"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (7 page)

Now and then Stieg would receive bullets in the mail, and once someone was waiting for him outside the entrance to the TT building. Warned in time, Stieg slipped out a back door. Our answering machine was set permanently on “Record” to keep evidence of the threats we received, and they were always in the same vein: “Piece of shit, you Jew-fucker.… Traitor, we’ll tear you apart … and we know where you live.…”

Swedish neo-Nazis have their own information network: the Anti-AFA (Anti-Anti-Fascist Action). In 1994, after the complaint lodged against
Storm
, the police seized a list of over two hundred antiracist activists. A few years later, extremists targeted Peter Karlsson and Katarina Larsson, two journalists at
Aftonbladet
—one of Sweden’s largest evening papers—who had once worked with us at
Expo
. At the time, they were investigating, among other things, the flourishing White Power music industry, which finances extremist groups throughout the world, and their efforts would later help lead to the bankruptcy of the racist Nordland music label in Sweden. Although they were allowed to officially conceal their identities in public records, their names, addresses, and detailed personal information about them were posted on the Internet in March 1999. Not long afterward,
Aftonbladet
published their reporters’ findings in an article revealing the names of neo-Nazis who had received training in weapons and explosives during their military service. Three months later, on June 28, Peter Karlsson and his eight-year-old son were the victims of a car bomb. When the little boy opened the car door, he was thrown back from the blast and only slightly injured, but his father sustained a serious spinal injury and remains severely handicapped.

On September 16 of that same year, trade unionist Björn Söderberg revealed that a neo-Nazi had been elected to the board of his local employees’ union. That same day and throughout the month of September, photos of more than twenty-five antiextremist activists, including that of Björn Söderberg, were requested from the passport services by the neo-Nazi newspaper
Info 14
. On October 12, Björn Söderberg was murdered, shot multiple times at his home in a Stockholm suburb. Among the possessions of one of the men implicated in his assassination, the police later found a list of more than a thousand names!

Events like these back up the threats directed at the magazine
Millennium
and underline the failings of the security measures provided by the state for any of the novel’s public citizens put at risk, failings that lead to the murders of Dag Svensson and Mia Bergman in
The Girl Who Played with Fire
. In fact, everything of this nature described in
The Millennium Trilogy
has happened at one time or another to a Swedish citizen, journalist, politician, public prosecutor, unionist, or policeman.
Nothing was made up
.

The culprits were quickly found and arrested on October 14, 1999. Shortly afterward, Stieg called one afternoon to tell me Peter Karlsson had just warned him that our passport photos, along with Söderberg’s, had been found among the evidence in the case, and that some of the suspects were still at large. Before hanging up, Stieg told me, “You mustn’t go home.” When the last member of the group was arrested on November 29, my friend Eleanor told me, relieved, “Now we can finally go out safely in public and stuff ourselves in a restaurant!”

Throughout that period, Stieg and I worried constantly about each other. Even before that, in a café I had always sat between him and the door as a kind of protective screen, but now we weren’t allowing ourselves to be seen together at all. My colleagues at work didn’t know the name of the man I lived with; I was always evasive, simply saying, “a journalist.” I never invited my coworkers home, only to public places. As for Stieg, without saying anything about it, he had set up a security network around me. This meant that if the police got a call reporting an incident on our street, they were authorized to send all available vehicles. I realized this the day there was a minor car accident outside our apartment and I heard so many sirens arrive that I went out on the balcony, saw only a fender bender, and thought, You’d think the cops had nothing better to do!

There wasn’t anything brave about living that way. We just did. We’d both chosen that. But it definitely had an effect on our lives. It was why—among other things—we’d never gotten married or had children.

It really was safer for Stieg to remain “single” in all official documents. True, his address was relatively easy to find, as I’ve explained, but since mine was the only name on our door and on all our bills, tracking down his exact whereabouts was more difficult.

In 1983, we had decided to get married. We bought rings in a store on Regeringsgatan—“Government Street”—and had them engraved with “Stieg and Eva.” We made an appointment with the minister of the parish of Spånga in northwest Stockholm to find out how long the necessary formalities would take, only to discover that getting married was more complicated and time-consuming than we’d thought. Once again, our professional obligations got in the way of our private lives, and neither one of us took the time to compile the required administrative dossier.

Then the United States invaded what we thought of as “our island,” Grenada. And we worked night and day to find out what had really happened there, so getting married was no longer our top priority. Besides, Stieg had just begun writing for
Searchlight
and started drawing too much interest from the extreme right to take any risks. Even though we weren’t married yet, we wore our rings; Stieg finally had to take his off when he gained weight in 1990, but it’s on his hand in many of my photographs from those days. As for me, I now wear Stieg’s ring as well as my own.

Erland, Stieg’s father, urged us several times to get married, especially at the end of the 1980s, when there was talk of eliminating the reversion of pensions on the death of a spouse if the marriage had not taken place before a certain
date. Like many couples of our generation, however, we did not follow through. And with good reason, since we had to consider the very real problem of our personal safety.

I also think that our respective childhoods did not condition us to have a family. When I was a little girl, I believed my mother had abandoned me. The reality was much more complex than that, of course, but that event certainly contributed to my fear of having a child. We thought about having one, naturally, but—and I mean this without any “irony”—there was always something more urgent to take care of: we wanted our financial situation to be more stable, more promising, more
secure
—before taking such an important step.… And time passed.…

A few months before his death, Stieg talked again about getting married. Especially since we already had our rings! With the
Millennium
books about to be published, we knew that our personal finances would improve, and since Stieg had decided to work only part-time at
Expo
, he would be less at risk from right-wing retaliation.

This time, it was death that overshadowed our private lives.

STIEG DID
not sit down one day at his computer and announce, “I’m going to write a crime novel!” In a way, he never even formally began to write one at all, because he never drew up an outline for the first book, or the next two, still less for the seven he intended should follow.

Stieg wrote sequences that were often unrelated to the others. Then he would “stitch” them together, following the thread of the story and his inclination.

In 2002, during a week’s island vacation, I could see he was a bit bored. I was working on my book about the Swedish architect Per Olof Hallman (1869–1941, a professional town planner), but Stieg was at loose ends, going around in circles.

So I asked him, “Haven’t you got some writing to work on?”

“No, but I was just thinking about that piece I wrote in 1997, the one about the old man who receives a flower in the mail every year at Christmas. Remember?”

“Of course!”

“I’ve been wondering for a long time what that was really all about.”

Stieg got right to it and we spent the rest of the week working outdoors on our computers, with the sea before our eyes and grass beneath our feet. Happy.

So my book and the trilogy took shape at the same time.

Contrary to what most people think, Stieg wasn’t a computer whiz, and he even used a typewriter for most of his writing life. We switched to computers only in the early 1990s, after I’d worked for a business that used them. Even at
Expo
, we had to call in a team of experts to protect our computers from hacking, because none of us was up to the job. And Stieg wasn’t a math nut, either, in spite of Lisbeth Salander’s fascination when she discovers Fermat’s Last Theorem in
The Girl Who Played with Fire
, a fascination Stieg describes over several pages here and there in the trilogy until Lisbeth loses interest in that mystery in the third volume. Actually, Stieg was always terrible at math, which almost cost him his baccalaureate exam, but the theorem typified the kind of knowledge we both loved: a heterogeneous, eccentric store of learning that wasn’t necessarily useful in life, yet delighted us. Sometimes reading a single sentence on an unfamiliar subject would inspire us to delve
deeply into its mysteries. Stieg was like a sponge, absorbing everything, and without ever taking notes! For example, to come up with the clothes his characters wore, which were always described in great detail, he never consulted any catalogues or peered into any shopwindows. All he did was study fashion in the street. And he loved that. Stieg had a very personal way of dressing. Unlike most people in his milieu, who generally favored sporty casual dress for every occasion, he wore tweed jackets, elegant but inexpensive, and he adapted his style to the people and situations he encountered. He had class, without ever coming across as a dandy or a snob.

In two years, he wrote two thousand pages of the trilogy. Whether it was for
Searchlight
, TT,
Expo
, or the trilogy, he always tackled his writing with the same energy. During the first year he worked evenings and weekends, going to bed late but no more so than usual. This sometimes made life hard for me, but our saving grace was that we laughed a lot. He’d take a break, go smoke a cigarette out on the balcony, then get back to work with renewed concentration. During that last year, he was also writing during the day and in the
Expo
office instead of dealing with his magazine work. That was the year he worked so hard he slept barely five or six hours a night. Whenever I would reread the texts that came toward the end of the trilogy, I’d notice that he’d written them at around three or four in the morning. I believe
The Millennium Trilogy
had become a refuge for him.

Stieg was an artist, so he did not always have his feet planted firmly on the ground. At home, I was there, “the
artist’s wife,” to take care of daily life, but at
Expo
things were a royal mess. Stieg was a good editor in chief for the magazine but a poor director for the foundation. Not only was he disorganized and completely on his own, but there was never enough money, either. He had no idea how to control or keep track of ongoing projects and was constantly exhausted from having to solve problems in haste and under pressure. After his death, I found a letter addressed to the foundation’s sponsors asking them once again for financial aid; dated November 7, it had never been sent. Stieg died on November 9. In the end, all the gratitude and praise heaped on
Expo
for its wonderful work were just words. Stieg had to fight to find a way to make it to the end of every month, and the worst part of it was—he was losing heart. He’d left TT, his severance pay was gone, and his hopes for
Expo
were foundering. Everything he’d believed in was going up in smoke. So he wrote and wrote. It was like therapy. He was describing Sweden the way it was and the way he saw his country: the scandals, the oppression of women, the friends he cherished and wished to honor, Grenada—that island so dear to us.… He thought out every little detail because he kept everything in his prodigious memory … and in his computer.

Without Stieg’s battles and crusades,
The Millennium Trilogy
would never have seen the light of day. His struggle is the heart, brain, and brawn of that saga.

STIEG CAMPAIGNED
for many years to have the Swedish Constitution hold the Internet to the same level of accountability demanded of all other media, namely, the obligation to have a legally responsible publisher. He got nowhere. The result is that even today, racist and fascist websites that incite hatred and threaten innocent people are still beyond the reach of the law.

In June 2004, Stieg raised this question at a conference in Paris presented by the OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe), an ad hoc organization under the United Nations Charter and the world’s largest security-oriented intergovernmental body. The OSCE, which comprises fifty-six states in Europe,
Central Asia, and North America, describes itself as “a forum for political negotiations and decision-making in the fields of early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation.” During this conference, Stieg spoke out against the danger of leaving the Internet beyond the reach of all legislation. “For racist groups,” he said, “cyberspace is a dream. It’s no accident that their first priority is to set up a website.” But he also warned against considering the law as the sole effective remedy: “In my opinion, legislation alone cannot defeat the challenge posed by hate propaganda on the Internet. In fact I appeal to you: do not put too much trust in legislation.”

Stieg felt that without the democratic activism of politicians and citizens (whose ranks include journalists), legislation would never get at the root of the problem, and he was very worried that if nothing was done, the situation was doomed to deteriorate even further.