no idea where to go. He glanced back at the girl, still in handcuffs, lying on the backseat without a seat belt. He had had to carry her to the car, and as soon as she landed on the seat she went out like a light. He didn’t know if she had fainted from her wounds or shut down out of sheer exhaustion.
He hesitated, then turned onto the E4 and headed for Stockholm.
Blomkvist had slept only an hour before the telephone started ringing. He squinted at the clock and saw that it was just past 4:00 a.m. He reached groggily for the receiver. It was Berger, and at first he could not understand what she was saying.
“Paolo Roberto is where?”
“At the hospital in Soder with the Wu girl. He tried to reach you, but you weren’t answering.”
“I turned my mobile off. What the hell is he doing in the hospital?”
Berger’s voice sounded patient but determined.
“Mikael, get a taxi over there right away and find out. He sounded totally confused and was talking about a chain saw and some building out in the woods and a monster who couldn’t box.”
Blomkvist blinked himself awake. Then he shook his head and made for the shower.
Paolo Roberto looked miserable lying there in his shorts on the hospital bed. Blomkvist had waited an hour to be allowed to see him. His nose was hidden beneath a bandage. His left eye was covered too and one eyebrow had surgical tape over five stitches. He had a bandage wrapped round his chest, and cuts and bruises all over his body. His right knee was in a brace.
Blomkvist offered him a coffee from the machine in the hall and inspected his face critically.
“You look like a car crash,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”
Paolo Roberto shook his head and met Blomkvist’s gaze. “A fucking monster happened,” he said.
He shook his head again and inspected his fists. His knuckles were so swollen that he could scarcely hold the cup. His right hand and wrist were in a splint. His girlfriend already had a lukewarm attitude towards boxing – now she was going to be furious.
“I’m a boxer,” he said. “I mean, when I was active I wasn’t afraid to step into the ring with anybody. I’ve taken a punch or two, but I know how to dish them out too. When I punch somebody they’re supposed to sit down and hurt.”
“But this one didn’t do that.”
Paolo Roberto shook his head for the third time. Then he told Blomkvist what had happened during the night.
“I hit him at least thirty times. Fourteen or fifteen times to the head. I hit him on the jaw four times. At first I was holding back a bit – I didn’t want to kill him, just protect myself. But in the end I gave it everything I had. One of my punches should have broken his jaw. But that fucking monster just shook his head a little and kept on coming. That is not a normal human being, I swear to God.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was built like a tank. I’m not exaggerating. He was over six foot six and weighed at least 300 pounds. All muscle and armour plating. A fucking giant who doesn’t know what pain is.”
“You’ve never seen him before?”
“Never. He had no idea how to box. I could feint and throw him off his guard and he didn’t have a clue how to move to avoid being hit. He was out of it. But at the same time he tried to move like a boxer. He held his arms up the right way and he kept recovering to a starting stance. Maybe he’d trained in boxing but hadn’t heard a word of what the trainer said. What saved my life – and the girl’s – was that he moved so slowly. He would throw roundhouse swings that he telegraphed a month in advance, and I could duck or parry them. He got in two good punches on me – one to the face, and you see what that did, then one to the body, where he cracked a rib. But neither of them was full power. If he’d landed them properly he would have knocked my head off.”
Paolo Roberto laughed, a bubbling sort of laugh.
“What’s funny?”
“I won. That moron tried to kill me and I won. I actually decked him. But I had to use a fucking plank to get him down for the count.”
He turned serious again. “If Miriam Wu hadn’t kicked him in the balls at just the right moment, I don’t want to think about how the hell it would have ended.”
“Paolo – I’m really, really glad you won. Miriam is going to say the same thing when she wakes up. Have you heard how she’s doing?”
“She looks about the same as I do. She has a concussion, several cracked ribs, a broken nose, and damage to her kidneys.”
Blomkvist bent forward and put his hand on Paolo Roberto’s good knee. “If you ever need me to do anything…” he said.
Paolo Roberto smiled. “Blomkvist – if
“Yes?”
“… ask Sebastian Lujan to do it for you.”
CHAPTER 26
Inspector Bublanski was in a dismal mood when he met Modig in the parking lot outside the hospital just before 7:00. Blomkvist had woken him up, and he in turn called Modig and woke her up. They met Blomkvist by the entrance and went with him to Paolo Roberto’s room.
Bublanski could hardly grasp the bewildering details, but what was eventually clear was that Wu had been kidnapped and that the boxer had beaten up the kidnapper. Except that to judge by his face, it was far from obvious who had beaten up whom. As far as Bublanski was concerned, the night’s events had lifted the investigation of Lisbeth Salander to a whole new level of complication. Nothing in this infernal case seemed to be normal.
How had Paolo Roberto even gotten involved in the affair?
“I’m a good friend of Lisbeth Salander’s,” he told them.
Bublanski and Modig looked at each other, surprised and sceptical.
“She sparred with me at the gym.”
Bublanski fixed his gaze somewhere on the wall behind Paolo Roberto. Modig could not help laughing out loud. After a while they had written down all the details he could give them.
“I’d like to make a few points,” Blomkvist said dryly.
They turned to him.
“First of all, Paolo’s description of the man who drove away from the warehouse in the van matches the one I gave of the person who attacked Salander at the same spot on Lundagatan. A tall guy with a light brown ponytail and a beer belly. OK?”
Bublanski nodded.
“Second, the point of the kidnapping was to force Miriam Wu to reveal where Lisbeth Salander is hiding. So these two thugs have been looking for Salander since at least a week before the murders. Agreed?”
Modig murmured a “yes.”
“Third, it looks less likely that Salander is the lone nutcase she has been portrayed as. And neither of these maniacs seems, on the face of it, to be a member of a lesbian Satanist gang.”
Neither Bublanski nor Modig said a word.
“And finally, number four. I think this story has something to do with a man called Zala. Dag Svensson did a lot of work on him in his last two weeks. All the relevant information is in his computer. Dag linked him to the murder of a prostitute named Irina Petrova in Sodertalje. The autopsy recorded that she was very severely beaten. So severely that any one of three of the worst blows would have been fatal on its own. Her injuries sound very like the ones that Miriam Wu and Paolo Roberto have been subjected to. In both cases the instruments of this
