“Did you miss all that? It was about the time when you left the country.”
“I’ve heard it mentioned.”
Salander waited for another five minutes before she looked at Mimmi.
“You wanted to kiss me on the mouth.”
Mimmi looked at her in surprise. “I was just teasing.”
Salander stood on tiptoe and pulled Mimmi’s face down to her level and gave her a long, deep kiss. When they separated there was applause.
“You’re nuts, you know that?” Mimmi said.
Salander did not get home until 7:00 in the morning. She pulled out the neck of her T-shirt and sniffed. She thought about taking a shower but decided the hell with it, and instead left her clothes on the floor and went to bed. She slept till 4:00 in the afternoon, then got up and went down to Soderhallarna market and had breakfast.
She thought about Blomkvist, and about her reaction to suddenly finding herself in the same room as him. She had been annoyed at his presence, but she also discovered that it no longer hurt to see him. He had been transformed to a little blip on the horizon, a minor perturbation factor in her existence. There were worse disturbances in life.
But she wished she had had the guts to go up to him and say hello. Or possibly break his legs. She wasn’t sure which.
Anyway, she was curious about what he was up to. She ran a few errands in the afternoon and came home around 7:00 p.m. She booted up her PowerBook and started Asphyxia 1.3. The icon
The volume on the hard drive had increased by almost 6.9 gigabytes since her previous visit. A large part of the increase was due to PDF files and Quark documents. The documents did not take up much room but the bitmaps did, despite the fact that the images were compressed. Since he had returned as publisher he had apparently archived every issue of
She sorted the files on the hard disk by date with the oldest at the top and noticed that Blomkvist had spent a great deal of time over the past few months on a folder named, apparently a book project. Then she opened Blomkvist’s email and read carefully through the address list in his correspondence.
One address made Salander jump. On January 26 Blomkvist had got an email from Harriet Fucking Vanger. She opened the message and read a few concise lines about a board meeting to take place at the
Salander digested the information. Then she shrugged and downloaded Blomkvist’s mail, Svensson’s book manuscript with the working title
She disconnected and went into the kitchen to put on some coffee. Then she sat on her new sofa in the living room with her PowerBook. She opened Mimmi’s cigarette case and lit a Marlboro Light. The rest of the evening she spent reading.
By 9:00 she had finished Johansson’s thesis. She bit her lower lip.
By 10:30 she had finished Svensson’s book.
At 11:30 she was reading the last of Blomkvist’s emails when she suddenly sat up and opened her eyes wide.
She felt a cold shiver go down her spine.
It was a message from Svensson to Blomkvist.
In an aside Svensson mentioned that he had some tentative ideas about an Eastern European gangster named Zala who might get a chapter all to himself – but acknowledged that there was not much time till the deadline. Blomkvist hadn’t answered the email.
Salander sat motionless until the screen saver went on.
Svensson put aside his notebook and scratched his head. He gazed at the single word at the top of the page in his notebook. Four letters.
He spent three minutes deep in thought, drawing labyrinthine rings around the name. Then he went and got a cup of coffee from the kitchenette. It was time to go home to bed, but he had discovered that he enjoyed working late at the
He had all the material under control, but for the first time since he started the project he felt uneasy that he might have missed an important detail.
Until that point he had been impatient to finish the writing and get the book published, but now he wished he had more time.
He thought about the autopsy report that Inspector Gulbrandsen had let him read. Irina P.’s body had been found in Sodertalje canal. She had devastating injuries to her face and chest. The cause of death was a broken neck, but two of her other injuries had been judged fatal. Six ribs had been broken and her left lung punctured. She had a ruptured spleen. The injuries were hard to interpret. The pathologist had offered the suggestion that a wooden club wrapped in cloth had been the weapon used. Why a killer would wrap a murder weapon in cloth could not be explained, but the scale of the injuries was not characteristic of an ordinary assault.
The murder remained unsolved, and Gulbrandsen had said that the prospect of their solving the case was slender.
The name Zala had come up on four occasions in the material that Mia had gathered over the last two years, but always on the periphery, always eerily elusive. Nobody knew who he was and nobody could provide proof that he even existed. Some of the girls had referred to his name being used as a threat, a terrifying warning to those who did not toe the line. He had spent a whole week hunting for more concrete information about Zala, asking questions of police, journalists, and several recently developed sources with contacts in the sex trade.
He had been in touch with the journalist Sandstrom, whom he had every intention of exposing in the book. Sandstrom had begged and pleaded for Svensson to have mercy. He had offered a bribe. Svensson was not going to change his mind, but he did use his advantage to pressure Sandstrom for information about Zala.
Sandstrom claimed he had never met Zala, but he had talked to him on the telephone. No, he did not have the number. No, he could not say who had set up the contact.
Svensson had been struck by the realization that Sandstrom was terrified. It was a terror beyond the threat of exposure. He was afraid for his life.
CHAPTER 10
The journeys to and from Ersta were time-consuming and a hassle. In the middle of March Salander decided to buy a car. She started by acquiring a parking place, a much greater problem than buying the car itself.
She had a space in the garage beneath the building in Mosebacke, but she did not want anyone to be able to connect the car to where she lived on Fiskargatan. On the other hand, several years before she had put herself on a waiting list for a space in the garage of her old housing association apartment on Lundagatan. She called to
