The Girl who played with Fire

Blomkvist stood there a long time, waiting, unsure what to do. At last he tried the keys in her door. They did not fit.

Salander stayed under the bush for fifteen minutes, moving only to look at her watch. Just after 3:00 she heard a door open and close and footsteps making for the bicycle shed in the courtyard.

When the sound died away she raised herself slowly to her knees and peered out of the bush. She looked steadily at every nook and cranny in the courtyard, but she saw no sign of Lundin. She walked back to the street, prepared to turn tail at any moment. She stopped at the top of the wall and looked out over Lundagatan, where she saw Blomkvist outside her apartment building. He was holding her bag in his hand.

She stood perfectly still, hidden behind a lamppost when Blomkvist’s gaze swept over the stairs and the wall. He did not see her.

Blomkvist stood outside her door for almost half an hour. She watched him patiently, without moving, until finally he gave up and headed down the hill towards Zinkensdamm. When he was gone she began to think about what had happened.

Kalle Blomkvist.

She could not for the life of her imagine how he had sprung up out of nowhere. Apart from that, the attack was not difficult to account for.

Carl Fucking Magnus Lundin.

Lundin had met the hulk she had seen talking to Bjurman.

Nils Fucking Slimebag Bjurman.

That piece of shit has hired some diabolical alpha male to get me out of the way. And I made it crystal clear to him what the consequences would be.

Salander was seething inside. She was so enraged that she tasted blood in her mouth. Now she was going to have to punish him.

PART 3. Absurd Equations March 23 – April 3

Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities.

(a + b) (a ? b) = a² ? b² + 1

CHAPTER 11

Wednesday, March 23 – Maundy Thursday, March 24

Blomkvist took his red pen and in the margin of Svensson’s manuscript drew a question mark with a circle around it and wrote “footnote.” He wanted a source reference inserted.

It was Wednesday, the evening before Maundy Thursday, and Millennium was more or less closed down for Easter week. Nilsson was out of the country. Karim had gone to the mountains with her husband. Cortez had come in to deal with telephone messages for a few hours, but Blomkvist sent him home since nobody was calling. Cortez left smiling happily, on his way to see a new girlfriend.

Svensson had not been around. Blomkvist sat in the office alone, plodding through his manuscript. The book was going to be twelve chapters and 288 pages long. Svensson had delivered the final text of nine of the twelve chapters, and Blomkvist had been over every word and given the hard copy back with requests for clarification and suggestions for reworking.

Svensson was a talented writer, and Blomkvist confined his editing for the most part to marginal notes. During the weeks when the manuscript had been growing on his desk they had disagreed about only one paragraph, which Blomkvist wanted to delete and Svensson fought tooth and nail to keep. It stayed in.

In short, Millennium had an excellent book that would very soon be off to the printer. There was no doubt that it would make dramatic headlines. Svensson was merciless in his exposure of the johns, and he told the story in such a way that nobody could fail to understand that there was something wrong with the system itself. It was journalistic work of the type that should be on the endangered species list.

Blomkvist had learned that Svensson was an exacting journalist who left very few loose ends. He did not employ the heavy-handed rhetoric typical of so much other social reporting, which turned texts into pretentious trash. His book was more than an expose – it was a declaration of war. Blomkvist smiled to himself. Svensson was about fifteen years younger, but he recognized the passion that he himself had once had when he took up the lance against second-rate financial reporters and put together a scandalous book. Certain newsrooms had not forgiven him.

The problem with Svensson’s book was that it had to be watertight. A reporter who sticks out his neck like that has to either stand behind his story 100 percent or refrain from publishing it. Right now Svensson was at 98 percent. There were still a few weak points that needed more work and one or two assertions that he had not adequately documented.

At 5:30 p.m. Blomkvist opened his desk drawer and took out a cigarette. Berger had decreed a total ban in the office, but he was alone and nobody else was going to be there that weekend. He worked for another forty minutes before he gathered up the pages and put the chapter on Berger’s desk. Svensson had promised to email the final text of the remaining three chapters the following morning, which would give Blomkvist a chance to go through them over the weekend. A summit meeting was planned for the Tuesday after Easter when they would all sign off on the final version of the book and the Millennium articles. After that only the layout remained, which was Malm’s headache alone, and then it would go to the printer. Blomkvist had not sought bids from different printers; he would entrust the job to Hallvigs Reklam in Morgongava. They had printed his book about the Wennerstrom affair and had given him a damn good price and first-rate service.

Blomkvist looked at the clock and decided to reward himself with another cigarette. He sat at the window and stared down on Gotgatan. He ran his tongue over the cut on the inside of his lip. It was beginning to heal.

He wondered for the thousandth time what really had happened outside Salander’s building early on Sunday morning.

All he knew for certain was that Salander was alive and back in Stockholm.

He had tried to reach her every day since then. He had sent emails to the address she had used more than a year ago. He had walked up and down Lundagatan. He was beginning to despair.

The nameplate on the door now read SALANDER-WU. There were 230 people with the surname Wu on the electoral roll, of whom about 140 lived in and around Stockholm, none of them on Lundagatan. Blomkvist had no idea whether she had a boyfriend or had rented out the apartment. No-one came to the door when he knocked.

Finally he went back to his desk and wrote her a good old-fashioned letter:

Hello, Sally,

I don’t know what happened a year ago, but by now even a numbskull like me has worked out that you’ve cut off all contact. It’s for you to decide who you hang around with, and I don’t mean to nag. I just want to tell you that I still think of you as my friend, that I miss your company and would love to have a cup of coffee with you – if you felt like it.

I don’t know what kind of a mess you’ve got yourself into, but the ruckus on Lundagatan was alarming. If you need help you can call me anytime. As you know, I am deeply in your debt.

Plus, I have your shoulder bag. When you want it back, just let me know. If you don’t want to see me, just give me an address to mail it to. I promise not to bother you, since you’ve indicated clearly enough