Ann-Catrine explained that she had spoken to Sten on the telephone and had a positive impression of him, which made Daniel even more suspicious.
“He misses you,” she said.
“Bullshit,” he said, and told her that he could not go back. He would be beaten, his life would be hell. Ann-Catrine listened to his story and afterwards gave him a few options, none of which felt right. He said he could manage on his own, she didn’t need to worry. Ann-Catrine replied that he was still a minor and that he needed support and guidance.
That was when he remembered the “Stockholm people”, as he thought of them: psychologists and doctors who had visited him every year of his childhood. They had measured and weighed him, interviewed him and taken notes. And they had made him take tests, all kinds of tests. He never much liked them and sometimes he had cried afterwards. He felt lonely and exposed to scrutiny, and he had thought of his mother and the life he never had with her. On the other hand, he did not hate them either. They would give him encouraging smiles and praise, and they said what a good and clever boy he was. There had never been a single unkind word. Nor did he see the visits as anything out of the ordinary. He thought it perfectly normal that the authorities should want to see how he was getting along with his foster family, and the fact that people were writing about him in medical records and protocols did not bother him. To him, it was a sign that he counted for something. Depending on who came to see him, he sometimes even viewed the visits as a welcome relief from work on the farm, especially more recently when the Stockholm people had shown an interest in his music and filmed him as he played the guitar. A few times, they seemed impressed and whispered to each other, and he had gone on to dream of how those films might get around and end up in the hands of agents or record producers.
The psychologists and doctors never gave more than their first names, and he knew nothing about them – apart from one woman who shook his hand one day and introduced herself with her full name, presumably by mistake. But that was not the only reason he remembered her. He had been entranced by her figure and her long, strawberry-blonde hair, and the high heels which were so unsuited to the dirt paths around the farmhouse. The woman had smiled at him, as if she genuinely liked him. Her name was Hilda von Kanterborg and she wore low-cut blouses and dresses, and had full red lips which he dreamed of kissing.
This was the woman he thought of when he asked if he could make a call from the social welfare offices. He was given a telephone directory for the Stockholm area and nervously flicked through it. For a moment he was convinced that Hilda von Kanterborg had been a cover, and that was the first time it crossed his mind that the Stockholm people might not be regular officials of the social welfare system. But then he did find her name and dialled the number. There was no answer, so he left a message.
When he returned the next day, having spent the night at Göteborg City Mission, she had returned his call and left another number. This time she answered and seemed happy to hear his voice. Straight away he realized that she knew he had run away. She told him that she was “terribly sorry” and said he was “exceptionally gifted”. He felt unbearably lonely and stifled an impulse to cry.
“Well, help me, then,” he said.
“My dear Daniel,” she said, “I would do just about anything. But we’re supposed to study, not to intervene.”
Daniel would return to that time and again over the years; it was one of the factors that made him take on a new identity and guard it with all his might. But right then, gripping the receiver, he felt miserable and blurted out: “What, what are you talking about?” Hilda became nervous, he could tell. She swiftly began to talk about other things, how he needed to finish school before he made any rash decisions. He said that all he wanted was to play the guitar. Hilda told him he could study music. He replied that he wanted to go to sea and make his way to New York to play in the jazz clubs there. She advised strongly against that: “Not at your age, and not with everything you’ve got going for you,” she said.
They talked for so long that Ann-Catrine and the other social workers were beginning to get impatient, and he promised to think about the options she had given him. He said he hoped to see her. She said she’d like that, but it did not come to pass. He was never to see her again.
People seemed to appear from nowhere to help him get a passport, a visa and a job as a kitchen worker and waiter on a Wallenius Lines freighter. He never understood how it all happened. The freighter would take him, not to New York, but to Boston. He found a slip of paper stapled to his employment contract with the following words in blue ballpoint pen: “Berklee College of Music, Boston, Massachusetts. Good luck! H.”
His life would never be the same again. He became an American citizen and changed his name to Dan Brody, and the years that followed were full of wonderful, exciting experiences. And yet, deep down, he felt disillusioned and alone. He nearly had a break-through at the start of his career. One day, jamming at Ryles Jazz Club on Hampshire Street in Boston, he played a solo which was both in the spirit of Django and at the same time something else, something new, and a murmur went through the audience. People began to talk about him and he got to know the managers and scouts of record companies. But in the end they felt he was lacking something, courage perhaps – and self-confidence. Deals fell through at the last minute, and he was eclipsed by others who were less talented and yet somehow more enterprising. He would have to be satisfied with a life in the shadows; he would be the one sitting behind the star. He would always miss the fervour he had felt as he played on the jetty at Blackåstjärnen.
Salander had tracked down several larger hand motion data-sets – used for medical research and to develop robots – and had fed them into Hacker Republic’s deep neural networks. She had been working so hard that she had forgotten to eat and drink, despite the heat. Finally she looked up from the computer and poured herself a glass, not of water, but of Tullamore Dew.
She had longed for alcohol. She had longed for sex, sunlight, junk food, the smell of the sea and the buzz of bars. And she had longed for the feeling of freedom. But for now she made do with Irish whiskey. It might not be bad to end up reeking like a drunken bum, she thought. No-one expects much from a wino. She looked out over Riddarfjärden and closed her eyes for a few moments. She stretched her back and let the algorithms in the neural network do their job while she went into the kitchen and microwaved a pizza. Then she rang Annika Giannini.
Annika was not pleased to hear what she was planning. She advised strongly against it, but when that fell on deaf ears she told Salander that the most she could do was film the suspect, nothing more. She recommended that Salander get in touch with Hassan Ferdousi, the imam. He would help her with “the more human aspects”. Salander ignored this advice, but that did not matter as Annika later contacted the imam herself, and sent him off to Vallholmen.
Salander dug into her pizza and drank whiskey, and then hacked into Blomkvist’s computer to type into the file he had called LISBETH STUFF:
Hilda is Hilda von Kanterborg. Find her.
Also check out Daniel Brolin. He’s a guitarist, very talented. Am busy with other things. Will be in touch.>
Blomkvist saw Salander’s message and was thankful that she had been released. He tried to call her. When there was no answer he cursed. So she too knew about Hilda von Kanterborg. What could that mean? Did she know her personally, or had she obtained the information by other means? He had no idea. But he needed no encouragement from Salander to go after von Kanterborg. He had already set his mind on that.
On the other hand, he had not been able to discover where this Daniel Brolin came into it. He found many different Daniel Brolins on the net, but none was a guitar player, or any kind of musician at all. Perhaps he was not trying as hard as he might have. He had got too involved following up other leads.
It had started the evening before, with the article Hilda’s sister had told him about. When
he first read it, it seemed unremarkable, too general to contain anything revelatory, let alone controversial. Hilda – under the pseudonym Leonard Bark – wrote about how the classic nature versus nurture debate had become politicized long ago. The Left would like us to believe that our prospects in life are primarily determined by social factors, while the Right argues for the influence of genetics.
Hilda observed that science always loses its way when guided by ideology or wishful thinking. There was a note of anxiety in her introductory passage, as if she were about to propose something shocking. But the article was balanced: it held that we are affected by genetics and social environment to the same degree, which was more or less what Blomkvist had expected.
One thing did surprise him, however. The environmental factors said to be most influential in shaping us were not those he had predicted. The essay suggested that mothers and fathers are often convinced they have a decisive influence over their children’s development, but they “flatter themselves”.
Hilda argued that our fate is more likely determined by what she called our “unique environment” – the one we do not share with anyone, not even our siblings. It is the environment we seek out and create for ourselves, for example when we find something which delights and fascinates us, and drives us in a certain direction. Rather like Blomkvist’s reaction as a young boy, perhaps, when he saw the film “All the President’s Men” and was struck by a strong urge to become a journalist.
Heredity and environment interact constantly, Hilda wrote. We seek out occurrences and activities which stimulate our genes and make them flourish, and we avoid things which frighten us or make us uncomfortable.
She based her conclusions on a series of studies, among others Mi.S.T.R.A., the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart, and investigations by the Swedish Twin Registry at the Karolinska Institute. Identical twins, or so-called monozygotic twins, with their essentially indistinguishable sets of genes, are ideal subjects. Thousands of twins, both identical and fraternal, grow up apart from each other, either because one or both have been adopted, or, more rarely, as the result of some unfortunate mix-up in a maternity ward. Many of these cases are heart-rending, but they also provide scientists with crucial test cases. The studies come to more or less the same conclusion: hereditary factors in conjunction with our unique environment are the primary factors in shaping our personality.
Blomkvist had no trouble coming up with hypotheses to challenge Hilda’s findings, and he could also identify problems with how the research material was to be interpreted. Yet he found that the article made for interesting reading. He learned about some extraordinary cases of identical twins who had grown up in different families and only met as adults, but were strikingly similar, not just in appearance but also in behaviour. There were the so-called “Jim Twins” of Ohio, U.S.A.: unaware of each other’s existence, yet both became chain-smokers of Salem cigarettes, bit their fingernails, suffered from bad headaches, had carpentry workbenches in their garage, named their dogs Toy, got married twice to women with the same name, had sons they christened James Allan and James Alan, and God knows what else.
Blomkvist could see why the gutter press had become excited, but he himself was not all that impressed. He knew how easy it was to become fixated by similarities and coincidences – how the sensational always sticks in the mind and stands out at the expense of the ordinary, which – maybe precisely because it is so ordinary – tells us something more significant about the real world.
But Blomkvist did see that all these studies on twins resulted in a paradigm shift for epidemiological science. The research community began to believe more in the power that genes have over us, and in their intricate interplay with environmental factors. Earlier, especially in the 1960s and ’70s, more weight had been given to the impact of social considerations. There was a prevailing notion that to grow up in a certain environment or to be raised in a particular way would inevitably produce a specific type of individual. Many scientists dreamed of being able to prove this, in order perhaps to determine how to produce better, happier people. It was one of the reasons why so many research projects with twins were initiated at that time, some of which Hilda, in evasive terms, described as “tendentious and radical”.
It was there that Blomkvist suddenly sat up and continued his research with renewed energy. He had no idea whether he was on the right track, yet he kept digging, including by searching combinations of the words “tendentious and radical” in the context of twins research. That is how he came across the name Roger Stafford.
Stafford was an American psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who had been a professor at Yale. He had worked closely with Freud’s daughter, Anna, and was said to be charismatic and charming. There were pictures of him with Jane Fonda, Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford, and he looked a little like a film star himself.
But his main claim to fame was less flattering. “Tendentious and radical” was precisely the point. In September 1989, the Washington Post disclosed that, in the late 1960s, Stafford had established close relationships with the female managers of five adoption agencies in New York and Boston. Two of the women had affairs with him, and there may have been promises of marriage. Not that he was reliant on that. Stafford was quite an authority at the time. In one of his books, The Egoistic Child, he claimed that identical twins thrive better and become more independent if they grow up apart. This conclusion was later debunked, but by then it had become established among therapists on the East Coast.
It was agreed that these women would contact Stafford as soon as twins were referred to them for adoption. The children were then placed in consultation with him. A total of forty-six babies were involved, twenty-eight identical and eighteen fraternal twins. None of the families was informed that their adopted son or daughter was a twin, or even that they had a sibling. The adoptive parents, on the other hand, were required to allow Stafford and his team to examine the children once a year and make them undertake a series of personality tests.
Before long one of the managers – a woman by the name of Rita Bernard – noticed that Stafford insisted on placing twins with sets of parents who were utterly different from each other in terms of status, education, religious affiliation, temperament, personality, ethnicity and in their methods of child-rearing. Instead of putting the twins’ interests first, Stafford seemed bent on pursuing research into heredity and environment, she said.
Stafford did not deny that he was engaged in scientific work. He saw it as an excellent opportunity to improve our understanding of how we are formed as individuals. He said that his research would become an “inestimable scientific resource”. He vehemently denied that he was not prioritizing the interests of the child, but for “reasons of integrity” he refused to make his material public. He donated it to the Yale Child Study Center, with the proviso that researchers and the public should have access to it only in 2078, when all those involved would be long dead. He did not, he said, want to exploit the fate of those twins.
That sounded noble, but there were critics who claimed that he declared the material confidential because it had fallen short of his expectations. Most agreed that the experiment was deeply unethical, and that Stafford had deprived siblings of the joy of growing up together. A fellow psychiatrist from Harvard even compared his activities with Joseph Mengele’s experiments on twins at Auschwitz. Stafford retaliated, wildly and proudly, with two or three lawyers, and the debate came to an end not long after. When Stafford died in 2001, he was buried with a certain amount of pomp and circumstance and in the presence of a number of celebrities. Some fine obituaries were published in the specialist press and newspapers. The experiment did not tarnish his memory to any significant extent, perhaps because the children who had been so brutally separated from each other had all come from the lower strata of society.
That was nothing unusual in those days, as Blomkvist knew only too well. One could inflict abuses on ethnic and other minorities in the name of science an
d for the good of society and get away with it. For that reason Blomkvist was unwilling to dismiss Stafford’s experiment as an isolated episode and looked further into the history. He noted that Stafford had been to Sweden in the 1970s and ’80s. There were pictures of him with Lars Malm, Birgitta Edberg, Liselotte Ceder and Martin Steinberg, the leading psychoanalysts and sociologists of the day.
At the time, nothing was known about Stafford’s experiments with twins, and he may have had other reasons for visiting Sweden. But Blomkvist kept digging, thinking of Salander all along. She too was a twin, a fraternal twin to a nightmare sister called Camilla. He knew the authorities had attempted to examine her when she was little and she had hated it. He also thought about Leo Mannheimer and his high I.Q. score, and about Ellenor Hjort’s suggestion that he might have been born into the traveller community. What Malin said about Leo no longer being left-handed was actually beginning to seem plausible.
He looked up medical phenomena which might explain the change, and became absorbed by an article in Nature magazine which explained how one fertilized egg splits in the womb and results in identical twins. Then he got up from his desk and stood motionless for a minute or two, muttering to himself. He rang Lotta von Kanterborg again and told her what he suspected. In fact he took a chance and presented his new, wild theory as fact.
“That sounds completely crazy,” she said.
“I know. But will you tell Hilda, if she gets in touch? Tell her that the situation is critical.”
“I will,” Lotta said.
Blomkvist went to bed with his mobile next to him on the bedside table. But no-one called. Even so he hardly slept, and now, a day later, he was back at his computer. He was looking into the people Stafford had met on his trips to Sweden, and to his surprise he came across Holger Palmgren’s name. Palmgren and sociology professor Martin Steinberg had been working together on a criminal case more than two decades ago. Blomkvist hardly thought that this was significant – Stockholm is a small place, after all. People are always running into each other.
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series Page 20