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 Saltsjon. 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-a-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
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 Chateau 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.
Then he sat down at her desk and opened the folder with Bjorck’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 Sandstrom, though Blomkvist knew nothing about that. He had not yet reached the letter
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.
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.
Bjorck 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
