The Girl Who Played with Fire (5 page)

Salander waited for a few minutes before she went down to where Dr. Forbes had been. She made a slow semicircle, inspecting the sand. All she could make out was pebbles and some shells. After a few minutes she broke off her search and went back to the hotel.

On her balcony, she leaned over the railing and peered in her neighbours’ door. All was quiet. The evening’s argument was obviously over. After a while she took from her shoulder bag some papers to roll a joint from the supply that Bland had given her. She sat down on a balcony chair and gazed out at the dark water of the Caribbean as she smoked and thought.

She felt like a radar installation on high alert.

Advokat Nils Erik Bjurman set down his coffee cup and watched the flow of people outside the window of Café Hedon on Stureplan. He saw everyone passing in an unbroken stream, but observed none of them.

He was thinking of Lisbeth Salander. He thought often about Salander.

What he was thinking made him boil with rage.

Salander had crushed him. He was never going to forget it. She had taken command and humiliated him. She had abused him in a way that had left indelible marks on his body. On an area the size of a book below his navel. She had handcuffed him to his bed, abused him, and tattooed him with
I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST
.

Stockholm’s district court had declared Salander legally incompetent. He had been assigned to be her guardian, which made her inescapably dependent on him. From the first time he met her he had fantasized about her. He could not explain it, but she seemed to invite that response.

What he had done—he, a fifty-five-year-old lawyer—was reprehensible, indefensible by any standard. He knew that, of course. But from the moment he’d laid eyes on Salander in December two years earlier, he had not been able to resist her. The laws, the most basic moral code, and his responsibility as her guardian—none of it mattered at all.

She was a strange girl—fully grown but with an appearance that made her easily mistaken for a child. He had control over her life; she was his to command.

She had a record that robbed her of credibility if she ever had a mind
to protest. Nor was it a rape of some innocent—her file confirmed that she had had many sexual encounters, could even be regarded as promiscuous. One social worker’s report had raised the possibility that Salander had solicited sexual services for payment when she was seventeen. A police patrol had observed a drunken older man sitting with a young girl on a park bench in Tantolunden. The police had confronted the pair; the girl had refused to answer their questions, and the man was too intoxicated to give them any sensible information.

In Bjurman’s eyes the conclusion was straightforward: Salander was a whore at the bottom of the social scale. It was risk-free. If she dared to protest to the Guardianship Agency, no-one was going to believe her word against his.

She was the ideal plaything—grown-up, promiscuous, socially incompetent, and at his mercy.

It was the first time he had exploited one of his clients. Previously it had never occurred to him to make advances to anyone with whom he had a professional relationship. To satisfy his sexual needs, he had always turned to prostitutes. He had been discreet and he paid well; the problem was that prostitutes were not serious, they were only pretending. It was a service he bought from a woman who moaned and rolled her eyes; she played her part, but it was as phony as street theatre.

He had tried to dominate his wife in the years that he was married, but she had merely gone along with it, and that too was a game.

Salander had been the perfect solution. She was defenceless. She had no family, no friends: a true victim, ripe for plundering. The opportunity makes the thief.

And then out of the blue she had destroyed him. She had struck back with a power and determination that he had not dreamed she possessed. She had humiliated him. She had tortured him. She had all but demolished him.

During the almost two years since then, Bjurman’s life had changed dramatically. After Salander’s nighttime visit to his apartment he had felt paralyzed—virtually incapable of clear thought or decisive action. He had locked himself in, did not answer the telephone, and was unable even to keep up contact with his regular clients. After two weeks he went on sick leave. His secretary was deputized to deal with his correspondence at the office, cancelling all his meetings and trying to keep irritated clients at bay.

Every day he was confronted by the tattoo on his body. Finally he took down the mirror from the bathroom door.

He returned to his office at the beginning of summer. He had handed over most of his clients to his colleagues. The only ones he kept for himself were companies for whom he dealt with legal business correspondence without being involved in meetings. His only active client now was Salander—each month he wrote up a balance sheet and a report for the Guardianship Agency. He did very precisely what she had demanded: the reports had not a grain of truth in them and made plain that she no longer needed a guardian. Each report was an excruciating reminder of her existence, but he had no choice.

Bjurman had spent the summer and the autumn in helpless, furious brooding. And then, in December, he pulled himself together and went on a vacation to France. While there, he consulted a specialist at a clinic for cosmetic surgery outside Marseilles about how best to remove the tattoo.

The specialist had examined his abdomen with ill-concealed astonishment. At last he recommended a course of action. One way would be laser treatment, he said, but the tattoo was so extensive and the needle had penetrated so deeply that he was afraid the only realistic solution was a series of skin grafts. It would be expensive and would take time.

In the past two years Bjurman had seen Salander on only one occasion.

On the night she attacked him and established control over his life, she had taken the spare set of keys to his office and apartment. She would be watching him, she had told him, and when he least expected it she would drop in. He had almost begun to believe it was an empty threat, but he had not dared to change the locks. Her warning had been unmistakable—if she ever found him in bed with a woman, Salander would make public the ninety-minute video that documented how he had raped her.

In January a year ago he had woken at 3:00 a.m., not sure why. He turned on his bedside light and almost howled in fright when he saw her standing at the foot of his bed. She was like a ghost suddenly there. Her face was pale and expressionless. In her hand she held her fucking Taser.

“Good morning, Mr. Advokat Bjurman,” she said. “So sorry for waking you this time.”

Good God, has she been here before? While I slept?

He could not tell whether she was bluffing. Bjurman cleared his throat and was about to speak. She cut him off with a gesture.

“I woke you for one reason only. I’m going to be away for a long time quite soon. Keep writing your reports every month, but don’t post copies to me. Send them to this hotmail address.”

She took a folded paper from her jacket pocket and dropped it on the bed.

“If the Guardianship Agency wants to get in touch with me, or anything else comes up that might require my being here, write me an email at this address. Is that understood?”

He nodded. “I understand …”

“Don’t speak. I don’t want to hear your voice.”

He clenched his teeth. He had not dared to try to reach her, since she had threatened to send the video to the authorities if he did. Instead he had thought for months what he would say to her when eventually she contacted him. He really had nothing he could say in his defence. All he could do was appeal to her humanity. He would try to convince her—if she would only give him a chance to speak—that he had done it in a fit of insanity, that he was utterly sorry for it and wanted to make amends. He would grovel if that would convince her, if he could only somehow defuse the threat that she posed.

“I have something to say,” he said in a pitiful voice. “I want to ask your forgiveness…”

She listened in silence to his plea. Then she put one foot on the bottom of the bed and stared at him in disgust.

“Now you listen, Bjurman: you’re a pervert. I have no reason to forgive you. But if you keep yourself clean, I’ll let you off the hook the day my declaration of incompetence is rescinded.”

She waited until he lowered his gaze.
She’s going to make me crawl
.

“There’s no change to what I said a year ago. You fail, and the video goes to the agency. You contact me in any way other than I tell you to, then I make the video public. I die in an accident, the video will be made public. You ever touch me again, I will kill you.”

He believed her.

“One more thing. The day I set you free, you can do as you like. But until that day you will not set foot again in that clinic in Marseilles. If you begin treatment, I will tattoo you again, and this time I’ll do it on your forehead.”

How the fucking hell did she find out about the clinic?

The next moment she was gone. He heard a faint click as she turned the front-door key. It was as if a ghost had paid him a visit.

At that instant he began to loathe Lisbeth Salander with an intensity
that blazed like red-hot steel in his brain and transformed his life into an obsession to crush her. He fantasized about killing her. He toyed with fantasies of having her crawl at his feet and beg him for mercy. But he would be merciless. He would put his hands around her throat and strangle her until she gasped for air. He wanted to tear her eyes from their sockets and her heart from her chest. He wanted to erase her from the earth.

Paradoxically, it was at this same moment that he felt as though he had begun to function again, and he discovered in himself a surprising emotional balance. He was obsessed with the woman and she was on his mind every waking minute. But he had begun to think rationally again. If he was going to find a way of destroying her, he would have to get his head in order. His life settled on a new objective.

He stopped fantasizing about her death and began planning for it.

Blomkvist passed less than six feet behind Advokat Bjurman’s back as he navigated with two scalding glasses of caffè latte to editor in chief Erika Berger’s table at Café Hedon. Neither he nor Berger had ever heard of Nils Bjurman, so neither was aware of his being there.

Berger frowned and moved an ashtray aside to make room for her glass. Blomkvist hung his jacket over the back of his chair, slid the ashtray over to his side of the table, and lit a cigarette. Berger detested cigarette smoke and gave him a furious look. He turned his head to blow the smoke away from her.

“I thought you gave up.”

“Temporary backsliding.”

“I’m going to stop having sex with guys who smell of smoke,” she said, smiling sweetly.

“No problem. There are plenty of girls who aren’t so particular,” Blomkvist said, smiling back.

Berger rolled her eyes. “So what’s the problem? I’m meeting Charlie at the theatre in twenty minutes.” Charlie was Charlotta Rosenberg, a childhood friend.

“Our intern bothers me,” Blomkvist said. “I don’t mind her being the daughter of one of your girlfriends, but she’s supposed to be in editorial for another eight weeks and I don’t think I can put up with her that long.”

“I’ve noticed the hungry glances she’s been casting your way. Naturally I expect you to behave like a gentleman.”

“Erika, the girl’s seventeen and has a mental age of ten, and I may be erring on the generous side.”

“She’s just impressed. Probably a little hero worship.”

“At 10:30 last night she rang the entry phone on my building and wanted to come up with a bottle of wine.”

“Oops,” Berger said.

“Oops is right. If I were twenty years younger I might not have even hesitated. I’m going to be forty-five any day now.”

“Don’t remind me. We’re the same age.”

The Wennerström affair had given Blomkvist a certain celebrity. Over the past year he had received invitations to the most improbable places, parties, and events. He was greeted with air kisses from all sorts of people he had hardly shaken hands with before. They were not primarily media people—he knew all of them already and was on either good or bad terms with them—but so-called cultural figures and B-list celebrities now wanted to appear as though they were his close friends. Now it was the thing to have Mikael Blomkvist as your guest at a launch party or a private dinner. “Sounds lovely, but unfortunately I’m already booked up,” was becoming a routine response.

One downside of his star status was an increasing rash of rumours. An acquaintance had mentioned with concern that he heard a rumour claiming that Blomkvist had been seen at a rehab clinic. In fact Blomkvist’s total drug intake since his teens consisted of half a dozen joints and one experiment with cocaine fifteen years earlier with a female singer in a Dutch rock band. As to alcohol, he was only ever seriously intoxicated at private dinners or parties. In a bar he would seldom have more than one large, strong beer. He also liked to drink medium-strong beer. His drinks cabinet at home had vodka and a few bottles of single malt Scotch, all presents. It was absurd how rarely he indulged in them.

Blomkvist was single. The fact that he had occasional affairs was known both inside and outside his circle of friends, and that had led to further rumours. His long-lasting affair with Erika Berger was frequently the subject of speculation. Lately it had been bandied about that he picked up any number of women, and was exploiting his new celebrity status to screw his way through the clientele of Stockholm’s nightspots. An obscure journalist had once even urged him to seek help for his sex addiction.

Blomkvist had indeed had many brief relationships. He knew he was
reasonably good-looking, but he had never considered himself exceptionally attractive. But he had often been told that he had something that made women interested in him. Berger had told him that he radiated self-confidence and security at the same time, that he had an ability to make women feel at ease. Going to bed with him was not threatening or complicated, but it might be erotically enjoyable. And that, according to Blomkvist, was as it should be.