“Anything else?”
“I have his D.N.A. and an autopsy report. With the injuries he has, I’m pretty sure he was a porter or guide on high-altitude climbing expeditions. He must have been very good at it.”
“What makes you say so?”
“He was unusually well endowed with type 1 muscle fibres and was probably able to carry heavy loads without consuming very much energy. But the main reason is the gene in his body which regulated the haemoglobin in his blood. He must have possessed great strength and endurance in low-oxygen environments. I suspect that he had some terrible experiences. He suffered severe frostbite and torn muscles. Several of his toes and fingers had been amputated.”
“Do you have his Y data?”
“I’ve got the whole of his genome.”
“Shouldn’t you check with YFull in that case?”
YFull was a Russian company – Paulina had written about them only a year or so ago – which was run by a team of mathematicians, biologists and programmers who collected Y chromosome D.N.A. from people all over the world. It came either from subjects who had enrolled in academic studies or from people who had taken their own D.N.A. samples to find out more about their origins.
“I was thinking of checking with Familytree and Ancestry, but YFull, you say?”
“I think they’re the best. The company’s run by people like you, a bunch of out-and-out nerds.”
“O.K.,” Salander said. “But I think it’ll be difficult.”
“Why do you say that?”
“My guess is the man belongs to a group that doesn’t have its D.N.A. analysed all that often.”
“There might be material from relatives of his in scientific reports? I happen to know there’s been a fair amount of research into why Sherpas are such effective climbers at high altitude,” Paulina said, proud to be actually involved.
“That’s true,” Salander said, no longer quite there.
“And it’s a pretty small population, isn’t it?”
“There are only a little over twenty thousand Sherpas in the entire world.”
“Well, then?” she said, perhaps hoping that they could have a go at it together.
But Salander opened another link on her laptop instead: a map of Stockholm.
“Why’s it so important to you?”
“It’s not important.”
Salander’s eyes darkened and Paulina got to her feet, feeling awkward, and dressed in silence. She left the room and the hotel and walked up towards Prague Castle.
CHAPTER 13
25.viii
Rebecka Forsell, then Rebecka Loew, had fallen in love with Johannes’ strength and good humour. She had been the doctor on Viktor Grankin’s Everest expedition, and had long had misgivings about her assignment. Nor had she been insensitive to the criticism that was directed at them. The commercialisation of Everest was a hot topic in those years.
There was talk of clients who bought themselves a place on the summit, just as others buy a Porsche. Not only were they considered to be sullying the very purity of the mountaineering ideal, they were also accused of increasing the risk to others on the mountain. Rebecka worried that too many in their group simply did not have enough experience, and perhaps Johannes especially, since he had never been above five thousand metres.
But once they reached Base Camp and the others began to suffer from coughs and headaches, and had doubts about the whole undertaking, Johannes was the least of her worries. He literally bounded along on the moraine, and made buddies with everyone, even the local population, perhaps because his attitude towards them was completely natural and always respectful. He joked with them, just as with everyone else, and told his amusing stories.
He was his own man and was regarded as genuine. But Rebecka was not sure if this was entirely true. In her opinion he was an intellectual who had consciously decided to see the world in a positive light, which only made him more attractive. Often all she wanted to do was take off with him and embrace life to the full.
It was true that he went through a deep crisis after Klara and Viktor died. For some reason the tragedy affected him more deeply than it did all the others. He fell into a severe depression, and it was a while before he was his happy and energetic self again. After that he took her to Paris and Barcelona, and in April the following year – just a few months after his father died – they were married in Östersund, and she said goodbye to her home in Bergen in Norway without ever looking back.
She liked Östersund and Åre and all the skiing, and she loved Johannes. She was not in the least surprised that his business flourished and people were drawn to him, or even that he became rich and was so swiftly made a cabinet minister. He was a phenomenon. He seemed to be running non-stop yet at the same time was able to reflect, and maybe that was the reason why she rarely got cross with him. He never drew breath, and he firmly believed that any problem could be solved merely by rolling up one’s sleeves and trying a little harder. The flip side was that he pushed their boys too much.
“You can do better,” he was forever saying, and even though he never failed to encourage her, he seldom had time to take her concerns seriously.
He would kiss her and say, “You can do it, Becka, you can do it.” He became busier and busier, especially after being made a government minister, and he often worked into the small hours, yet he was up early and doing his five kilometres and his Navy Seals, as he called them, his bodyweight training. The pace was inhuman. But he liked it that way, she thought, and he did not seem to care that the wind had turned, and that he who had been so admired was now the object of so much abuse.
She was the one who suffered more. Last thing at night and first thing in the morning she would google his name compulsively, and find the most dreadful threads and accusations, and sometimes, in her darkest hours, she thought it was all her fault – she blamed her Jewish roots. Even Johannes, who was a fine Aryan specimen, fell victim to those anti-Semitic hate campaigns, yet for a long time he just shrugged it off and remained optimistic.
“It will make us strong, Becka, and soon everything will change.”
But in the end the lies must have got to him too. Not that he complained or grumbled for one second. He was a person whose enthusiasm ran on autopilot, and last Friday he took a week’s holiday – without a word of warning or explanation – which must have caused his staff a headache or two. That was why they were now on Sandön, in their house by the water, while the boys were with his mother. They had come out accompanied by the inevitable bodyguards, which meant she had to talk to them and look after them. Johannes had gone to ground in his study on the top floor. Yesterday she had heard him shouting into the telephone. This morning he had not even worked out. He had eaten his breakfast in silence and gone into hiding upstairs again. Something was seriously wrong. She could feel it.
Outside, the wind was getting up. She was in the kitchen making a beetroot salad with feta and pine nuts. It was time for lunch, but she could hardly bring herself to let him know.
She did go up in the end, and even though she should have known better she walked into the room without knocking to find him hurriedly putting away some papers. If he had not been acting so suspiciously, she wouldn’t even have noticed them. But now she could see that it was a psychiatric medical file. That was strange. Perhaps a security check on some colleague? She tried to smile her usual smile.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“It’s lunchtime.”
“I’m not hungry.”
You’re always hungry for Christ’s sake, she wanted to shout.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “Tell me.”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, I can see there is.”
She could feel the anger pounding inside.
“I told you, nothing.”
“Are you ill or something?” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I can see you’re reading medical records, so obviously I�
�m interested,” she snapped back, and that was a mistake.
She realised it at once. He looked at her with eyes filled with anxiety, and that scared her. She muttered an apology, and as she left the room she noticed that her legs could hardly carry her.
What’s wrong? she thought. We used to be so happy.
Salander knew that Camilla was now in an apartment on Strandvägen in Stockholm. She knew that Camilla’s hacker, Jurij Bogdanov, and the former G.R.U. agent and gangster Ivan Galinov were there with her, and she realised that she had to act. But how? Instead she carried on looking into the case of Blomkvist’s Sherpa. Perhaps it was a form of escapism. With her BAM Viewer she found sixty-seven distinctive markers in the D.N.A. segment, so she went through them one by one and eventually identified a haplogroup, even a patrilineal one.
It was called DM174, and it too was highly unusual, which could be either a good or a bad thing, and she entered the group into the YFull search engine – the Moscow D.N.A. sequencing company Paulina had recommended – and waited.
“What a crap site, this is unbelievably slow.”
She was not hoping for anything much, and wondered why she was even bothering. She should forget the whole thing and concentrate on Camilla. But then she got an answer, and she whistled. There had been 212 hits, spread over 156 family names. That was much more than she had been expecting. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and then went through all the material, going into more depth with unusual variants in the segment. One name kept cropping up. It felt absurdly wrong. But it came up over and over again: Robert Carson in Denver, Colorado.
He did indeed look a little Asian. But apart from that, he was American through and through, a marathon runner, downhill skier and geologist at the city’s university, forty-two years old, father of three, a politically active Democrat and fierce opponent of the National Rifle Association, ever since his oldest son had been caught up in a school shooting in Seattle.
Robert Carson was also a keen amateur genealogist. Two years earlier he had had his large Y chromosome analysed, which revealed that he had the same EPAS1 mutation as the beggar.
“I have the supergene,” he had written in a piece on the rootsweb.com ancestry website, to which he added a picture of himself posing in high spirits by a stream in the Rocky Mountains, showing off his biceps, wearing overalls and a Colorado Avalanche ice-hockey team cap.
He recounted that his paternal grandfather, Dawa Dorje, had lived in southern Tibet, not far from Mount Everest, but that he had fled the country in 1951 during the Chinese occupation and settled with relatives in the Khumbu valley, near the Tengboche Buddhist monastery in Nepal. On the net there was a picture of his grandfather together with Sir Edmund Hillary at the inauguration of the hospital in the village of Kunde. He had had six children, among them Lobsang, “a madcap and good-looker and, believe it or not, a Rolling Stones nut,” Robert wrote. “I never got to meet him, but Mom has told me he was the strongest climber in the expedition and the most handsome and charismatic by a stretch. (Then again Mom was not exactly objective, and neither was I.)”
Lobsang Dorje had apparently taken part in a British expedition in September 1976, to climb Everest via the West Ridge. The group included an American woman, Christine Carson. She was an ornithologist and, during the approach march, studied the bird life – “a profusion of passerines”, she wrote. At the time, Christine was forty years old, unmarried and childless, and a professor at the University of Michigan. At Base Camp she was struck by severe nausea and headaches, and decided to go back down to Namche Bazaar for medical treatment. On September 9 she learned that six members of the expedition, among them Lobsang Dorje, had died not far from the summit.
When she returned home she discovered she was expecting Lobsang Dorje’s baby. It was a delicate situation. Lobsang had been only nineteen and engaged to a girl in the Khumbu Valley. But Christine gave birth to Robert in April 1977, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Even though it was not possible to say for certain – there is always an element of randomness in genetic selection – Robert and the beggar were probably third or fourth cousins. They would have had a common ancestor some time during the nineteenth century, which was not all that close, but Salander guessed that Blomkvist would be able to fill in the gaps, especially since Carson appeared to be actively interested in these questions himself, and seemed a talkative and bright sort of person. Salander found pictures of him meeting his father’s family in the Khumbu valley the previous year.
She wrote to Blomkvist:
She deleted the last sentence. It was his own bloody business how he did his job. Then she pressed send and went out to look for Paulina.
Bublanski was strolling along Norr Mälarstrand with Inspector Modig. It was one of his newfangled ideas to hold meetings while walking. “It seems to make it easier to think,” he explained. But it was also an attempt to lose some weight and improve his fitness.
These days he was out of breath at the slightest exertion, and it was not at all easy for him to keep up with Modig. They had talked about everything imaginable and had now got on to the case that had prompted Blomkvist’s call. Modig described her visit to the electrical shop on Hornsgatan, and at that he heaved a sigh. Why did everyone have this thing about Forsell? People seemed to want to blame him for all the ills in society. Bublanski hoped to God that it did not have anything to do with Forsell’s Jewish wife.
“I see,” he said.
“Well, yes, it does seem pretty crazy.”
“Any other motives you can think of?”
“Envy, maybe.”
“What could anyone have envied in that poor man?”
“There’s envy even on the lowest rung of the ladder. I spoke to a woman from Romania, Mirela her name is,” Sonja said. “She told me that the man pulled in more money than all the other beggars in the neighbourhood. There was something about him that made people generous, and I know that caused some resentment among those who had been in the area for a while.”
“Doesn’t sound to me like something you’d kill for.”
“Maybe not. But the man seemed to have a relatively large amount of money at his disposal. He was a regular at the hot dog stand below Bysistorget and at McDonald’s on Hornsgatan, and of course also at the Systembolaget liquor store on Rosenlundsgatan, where he bought vodka and beer. And a few times it seems he was also spotted in the early hours further up towards Wollmar Yxkullsgatan in Södermalm, where he bought moonshine.”
“Did he now?”
Bublanski thought it over.
“I can guess what you’re thinking,” Modig said. “We ought to have a word with the people who flog that stuff.”
“Quite right,” he said, taking a deep breath so he could make it up the hill to Hantverkargatan, and his thoughts turned again to Forsell and his wife Rebecka, a charming woman whom he had met at the Jewish Community Centre.
She was tall, certainly more than one eighty-five, fine-limbed with light, elegant steps and large, dark eyes which shone with warmth and vitality. He could understand why this couple attracted so much animosity.
Of course people resented those who exude such boundless energy. They make the rest of us feel small and feeble in comparison.
CHAPTER 14
25.viii
Blomkvist read Salander’s message and got up from his desk to look out across the water. It was five in the afternoon, and it was becoming increasingly windy out there. A yacht was racing along in the storm further out in the bay. A Sherpa, he thought, a Sherpa. There must be something to that, surely?
Not that he had really believed it was anything to do with the Minister of Defence. But still … one could not ignore the fact that Forsell had climbed Mount Everest
in 2008. Blomkvist resolved to get to the bottom of the story. There was no shortage of material about the drama, and that, as he had already concluded, was chiefly down to Klara Engelman.
Engelman was glamour personified, God’s gift to gossip columnists, with her dyed-blonde hair and surgically enhanced lips and breasts. She was married to a notorious tycoon, Stan Engelman, who owned hotels and other properties in New York, Moscow and St Petersburg. Klara was not a society girl but rather a Hungarian former model who had travelled to the U.S.A. in her youth and won a Miss Bikini contest in Las Vegas. There she met Stan, a member of the jury – a detail the tabloids loved.
But in 2008 she was thirty-six years old and mother to the couple’s then twelve-year-old daughter, Juliette. She had a degree in Public Relations from St Joseph’s College in New York and seemed to want to show that she could accomplish something on her own. Today, more than ten years after the tragedy, it was difficult to understand the indignation she aroused at Base Camp. Her blog for Vogue admittedly featured a number of ridiculously styled photographs of her wearing the latest fashions. But with the benefit of hindsight it was clear that the coverage she got was patronising and sexist. The reporters made her out to be nothing more than a bimbo, and held her up as the very antithesis to the mountains and an affront to the local population. She was the vulgarity of the wealthy West contrasted with the purity of the mountain’s wide-open spaces.
Klara Engelman was on the same expedition as Johannes Forsell and his friend Svante Lindberg, who was now his parliamentary under-secretary. All three had paid seventy-five thousand dollars to be guided to the summit, and that of course added insult to injury. Everest was said to have become a haunt for the rich, who were there only to boost their egos. The leader of the expedition and owner of the guiding company was the Russian, Viktor Grankin, and in addition to him there were three guides, a Base Camp manager, a doctor and fourteen Sherpas – and the ten clients. This many people were needed to get them to the top.
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