The Girl Who Played with Fire (24 page)

She gauged him as aggressive and weighing over 265 pounds. She used her keys as brass knuckles and didn’t hesitate a millisecond before, with a movement as swift as a lizard, she slashed a deep wound in his cheek, from the bottom of his nose to his ear. He was flailing at the air as Salander then seemed to sink through the ground.

Blomkvist saw Salander lash out with her fist. At the instant she struck her attacker she dropped to the ground and rolled beneath the car.

Seconds later Salander was up on the other side of the car, ready for fight or flight. She met the enemy’s gaze across the hood and decided on the latter option. Blood was pouring from his cheek. Before he even managed
to focus on her she was away across Lundagatan, running towards Högalid Church.

Blomkvist stood paralyzed, his mouth agape, when the attacker suddenly dashed after Salander. He looked like a tank chasing a toy car.

Salander took the steps to upper Lundagatan two at a time. At the top of the stairs she glanced over her shoulder and saw her pursuer reaching the first step. He was fast. She noticed the piles of boards and sand where the local authority had dug up the street.

Lundin was almost up the steps when Salander came into view again. He had time to register that she was throwing something, but he did not have time to react before the sharp-edged cobblestone hit him on the temple. The stone was thrown with considerable force, and it ripped another wound on his face. He could feel himself losing his footing and then the world spun as he fell backwards down the stairs. He managed to break his fall by grabbing the railing, but he had lost several seconds.

Blomkvist’s paralysis dissolved when the man disappeared up the stairs. He started yelling for him to fuck off.

Salander was halfway across the churchyard when she heard Blomkvist’s voice.
What the hell?
She switched directions and looked over the railing of the terrace. She saw Blomkvist ten feet below her. She hesitated a tenth of a second before she took off again.

At the same time as Blomkvist began to run towards the steps he noticed that a Dodge van was starting up outside Salander’s front door, behind the car she had tried to get into. The vehicle swung out from the curb and passed Blomkvist, going in the direction of Zinkensdamm. He caught a glimpse of a face as it passed. It was too dark to read the licence plate.

Blomkvist caught up with Salander’s pursuer at the top of the steps. The man had stopped and stood motionless, looking around.

Just as Blomkvist got to him he turned and gave him a powerful backhand across the face. Blomkvist was completely unprepared. He tumbled headlong down the steps.

Salander heard Blomkvist’s stifled cry and almost stopped.
What the hell is going on?
But when she turned she saw Lundin only a hundred feet from her.
He’s faster. Shit, he’s going to catch me
.

She turned left and ran up several steps to the terrace between two buildings. She reached a courtyard that did not present the least cover and ran as fast as she could to the next corner. She turned right and realized just in time that she would be heading into a blind alley. As she reached the end of the next building she saw Lundin arrive at the top of the steps to the courtyard. She kept running—out of his sight—for another few yards and dived headfirst into a rhododendron bush alongside the building.

She heard Lundin’s heavy footsteps, but she could not see him. She held her breath, pressing herself into the soil beneath the bush.

Lundin passed her hiding place and stopped. He hesitated for ten seconds before jogging around the courtyard. A minute later he came back. He stopped at the same place as before. This time he stood still for thirty seconds. Salander tensed her muscles, poised for instant flight if she were discovered. Then he moved again, passing less than six feet from her. She listened to his steps fade away across the courtyard.

Blomkvist felt pain in his neck and jaw as he got laboriously to his feet, feeling dizzy. He tasted blood from a split lip.

He made his way unsteadily to the top of the steps and looked around. He saw the man with the ponytail running a hundred yards further down the street. The man stopped and peered between the buildings, and then ran across Lundagatan and climbed into the Dodge van. The vehicle sped off towards Zinkensdamm.

Blomkvist walked slowly along the upper part of Lundagatan, looking for Salander. He could not see her anywhere. There was not a living soul. He was astonished how desolate a street in Stockholm can be at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning in March. After a while he went back to the front door of Salander’s apartment building on lower Lundagatan. As he passed the car where the attack had taken place he stepped on a key ring. He bent to pick it up and saw a shoulder bag under the car.

Blomkvist stood there a long time, waiting, unsure what to do. At last he tried the keys in her door. They did not fit.

Salander stayed under the bush for fifteen minutes, moving only to look at her watch. Just after 3:00 she heard a door open and close and footsteps making for the bicycle shed in the courtyard.

When the sound died away she raised herself slowly to her knees and peered out of the bush. She looked steadily at every nook and cranny in the courtyard, but she saw no sign of Lundin. She walked back to the street, prepared to turn tail at any moment. She stopped at the top of the wall and looked out over Lundagatan, where she saw Blomkvist outside her apartment building. He was holding her bag in his hand.

She stood perfectly still, hidden behind a lamppost when Blomkvist’s gaze swept over the stairs and the wall. He did not see her.

Blomkvist stood outside her door for almost half an hour. She watched him patiently, without moving, until finally he gave up and headed down the hill towards Zinkensdamm. When he was gone she began to think about what had happened.

Kalle Blomkvist
.

She could not for the life of her imagine how he had sprung up out of nowhere. Apart from that, the attack was not difficult to account for.

Carl Fucking Magnus Lundin
.

Lundin had met the hulk she had seen talking to Bjurman.

Nils Fucking Slimebag Bjurman
.

That piece of shit has hired some diabolical alpha male to get me out of the way. And I made it crystal clear to him what the consequences would be
.

Salander was seething inside. She was so enraged that she tasted blood in her mouth. Now she was going to have to punish him.

Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities.

(
a
+
b)
(
a
−
b) = a
²
− b
²
+
1

Blomkvist took his red pen and in the margin of Svensson’s manuscript drew a question mark with a circle around it and wrote “footnote.” He wanted a source reference inserted.

It was Wednesday, the evening before Maundy Thursday, and
Millennium
was more or less closed down for Easter week. Nilsson was out of the country. Karim had gone to the mountains with her husband. Cortez had come in to deal with telephone messages for a few hours, but Blomkvist sent him home since nobody was calling. Cortez left smiling happily, on his way to see a new girlfriend.

Svensson had not been around. Blomkvist sat in the office alone, plodding through his manuscript. The book was going to be twelve chapters and 288 pages long. Svensson had delivered the final text of nine of the twelve chapters, and Blomkvist had been over every word and given the hard copy back with requests for clarification and suggestions for reworking.

Svensson was a talented writer, and Blomkvist confined his editing for the most part to marginal notes. During the weeks when the manuscript had been growing on his desk they had disagreed about only one paragraph, which Blomkvist wanted to delete and Svensson fought tooth and nail to keep. It stayed in.

In short,
Millennium
had an excellent book that would very soon be off to the printer. There was no doubt that it would make dramatic headlines. Svensson was merciless in his exposure of the johns, and he told the story in such a way that nobody could fail to understand that there was
something wrong with the system itself. It was journalistic work of the type that should be on the endangered species list.

Blomkvist had learned that Svensson was an exacting journalist who left very few loose ends. He did not employ the heavy-handed rhetoric typical of so much other social reporting, which turned texts into pretentious trash. His book was more than an exposé—it was a declaration of war. Blomkvist smiled to himself. Svensson was about fifteen years younger, but he recognized the passion that he himself had once had when he took up the lance against second-rate financial reporters and put together a scandalous book. Certain newsrooms had not forgiven him.

The problem with Svensson’s book was that it had to be watertight. A reporter who sticks out his neck like that has to either stand behind his story 100 percent or refrain from publishing it. Right now Svensson was at 98 percent. There were still a few weak points that needed more work and one or two assertions that he had not adequately documented.

At 5:30 p.m. Blomkvist opened his desk drawer and took out a cigarette. Berger had decreed a total ban in the office, but he was alone and nobody else was going to be there that weekend. He worked for another forty minutes before he gathered up the pages and put the chapter on Berger’s desk. Svensson had promised to email the final text of the remaining three chapters the following morning, which would give Blomkvist a chance to go through them over the weekend. A summit meeting was planned for the Tuesday after Easter when they would all sign off on the final version of the book and the
Millennium
articles. After that only the layout remained, which was Malm’s headache alone, and then it would go to the printer. Blomkvist had not sought bids from different printers; he would entrust the job to Hallvigs Reklam in Morgongåva. They had printed his book about the Wennerström affair and had given him a damn good price and first-rate service.

Blomkvist looked at the clock and decided to reward himself with another cigarette. He sat at the window and stared down on Götgatan. He ran his tongue over the cut on the inside of his lip. It was beginning to heal.

He wondered for the thousandth time what really had happened outside Salander’s building early on Sunday morning.

All he knew for certain was that Salander was alive and back in Stockholm.

He had tried to reach her every day since then. He had sent emails to the address she had used more than a year ago. He had walked up and down Lundagatan. He was beginning to despair.

The nameplate on the door now read
SALANDER-WU.
There were 230 people with the surname Wu on the electoral roll, of whom about 140 lived in and around Stockholm, none of them on Lundagatan. Blomkvist had no idea whether she had a boyfriend or had rented out the apartment. No-one came to the door when he knocked.

Finally he went back to his desk and wrote her a good old-fashioned letter:

As anticipated he never heard a word from her.

When he had got home the morning after the attack on Lundagatan, he opened the shoulder bag and spread the contents on the kitchen table. There was a wallet with an ID card, about 600 kronor, 200 American dollars, and a monthly travel card. There was a pack of Marlboro Lights, three Bic lighters, a box of throat lozenges, a packet of tissues, a toothbrush, toothpaste, three tampons in a side pocket, an unopened pack of condoms with a price sticker that showed they were bought at Gatwick Airport in London, a bound notebook with stiff black A4 dividers, five ballpoint pens, a can of Mace, a small bag with makeup, an FM radio with an earphone but no batteries, and Saturday’s
Aftonbladet
.

The most intriguing item was a hammer, easily accessible in an outside pocket. However, the attack had come so suddenly that she had not been able to make use of it or the Mace. She had evidently used her keys as brass knuckles—there were still traces of blood and skin on them.

Of the six keys on the ring, three of them were typical apartment keys—front door, apartment door, and the key to a padlock. But none of them fit the door of the building on Lundagatan.

Blomkvist opened the notebook and went through it page by page. He recognized Salander’s neat hand and could see at once that this was not a girl’s secret diary. Three-quarters of the pages were filled with what looked like mathematical notations. At the top of the first page was an equation that even Blomkvist recognized.

Blomkvist had never had trouble doing calculations. He had left secondary school with the highest marks in math, which in no way meant, of course, that he was a mathematician, only that he had been able to absorb the content of the school’s curriculum. But Salander’s pages contained formulas of a type that Blomkvist neither understood nor could even begin to understand. One equation stretched across an entire double page and ended with things crossed out and changed. He could not even tell whether they were real mathematical formulas and calculations, but since he knew Salander’s peculiarities he assumed that the equations were genuine and no doubt had some esoteric meaning.