“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 very 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 Greitz more trouble than all the others put together.”
December, a year and a half 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 was above all so 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. But more than anything he had so many questions, 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 into the red sofa beneath the Bror Hjorth painting. The man sat in the armchair beside it. There was even something eerily familiar about that, the movement, the body sinking into the chair.
“I always knew something,” Leo said. “Something was wrong.”
“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.
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 all 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.
It was a miracle to meet not just a twin brother, but also someone who thought and felt and heard as he did. And how much time they spent discussing just that, the things they could hear! They became totally engrossed, two total nerds, enjoying the mind-boggling experience of at last being able to discuss a subject no-one else understood. Sometimes Dan too climbed onto a chair to propose a toast.
They promised to stick together. They swore to be as one. They vowed many magnificent and beautiful things – but also they vowed to work out what had happened, and why. They spoke about the people who had examined them when they were young, and about the tests and filming and questions. Dan told Leo about Hilda, and Leo told Dan about Carl Seger and Rakel Greitz, with whom he had stayed in touch over the years.
“Rakel Greitz,” Dan said. “What does she look like?”
Leo described the birthmark on her throat, and at that Dan stiffened. He knew that he too had met Greitz. That realization was a decisive moment. 11.00 p.m. on Sunday, December 17. The street was dark and silent, and it was no longer snowing. Snowploughs could be heard in the distance.
“Isn’t Greitz kind of wicked?”
“She strikes one as being pretty cold,” Leo said.
“She gave me the creeps.”
“I didn’t care much for her either.”
“But you went on seeing her?”
“I never stood up to her as much as I perhaps should have.”
“We’re both a bit feeble, aren’t we?” Dan said gently.
“I suppose we are. But Rakel was also my link to Carl. She always told me nice stories about him, all the things I wanted to hear, I suppose. I’m having Christmas lunch with her next week.”
“Have you ever asked her about your background?”
“Thousands of times, and every time she’s said …”
“… that you were left at an orphanage in Gävle, but they never managed to trace your biological parents.”
“
I’ve also called that bloody orphanage,” fumed Leo, “and they confirmed the information.”
“Well, what about the whole gypsy thing, then?”
“That’s just a rumour, she says.”
“She’s lying.”
“Clearly.”
A grim look came over Leo’s face.
“Rakel seems to be the spider at the centre of the web, don’t you think?” Dan said.
“It would seem so.”
“We should nail them all!”
A wild thirst for revenge flared in the apartment on Floragatan, and as Sunday evening turned into night and then Monday morning, they agreed to lie low and not tell a soul about their meeting. Leo would cancel the reservation for their Christmas lunch, call Greitz and invite her to the apartment instead, catching her with her guard down while Dan hid in an adjoining room. Greitz needed to suffer. The brothers concocted a plan.
Hilda had downed one glass after another, and although she did not seem drunk she was shaky and sweating so profusely that her throat and chest were glistening.
“Rakel Greitz and Martin Steinberg wanted both identical and fraternal twins in the project, so that they could make proper comparisons. Lisbeth and her sister Camilla were included in one of the registers from the Institute of Human Genetics and were regarded as ideal candidates. No-one had much respect for Agneta, but their father was—”
“A monster.”
“A highly gifted monster, and that’s what made the children so very interesting. Rakel wanted to separate them. She became obsessed with the idea.”
“Even though the girls already had a home and a mother.”
“Please don’t think I’m trying to defend Rakel, not for one second. But … at the time she had strong arguments, even from a purely human point of view. The father, Zalachenko, was both violently abusive and an alcoholic.”
“I know about that.”
“I know you do. But I want to say it in our defence. It was a hellish home environment, Mikael. It wasn’t just the father’s rapes and assaults. The fact is, he clearly favoured Camilla, which made for a disastrous relationship between the daughters from the outset. It was as if they were born to be enemies.”
Blomkvist thought about Camilla and the murder of his colleague Andrei Zander. He gripped his glass firmly but said nothing.
“There were compelling reasons – I even thought so myself – to place Lisbeth with another family,” Hilda said.
“But she adored her mother.”
“Believe me, I know. I learned a lot about that family. Agneta may have seemed a broken woman when Zalachenko beat her black and blue, but when it came to her children, she was a fighter. She was offered money. She was threatened. She was sent nasty letters with all sorts of official stamps on them. But she refused to give up her child. ‘Lisbeth stays with me,’ she said. ‘I will never abandon her.’ She fought tooth and nail, and the whole process went on for so long that eventually it became too late to separate the girls. But for Rakel it had become a matter of principle, an obsession. I was called in to mediate.”
“What happened?”
“To begin with, I was more and more impressed with Agneta. We saw a lot of each other at the time, you could almost say that we became friends. I took up her case. I really did fight to help her keep Lisbeth. But Rakel would not let herself be beaten so easily, and one evening she showed up with Benjamin Fors, her flunky.”
“Who?”
“He’s basically a social worker, but he’s done Rakel’s dirty work for ages. Martin Steinberg arranged for him to work with her. Benjamin isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box, but there’s a lot of him and he’s unswervingly loyal. Rakel has helped him through some difficult times, including when he lost his son in a car accident, and in return he’ll do anything for her. I should think he’s almost sixty by now. He’s over two metres tall and super fit, and has this slightly comical, good-natured look about him, complete with bushy eyebrows. But he can turn rough, if Rakel wants, and this particular evening on Lundagatan …”
Hilda paused and swallowed some more rosé.
“Yes?”
“It was in October, and cold,” she said. “Carl Seger had just been killed, and I was away attending a memorial service, which was probably no coincidence. The operation had been carefully planned. Camilla was sleeping over at a friend’s, only Agneta and Lisbeth were at home. Lisbeth must have been six. Their birthday’s in April, right? She and Agneta were in the kitchen, having tea and toast. There was a storm blowing outside on Skinnarviksberget.”
“How do you know all these details?”
“I’ve heard it from three different sources: our own official report – which is no doubt the least reliable – and also Agneta’s version. We talked for hours after it happened.”
“And the third?”
“Lisbeth herself.”
Blomkvist looked at her in surprise. He knew how secretive Salander was about her own life. He had certainly never heard a word about the episode, not even from Holger Palmgren.
“And when was that?” he said.
“About ten years ago now,” she said. “It was a time in Lisbeth’s life when she wanted to know more about her mother, and I told her what I knew. I told her that Agneta had been strong and intelligent, and I saw that made her happy. We spent a long time chatting at my place in Skanstull, and in the end she told me this story. It was like a punch to the gut.”
“Did Lisbeth know you belonged to the Registry?”
Hilda reached for the third bottle of rosé.
“No. She didn’t even know Rakel’s name. She thought it was just some compulsory measure imposed by the social services. She had no idea about the twins project, and I …”
Hilda fingered her glass.
“You held back the truth.”
“There were people watching me, Mikael. I was bound by professional secrecy; I knew what had happened to Carl.”
“I understand,” he said, and to a degree he really did.
It could not have been easy for Hilda, and it was brave of her to be sitting there talking openly with him. There was no case for him to judge her.
“Please go on,” he said.
“That evening on Lundagatan, there was a storm, as I said. Zalachenko had been there the previous day and Agneta was covered in bruises and had pains in her stomach and between her legs. She was in the kitchen drinking tea with Lisbeth. They were enjoying a quiet moment together. Then the doorbell rang, and as you can imagine they were terrified. They thought the father was back.”
“But it was Rakel.”
“It was Rakel and Benjamin, which was not much better. They solemnly announced that under the terms of such and such a law, they had come to fetch Lisbeth, for her own protection. Then things turned nasty.”
“In what way?”
“Lisbeth must have felt terribly betrayed. She was only a little girl, after all, and when Rakel had first come and set her different tests to do, she had also given her hope. Say what you will about Rakel, but she does have an aura of authority about her. She’s even a bit regal, with her straight back and that fiery birthmark on her throat. I think Lisbeth had dreamed that she would be able to help them keep her father away from their home. But that evening she realized that Rakel was like all the rest—”
“Another person who did nothing to stop the abuse and the violence.”
“And now on top of it all Rakel was going to take Lisbeth away for her own safety. Her safety! Rakel even had a syringe filled with Stesolid. She meant to sedate the girl and carry her off. Lisbeth went crazy. She bit Rakel’s finger, climbed on a table in the living room, managed to open the window and just threw herself out. They were only one floor up, but it was still a two and a half metre drop to the ground and Lisbeth was a skinny little thing. She had no shoes, just socks, jeans and some sort of sweater, and there was a full-blown storm raging outside. She landed in a crouch, fell forward and banged her head, but she jumped to her feet
and ran off into the darkness. She ran and ran, all the way down towards Slussen and into Gamla Stan, until she got to Mynttorget and the Royal Palace, frozen and soaked through. I think she slept in a stairwell that night. She stayed away for two days.” Hilda fell silent. “Could I ask you …”
“What?”
“I’m feeling so miserable today. Could you run down to reception and bring back some cold beers? I need something cooler than this dishwater,” she said, pointing at the bottles.
Blomkvist looked at her with concern. But he nodded and went down to reception. To his surprise, he not only bought six cold bottles of Carlsberg. He also sent off an encrypted message, which may not have been such a good idea. But he felt that he owed it to her.
Then he carried the beers up to Hilda and listened to the rest of the story.
CHAPTER 17
21 – 22.vi
Salander was in the Opera Bar, trying to celebrate her release from prison. It was not going well. A group of silly, giggling girls with wreaths in their hair, probably a hen party, were at a table behind her. Their laughter cut right through her as she looked out at Kungsträdgården. A man walked by outside with a black dog.
She had chosen the place because of their cocktails, and maybe also for the atmosphere and bustle, but it was not really doing it for her. Occasionally her eyes scanned the faces in the room; maybe she could bring someone back to her place, could be a man, possibly a woman.
All sorts of things went through her mind, and she kept looking at her mobile. She had had an e-mail from Hanna Balder, August’s mother. August, the autistic boy with the photographic memory who had witnessed the murder of his father, was now back in the country, after a long stay abroad, and according to Hanna was “doing well, all things considered”. That sounded promising, although Salander could not help thinking about his gaze, those glazed eyes which had not only seen much more than they should, they also seemed to be retreating into a shell. She reflected, not without pain, that certain things are seared into your brain. You can never shake them off, you have to live with them. She remembered how, when they were hiding in that small house in Ingarö, the boy had banged his head over and over on the dining table in a fit of wild frustration. For a fleeting moment she felt like doing the same: smashing her head against the bar counter. But all she did was clench her jaws.
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series Page 26