you were being honest with yourself.”

  “If what you say is true, I would think that Leo and Daniel had swapped identities.”

  “But why would they?”

  “Because…” She was searching for words. “Because they both have a strong melancholy streak and are highly gifted. They would be able to move into a completely new context without much difficulty, and maybe they’d see it as a novel and exciting experience. Carl used to tell me that Leo often felt imprisoned in a role he did not enjoy.”

  “And Daniel?”

  “For Daniel…I don’t know, it must be fantastic to be able to step into Leo’s world.”

  “You said that Daniel was furious on the telephone, didn’t you? It must have been painful for him to realize that his twin brother grew up in affluent circumstances, while he had to work long days on a farm.”

  “Yes, but…”

  Hilda studied the bottles of rosé, as if worried that they might soon run out.

  “You have to understand how exceptionally sensitive and empathic these boys are. Carl and I often talked about it. They were lonely. But the two of them are a perfect match and my guess, if they have met, is that it was a fantastic meeting. It may have been the best, the very happiest thing that’s ever happened to them.”

  “So you don’t think it’s likely that something went wrong?”

  Hilda shook her head. Rather too emphatically, Blomkvist thought.

  “Did you ever tell anybody that Daniel had called you?”

  Hilda hesitated maybe a little too long. She lit a cigarette from the butt of the previous one.

  “No,” she said. “I no longer have any contact with the Registry. Who would I have told?”

  “You said that Greitz came to see you quite regularly.”

  “I haven’t told her a thing. I’ve always been wary of her.”

  Blomkvist pondered a while, then went on in a sterner tone than he had intended.

  “There’s one more thing you have to tell me about.”

  “Is it about Lisbeth Salander?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “It’s hardly a secret that the two of you are close.”

  “Was she a part of the project?”

  “She caused Rakel more trouble than all the others put together.”

  DECEMBER, ONE AND A HALF YEARS EARLIER

  Leo stepped into his apartment alongside the man who looked like him. The man wore a tatty black coat with a white fake-fur collar, grey suit trousers and reddish-brown boots which looked like they had done a lot of walking. He took off his woollen hat and coat and set down his guitar. His hair was more untidy than Leo’s, the sideburns longer and his cheeks more chapped. But that only made the similarity more chilling.

  It was like seeing oneself in a new guise. Leo broke into a cold sweat. He realized that he was scared to death. He felt the floor opening up in front of him. But it above all was puzzling. He looked at the man’s hands and fingers and then at his own, and he longed for a mirror. He wanted to compare every crease and wrinkle in their faces. More than anything, he had questions, and he wanted to ask and ask and never stop. He thought about the music he had heard coming from the stairwell, and the man describing himself as only half a person—it was just as he himself had always felt. There was a lump in his throat.

  “How is this possible?” he asked.

  “I believe…” the other man said.

  “What?”

  “…that we were part of an experiment.”

  Leo could hardly take it in. He remembered Carl, and his father coming up the stairs that autumn day, and he faltered. He collapsed onto the red sofa beneath the Bror Hjorth painting. The man sat in the armchair beside it. There was even something eerily familiar about that movement, the body sinking into the chair.

  “I always knew something was wrong,” Leo said.

  “Did you know you were adopted?”

  “My mother told me.”

  “But you had no idea I existed?”

  “Absolutely not. Or rather…”

  “What?”

  “I’ve thought. I’ve dreamed. I’ve imagined all kinds of things. Where did you grow up?”

  “On a farm outside Hudiksvall. Then I moved to Boston.”

  “Boston…” Leo muttered.

  He heard a heart beating. He thought it was his own, but it was the other man’s, his twin brother’s.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

  “I sure could use one.”

  “Champagne? It goes straight into your bloodstream.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  Leo got up and went towards the kitchen, but stopped without really knowing why. He was too confused, too agitated to understand what he was doing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Sorry? Why?”

  “I had such a shock at the door, I can’t even remember your name.”

  “Dan,” the man said. “Dan Brody.”

  “Dan?” Leo said. “Dan.”

  Then he went to fetch a bottle of Dom Perignon and two glasses. Perhaps that was not the exact moment it began. Their conversation must have been surreal and incomprehensible for a while longer. But it was snowing outside and the sounds of a Friday evening could be heard: laughter, voices, music from cars outside and from the other apartments. They smiled and raised their glasses and opened up more and more. Soon they were talking as they never had to anyone before.

&n
bsp; Later, neither was capable of describing the conversation and its meanderings. Every thread, every topic was interrupted by more questions and digressions. It was as if there were not enough words—as if they could not talk fast enough. Night came, and then a new day, and only rarely did they stop to eat or sleep, or to play music.

  They played for hours on end, and for Leo this was the best thing of all. He was a loner. He had played every day of his life, but almost always alone. Dan had played with hundreds of other musicians—amateurs, professionals, virtuosos, some of whom were hopeless, some with a keen ear, some who could only play in one genre, some who could play them all, people capable of shifting into another key mid-phrase and picking up every shift in rhythm. Yet never before had he played with anyone who understood him so intuitively, so immediately. They not only jammed together, they spoke about their music and shared ideas, and sometimes Leo would climb onto a table or chair and propose a toast:

  “I’m so proud! You’re so good, so phenomenally good.”

  It was such an overwhelming joy to play with his twin brother that he raised the level of his own playing and became more adventurous, more creative with his solos. Even though Dan was the more skilled musician, Leo rediscovered the fire in his music too.

  Sometimes they talked and played at the same time. They told each other every detail of their lives, and discovered connections and coincidences of which they had been unaware. They let their stories run together and each added a touch of colour to the other.

  However, even though Dan did not say so at the time, the feelings were not always mutual. At times he found himself consumed by envy when he remembered how, as a child, he had gone hungry or how he had run away from the farm. How he had been betrayed by Hilda. We’re supposed to study, not to intervene. He felt flashes of anger, and when Leo complained that he had lacked the courage to devote himself fully to his music and was instead forced to become a partner in Alfred Ögren—forced to become a partner!—the injustice was almost more than Dan could bear. Yet that moment was an exception. Their first weekend that December was a time of great, all-enveloping joy for him too.