The Girl Who Played with Fire (10 page)

That evening she telephoned Jeremy MacMillan, partner in the law firm MacMillan & Marks in Gibraltar. She had done business with MacMillan before. For a fee even he thought generous he had set up P.O. box companies to be owners of the accounts that administered the fortune she had stolen a year ago from the corrupt financier Hans-Erik Wennerström.

She engaged MacMillan’s services again, instructing him to open negotiations with Nobel Estates on behalf of Wasp Enterprises to buy the apartment on Fiskargatan near Mosebacke Torg. It took four days, and the figure finally arrived at made her raise her eyebrows. Plus the 5 percent commission to MacMillan. Before the week was out she had moved in with two boxes of clothes and bed linens, a mattress, and some kitchen utensils. She slept on the mattress in the apartment for three weeks while she investigated clinics for plastic surgery, straightened out a number of unresolved bureaucratic details (including a nighttime talk with a certain lawyer, Nils Bjurman), and paid in advance for the rent at her old place, as well as the electricity bills and other monthly expenses.

Then she had booked her journey to the clinic in Italy. When the treatments were done and she was discharged, she sat in a hotel room in Rome and thought about what to do next. She should have returned to Sweden to get on with her life, but for various reasons she could not bear to think about Stockholm.

She had no real profession. She could see for herself no future at Milton Security. It was not Armansky’s fault. In all probability, he would have liked her to work full-time and turn herself into an efficient cog in the company machine, but at the age of twenty-five she lacked the education, and she had no wish to find herself pushing fifty and still plodding away doing investigations of crooks in the corporate world. It was an amusing hobby—not a lifetime career.

Another reason she was reluctant to return to Stockholm was Blomkvist.
In Stockholm she would risk running into
Kalle Fucking Blomkvist
, and at the moment that was just about the last thing she wanted to do. He had hurt her. She acknowledged that this had not been his intention. He had behaved rather decently. It was her own fault that she had fallen “in love” with him. The very phrase was a contradiction when it came to
Lisbeth Fucking Bitch Salander
.

Blomkvist was known for being a ladies’ man. At best she had been an amusing diversion, someone on whom he had taken pity at a moment when he needed her and there was no-one better available. But he had quickly moved on to yet more amusing company. She cursed herself for lowering her guard and letting him into her life.

When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death.
Fuck you
. He had noticed her just as the doors closed and looked at her with searching eyes before she turned and walked away as the train pulled out.

She didn’t understand why he had so stubbornly tried to stay in contact with her, as if she were some fucking welfare project he had taken on. It annoyed her that he was so clueless. Every time he sent her an email she had to force herself to delete the message without reading it.

Stockholm did not seem in the least attractive. Apart from the freelance work for Milton Security, a few discarded bed partners, and the girls in the old rock group Evil Fingers, she hardly knew anyone in her hometown.

The only person she had any respect for now was Armansky It was not easy to define her feelings for him. She had always felt a mild surprise that she was attracted to him. If he had not been quite so married, or quite so old, or quite so conservative, she might have considered making an advance.

So she took out her diary and turned to the atlas section. She had never been to Australia or Africa. She had read about but never seen the Pyramids or Angkor Wat. She had never ridden on the Star Ferry between Kowloon and Victoria in Hong Kong, and she had never gone snorkelling in the Caribbean or sat on a beach in Thailand. Apart from some quick business trips when she had visited the Baltics and neighbouring Nordic countries, as well as Zurich and London, of course, she
had hardly ever left Sweden. As a matter of fact, she had seldom been outside Stockholm.

In the past she could never afford it.

She stood at the window of her hotel room overlooking Via Garibaldi in Rome. The city was like a pile of ruins. Then she made up her mind. She put on her jacket and went down to the lobby and asked if there was a travel agent in the vicinity. She booked a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv and spent the following days walking through the Old City in Jerusalem and visiting the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Wailing Wall. She viewed the armed soldiers on street corners with distrust, and then she flew to Bangkok and kept on travelling for the rest of the year.

There was only one thing she really had to do. She went to Gibraltar twice. The first time to do an in-depth investigation of the man she had chosen to look after her money. The second time to see to it that he was doing it properly.

It felt quite odd to turn the key to her own apartment on Fiskargatan after such a long time.

She set down her groceries and her shoulder bag in the hall and tapped in the four-digit code that turned off the electronic burglar alarm. Then she stripped off her damp clothes and dropped them on the hall floor. She walked into the kitchen naked, plugged in the refrigerator, and put the food away before she headed for the bathroom and spent the next ten minutes in the shower. She ate a meal consisting of a Billy’s Pan Pizza, which she heated in the microwave, and a sliced apple. She opened one of her moving boxes and found a pillow, some sheets, and a blanket that smelled a little suspect after having been packed away for a year. She made up her bed on the mattress in a room next to the kitchen.

She fell asleep within ten seconds of her head hitting the pillow and slept for almost twelve hours. Then she got up, turned on the coffeemaker, wrapped a blanket around herself, and sat in the dark on a window seat, smoking a cigarette and looking out towards Djurgården and Saltsjön, fascinated by the lights.

The day after Salander came home was a full day. She locked the door of her apartment at 7:00 in the morning. Before she left her floor she opened a ventilation window in the stairwell and fastened a spare key to a thin copper wire that she had tied to the wall side of a drainpipe clamp.
Experience had taught her the wisdom of always having a spare key readily accessible.

The air outside was icy. Salander was dressed in a pair of thin, worn jeans that had a rip beneath one back pocket where her blue panties showed through. She had on a T-shirt and a warm polo sweater with a seam that had started to fray at the neck. She had also rediscovered her scuffed leather jacket with the rivets on the shoulders, and decided she should ask a tailor to repair the almost nonexistent lining in the pockets. She was wearing heavy socks and boots. Overall, she was nice and warm.

She walked down St. Paulsgatan to Zinkensdamm and over to her old apartment on Lundagatan. She checked first of all that her Kawasaki was still safe in the basement. She patted the seat before she went up to the apartment and had to push the front door open against a mountain of junk mail.

She hadn’t been sure what to do with the apartment, so when she’d left Sweden a year ago, the simplest solution had been to arrange an automatic bank account to pay her regular bills. She still had furniture in the apartment, laboriously collected over time from various trash containers, along with some chipped mugs, two older computers, and a lot of paper. But nothing of value.

She took a black trash bag from the kitchen and spent five minutes sorting the junk from the real mail. Most of the heap went straight into the plastic bag. There were a few letters for her, mainly bank statements and tax forms from Milton Security. One advantage of being under guardianship was that she never had to deal with tax matters—communications of that sort were conspicuous by their absence. Otherwise, in a whole year she had accumulated only three personal letters.

The first was from a lawyer, Greta Molander, who had served as executor for Salander’s mother. The letter stated that her mother’s estate had been settled and that Lisbeth Salander and her sister Camilla had inherited 9,312 kronor each. A deposit of said amount had been made to Ms. Salander’s bank account. Would she please confirm receipt? Salander stuffed the letter in the inside pocket of her jacket.

The second was from Director Mikaelsson of Äppelviken Nursing Home, a friendly reminder that they were storing a box of her mother’s personal effects. Would she please contact Äppelviken with instructions as to what she would like done with these items? The letter ended with the warning that if they did not hear from Salander or her sister (for whom they had no address) before the end of the year, they would have no alternative—space being at a premium—but to discard the items. She
saw that the letter was dated June, and she took out her mobile telephone. The box was still there. She apologized for not responding sooner and promised to pick it up the next day.

The last letter was from Blomkvist. She thought for a moment before deciding not to open it, and threw it into the bag.

She filled another box with various items and knickknacks that she wanted to keep, then took a taxi back to Mosebacke. She put on makeup, a pair of glasses, and a blond shoulder-length wig and tucked a Norwegian passport in the name of Irene Nesser into her bag. She studied herself in the mirror and decided that Irene Nesser looked a little bit like Lisbeth Salander, but was still a completely different person.

After a quick lunch of a Brie baguette and a latte at Café Eden on Götgatan, she walked down to the car rental agency on Ringvägen, where Irene Nesser rented a Nissan Micra. She drove to IKEA at Kungens Kurva and spent three hours browsing through the merchandise, writing down the item numbers she needed. She made a few quick decisions.

She bought two Karlanda sofas with sand-coloured upholstery, five Poäng armchairs, two round side tables of clear-lacquered birch, a Svansbo coffee table, and several Lack occasional tables. From the storage department she ordered two Ivar combination storage units and two Bonde bookshelves, a TV stand, and a Magiker unit with doors. She settled on a Pax Nexus three-door wardrobe and two small Malm bureaus.

She spent a long time selecting a bed, and decided on a Hemnes bed frame with mattress and bedside tables. To be on the safe side, she also bought a Lillehammer bed to put in the spare room. She didn’t plan on having any guests, but since she had a guest room she might as well furnish it.

The bathroom in her new apartment was already equipped with a medicine cabinet, towel storage, and a washing machine the previous owners had left behind. All she had to buy was a cheap laundry basket.

What she did need, though, was kitchen furniture. After some thought she decided on a Rosfors kitchen table of solid beechwood with a tabletop of tempered glass and four colourful kitchen chairs.

She also needed furniture for her office. She looked at some improbable “work stations” with ingenious cabinets for storing computers and keyboards. In the end she shook her head and ordered an ordinary desk, the Galant, in beech veneer with an angled top and rounded corners, and a large filing cabinet. She took a long time choosing an office chair—in which she would no doubt spend many hours—and chose one of the most expensive options, the Verksam.

She made her way through the entire warehouse and bought a good supply of sheets, pillowcases, hand towels, duvets, blankets, pillows, a starter pack of stainless steel cutlery, some crockery, pots and pans, cutting boards, three big rugs, several work lamps, and a huge quantity of office supplies—folders, file boxes, wastepaper baskets, storage boxes, and the like.

She paid with a card in the name of Wasp Enterprises and showed her Irene Nesser ID. She also paid to have the items delivered and assembled. The bill came to a little over 90,000 kronor.

She was back in Söder by 5:00 p.m. and had time for a quick visit to Axelsson’s Home Electronics, where she bought a nineteen-inch TV and a radio. Just before closing time she slipped into a store on Hornsgatan and bought a vacuum cleaner. At Mariahallen market she bought a mop, dishwashing liquid, a bucket, some detergent, hand soap, toothbrushes, and a giant package of toilet paper.

She was tired but pleased after her shopping frenzy. She stowed all her purchases in her rented Nissan Micra and then collapsed in Café Java on Hornsgatan. She borrowed an evening paper from the next table and learned that the Social Democrats were still the ruling party and that nothing of great significance seemed to have occurred in Sweden while she had been away.

She was home by 8:00. Under cover of darkness she unloaded her car and carried the items up to V. Kulla’s apartment. She left everything in a big pile in the hall and spent half an hour trying to find somewhere to park. Then she ran water in the Jacuzzi, which was easily big enough for three people. She thought about Blomkvist for a moment. Until she saw the letter from him that morning, she had not thought about him for several months. She wondered whether he was home, and whether the Berger woman was there now in his apartment.

After a while she took a deep breath, turned over on her stomach, and sank beneath the surface of the water. She put her hands on her breasts and pinched her nipples hard, holding her breath for far too long, until her lungs began to ache.

Erika Berger, editor in chief, checked her clock when Blomkvist arrived. He was almost fifteen minutes late for the planning meeting that was held on the second Tuesday of each month at 10:00 a.m. sharp. Tentative plans for the next issue were outlined, and decisions about the content of the magazine were made for several months in advance.