A Darker Shade of Sweden (19 page)

He thought of when they had searched Pekkari's room. Not a single letter in any of the drawers. Not a single photograph.

“He would have had his head cut off,” Spett protested. “It's senseless.”

“The evidence pointed to him. Perhaps he imagined that he had done it. That what everyone said was true. Who can know?”

Spett snorted incredulously, then laughed at Kajsa who was greeting the train conductor and trying to invite him to play. She ran a few crazy turns, spattering him with snow.

“Well,” Björnfot said, stroking his moustache. “People talk about the mystery of God. But I'd say people can be just as great a mystery.”

“I thought that only applied to women,” Spett said.

Speaking about women made sheriff Björnfot remember to check his watch. He had arranged to meet his wife at one o'clock. It was time to get going.

“But admit that it's strange,” Spett said before Björnfot hurried off. “The Laestadian brethren, I mean. They could forgive Pek­kari for being a cold-blooded killer. But they couldn't forgive him for being a simple liar.”

“People are a mystery,” Björnfot said again and bid him good-bye for now.

She stood waiting at the street corner as he came panting up the hillside. Her dark, wide eyebrows under the ermine hat. Her hands in the white muff. Her long, black coat had a rim of snow.

“Just wait!” Björnfot said cheerfully and linked his arm through hers.

The walk to the new music pavilion took only three minutes. He had borrowed a key. On the stage up front was a Steinway grand piano.

“It's yours every Thursday from two till half past three,” he said. “Nobody will disturb you.”

She looked at the grand piano. Felt herself lured into a trap.

She thought of her first trip up north to Kiruna. In Gällivare, the train conductor had come up to her and inquired whether she had someone to “answer for her.”

“What do you mean?” she had asked.

“You can't travel to Kiruna by yourself,” he had replied. “You must have a man to answer for you. Or at least a certificate stating that a man will meet you up there and answer for you.”

“Answer for me?” she had exclaimed, but at that moment Albert and the girls had entered the compartment. They had just been outside, taking a walk on the platform during the stop.

The conductor had excused himself, checked their tickets and gone his way.

Albert had defended him.

“It's not like Stockholm,” he had said. “It's a mining town. But they don't want it to turn into another Malmberget, full of drunkenness and . . .”

He had stopped talking and glanced at the girls, who were following their discussion with rapt expressions.

“. . . and women who oblige with this and that,” he said. “They want to keep that kind of womenfolk out. There's no need for you to take offense.”

“In Finland, women are allowed to vote,” she had said. “Here, we're not allowed to take the train.”

Kiruna was a town belonging to men. The gentlemen and their businesses. And of course the sheriff was always invited when this or that was to be discussed.

How he polished his boots when he was invited to visit managing director Lundbohm. Spat and buffed. The director himself sometimes turned up for meetings dressed as a navvy.

She had expected something else from this town of the future. Something that felt modern. But the women here sighed devoutly in front of the altarpiece painted by Prince Eugén.

And she suffered poverty badly. All those women and children whose cheekbones stuck out from their faces like mountaintops. From hand to mouth, all the time. All those women whose men came to harm in the mines. The child auctions. They had them in Stockholm as well. But here, it was all so close. It affected her badly.

Albert had a five-year contract as sheriff. She couldn't understand how she would bear it. Nowadays she could hardly stand him either. His heavy breathing when sleeping. His table manners had begun to annoy her. She felt ashamed of herself. But what did that accomplish? Sometimes she wished that she would come down with some illness. Just to escape it all.

He opened his uniform coat and pulled out the parcel with the sheet music her mother had sent her.

“I can't,” she said. “My fingers are frozen stiff.”

He dropped the music. Took her hands in his.

“You don't want to?” he said, pleadingly. “Don't you have any feelings left for me?”

She gave in. Loosened herself from his hold and sat down at the piano. Struck a chord. Hoped for it to be out of tune. It wasn't.

I'll drown here, she thought.

And at that moment, her fingers dove down onto the keys.

They landed on the opening chord to Debussy's
La Cathédrale Engloutie
.

The piano can't lie to Debussy. The first tones sound one by one. But the grand piano keeps the promise it made from the start.

Now the cathedral bells are ringing down in the depths of the sea. She strikes each key distinctly. Oh, these pealing sounds. The storm tears the surface. Waves rise high. The bells below toll and ring out.

Her touch is hard and demanding. Furious.

Her fingers aren't long enough. Her arms aren't long enough. Her coat arms are tight as a straitjacket. She sweats. Her back hurts when she stretches.

Then she looks at Albert. He is smiling, but below that smile is worry. He doesn't understand this music. It frightens him. She frightens him when she shows him this side of herself.

Abruptly, she stops playing. Her hands land in her lap. She almost wants to sit on them.

“Go on,” he says.

Why, she wants to ask him. You don't understand.

And as if he could see right through her, he says:

“I'm a simple man . . .”

His voice thickens. The thought of his crying scares her half to death.

“. . . but if you knew how proud I am of you, my songbird. When you play. I wish I could . . . I'm really trying . . .”

He is unable to go on speaking. His lips compress and the muscles under their skin twitch.

She looks out the window. A squirrel runs along a branch. Snow loses its grip and falls to the ground. It is light outside. Beyond all the white, the sky is colored rose.

Her heart is not as heavy as before.

I'll try to be happy, she decides. Thursdays from two until three-thirty. Maybe that's what I need.

She smiles at him. Then she puts her hands on the keys again and begins to play. She picks Schubert's
Impromptu
in G Flat Major. It's lyrical and she knows that he likes it very much. She looks at him and smiles. Goes on playing tunes he appreciates.

Now he is smiling back at her, his heart happy. As if she were the returning sun.

He is a good man, she thinks. He deserves better.

She is miserable in Kiruna. Sometimes she thinks she'll go mad.

But he is a good man. And soon it will be Christmas.

Åsa Larsson was born in 1966 in the university town Uppsala, roughly fifty miles north of Stockholm. At four she moved with her family to Kiruna, a mining town some 750 miles farther north, where she grew up; her paternal grandfather Erik August Larsson, who lived there until his death in 1982, was a cross-country skier who won one gold and one bronze medal at the 1936 Winter Olympics, but who later renounced sports and became a preacher in the Firstborn Laestadians congregation, noted for its highly traditionalist and conservative pietism.

Åsa Larsson grew up in the strict Laestadian faith, to which her parents also subscribed. As a student, however, she gradually rejected the extreme views of the Laestadians, returned to Uppsala to study law and went to work as a tax lawyer. But the harsh landscapes of the extreme north and issues of faith and religious conflict remain important and recurring themes in her fiction.

She published her first novel in 2003,
Solstorm
(Sun Storm),
which won the Best First Novel Award from the Swedish Crime Fiction Academy; it also introduced her recurring protagonist, prosecutor Rebecka Martinsson. Her second novel,
Det blod som spillts
(The Blood Spilt
, 2004
),
won the academy's Best Novel of the Year Award, as did her fifth novel,
Till offer åt Molok
(Sacrifice to Molok
, 2012
)
. Larsson's novels have been extensively translated; she now writes full time and lives in Mariefred, a small town fairly close to Stockholm, with her husband and two children.

BRAIN POWER

S
TIEG
L
ARSSON

Stieg Larsson's first and only professionally published works of fiction were the three novels known as
The Millennium Trilogy,
which he began writing in the summer of 2002, shortly before his forty-eighth birthday, and that after his death in late 2004 became an international publishing phenomenon, selling so far a total of more than seventy-five million copies in some fifty languages.

What few of Stieg Larsson's readers may know, however, is that he had dreamed of becoming a fiction writer for most of his life. By age ten he was already writing stories; in his teens, he tried his hand at novels and also published a handful of stories in mimeographed science fiction fanzines published by himself or others. Later on he worked on at least one very ambitious science fiction novel which never satisfied him and that he finally discarded.

As noted, Larsson's first literary love was science fiction, but in his early teens he also became fascinated by crime fiction. He favored the hard-boiled, grittier crime stories: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Peter O'Donnell were early favorite authors. And when he began publishing his fanzine stories at seventeen, he sometimes combined his two favorite genres, writing suspense or crime stories in a science fiction mode.

The story presented here initially appeared in the third issue of
Sfären
, a fanzine copublished by Larsson and his close friend Rune Forsgren. That issue—fewer than fifty mimeographed copies—appeared in April 1972. For all practical purposes, this is the first time the story is published.

“Brain Power” is an early work by the teenager who would turn into the man who wrote
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
. But the story shows that even the very young Stieg Larsson had a talent for storytelling; it shows that at seventeen he was already concerned with issues such as the abuse of power and the abrogation of civil liberties by the elite, and it shows his interest in building both suspense and narrative through a series of disclosures, only gradually letting the reader in on what is actually happening.

What we get then is not only a very early glimpse of the storyteller who gave us Lisbeth Salander, but also of his love of both science fiction and crime fiction, of his joy in writing, and of his lifelong dedication to the causes of justice, compassion, and civil liberty.

Mr. Michael November Collins

Sector 41

Aldedo Street

8048 New York 18-A-34

Mr. Michael November Collins, that's me, and the letter with my name and address on its envelope arrived in the morning, dropping from the mail tube to the breakfast table.

Judith, my wife, picked it out of the basket, read my name and handed it to me. Even before opening the letter I saw that it wasn't an everyday one. There was no postage on it, just a stamp informing me that postage was paid by the government—or the taxpayers, whichever you prefer. My getting mail from the government was hardly a common thing. It had only happened a single time before, two years ago when I'd managed to run myself into a gold medal at the Olympics and the President had sent me his congratulations. That was in 2172. Now was 2174, but the world record I set then still held.

I slit the envelope open.

Michael November Collins 46-06-18

Mr. Collins is called upon to report for medical examination at the office of Dr. Mark Wester, Boston University, State Research Facility, on 74-08-24. This is a Governmental request.

That was the entire text of the letter, apart from an illegible signature above the single word “Assistant.”

I was still staring in confusion at the letter when Michael Junior and Tina came to say goodbye before rushing off to the school lift. While I was hugging the children, Judith came up, took the letter from me and told the kids to hurry.

“What's the meaning of this?” Judith asked.

“No idea, honey. I guess I'll just have to go there and find out.”

“But why would they want you to have a medical examination?”

I pulled her close, smiled and gave her a kiss.

“Maybe it's something about my fitness. I do hold a few world records, you know.”

“But why at the government's request?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.” I shrugged. “But I guess in time they'll tell me why.”

“Doctor Mark Wester,” I repeated.

I was standing by the information desk in the central rotunda of Boston University, speaking to the attendant.

“Where can I find him?” I asked impatiently.

“I'll phone his secretary. It may take a while. As you perhaps don't realize, Boston University is no ordinary university, but a state research center, and formalities usually do take a few minutes.”

“No, I didn't know. Perhaps you can enlighten me by telling me why I've been asked to come here?”

“For a medical examination. It says so in your letter.”

She picked up her phone and tapped a number.

“Mary? Hi, it's Information. You're expecting a Mister Michael November Collins today. He's here now.”

Silence.

“Oh, okay, I can send him right up.”

She gave me a smile and pointed to a uniformed man seated inside a glass booth. “Talk to the man in there. I'll give him a call, and he'll show you to Doctor Wester.” She lifted her phone again, and I began walking across the hall. I saw that she'd finished her phone call before I was even halfway across. The uniformed man rose, left his cage, came to meet me and shook my hand.

“I understand you're here to see Mark Wester.”

“That's right.”

“Fine. I'll show you to him. Please follow me.”

While walking along in his footsteps, I began feeling a steadily growing apprehension. My imagination was telling me that something was wrong. I couldn't put my finger on exactly what made me feel that way, but that only added irritation to my unease. Twice along the way we had to stop when uniformed guards asked us for access permits, but both times my guide sent them away by pointing to me and saying, “He's here to see Doctor Wester.”

I grew steadily more bewildered, and finally couldn't refrain from asking him why I had been requested to see Wester. But the man knew nothing more than the girl at the information desk. Finally, we arrived.

An assistant, whom I assumed to be Mary, asked me to sit down on the couch and said that Doctor Wester would see me in just a minute or two. After three minutes, a man of around fifty came out of an inner office. He was fairly heftily built, and all of his visible skin was darkly tanned—a real tan, I mean, not the disgusting coloring you buy at the chemists. He looked to be in great shape.

“Thanks for coming in,” he said and held his hand out. I shook it.

“Perhaps you'd like to tell me why I'm here,” I asked.

“Didn't they put that in the letter? You're to have a medical examination.”

“That's what they wrote. I just don't understand why.”

“Oh, that. Well, you'll understand why in a short while. All depending on the results, of course.”

“Oh. Really? Well, in fact I'm not sure if I have any great wish to be checked. I'm extremely fit. In my line of work, I have to be.”

“Certainly. I know you're incredibly fit, but what I want to find out is how your innards are doing.”

He laughed, patted me on the back, and showed me into his office.

“I didn't know Boston University is a state research center. Don't you have any students at all any longer?”

“Yes, but we're all about specialized education nowadays. Not much of what we do is known to the general public.”

“So what are you doing?”

“I really shouldn't tell you, I suppose, but I suppose you could sum it all up by saying that we're doing biological research.”

“And what's that got to do with me? Where do I come into this?”

“Unfortunately, I'm afraid I can't give you any details until we have finished testing you.”

“Really? Well, how about getting started at once, in that case? I'd really like to get this over and done with, so I can get back to Judith and the kids again.”

“Oh, that's true, you're married, of course,” Wester said, scratching his head.

“So I am. To the most wonderful woman in the world,” I said, smiling.

“Good for you. Personally I have neither wife nor children, and I suppose I'm getting too old to start thinking about those things. At any rate I'm happy that you agree to our examinations.”

“So when can we start?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? I had believed it could all be done today.”

“We're talking of extremely thorough and complex examinations, and I'm afraid the procedure will take some time. But don't worry. We have arranged a private room for you here at the university. And you can always phone your wife.”

“Exactly how many days are we talking about here?”

“It's difficult to say. But it might be up to a week. It depends on if everything works out as it should.”

“A week! What kind of examinations are we talking about here? I want to know what this is all about. Why am I here? How are you going to test me? And why?”

“I've already said that I can't tell you until we have the results.”

“In that case I'm not going to go along with any tests at all,” I said firmly.

Wester smiled.

“Please, there's no reason to get all worked up about this. I assure you that the tests will be absolutely harmless.”

“That doesn't change anything,” I said. “I still want to know the reason for them. That's not negotiable. I won't cooperate otherwise.”

“You've misunderstood, I'm afraid. It's not a matter of cooperating or not. You
will
cooperate. That's an order.”

“Whose order?”

“The government's.”

“Damn the government,” I said and grew angry. “I'm not cooperating.”

“You don't have a choice.”

“I certainly do. I'll simply stand up and walk out the same door I came in.” I stood up and walked away from him.

“Please take a look at this paper,” Wester said just as I was grasping the doorknob.

“Why should I?”

“Because it's of great concern to you.”

“So long,” I said, opening the door.

“It's an order signed by the president . . .”

I hesitated.

“It demands your absolute obedience. If you refuse, you will be arrested for obstructing the government.”

“Is this some kind of joke?”

“Hardly. You can be punished by up to twenty-five years in prison and fined twenty-thousand dollars.”

I stared at him, mouth open.

“I don't believe you.”

“Read it yourself.”

Slowly, I closed the door. Slowly, Wester had adopted a threatening attitude.

“Well, how about it?”

“It doesn't look as if I have much of a choice, does it?”

“No, not really.”

“Can I phone my wife?”

“Of course. You are free to do whatever you like.”

“As long as it doesn't contradict what's in your orders, you mean?”

“Exactly. Someone will escort you to your rooms.”

“Where I'll be under guard?”

“Just to ensure your safety, of course.”

“Of course . . .”

Mark Wester certainly hadn't exaggerated when he told me that the tests and examinations to be performed were complex. For four days I did nothing except be shuffled from one room to the next, in each of which different doctors did their best to discover any ailments. In vain I tried to explain to them that I was as fit as a fiddle—to use an old and tired cliché. Nothing helped. They examined me from top to toe, from the inside and out. The first day they put me to a number of physical tests and fitness tests. They checked, double-checked, triple-checked and then, just to be sure of not having overlooked even the slightest detail, did a final check.

The second day I was X-rayed; they tapped my spine and asked me to stick my tongue out and say, “Aaaah!”

That was all they did that day, and so I actually got a short breathing pause. They had given me a luxurious suite of rooms, and I was truly living just as comfortably as I normally spent my time wishing I could live. I phoned Judith every night and tried to explain to her that I had to stay put for a while. I never mentioned Wester's threats about jail time and fines. She kissed me over the phone and wished for me to come back home.

From the first time I was taken to my suite of rooms and for my entire stay at the university, two hefty uniformed guys from the university security force had stuck to me like glue. Just to ensure my safety, of course.

If I'd been hoping for the rest of the examinations to be no harder than those during the second day, I was hugely mistaken. During the third, fourth, and fifth day they practically turned my entire body inside out, scrutinizing every nook and cranny. They checked me for everything from athlete's foot to lung cancer.

On the sixth day it was finally all over, and Wester came to my rooms to tell me that I would be allowed to go home over the weekend, but that I had to return on Monday.

“Why?” I asked. It had become a routine question.

“We'll take your appendix out.”

I turned in my hospital bed, discarding mt half-read comic book. I really didn't like my situation. The operation had been performed twelve days ago, and since then the doctors had pumped me full of vaccines against every conceivable illness.

I was bored and mad as hell. Mad because they more or less forced me to do whatever they felt like. Mad because I no longer felt like a free citizen of the United States. Mad because they refused to tell me what it was all about.