"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (12 page)

IN
THE
Millennium Trilogy
, it’s no accident that for Mikael Blomkvist, everything begins on a boat. Water and the sea are inescapable when you live in a country with almost 13,000 miles of coastline and thousands of small islands.

The Stockholm archipelago is the largest one we have in Sweden, and every year Stieg and I would set off to explore one of its 24,000 islands. In the North, where we were born, we rowed our boats, since sailing was considered a sport for snobs. So before tackling a trip during which we might sink, drown, or be knocked cold by a swinging boom, I’d managed to get Stieg to join me in a crash course in sailing. He adored studying charts, having learned map reading during his military service. Me, I preferred to be at the helm. We’d
take turns there, but if the weather worsened, I’d take over the wheel. We started out by buying
Josephine
, and we kept that name because a change would have brought bad luck. She was a secondhand motorboat, mahogany, twenty-eight feet, built in 1954, the year Stieg was born. When we began sailing, however, we always rented our boats. As a pair we functioned perfectly well, almost via osmosis. Once, whipped by a ferocious wind, the boom broke loose, and as our friend Eleanor watched in amazement, Stieg and I immediately cobbled together an emergency tie-up with some military webbing belts—without needing to exchange a single word.

Josephine
’s home port was Årsta, where Mikael goes to exchange Christmas presents with his ex-wife and daughter Pernilla in
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
. Thanks to all our trips back and forth, Stieg and I knew the area well.

When Lisbeth decides to strong-arm her way into the apartment of Per-Åke Sandström, the pimp “journalist” who is Dag Svensson’s informant, she equips herself at Watski, a hardware store on Erstagatan in Stockholm. That was where Stieg and I bought everything we needed for boating. I particularly remember an anchor and chain that must have weighed more than sixty-five pounds, and which I lugged through the Årsta forest all the way to
Josephine
.

To tie up Sandström, Lisbeth uses a clove hitch, a knot Stieg and I tied and retied for whole evenings to get right. As for her little Minolta 8x binoculars, they’re the ones we always had in our pockets when we were sailing, to help us spot seamarks and stay on course.

We knocked around quite a lot at the top of the archipelago, too, up by Arholma, the most northerly island, where Blomkvist meets the old school chum who gives him the idea to write about Wennerström. The guest marina there is as busy as Stieg says, and boats really have to crowd together to leave a few spaces for latecomers. I’ve never understood the strange popularity of the place, because it’s the favorite summer resort of enormous mosquitoes, twice as big as normal, which feast on visitors all night long.

After Holger Palmgren retired, the lawyer Nils Erik Bjurman became Lisbeth’s legal guardian, and this vile character owns a second home in Stallarholmen. Stieg and I often put in there with
Josephine
whenever we were touring Lake Mälaren during the summer.

Bjurman’s friend Gunnar Björck, the assistant chief of the immigration division within Säpo and a member of the Section, tries to hide at the end of the trilogy by going way out to Landsort, a village on the island of Öja, where he rents a guest room in an old lighthouse. For several autumns in a row, Stieg and I sailed south along the archipelago, heading for Landsort, and each time we had to cut our trip short because of bad weather. After hours of fighting gray seas and contrary winds, we’d turn back, discouraged by how little headway we’d made. One summer, frustrated by those setbacks, we took a room in the lighthouse and spent several days there, just so we could finally see the island at least one time!

In the last part of
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
, Mikael has an affair with the stunning Inspector Monica
Figuerola, the Säpo policewoman assigned to Lisbeth Salander’s case. While he’s staying in the little wooden cabin out at Sandhamn, he goes to get her at the ferry dock, and that same night they have dinner together outside on the veranda. Figuerola questions Blomkvist about his real relationship with Lisbeth, and at one point she watches an Amigo 23 chugging past, heading for the marina with its navigation lights glowing.

One autumn, when rental prices had dropped a bit but the weather had been less cooperative, Stieg and I rented one of these pretty little sailboats with the simply sublime interior finished with precious hardwoods. She was very stable but rather sluggish, especially with the wind astern, which was what we had to deal with for several days. I was grumbling at the helm;
why
had we rented this bathtub that seemed to be dragging an anchor behind her! Then came the day when we suddenly faced a headwind, and to our amazement, the Amigo 23 underwent a sea change: she awakened, sat up, took a deep breath, and began bravely to cleave the waves. She’d become so agile that—remarkably—not one drop of spray touched us! Sheer happiness. I couldn’t stop stroking her flanks to thank and encourage her, but she was in her element and no longer needed us at all. Dazzled and dry, we streaked in no time to the far end of the island, absolutely charmed by this Amigo 23 that thoroughly deserved her name.

And that’s why Stieg saluted this little boat that gave us such a surprising and fantastic experience.

IN THE
1990s, the banking and real estate debacle described by Mikael Blomkvist and Robert Lindberg at the beginning of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
was a reality with which Stieg and I, unfortunately, were only too familiar.

The financial crisis that affected every industrialized nation hit Sweden particularly hard. To parry a speculative attack on the krona, the Bank of Sweden was forced into a devaluation, which did not help the debt burden of banks that were already in serious trouble.

New taxes, a staggering rise in interest rates, a drop in construction subsidies.… The real estate sector took a huge hit, with many firms closing or resorting to massive
layoffs. When I lost my job as an architect, Stieg and I entered a period of very tough times.

In the autumn of 1992, Blomkvist says, “I had a variable-rate mortgage on my apartment when the interest rate shot up five hundred percent in October. I was stuck with nineteen percent interest for a year.” That is exactly what happened to Sweden, and to us personally. Fortunately, my severance pay helped supply part of the 100,000 extra kronor—almost $15,000—we had to hand over that dreadful year, and if we hadn’t paid, we would have lost our home, a 600-square-foot apartment on the top floor of a walk-up. Bought two years earlier in a former working-class neighborhood of Stockholm, it was the first apartment we ever owned. And it is still my home.

IT WASN’T
until 1996 that the Swedish government began to worry about a very serious situation: aside from a few superexpensive co-op apartments, housing construction had been more or less at a standstill since 1992. Parliament then launched a vast study of plans for both low-cost housing and research into broad solutions to make the construction sector as a whole more productive and less expensive. I applied for a position in the Construction Cost Delegation, and I was hired. Between 1997 and 2000, I labored day and night over questions that have long interested me and which I had already studied extensively on my own. And now—I was being paid to do
that! It was heaven. The project generated over 2,400 pages, and allusions to its contents crop up all through the last volume of
The Millennium Trilogy
. Because Stieg didn’t have time to read the whole report, every day for three years I told him highlights of what was in it. Certain details were eye-opening, and even amusing.

For example: “You want to run a story on toilets? In
Millennium
?” exclaims Malin Eriksson, the acting editor in chief of the magazine, in
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
. She can’t believe that Henry Cortez, their investigative whiz, wants to write about such a frivolous subject in their distinguished magazine. But wait! The real story is that Swedish construction cartels shamelessly and grossly inflate the prices for cheaply manufactured toilets they buy from Asian countries such as Thailand. The mocking description Stieg concocts about how taxpayers are shafted by such price-fixing really tickled my colleagues at the Construction Cost Delegation, who got the point immediately and recognized data from our study.

IN
2000, Stieg and I were disgusted to learn that leading asphalt paving contractors had formed an “asphalt cartel” that for years had been raking in exorbitant sums for routine road maintenance throughout Sweden. Even worse, the Swedish Road Administration was implicated in the affair, which led the minister of industry at the time to admit that the situation was “embarrassing”! That prompted us to write an article
together that only Stieg signed, because of our wish never to have our names linked together. The piece, entitled “Embarrassing? Criminal!,” appeared in the national evening paper
Aftonbladet
. And it had repercussions: one municipality sued the contractors for reimbursement of all taxpayers’ monies spent, and prices in that sector of construction fell by more than 25 percent.

A result that convinced Stieg and me that we should definitely plan to work together again on issues like these.

ON THAT
autumn day in 2003, when I walked into our apartment, I remember yelling, “It’s just not possible!”

I was returning from the post office, where I’d retrieved the brown-paper-wrapped package containing the manuscript of the first volume of
The Millennium Trilogy
, which Stieg had sent off during the summer to Piratförlaget, Sweden’s third-largest publishing house. “They didn’t even go pick it up!” I added.

Stieg was bewildered. “But when I called them that day,
they
were the ones who asked me to send it.…”

“We’re not giving up! Call them back and tell them I’ll deliver it to them myself.”

A few days later I set out in the rain for Gamla Stan, the
old quarter of Stockholm, with the manuscript wrapped in the same brown paper. A big chunk of book. And I know what I’m talking about: some nights when I used to lie on my bed exhausted after a busy day, pen in hand, with the latest version of the text propped up on my chest, I would doze off … and the whole thing would smack me right in the face!

I delivered the package to a pleasant blonde and was able to assure Stieg that it was now on someone’s desk.

But there was no further news. Several weeks went by before Stieg decided to call, only to learn that Piratförlaget wasn’t interested.

“Too bad,” I announced. “Your book is great, it’ll be published someday, and since those people don’t seem to know where the post office is, I’m going to go get the book back right now!”