The Girl Who Played with Fire (16 page)

The apartment had been a fixed point for almost all of her life. Although she no longer needed it, she did not like the idea of selling it. That would mean strangers in her space.

The logistical problem was that all her mail—insofar as she received any at all—came to Lundagatan. If she got rid of the apartment she would have to find another address to use. Salander did not want to be an official entry in all the databases. In this regard she was almost paranoid. She had no reason to trust the authorities, or anyone else for that matter.

She looked out at the firewall of the back courtyard, as she had done her whole life. She was suddenly glad of her decision to leave the apartment. She had never felt safe there. Every time she turned onto Lundagatan and approached the street door—sober or not—she had been acutely aware of her surroundings, of parked cars and passersby She felt sure that somewhere out there were people who wished her harm, and they would most probably attack her as she came or went from the apartment.

There had been no attack. But that did not mean that she could relax. The address on Lundagatan was on every public register and database, and in all those years she had never had the means to improve her security; she could only stay on her guard. Now the situation was different. She did not want anyone to know her new address in Mosebacke. Instinct warned her to remain as anonymous as possible.

But that did not solve the problem of what to do with the old apartment. She brooded about it for a while and then took out her mobile and called Mimmi.

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Hi, Lisbeth. So you make contact after only a week this time?”

“I’m at Lundagatan.”

“OK.”

“I was wondering if you’d like to take over the apartment.”

“What do you mean?”

“You live in a shoebox.”

“I like my shoebox. Are you moving?”

“It’s empty here.”

Mimmi seemed to hesitate at the other end of the line.

“Lisbeth, I can’t afford it.”

“It’s a housing association apartment and it’s all paid off. The rent is 1,480 a month, which must be less than you’re paying for the shoebox. And the rent has been paid for a year.”

“But are you thinking of selling it? I mean, it must be worth quite a bit.”

“About one and a half million, if you can believe the estate agents’ ads.”

“I can’t afford that.”

“I’m not selling. You could move in here tonight, you can live here as long as you like, and you won’t have to pay anything for a year. I’m not allowed to rent it out, but I can write you into my agreement as my roommate. That way you won’t have any hassle with the housing association.”

“But Lisbeth—are you proposing to me?” Mimmi laughed.

“I’m not using the apartment and I don’t want to sell it.”

“You mean I could live there for free, girl? Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“As long as you like. Are you interested?”

“Of course I am. I don’t get offered a free apartment in the middle of Söder every day of the week.”

“There’s a catch.”

“I thought as much.”

“You can live here as long as you like, but I’ll still be listed as resident and I’ll get my mail here. All you have to do is take in the mail and let me know if anything interesting turns up.”

“Lisbeth, you’re the freakiest. Where are you going to live?”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Salander said.

They agreed to meet that afternoon so that Mimmi could have a
proper look at the apartment. Salander was already in a much better mood. She walked down to Handelsbanken on Hornsgatan, where she took a number and waited her turn.

She showed her ID and explained that she had been abroad for some time and wanted to know the balance of her savings account. The sum was 82,670 kronor. The account had been dormant for more than a year, and one deposit of 9,312 kronor had been made the previous autumn. That was the inheritance from her mother.

Salander withdrew 9,312 kronor. She wanted to spend the money on something that would have made her mother happy. She walked to the post office on Rosenlundsgatan and sent an anonymous deposit to one of Stockholm’s crisis centres for women.

It was 8:00 on Friday evening when Berger shut down her computer and stretched. She had spent nine hours solid putting the finishing touches on the March issue
of Millennium
, and since Eriksson was working full-time on Svensson’s themed issue she had had to do a good part of the editing herself. Cortez and Karim had helped out, but they were primarily writers and researchers, and not used to editing.

So she was tired and her back ached, but she was satisfied both with the day and with life in general. The accountant’s graphs were pointing in the right direction, articles were coming in on time, or at least not unmanageably late, and the staff was happy. After more than a year, they were still on a high from the adrenaline rush of the Wennerström affair.

After trying for a while to massage her neck, Berger decided she needed a shower and thought about using the one in the office bathroom. But she felt too lazy and put her feet up on the desk instead. She was going to turn forty-five in three months, and that famous future she had longed for was starting to be a thing of the past. She had developed a network of tiny wrinkles and lines around her eyes and mouth, but she knew that she still looked good. She worked out at the gym twice a week, but she had noticed it was getting more difficult to climb the mast during her long sailing trips. And she was the one who always had to do the climbing—her husband had terrible vertigo.

Berger reflected that her first forty-five years, despite a number of ups and downs, had been by and large successful. She had money, status, a home which gave her great pleasure, and a job she enjoyed. She had a tenderhearted husband who loved her and with whom she was still in love after fifteen years of marriage. And on the side she had a pleasant
and seemingly inexhaustible lover, who might not satisfy her soul but who did satisfy her body when she needed it.

She smiled as she thought of Blomkvist. She wondered when he was going to come clean and tell her that he was sleeping with Harriet Vanger. Neither of them had breathed a word about their relationship, but Berger wasn’t born yesterday. At the board meeting in August she had noticed a glance that passed between them. Out of sheer cussedness she had tried both of their mobile numbers later that evening, and both were turned off. That was hardly watertight evidence, of course, but after subsequent board meetings Blomkvist was always unavailable in the evening. It was almost comical to watch the way Vanger would leave after dinner with the same excuse—that she had to go to bed early. Berger did not pry, and she was not jealous. On the other hand, she would certainly tease them both about it at some suitable occasion.

She never got involved in Blomkvist’s affairs with other women, but she hoped that his affair with Vanger would not give rise to problems on the board. Yet she was not really worried. Blomkvist had all manner of terminated relationships behind him, and he was still on friendly terms with most of the women involved.

Berger was incredibly happy to be Blomkvist’s friend and confidante. In certain ways he was a fool, and in others so insightful that he seemed like an oracle. But he had never understood her love for her husband, had never been able to grasp why she considered Greger Beckman such an enchanting person: warm, exciting, generous, and above all without many of the traits that she so detested in most men. Beckman was the man she wanted to grow old with. She had wanted to have children with him, but it had not been possible and now it was too late. But in her choice of a life partner she could not imagine a better or more stable person—someone she could so completely and wholeheartedly trust and who was always there for her when she needed him.

Blomkvist was very different. He was a man with such shifting traits that he sometimes appeared to have multiple personalities. As a professional he was obstinate and almost pathologically focused on the job at hand. He took hold of a story and worked his way forward to the point where it approached perfection, and then he tied up all the loose ends. When he was at his best he was brilliant, and when he was not at his best he was still far better than the average. He seemed to have an almost intuitive gift for deciding which story was hiding a skeleton in the closet and which story would turn into a dull, run-of-the-mill piece. She had never regretted working with him.

Nor had she ever regretted becoming his lover.

The only person who understood Berger’s passion for sex with Blomkvist was her husband, and he understood it because she dared to discuss her needs with him. It was not a matter of infidelity, but of desire. Sex with Blomkvist gave her a kick that no other man was able to give her, including her husband.

Sex was important to her. She had lost her virginity when she was fourteen and spent a great part of her teenage years in a frustrated search for fulfilment. She had tried everything, from heavy petting with classmates and an awkward affair with a teacher to phone sex and fetishism. She had experimented with most of what interested her in eroticism. She had toyed with bondage and been a member of Club Xtreme, which arranged parties of the kind that were not socially acceptable. On several occasions she had tried sex with other women and, disappointed, admitted that it simply was not her thing and that women could not excite her even a fraction as much as a man could. Or two. With Beckman she had explored sex with two men—one of them a famous gallery owner—and discovered both that her mate had a strong bisexual inclination and that she herself was almost paralyzed with pleasure at feeling two men simultaneously caressing and satisfying her, just as she experienced a sense of pleasure that was difficult to define when she watched her husband being caressed by another man. She and Beckman had repeated that excitement with the same success with a couple of regular partners.

It was not that her sex life with her husband was boring or unsatisfying. It was just that Blomkvist gave her a completely different experience.

He had talent. He was quite simply so good that it felt as if she had achieved the optimal balance with Beckman as husband and Blomkvist as lover-when-needed. She could not do without either of them, and she had no intention of choosing between them.

And this was what her husband had understood, that she had a need beyond what he could offer her, even in the form of his most imaginative acrobatic exercises in the Jacuzzi.

What Berger liked best about her relationship with Blomkvist was the fact that he had no desire whatsoever to control her. He was not the least bit jealous, and even though she herself had had several attacks of jealousy when they first began to go out together twenty years ago, she had discovered that in his case she did not need to be jealous. Their relationship was built on friendship, and in matters of friendship he was boundlessly loyal. It was a relationship that would survive the harshest tests.

But it bothered her that so many of her acquaintances still whispered about her relationship with Blomkvist, and always behind her back.

Blomkvist was a man. He could go from bed to bed without anyone raising their eyebrows. She was a woman, and the fact that she had a lover, and with her husband’s consent—coupled with the fact that she had also been true to her lover for twenty years—resulted in the most interesting dinner conversations.

She thought for a moment and then picked up the phone to call her husband.

“Hi, darling. What are you doing?”

“Writing.”

Beckman was not just an artist; he was most of all a professor of art history and the author of several books. He often participated in public debate, and he acted as consultant to several large architecture firms. For the past year he had been working on a book about the artistic decoration of buildings and its influence, and why people prospered in some buildings but not in others. The book had begun to develop into an attack on functionalism which (Berger suspected) would cause a furor.

“How’s it going?”

“Good. It’s flowing. How about you?”

“I just finished the latest issue. It’s going to the printer on Thursday.”

“Well done.”

“I’m wiped out.”

“It sounds like you’ve got something in mind.”

“Have you planned anything for tonight? Would you be terribly upset if I didn’t come home?”

“Say hello to Blomkvist and tell him he’s tempting fate,” said Beckman.

“He might like that.”

“OK. Then tell him that you’re a witch who’s impossible to satisfy and he’ll end up aging prematurely.”

“He knows that.”

“In that case all that’s left for me is to commit suicide. I’m going to keep writing until I pass out. Have a good time.”

Blomkvist was at Svensson and Johansson’s place in Enskede, wrapping up a discussion about some details in Svensson’s manuscript. She wondered if he was busy tonight, or would he consider giving a massage to an aching back.

“You’ve got the keys,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

“I will. See you in an hour or so.”

It took her ten minutes to walk to Bellmansgatan. She undressed and showered and made espresso. Then she crawled into bed and waited naked and full of anticipation.

The optimum gratification for her would probably be a threesome with her husband and Blomkvist, and that would never happen. Blomkvist was so straight that she liked to tease him about being a homophobe. He had zero interest in men. Apparently you could not get everything you wanted in this world.

The blond giant frowned in irritation as he manoeuvred the car at ten miles an hour along a forest road in such bad repair that for a while he thought he must have taken a wrong turn. It was just beginning to get dark when the road finally widened and he caught sight of the cabin. He stopped, turned off the engine, and took a look around. He had about fifty yards to go.

He was in the region of Stallarholmen, not far from the town of Mariefred. It was a simple 1950s cabin in the middle of the woods. Through a line of trees he could see a strip of ice on Lake Mälaren.