The Girl Who Played with Fire (68 page)

The camera was hidden in what looked like a smoke detector in the hall ceiling, and it took a low-res photograph every second. She played back the sequence from zero, the moment the door was opened and the alarm activated. Then a lopsided smile spread across her face as she looked down at Mikael Blomkvist, who for half a minute acted out a jerky pantomime before he finally punched in the code and then leaned on the doorjamb looking as though he had just avoided having a heart attack.

Kalle Fucking Blomkvist had tracked her down.

He had the keys she had dropped on Lundagatan. He was smart enough to remember that
Wasp
was her handle on the Net. And if he had found the apartment, then he had probably also worked out that it was owned by Wasp Enterprises. As she watched he began to move jerkily down the hall and disappeared from the camera’s view.

Shit. How could I have been so predictable? And why did I drop those keys?…
Now her every secret lay open to Blomkvist’s prying eyes.

After thinking about it for a couple of minutes she decided that it no longer made any difference. She had erased the hard drive. That was the important thing. It could even be to her advantage that he was the one to have found her hideout. He already knew more of her secrets than anyone else did. Practical Pig would do the right thing. He would not sell her out. She hoped. She put the car in drive and pressed on, deep in thought, towards Göteborg.

Eriksson ran into Paolo Roberto in the stairwell to
Millennium’s
offices when she arrived at 8:30. She recognized him at once, introduced herself, and let him in. He had a bad limp. She smelled coffee and knew that Berger was already there.

“Hello, Erika. Thanks for agreeing to see me at such short notice,” the boxer said.

Berger studied the impressive collection of bruises and lumps on his face before she leaned forward and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“You look like shit,” she said.

“I’ve broken my nose before. Where are you keeping Blomkvist?”

“He’s out somewhere playing detective, looking for leads. As usual it’s impossible to get hold of him. Except for a strange email last night I haven’t heard from him since yesterday morning. Thank you for … well, thanks.”

She pointed to his face.

Paolo Roberto laughed.

“Would you like coffee? You said you had something to tell me. Malin, join us.”

They sat in the comfortable chairs in Berger’s office.

“It’s that big blond fucker I had the fight with. I told Mikael that his boxing wasn’t worth a rotten lingonberry But the funny thing was, he kept assuming the defensive position with his fists and circled around as if he
were
a boxer. It seemed as if he had actually had some sort of training.”

“Mikael mentioned that on the phone yesterday,” Eriksson said.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so yesterday when I got home I sat down and sent out emails to boxing clubs all over Europe. I described what had happened and gave as detailed a description as I could of the guy.”

“Did you have any luck?”

“I think I got a nibble.”

He put a faxed photograph on the table in front of Berger and Eriksson. It looked to have been taken during a training session at a boxing club. Two boxers were standing listening to instructions from a heavyset older man in a narrow-brimmed leather hat and tracksuit. Half a dozen people were hanging around the ring listening. In the background stood a large man who looked like a skinhead. A circle had been drawn around him with a marker pen.

“The picture is seventeen years old. The guy in the background is Ronald Niedermann. He was eighteen when the picture was taken, so he should be about thirty-five now. That fits with the giant that kidnapped Miriam Wu. I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that it’s him. The picture is a little too old and it’s poor quality. But I can say that he looks quite similar.”

“Where did you get the picture?”

“I got an answer from Hans Münster, a veteran trainer at Dynamic in Hamburg. Ronald Niedermann boxed for them for a year in the late eighties. Or rather, he tried to box for them. I got the email first thing this morning and called Münster before I came here. To sum up what Münster said: Niedermann is from Hamburg and hung out with a skinhead gang in the eighties. He has a brother a few years older, a very talented boxer, and it was through him that he joined the club. Niedermann had fearsome strength and a physique that was almost unparalleled. Münster said that he’d never seen anyone hit so hard, not even among the elite.
They measured the weight of his punch one time and he went right off the scale.”

“It sounds as though he could have made a career in the ring,” Berger said.

Paolo Roberto shook his head. “According to Münster he was impossible, for several reasons. First, he couldn’t learn to box. He would stand still throwing haymakers. He was phenomenally clumsy—that fits the guy I fought in Nykvarn—but what was worse, he didn’t understand his own strength. Now and then he’d land a punch that would cause a horrible injury during sparring practice. There were broken noses and jaws—a whole series of unnecessary injuries. They just couldn’t keep him around.”

“So he could box, but not really. Is that it?” Eriksson said.

“Exactly. But the reason for him stopping was medical.”

“How do you mean?”

“He was apparently invulnerable. It didn’t matter how many punches he took, he just shook them off and kept fighting. It turned out that he suffers from a very rare condition called congenital analgesia. I looked it up. It’s an inherited genetic defect that means the transmitter substance in his nerve synapses doesn’t function properly. Or in lay terms, he can’t feel pain.”

“That sounds like a gold mine for a boxer.”

Paolo Roberto shook his head once more. “On the contrary. It can be a life-threatening disorder. Most people with congenital analgesia die relatively young, between twenty and twenty-five. Pain is the body’s warning system that something’s wrong. If you put your hand on a red-hot burner, it hurts and you snatch it away. But if you have this disease you don’t do anything until you start smelling burned flesh.”

Eriksson and Berger looked at each other.

“Are you serious?” Berger said.

“Absolutely. Niedermann can’t feel a thing, and he goes around as if he’s had a massive dose of local anaesthesia twenty-four hours a day. He’s managed to deal with it because he has another genetic feature that compensates for it. He has an extraordinary build with an extremely strong skeleton, which makes him almost invulnerable. His raw strength is damn near unique. And above all, he must heal easily.”

“I’m beginning to understand what an interesting boxing match it must have been.”

“It certainly was that. I wouldn’t want to do it again. The only thing that made an impression on him was when Miriam Wu kicked him in the
balls. He actually fell to his knees for a second … which must be because there’s some sort of physical reaction connected to a blow of that type, since he doesn’t feel any pain. And believe me—even I would have collapsed if she had kicked me like that.”

“So how did you end up beating him?”

“People with this disease can in fact be injured just like anyone else. Forget that Niedermann seems to have bones of concrete. But when I whacked him with a plank on the back of his head he dropped like a rock. He was probably concussed.”

Berger looked at Eriksson.

“I’ll call Mikael,” Eriksson said.

Blomkvist heard his mobile go off, but he was so stunned that he did not answer until the fifth ring.

“Hi, it’s Malin. Paolo Roberto thinks he’s identified the giant.”

“That’s good,” Blomkvist said absentmindedly.

“Where are you?”

“That’s hard to say.”

“You sound funny.”

“Sorry. What did you say?”

Eriksson summed up Paolo Roberto’s story.

“Follow up on it,” Blomkvist said, “and see if you can find him in some database. I think it’s urgent. Call me on my mobile.”

To Eriksson’s surprise, he disconnected without even saying goodbye.

Blomkvist was standing at that moment by a window, looking out at a magnificent view that stretched far from Gamla Stan towards Saltsjön. He felt numb. There was a kitchen off the hall to the right of the front door. Then there was a living room, an office, a bedroom, and even a small guest room that seemed not to have been used. The mattress was still in its plastic wrapper and there were no sheets. All the furniture was brand-new, straight from IKEA.

What floored Blomkvist was that Salander had bought the pied-à-terre that had belonged to Percy Barnevik, a captain of industry. The apartment was about 3,800 square feet and worth twenty-five million kronor.

Blomkvist wandered through deserted, almost eerily empty corridors and rooms with patterned parquet floors of different kinds of wood, and Tricia Guild wallpaper of the type that Berger had at one time coveted. At the centre of the apartment was a wonderfully bright living room with an
open fireplace, but Salander seemed never to have had a fire. There was an enormous balcony with a fantastic view. There was a laundry room, a sauna, a gym, storage rooms, and a bathroom with a king-size bath. There was even a wine cellar, which was empty except for an unopened bottle of Quinta do Noval port
—Nacional!—
from 1976. Blomkvist struggled to imagine Salander with a glass of port in her hand. An elegant card indicated that it had been a moving-in present from the estate agent.

The kitchen contained all manner of equipment, with a shiny French gourmet stove with a gas oven as the focus. Blomkvist had never before set eyes on a La Cornue Château 120. Salander probably used it for boiling tea water.

On the other hand he admired with awe the espresso machine on its own separate table. She had a Jura Impressa X7 with an attached milk cooler. The machine looked barely used and had probably been in the kitchen when she bought the apartment. Blomkvist knew that a Jura was the espresso equivalent of a Rolls-Royce—a professional machine for domestic use that cost in the neighbourhood of 70,000 kronor. He had an espresso machine that he had bought at John Wall, which had cost around 3,500 kronor—one of the few extravagances he had allowed himself for his own household, and a fraction of the grandeur of Salander’s machine.

The refrigerator contained an open milk carton, some cheese, butter, caviar, and a half-empty jar of pickled gherkins. The kitchen cupboard contained four half-empty jars of vitamins, tea bags, coffee for an ordinary coffeemaker, two loaves of bread, and a packet of crispbreads. On the kitchen table was a bowl of apples. There were three ham pies and a fish casserole in the freezer. That was all the food he found in the apartment. In the trash under the counter next to the stove he saw several empty packages for Billy’s Pan Pizza.

The arrangement was all out of proportion. Salander had stolen several billion kronor and bought herself an apartment with space for an entire court. But she only needed the three rooms she had furnished. The other eighteen rooms were empty.

Blomkvist ended his tour in her office. There were no flowers anywhere. There were no paintings or even posters on the walls. There were no rugs or wall hangings. He could not see a single decorative bowl, candlestick, or even a knickknack that had been saved for sentimental reasons.

Blomkvist felt as if someone were squeezing his heart. He felt that he had to find Salander and hold her close.

She would probably bite him if he tried.

Fucking Zalachenko
.

Then he sat down at her desk and opened the folder with Björck’s report from 1991. He did not read it all, but skimmed through it, trying to absorb the essentials.

He booted up her PowerBook with the 17-inch screen, 200 GB hard drive, and 1,000 MB of RAM. It was empty. She had wiped it. That was ominous.

He opened her desk drawer and found a 9 mm Colt 1911 Government single-action with a fully loaded magazine, seven rounds. It was the pistol Salander had taken from the journalist Sandström, though Blomkvist knew nothing about that. He had not yet reached the letter
S
on the list of johns.

Then he found a DVD marked
BJURMAN
.

He stuck it into his iBook and watched its contents with horror. He sat in stunned silence as he saw Salander beaten up, raped, almost murdered. The film seemed to have been made with a hidden camera. He did not watch it all but skipped from one section to the next, each worse than the last.

Bjurman
.

Salander’s guardian had raped her, and she had documented the event to the final detail. A digital date showed that the film had been recorded two years earlier. That was before he met her. Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

Björck and Bjurman together with Zalachenko in the seventies.

Zalachenko and Salander and a Molotov cocktail made from a milk carton in the early nineties.

Then Bjurman again, now her guardian, having replaced Palmgren. The circle had been closed. Bjurman had attacked his ward. He had treated her as a mentally ill, defenceless girl, but Salander was anything but defenceless. She was the girl who at the age of twelve had gone to war with a hit man who had defected from the GRU, and she had crippled him for life.

Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.

He thought back to the time when he had come to know her in Hedestad. It must have been a matter of months after the rape. He could not recall that she had hinted by so much as a single word that any such
thing had happened to her. She had not revealed much at all about herself. Blomkvist could not guess what she had done to Bjurman—but she had not killed him.
Oddly enough
. Otherwise Bjurman would have been dead two years ago. She must have been controlling him in some way and for some purpose that he could not begin to understand. Then he realized that he had the means of her control right there on the desk. The DVD. As long as she had that, Bjurman was her helpless slave. And Bjurman had turned to the man he supposed was an ally. Zalachenko. Her worst enemy. Her father.