The Girl who played with Fire

her midsection. She sank to her knees again. He gave her one more slap to the side of her head, and she tumbled to the floor. Then he kicked her in the torso. She gasped for breath as she heard a rib crack.

Paolo Roberto saw nothing of the beating, but he did hear Miriam Wu wail in pain, a sharp, shrill scream that was immediately cut off. He looked in the direction of the sound and clenched his teeth. There was a room beyond a dividing wall. He moved silently through the warehouse and peered through the doorway just as the man rolled the girl onto her back. The giant vanished from his field of view for a few seconds and came back with a chain saw, which he set on the floor in front of her. Paolo Roberto slipped off his jacket.

“I want the answer to a simple question.”

He had a high-pitched voice, almost as if it had never broken, and an accent.

“Where is Lisbeth Salander?”

“I don’t know,” Miriam Wu said, obviously in pain.

“That’s the wrong answer. You’ll have one more chance before I start this thing.”

He squatted down and patted the chain saw.

“Where is Lisbeth Salander hiding?”

Wu shook her head.

When the man reached for the chain saw, Paolo Roberto took three determined strides into the room and threw a hard right hook at his kidneys.

Paolo Roberto had not become a world-famous boxer by being tentative in the ring. He had fought thirty- three bouts in his professional career and won twenty-eight of them. When he punched someone as hard as he could he expected to see his opponent feel pain. But this time he felt as if he had smashed his hand into a concrete wall. He had never experienced anything like it in all the years he’d spent as a boxer. He looked in astonishment at the colossus in front of him.

The man turned and looked with equal astonishment at the boxer.

“What do you say we find you somebody in your own weight class?” said Paolo Roberto.

He got off a string of right-left-right punches to the body and put some muscle behind them. They were heavy blows. The only effect was that the giant took half a step back, more from surprise than from the effect of the punches. Then he smiled.

“You’re Paolo Roberto,” he said.

Paolo Roberto stopped, amazed. He had just landed four punches that should have put the giant on the deck while the referee counted to ten. But his blows seemed not to have had the slightest effect.

Good God. This isn’t normal.

Then he saw as if in slow motion the man’s right hook come flying towards him. He was slow and telegraphed the punch in advance. Paolo Roberto had time to move, but the blow glanced off his shoulder. It felt as if he had been hit by a steel bar.

Paolo Roberto backed up two steps, filled with new respect for his opponent.

There’s something wrong with him. Nobody can hit this hard.

He automatically blocked a left hook with his forearm and felt at once a sharp pain. He did not manage to block the right hook that came out of nowhere and landed on his forehead.

Paolo Roberto tumbled backwards out the door. He landed against a mound of wooden pallets and shook his head. He felt blood streaming down his face. He cut my eyebrow. It’ll have to be sewn up. Again.

In the next moment the giant came into view and Paolo Roberto instinctively twisted to the side. He escaped by a hairsbreadth another clublike blow from those enormous fists. He quickly backed up, three, four shuffles, and got his arms up in a defensive position. He was shaken.

The man regarded him with eyes that were curious and almost amused. Then he assumed the same defensive position. This guy is a boxer. They began to circle each other slowly.

The hundred and eighty seconds that followed became the most bizarre match that Paolo Roberto had ever fought. There were no coaches, no referee. There was no bell to call a halt to the round and send the fighters to their corners. No pause for water and smelling salts and a towel to wipe the blood from his eyes.

Paolo Roberto knew now that he was fighting for his life. All his training, all the years of hammering on punching bags, all the sparring, and all the experience from all the bouts he had fought came together as the adrenaline pumped in a way he had never before experienced.

They went at each other in an exchange into which Paolo Roberto put all his power and all his fury. Left, right, left, left again, and a jab with the right to the face, duck the left hook, back up a step, attack with the right. Every punch landed with solid force.

He was in the biggest battle of his life. He was hitting with his brain as much as with his fists. He managed to avoid every punch his opponent threw at him.

He landed a right hook clear as a bell to the jaw that felt like he had broken a bone in his hand and that should have made his opponent collapse in a heap. He glanced at his knuckles and saw that they were bloody. He could see bruises and a swollen area on the giant’s face. But his opponent seemed not even to feel the blows.

Paolo Roberto backed up, breathed as steadily as he could, and took stock. He’s no boxer. He moves like a boxer, but he can’t box for shit. He’s only pretending. He can’t block. He telegraphs his punches. And he’s as slow as a tortoise.

In the next instant the giant got in a left hook to the side of Paolo Roberto’s rib cage. That was the second time he had connected well. Paolo Roberto felt pain shoot through his body as a rib cracked. Again he backed away, but he tripped over a pile of scaffolding and fell on his back. He saw the giant towering over him, but he flung himself into a roll to the side and staggered to his feet.

He squared up, trying to gather his strength, but the man was on him again. He ducked, ducked again, and backed away, feeling terrible pain each time he parried a blow with his shoulder.

Then came the moment that every boxer has experienced with dread. The feeling that could turn up any time in the middle of a bout. The feeling of just not being good enough. The realization that you are about to lose.

That’s the crux of almost every fight, the moment when the strength drains out of you and the adrenaline pumps so hard that it becomes a burden and surrender appears like a ghost at ringside. That’s the moment that separates the pros from the amateurs and the winner from the loser. Few boxers who find themselves at the edge of that abyss manage to turn the match around, turn certain defeat into victory.

Paolo Roberto was struck by this insight. He felt a roaring in his head that made him dizzy and he experienced the moment as if he were watching the scene from outside, peering at this giant through a camera lens. This was the moment when it was a matter of winning or disappearing for good.

He backed in a wide semicircle to collect his strength and buy time. The man followed him steadily but slowly, precisely as though he knew that the outcome was decided but he wanted to draw the round out. He boxes, but he can’t really box. He knows who I am. He’s a rank amateur. But he has a devastating power in his punch and he seems insensitive to all punishment.

These thoughts rattled around in Paolo Roberto’s head as he tried to decide what to do.

Suddenly he was reliving the night in Mariehamn two years before when his career as a professional boxer had ended in the most brutal way. He had met the Argentine Sebastian Lujan, or rather, Sebastian Lujan met him. Paolo Roberto had walked into the first knockout of his life and had been unconscious for fifteen seconds.

He often thought about what had gone wrong. He was in tip-top shape. He was focused. But the Argentine had landed a solid punch and the round had been transformed into a raging sea.

Watching the video afterwards, he saw how he had staggered around the ring, as defenceless as Donald Duck. The knockout came twenty-three seconds later.

Sebastian Lujan hadn’t been any better, or better trained than he was. The margins of error being so small, the bout could have gone either way.

The only difference he could detect later was that Lujan had been hungrier. When Paolo Roberto went into that ring in Mariehamn he was set on winning, but he wasn’t dying to box. It did not mean life or death any more. A loss was not a catastrophe.

A year and a half later he was still a boxer. But he was no longer a pro, and he took on only friendly