The Girl Who Played with Fire (12 page)

The last fourteen years of Agneta Sofia Salander’s life had been punctuated by small cerebral haemorrhages which left her unable to take care of herself. Sometimes she had not even been able to recognize her daughter.

Thinking about her mother always pitched Salander into a mood of helplessness and darkness black as night. As a teenager she had cherished the fantasy that her mother would get well and that they would be able to form some sort of relationship. That was her heart thinking. Her head knew that it would never happen.

Her mother had been short and thin, but nowhere near as anorexic-looking as Salander. In fact, her mother had been downright beautiful, and had a lovely figure. Just like Salander’s sister, Camilla.

Salander did not want to think about her sister.

For Salander it was an irony of fate that she and her sister were so dramatically dissimilar. They were twins, born within twenty minutes of each other.

Lisbeth was first. Camilla was beautiful.

They were so different that it seemed grossly unlikely that they could
have come from the same womb. If something hadn’t gone wrong with her genetic code, Lisbeth would have been as radiantly beautiful as her sister. And probably as crazy.

From the time they were little girls Camilla had been outgoing, popular, and successful at school, while Lisbeth had been ungiving and introverted, rarely responding to the teachers’ questions. Camilla’s grades were very good; Lisbeth’s never were. Already in elementary school Camilla had distanced herself from her sister to the point that she would not even take the same route to school that Lisbeth took. Teachers and friends noticed that the two girls never had anything to do with each other, never sat next to each other. From the age of eight they had been in separate classes. When they were twelve and “All The Evil” happened, they had been sent to different foster homes. They had not seen each other since their seventeenth birthday, and that meeting had ended with Lisbeth getting a black eye and Camilla a fat lip. Lisbeth did not know where Camilla was living now, and she hadn’t made any attempt to find out.

In Lisbeth’s eyes Camilla was insincere, corrupt, and manipulative. But it was Lisbeth whom society had declared incompetent.

She zipped up her leather jacket before she walked through the rain to the main entrance. She stopped at a garden bench and looked around. On this very spot eighteen months ago, she had seen her mother for the last time. She had paid an unscheduled visit to the nursing home when she was on her way north to help Blomkvist in his attempt to track down a serial killer. Her mother had been restless and didn’t seem to recognize Salander. She held on tight to her hand and looked at her with a bewildered expression. Salander was in a hurry. She loosened her mother’s grip, gave her a hug, and rode away on her motorcycle.

The director of Äppelviken, Agnes Mikaelsson, greeted her warmly and took her to a storeroom where they found the cardboard box. Salander hefted it. Only five or six pounds. Not much in the way of an inheritance.

“I had a feeling you’d come back someday,” Mikaelsson said.

“I’ve been out of the country,” Salander said.

She thanked her for saving the box, carried it back to the car, and left Äppelviken for the last time.

Salander was back in Mosebacke just after noon. She put her mother’s box unopened in a hall closet and left the apartment again.

As she opened the front door a police car drove slowly past. Salander warily observed the presence of the authorities outside her building, but when they showed no sign of interest in her she put them out of her mind.

She went shopping at H&M and KappAhl department stores and bought herself a new wardrobe. She picked up a large assortment of basic clothes in the form of pants, jeans, tops, and socks. She had no interest in expensive designer clothing, but she did enjoy being able to buy half a dozen pairs of jeans at one time without a second thought. Her most extravagant purchases were from Twilfit, where she chose a drawerful of panties and bras. This was basic clothing again, but after half an hour of embarrassed searching she also settled on a set that she thought was sexy, even erotic, and which she would never have dreamed of buying before. When she tried them on that night she felt incredibly foolish. What she saw in the mirror was a thin, tattooed girl in grotesque underwear. She took them off and threw them in the trash.

She also bought herself some winter shoes and two pairs of lighter indoor shoes. Then she bought a pair of black boots with high heels that made her a couple of inches taller. She also found a good winter jacket in brown suede.

She made coffee and a sandwich before she drove the rental car back to its garage near Ringen. She walked home and sat in the dark all evening on her window seat, watching the water in Saltsjön.

Mia Johansson cut the cheesecake and decorated each slice with a scoop of raspberry ice cream. She served Berger and Blomkvist first before she put down plates for Svensson and herself. Eriksson had resolutely resisted dessert and was content with black coffee in an old-fashioned flowered porcelain cup.

“It was my grandmother’s china service,” said Mia when she saw Eriksson examining the cup.

“She’s scared to death that a cup is going to break,” Svensson said. “She takes it out only when we have really important guests.”

Johansson smiled. “I spent several years with my grandmother when I was a child, and the china is almost all I have left of her.”

“They’re really beautiful,” Eriksson said. “My kitchen is one hundred percent IKEA.”

Blomkvist didn’t give a damn about flowered coffee cups and instead
cast an appraising eye on the plate with the cheesecake. He pondered letting his belt out a notch. Berger apparently shared his feelings.

“Good God, I should have said no to dessert too,” she said, glancing ruefully at Eriksson before taking up her spoon with a firm grip.

It was supposed to be a simple working dinner, in part to cement the cooperation they had agreed on and in part to continue to discuss plans for the themed issue. Svensson had suggested that they meet at his place for a bite to eat, and Johansson had served the best sweet-and-sour chicken Blomkvist had ever tasted. Over dinner they put away two bottles of robust Spanish red, and Svensson asked if anyone would like a glass of Tullamore Dew with their dessert. Only Berger was foolish enough to decline, and Svensson got out the glasses.

It was a one-bedroom apartment in Enskede. Svensson and Johansson had been going out for a few years, but had taken the plunge and moved in together a year ago.

The group gathered at around 6:00 p.m., and by the time dessert was served at 8:30 not a word had been said about the ostensible reason for the dinner. But Blomkvist did discover that he liked his hosts and enjoyed their company.

It was Berger who finally steered the conversation to the topic they had all come to discuss. Johansson produced a printout of her thesis and placed it on the table in front of Berger. It had a surprisingly ironic title—“From Russia with Love”—an homage, of course, to Ian Fleming’s classic novel. The subtitle was “Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Society’s Response.”

“You have to recognize the difference between my thesis and the book Dag is writing,” she said. “Dag’s book is a polemic aimed at the people who are making money from trafficking. My thesis is statistics, field studies, law texts, and a study of how society and the courts treat the victims.”

“The girls, you mean.”

“Young girls, usually fifteen to twenty years old, working class, poorly educated. They often have unstable home lives, and many of them are subjected to some form of abuse even in childhood. One reason they come to Sweden is that they have been fed a pack of lies.”

“By the sex traders.”

“In this sense there is a sort of gender perspective to my thesis. It’s not often that a researcher can establish roles along gender lines so clearly. Girls—victims; boys—perpetrators. Apart from a handful of women
working on their own who profit from the sex trade, there is no other form of criminality in which the sex roles themselves are a precondition for the crime. Nor is there any other form of criminality in which social acceptance is so great, or which society does so little to prevent.”

“And yet Sweden does have tough laws against trafficking and the sex trade,” Berger said. “Is that not the case?”

“Don’t make me laugh. Several hundred girls—there are no published statistics, obviously—are transported to Sweden every year to work as prostitutes, which in this case means making their bodies available for systematic rape. After the law against trafficking went into effect, it was tested in the courts a few times. The first time was in April 2003, the case against that crazy brothel madam who had a sex change. And she was acquitted, of course.”

“I thought she was convicted.”

“Of running a brothel, yes. But she was acquitted of trafficking charges. The thing was, the girls who were the victims were also the witnesses against her, and they vanished back to the Baltics. Interpol tried to track them down, but after months of searching it was decided that they were not going to be found.”

“What had become of them?”

“Nothing. The TV show
Insider
did a follow-up and went over to Tallinn. It took the reporters exactly one afternoon to find two of the girls, who were living with their parents. The third girl had moved to Italy.”

“The police in Tallinn, in other words, weren’t very effective.”

“Since then we have actually won a couple of convictions, but in each case they were men who had been arrested for other crimes, or who were so conspicuously stupid that they couldn’t help but be caught. The law is pure window dressing. It isn’t enforced. And the problem here,” Svensson said, “is that the crime is aggravated rape, often in conjunction with abuse, aggravated abuse, and death threats, and in some instances illegal imprisonment as well. That’s everyday life for many of the girls who are brought, wearing miniskirts and heavy makeup, to some villa in the suburbs. The thing is that a girl like that doesn’t have any choice. Either she goes out and fucks dirty old men or she risks being abused and tortured by her pimp. The girls can’t run away—they don’t know the language, they don’t know the law, and they don’t know where they could turn. They can’t go home because their passports have been taken away, and in the case of the brothel madam the girls were locked in an apartment.”

“It sounds like slave labour camps. Do the girls make any money at all?”

“Oh yeah,” Johansson said. “They usually work for several months before they’re allowed to go back home. They’re given between 20,000 and 30,000 kronor, which in Russian money is a small fortune. Unfortunately they’ve often picked up heavy alcohol or drug habits and a lifestyle that means the money will run out very quickly. This makes the system self-sustaining: after a while they’re back again and return voluntarily, so to speak, to their torturers.”

“How much money is this business turning over annually?” Blomkvist asked.

Mia glanced at Svensson and thought for a moment before she responded.

“It’s very hard to give an accurate answer. We’ve calculated back and forth, but most of our figures are necessarily estimates.”

“Give us a broad brush.”

“OK, we know, for example, that the madam, the one convicted of procuring but acquitted of trafficking, brought thirty-five women from the East over a two-year period. They were all here for anything from a few weeks to several months. In the course of the trial it emerged that over those two years they took in two million kronor. I have worked out that a girl can bring in an estimated 60,000 kronor a month. Of this about 15,000, say, is costs—travel, clothing, full board, etc. It’s no life of luxury; they may have to crash with a bunch of other girls in some apartment the gang provides for them. Of the remaining 45,000 kronor, the gang takes between 20,000 and 30,000. The gang leader stuffs half into his own pocket, say 15,000, and divides the rest among his employees—drivers, muscle, others. The girl gets to keep 10,000 to 12,000 kronor.”

“And per month?”

“Suppose a gang has two or three girls grinding away for them, and they take in around 150,000 a month. A gang consists of two or three people, and that’s their living. That’s about how the finances of rape look.”

“And how many of them are we talking about… if you extrapolate?”

“At any given time there are about a hundred active girls who are in some way victims of trafficking. That means the total income in Sweden each month would be around six million kronor, around seventy million per year. And that’s only the girls who are victims of trafficking.”

“That sounds like small change.”

“It is small change. And to bring in these relatively modest sums, around a hundred girls have to be raped. It drives me mad.”

“That sounds like an objective researcher! But how many creeps are living off these girls?”

“I reckon about three hundred.”

“That doesn’t sound like an insurmountable problem,” Berger said.

“We pass laws and the media gets outraged, but hardly anyone has actually talked to one of these girls from the East or has any idea how they live.”

“How does it work? I mean, in practice. It’s probably fairly difficult to bring a sixteen-year-old over here from Tallinn without anyone noticing. How does it work once they arrive?” Blomkvist asked.

“When I started researching this, I thought we were talking about an incredibly well-run organization with some form of professional mafia spiriting girls unnoticed across the borders.”

“But it’s not?” Eriksson said.

“The business is organized, but I came to the conclusion that we’re talking about many small and badly organized gangs. Forget the Armani suits and the sports cars—the average gang is half Russians or Balts and half Swedes. The gang leader is typically forty, has very little education, and has had problems all his life. His view of women is pure stone age. There’s a clear pecking order in the gang and his associates are often afraid of him. He’s violent, frequently high, and he beats the shit out of anyone who steps out of line.”