“You said you thought she would kill you, right?” he said.
“I was certain of it. But she must be planning something worse.”
“I think you’re wrong there.”
“How do you mean?”
“I think she really did want to shoot you. I can’t see why else she would have attacked. Sure, she scared the shit out of Kuznetsov. But apart from that, what did she gain? Nothing. All she did was expose herself.”
“So what you’re suggesting …”
She looked out at the garden, and wondered where the hell the gardeners had got to.
“I’m suggesting that she hesitated and couldn’t bring herself to do it. That she hasn’t got it in her. That she’s not so strong after all.”
“That’s a comforting thought,” Kira said.
“I think it’s true. Otherwise it doesn’t add up.”
She suddenly felt a little better.
“And I suppose she has people she cares about,” she said.
“She has her girlfriends.”
“And she has her Blomkvist. More than anything, she has her Mikael Blomkvist.”
CHAPTER 7
16.viii
Blomkvist was in Gondolen restaurant at Slussen, dining with Dragan Armansky, the founder of Milton Security. He was slightly regretting it now. His legs and back hurt after his run in Årstaviken, and on top of that he was rather bored. Armansky was droning on about opportunities for developing his business in the East, or maybe it was the West, and then in the middle of it all there was an anecdote about a horse which had managed to get into a marquee on Djurgården:
“… and then those idiots pushed the grand piano into the swimming pool.”
Blomkvist was not sure if that had anything to do with the horse. But he was not listening all that carefully. Furthest away from them was a group of colleagues from Dagens Nyheter, among them Mia Cederlund with whom he had had an unhappy affair, and over there was Mårten Nyström, the Royal Dramatic Theatre actor, who had not been shown in a flattering light in Millennium’s investigation into misuse of power in the theatre world. None of them looked all that pleased to see him, and Blomkvist kept his eyes on the table, drank his wine, and thought of Lisbeth Salander.
She was his and Armansky’s only point in common. Armansky was the only employer she had ever had, and he had never really got over her, which was perhaps not so surprising. Long ago Armansky had given her a job as some sort of a social welfare project, and she turned out to be the most brilliant colleague he had ever had. For a while he may even have been in love with her.
“Sounds wild,” Blomkvist said.
“You can say that again, and the piano—”
“So you had no idea either that she was going to move?” he interrupted.
Armansky was reluctant to change the subject, and perhaps it upset him that Blomkvist was not more amused by his story. After all, a grand piano in a swimming pool … But then he quickly became serious.
“I shouldn’t really be telling you this,” he began.
Blomkvist thought that sounded like a good start and he leaned forward.
Lisbeth had had a nap and a shower and was sitting at her computer in her Copenhagen hotel room when Plague – her closest contact in Hacker Republic – sent an encrypted message. It was only a short, routine question, but it still disturbed her.
It’s all fucked up, she thought. She answered:
She felt like going out on the town, to forget everything. She wrote:
Bye bye, Plague, she thought. She wrote:
“Never you mind,” she muttered.
Footsteps, she thought, her father’s whispered voice and her own hesitation, her inability to fully understand, and then the silhouette of her sister getting up from the bed and slipping out of the room with Zala, that pig. She answered:
She felt like throwing the computer at the wall. She wrote:
Give me a break, she thought.
Mobile interception is child’s play, but who does he know in situ?
Which means she won’t come cheap.
Then she closed her computer and got up to dress. She decided that the black suit would have to do for today too, even though the rain yesterday had crumpled it and there was a grey stain on the right sleeve. And it didn’t look any better for having been slept in. But what the hell, and she had no intention of putting on make-up either. She ran her fingers through her hair, left the room and took the lift down to the ground floor, where she ordered a beer in the bar.
The open spaces of Kongens Nytorv lay outside, and there were a few dark clouds in the sky. But Salander noticed none of this. She was stuck in the memory of the hand that had hesitated on Tverskoy Boulevard, and in the film from the past that kept replaying in her head. She was oblivious to everything else, until a voice close to her ear suddenly asked:
“Are you O.K.?”
This annoyed her. Why was it anyone’s business? She did not even look up, and then she saw she had a text from Blomkvist.
Armansky leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially:
“In the spring Lisbeth called to ask me to speak to the apartment owners’ association, and see to it that surveillance cameras were installed outside the entrance to her building on Fiskargatan. I thought that sounded like a good idea.”
“So you arranged for it to be done.”
“Well, it’s not something you can fix just like that, Mikael. You need permission from the county council and one thing and another. But it all worked out this time. I had to point out that the level of threat was considerable and Chief Inspector Bublanski produced a report.”
“Hats off to him.”
“We pulled out all the stops and at the beginning of July I sent two guys over to install a couple of remote-controlled Netgears. We took the greatest care over the encryption, believe you me. Nobody else was to be able to view the film sequences, and I told my team at the surveillance centre to keep an eye on the monitors. I was worried about Lisbeth. I was afraid they were going to come for her.”
“We all were.”
“But I wasn’t expecting to be proved right so soon. Six days later, at half past one in the morning, the microphones we had mounted there picked up the sound of motorcycles, and our night-shift operator Stene Granlund was on the point of repositioning the cameras when someone got there before him.”
“Oops.”
“Exactly. Stene didn’t even have time to think about it. The bikers were two men in leathers from Svavelsjö Motorcycle Club.”
“Bugger.”
“Precisely. Lisbeth’s address was no longer quite so secret, and Svavelsjö don’t usually show up with coffee and buns.”
“Not their style.”
“Fortunately the guys turned around and left when they saw the cameras, and of course we immediately contacted the police, who were able to identify the men – one of them was called Kovic, I remember. Peter Kovic. But that didn’t get rid of the problem
, of course, so I rang Lisbeth and asked to meet her right away. She agreed, though rather reluctantly. She came to my office, looking the very image of a perfect daughter-in-law.”
“Sounds like a bit of an exaggeration.”
“I mean, by her standards. The studs had gone, her hair was cut short, and she looked respectable, and I thought, my God, I’ve missed this funny person. I couldn’t bring myself to tear a strip off her – obviously I realised that she’d hacked our cameras – so I just warned her to be careful. They’re out to get you, I told her. ‘People have always been out to get me,’ was all she said, and that really made me mad. I told her that she needed to look for help, for protection: ‘Or they’re going to kill you.’ But then something happened that scared me.”
“What?”
“She looked at the floor and said: ‘Not if I keep one step ahead.’”
“What did she mean by that?”
“That’s what I asked myself, and then the story of her father came back to me.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that she defended herself that time by going on the attack, and I had a feeling that she was planning something similar now: by getting her retaliation in first, and that made me very frightened, Mikael. I saw her eyes and then it no longer mattered how neat and tidy she looked. What I saw was lethal. Her eyes were jet black.”
“I think you’re exaggerating. Lisbeth takes no unnecessary risks. She’s normally quite rational.”
“She is rational – in her own crazy way.”
Blomkvist thought about what Salander had said to him at Kvarnen: that she would be the hunter and not the hunted.
“So what happened?”
“Nothing. She just pushed off, and I haven’t heard a word from her since. Every day I’ve been expecting to read somewhere that Svavelsjö’s clubhouse has been blown to smithereens or that her sister’s been found burned to a crisp in a car in Moscow.”
“Camilla is being protected by the Russian mafia. Lisbeth would never start a war with them.”
“Do you honestly believe that?”
“I don’t know. But I’m certain that she never …”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said, and bit his lip. He felt naive and stupid.
“It’s not over till it’s over, Mikael. That was the feeling I got. Neither Lisbeth nor Camilla will give up until one of them is lying dead.”
“I think you’re making too much of this,” Blomkvist said.
“You do?”
“I hope so,” he corrected himself. He poured them both some more wine and excused himself for a moment.
He picked up his telephone and texted Salander.
To his surprise, he got an answer right away.
*
‘Holiday’ was maybe putting it a bit strongly. But Salander’s idea of happiness had to do with relief from pain, and as she knocked back her beer at the bar of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, that is precisely what she felt: a form of release, as if she were only just beginning to register how tense she had been all summer long – how the hunt for her sister had driven her to the edge of madness. Not that she really unwound; her childhood memories still went round and round in her brain. But her field of vision seemed to broaden and she even began to feel a yearning, not necessarily for anything in particular, but simply to get away from everything. It was enough to give her a sense of freedom.
“Are you O.K.?”
She heard the question again above the noise of the bar, and she turned to find herself looking straight at a young woman standing next to her.
“Why do you ask?” she said.
The woman was perhaps thirty years old, dark and intense, with slanting eyes and long, curly black hair. She wore jeans with a dark-blue blouse and high-heeled boots. There was something both hard and probing about her. Her right arm was bandaged.
“I’m not sure,” the woman said. “It’s just the sort of thing one says.”
“I guess it is.”
“But if you don’t mind my saying, you looked pretty fucked up.”
Salander had heard this many times in her life. People had come up to her and said that she seemed surly, or angry, or precisely that – fucked up – and she always hated it. But for some reason she accepted it now.
“I suppose I have been.”
“But it’s better now?”
“Well, it’s different, in any case.”
“I’m Paulina, by the way, and I’m not in great shape myself.”
Paulina Müller waited for the young woman to introduce herself. But she said nothing, she didn’t even nod. But nor did she tell her to get lost. Paulina had noticed her because of the way she walked, as if she didn’t give a damn about the world and would never bother to ingratiate herself with anyone. There was something strangely appealing about that, and Paulina thought that maybe she had once walked like that too, before Thomas took those strides away from her.
Her life had been destroyed so slowly, so gradually, that she had hardly noticed it. Even though the move to Copenhagen had brought home to her the extent of the damage, the presence of this woman made her feel it even more keenly. The mere fact of standing next to her made Paulina aware of her own lack of freedom. She was drawn to the aura of total independence the woman projected.
“Are you local?” she asked tentatively.
“No,” the woman said.
“We’ve just moved here from Munich. My husband’s been made head of Scandinavia for Angler, the pharmaceutical company,” she continued, and saying it made her feel almost respectable.
“I see.”
“But this evening I ran away from him.”
“O.K.,” the woman said.
“I was a journalist at Geo, you know, the science magazine, but I quit when we moved here.”
“I see,” the woman said.
“I wrote about medicine and biology, mostly.”
“O.K.”
“I really enjoyed it,” she said. “But then my husband got this job, and things turned out the way they did. I’ve freelanced a bit.”
She kept answering questions which had never been asked, and the woman just said “I see”, or “O.K.”, until finally she asked what Paulina was drinking. “Anything, whatever,” Paulina replied, and she got a whisky, a Tullamore Dew with ice, and a smile, or at least the hint of a smile. The woman was wearing a black suit which could have done with some cleaning and a pressing, and a black shirt, and she wore no make-up at all. She looked haggard, as if she had not slept properly for a long time, and there was a dark, unsettling force in her eyes. Paulina tried to make her laugh.
It was not a great success. Except that the woman came closer, and Paulina realised that she liked that. Maybe that was why she looked nervously out into the street, even more afraid now that Thomas would appear, and then the woman suggested that they should go for another drink in her room instead.
She said, “No, no, absolutely no way, no chance. My husband really wouldn’t like that.” Then they kissed and went up to the room and made love, and she could not recall having experienced anything like it before, so full of fury and desire all at once. Then she told the woman about Thomas and the whole tragedy back home, and the woman looked as if she could kill. But Paulina could not tell whether it was Thomas or the whole world she wanted to destroy.
CHAPTER 8
20.viii
Blomkvist did not show up at the magazine the following week, nor did he spend any time on his story about troll factories. He tidied up the apartment, went for some runs, read two novels by Elizabeth Strout and had dinner with his sister Annika Giannini, mainly because she was Salander’s lawyer. But Annika did not have much to report, except that Salander had been in touch, asking about German lawyers specialising in family law.
Mostly he just whiled away the days. Sometimes he would spend hours lazing
around, and talking on the telephone to his old friend and colleague Erika Berger about the latest developments in her divorce. There was something strangely cathartic in that, as if they were teenagers again, chattering away about their love lives. But in reality it was a difficult process for her, and on the Thursday she rang again, sounding completely different. She wanted to talk about work and they had a row. He should stop being so self-absorbed, she told him, and she really gave him a piece of her mind.
“It’s not that, Ricky,” he said. “I’m knackered. I need a holiday.”
“But you said the story was basically finished. Send it over and we’ll fix it.”
“It’s just a load of old rubbish.”
“I don’t believe that for one second.”
“Well, it’s true, unfortunately. Did you read the Washington Post investigation?”
“Certainly not.”
“They show me up on every point.”
“It doesn’t all have to be scoops, Mikael. Just to get your perspective is worth a great deal. You can’t always be the one with the breaking news. It’s crazy even to think so.”
“But the article just isn’t good enough. The writing is tired. Let’s can it.”
“We’re not canning anything, Mikael. But O.K. … let’s hold it for this issue. I think I’ve got enough content for this one anyway.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“What will you do instead?”
“I’ll go and spend a few days at Sandhamn.”
It was not their happiest conversation, but still he felt as if a burden had been lifted, and he took a suitcase out of the wardrobe and began to pack. It was slow work, as if he didn’t want to go there either, and every now and then Salander drifted back into his thoughts. He cursed the fact that he could not get her out of his head; however much she promised not to do anything stupid, he was worried about her, and angry too. In fact he was furious with her for being so uncommunicative, so cryptic. He wanted to hear more about the threats and the surveillance cameras, and about Camilla, and Svavelsjö M.C.
He wanted to turn everything inside out to see if he could do something to help, remembering what she had said at Kvarnen. He could still hear her footsteps disappearing into the evening on Medborgarplatsen. He stopped packing, sauntered into the kitchen and was drinking yoghurt straight from the carton when his mobile rang. Number unknown. But now he was off work, he thought he might as well answer. He could even put on a cheery voice: Hey, how fucking great of you to call and give me some more abuse.
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 6