The Girl Who Played With Fire
It’s interesting to speculate what new heights of publishing success Stieg Larsson might have achieved had he lived, having already created an entirely new kind of heroine for crime fiction. His freelance investigator, ace computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, couldn’t be further from the booze-loving coppers (male and female) who populate most of the genre. She is a surly young woman, relying on her Goth appearance, with tattoos and skin piercings, to keep people at bay (except those she decides to sleep with – on her own terms). But underneath the forbidding exterior she has, as already described, a cutting intelligence.
In the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, Larsson continues to pair her with the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist. But as the book opens we learn that Lisbeth has cut herself off from everyone who knows her; she has (despite her contempt for the opinions of others) had breast enlargement surgery, and has taken up with a naive younger lover. After exacting revenge on a corrupt authority figure who has abused her, she is soon the key suspect in three savage murders, and the ex-security analyst is on the run, the object of a nationwide search. But her ally, Blomkvist, who has just published an exposé of the sex trafficking industry in Sweden, is on her side – even though she dumped him as a lover. As with the first book in the Millennium Trilogy, this is exuberant stuff: the 600-or-so page novel may be (like its predecessor) in need of pruning, but its rebellious, taboo-breaking heroine is an absolute winner.
Larsson begins in familiar territory. In the disturbing flashback prologue, Lisbeth Salander is half-naked and tied to a bed with leather straps in a darkened room. She has been imprisoned for 43 days. To keep her sanity she fantasises about setting fire to her abductor. He appears: he is tall, has reddish-brown tangled hair, sparse goatee, glasses with black frames, aftershave, speaks with a dark, clear voice, emphasising every word. He wishes her ‘Happy Birthday’. By this point Larsson has reader tension ratcheted up to a high degree. The man attempts to rape her, but she retaliates. He tightens the straps, we think he will try again, but he leaves. She again fantasises about dowsing him with petrol. The author, as aware as ever of the value of withholding key information, hits us with the killer punch line – she is only 13.
As Chapter 1 opens, Larsson has moved the action forward again and we find Lisbeth Salander at a hotel on the Caribbean island of Grenada, watching coolly as a woman emerges from the pool. She is slim with shoulder-length brown hair, an oval face, wearing a black bikini and sunglasses; we learn she is 35 and talks with a Southern US accent. Salander is tanned brown, despite trying to keep in the shade, smokes, and is wearing khaki shorts and a black top. Steel drums, we are told, fascinate her.
Salander is keeping an eye on the woman because she suspects her husband is abusing her – she hears noises of ‘muted terror’ from them in the room next to hers. Once again we have Larsson’s protagonist acting as vigilante/avenger, and once again the male sex is painted in unsavoury fashion. The husband is presumably in Grenada on business. The couple argue strenuously every night while Salander tries to concentrate on a book about the mysteries of maths – typical reading, we now know, for her. She almost kicks in their door to put a stop to it. Next day she notices the woman has a bruise on her shoulder and a scrape on her hip.
We also learn that Salander has become fascinated with a, for her, typically esoteric subject – spherical astronomy. She has visited Rome, Miami, Florida Keys – and is now island-hopping through the Caribbean. She came ashore at St George’s, the capital of Grenada, in an off-season tropical rainstorm and is staying at the Keys Hotel. She finds the local fruit, guinep, delightful – like sour Swedish gooseberries. Larsson is adept at this kind of physical preference detail applied to his heroine – and it appears just as we had started to think she isn’t quite human: such info ‘grounds’ her for the reader.
Using the device of judicious switch of protagonists that was one of the pleasures of the first book, Larsson now transports us back to Lundagatan, where Mikael Blomkvist calls at Salander’s apartment – as he has done every week or so – and wonders where she is. He remembers the affair they conducted (for half a year) during the events of the previous entry in the Millennium Trilogy. Salander, of course, had saved his life – and he recollects her photographic memory and phenomenal computer skills – and the fact that she is a world-class hacker, known online as ‘Wasp’. They parted two days before Christmas, with Lisbeth wanting nothing more to do with him. This, of course, is a canny strategy on Larsson’s part, as it re-establishes the initial dynamic between the couple, compromised by their abortive sexual relationship.
Salander has a shower. She weighs 40kg, stands 1m 52cm, and has doll-like, delicate limbs, small hands and hardly any hips. But, we are surprised to read, she is pleased with her new, full breasts, following surgery in a clinic outside Genoa when she was 25. This is one of Larsson’s more controversial choices for his heroine – surely her utter self-reliance (however damaged her psyche) would have precluded such a remoulding of her body along conventional, male-pleasing lines? But it has made her happier and given her more self-confidence – we may decide for ourselves if we agree with her choices. She now enjoys wearing sexy lingerie because of her fuller figure, another surprising detail, given her usual taste for off-putting physical accoutrements.
Salander takes a bus to St George’s, a compact and tight-knit town on a U-shaped bay, with houses climbing up steep hills. She withdraws $300, sits on the veranda of the Turtleback restaurant and watches as the man from her next-door room comes out, sits down, and stares out at the sea.
Some readers may wonder why the author talks in depth about Salander’s interest in mathematics, especially riddles and puzzles. There’s a great deal here about the book she’s reading, the 1,200-page Dimensions in Mathematics. We discover all about Fermat’s Last Theorem, the puzzle set by a French civil servant in 1601 and only solved in 1993. It apparently takes Salander seven weeks to find her own solution. This accruing of information is a crucial element in the heroine’s make-up, and conveying it at length to the reader persuades us that it is not mere literary window-dressing.
The hotel barmaid, Ella Carmichael, tells Salander the couple in the room next door are Dr Forbes and his wife. He is discussing plans for a new high school in St George’s – ‘A good man,’ says Ella. ‘Who beats his wife,’ snaps back Lisbeth. Back in her room she e-mails ‘plague.xyz_666’ to request information on Forbes and his wife, offering a $500 reward.
If readers feel that Larsson is insufficiently critical of his acerbic heroine, there is a clue to the ambiguity of his attitude in the description of a new sexual relationship Lisbeth has initiated. She visits her lover, George Bland, a student of 16 who she befriended the day after she arrived on the island, helping him with his maths homework. She finds his company relaxing. She does not normally make small talk with strangers, and she doesn’t like personal discussions. But she seduces the boy on an impulse, and now they see each other every evening. Lisbeth is unquestionably the controlling, dominant force in the relationship with the immature George – and it might be argued that she ruthlessly uses a variety of means (including her newly augmented body) in a fashion that is not ideologically dissimilar to the men who have dominated her – though there is no suggestion of the grim bullying she has received.
For Chapter 2, Larsson switches our attention to a café on Stureplan, and a nemesis of Salander’s. Nils Erik Bjurman is thinking about what Salander did to him. It’s another example of Larsson’s attitude to his own sex that those who undergo sexual humiliation of the kind they practise on women are splenetic forces of malevolence, bent on revenge at all costs. Bjurman, we remember, was a lawyer assigned to be Salander’s legal guardian. Salander was considered a promiscuous child and in need of protection. But Bjurman abused his position and raped her – and consequently Salander took her revenge on him by tattooing his crimes on his belly. A broken man, he gave up most of his clients and wrote fictitious, positive monthly reports on Salander – as she had stipulated. He sets about getting skin grafts to remove the tattoo. Salander had visited him in the middle of the night and blackmailed him with a DVD she had made of the rape: she is going away, but Bjurman must continue writing his reports as if she is still under his protection, or she will make public the DVD. From that moment on Bjurman has an overwhelming desire to destroy her – this galvanises him and gives his life a new purpose.
While Bjurman is bitterly remembering what Salander did, Mikael Blomkvist (unaware of the lawyer’s existence) passes him to join his editor-in-chief, and erstwhile lover, Erika Berger, at a nearby table. Blomkvist lights up a cigarette. Erika detests smokers – not a reliable indicator of her character, as the chain-smoking author might be expected to disagree with her – and makes a veiled reference to finding a lover who doesn’t smoke. She’s meeting childhood friend Charlotte ‘Charlie’ Rosenberg. We learn that Blomkvist is being sexually harassed by a work-experience girl, the daughter of one of Erika’s friends, who is only 17 (both Berger and Blomkvist are 45). This is something of a reversal of the serial sexual harassment practised by males in the books – but Blomkvist’s experience is more a nuisance than anything else.
His long-term affair with Berger began 20 years ago when she was a young journo. He radiates self-confidence and is entirely non-threatening, hence (as Larsson tells us) his attraction to the opposite sex (readers may argue with this as a rationale for the journalist’s extraordinary success with women). He prefers older women – Salander was an aberration. He doesn’t want a repeat of this entanglement with the media school graduate who is working at Millennium. She is clearly desperate for him (more Larsson wish-fulfilment by proxy?), and he doesn’t want to hurt her.
We switch from these minor problems to a major one exercising one of the trilogy’s many villains. The despicable Bjurman is contemplating how to get the incriminating DVD back from Salander (he is unaware of her link with Blomkvist). As her guardian, he has access to all her medical records. Over time, he has tracked down all the information he can find about her. The more he reads about her, the more he sees her as a sick, twisted psycho – but still, tellingly, as he sees it, a whore.
According to notes made by her former therapist, Palmgren, something had set off Salander’s madness when she was 12 or 13 (cryptically referred to as ‘All the Evil’). Since then, her mother had been incapable of looking after her and she had lived in foster homes. But what was ‘The Evil’? Readers will remember the events of the prologue and make a connection. Salander has a twin sister, Camilla, and nothing is known of her father. A missing report dated 12 March 1991 could provide the answer to her trauma, but Bjurman is denied access to it. Two months later he has the 47-page report and discovers the identity of someone else (the abductor) who must hate her as much as he does. It is a grim, if improbable, alliance. He is interrupted in his reverie by the appearance of a towering blond bodybuilder who tells him ‘We got your letter’…
Chapter 3 moves back to Grenada. Via her cyberspace contact, Plague, Lisbeth receives e-mailed information about Dr Forbes in the form of documents and photos. Rev. Richard Forbes, of the Presbyterian Church of Austin South, is 42. We get a brief biography – born Nevada, farmer, businessman, newspaper correspondent, certified public accountant, Christian rock-band manager (a typical Larsson signifier!), arrested in 1995 for embezzling the band’s money. Salander wakes up to strong winds – Hurricane Matilda is approaching (readers may be reminded of another hurricane that plays a key part in crime fiction, in the work of James Lee Burke). The hotel front desk man Freddie McBain (another crime fiction reference) tells Lisbeth she must come down to the lobby. She freshens up, goes down with her most valuable possessions, and helps Ella Carmichael take blankets down to the storm cellar. Larsson handles this build-up of background tension with customary assurance. Dr Forbes is nowhere to be seen. The storm hits Petit Martinique, a few miles away, so McBain tells them to go downstairs to the already-prepared underground shelter.
Salander suddenly fears for the safety of her lover, Bland, and rushes out into the stormy night to rescue him. As she drags him into the hotel, she glimpses by the illumination of a lightning flash, the Forbes couple on the beach, where she had seen the husband before. The marshalling of elements here has Hitchcockian undertows. They are struggling – Salander realises Forbes is going to murder his wife under cover of the storm. She rushes over to them, brandishing a chair leg. She hits the doctor, who is wielding an iron pipe, before he can deliver the death blow to his wife, then Bland helps her to drag the woman, who has a head wound, back to the hotel. A tornado appears out at sea, although Grenada is not in a tornado zone – a rare mystical moment in the decidedly non-mystical Larsson scenarios – and Forbes is pulled into the sea. After this vividly described episode, Salander tells Bland to say they didn’t see the husband, as they carry Mrs Forbes down to the cellar. She recovers a few hours later, her wound not serious.
Next day, they emerge from the cellar. Salander is questioned by Constable Ferguson and denies seeing Dr Forbes. Ferguson says they found his body in the airport car park, 600 metres south. Meteorological reports suggest it was a ‘pseudo-tornado’ that killed Forbes, the only fatality of the night – no one knows what it was, other than an act of God, although divine retribution is not standard Larsson territory. Geraldine can’t remember a thing.
Larsson calls Part Two of The Girl Who Played with Fire ‘From Russia with Love’; by now, readers will be used to the author’s affectionate referencing of other crime/thriller fiction. As Chapter 4 opens, Salander lands at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport. Normally frugal, she takes a taxi, as she now has more than 3 billion kronor in her bank account, thanks to an internet coup and fraud. She buys supplies from a 7-11 store and walks to her apartment in Fiskargatan, avoiding the Millennium offices. She lives on the top floor, under the name of ‘V Kulla’ (a reference to Pippi Longstocking’s Villekulla Cottage).
After treatment at the Italian clinic, she didn’t feel like returning to Sweden to work for the security firm who employed her previously, investigating corporate crooks till she’s 50. She also didn’t want to see Blomkvist, who she feels has hurt her, although he did behave ‘decently’. She blames herself for falling in love with this serial womaniser, but she ignores all his attempts to contact her.
This closing off of emotional contact (which Larsson is so adroit at conveying) led to her making a decision to travel the world; she had rarely been outside Stockholm before. First Tel Aviv, then Bangkok, then travelling on for the rest of the year, including her sojourn on Grenada. She also went to Gibraltar twice. She enters her bathroom, strips naked and takes a long shower (she clearly enjoys being in her own skin) and sleeps in her new apartment for the first time in a year. Next day, she returns to her old flat, checks that her Kawasaki motor bike in the basement is OK, then rifles through her huge pile of mail – there’s only a handful of personal letters: one regarding her mother’s estate, which has been settled (she and her sister are getting 9,312 kronor each), and a letter from Blomkvist, which she throws away, unread.
She dons a wig and glasses and, as ‘Irene Nesser’ (a real person who lost her passport three years earlier, ‘acquired’ by Plague) hires a Nissan Micra to go to IKEA to buy furniture for her flat – cue a Fight Club-type moment with a lengthy list of IKEA products. Necessary? Possibly, as it does demonstrate she is a fastidious person who attends to every detail and is not afraid of spending money – over 90,000 kronor in this case. She vaguely wonders about Blomkvist. In her Jacuzzi, she squeezes her nipples hard underwater until she runs out of breath (one of the various erotic S&M moments which contrast so strikingly with the violent, invasive sex that is a keynote of so much of the books).
Next morning, Blomkvist is late for Berger’s planning meeting. Freelance writer Dag Svensson is present – they are buying a piece from him for their May issue on sex trafficking. Svensson was introduced to the subject through his girlfriend Mia Johansson, who is writing a thesis on it. A huge number of under-age girls are lured to Sweden from Eastern Europe by the so-called ‘sex mafia’ – we are firmly into the sexual exploitation territory that is for Larsson a mainspring of the trilogy. He wants Millennium to publish a book on it, and claims various government figures are intimately involved with the sex-trade.
Salander returns to Appelviken, the nursing home where her mother, Agneta Sofia Salander, spent her final years before dying at only 43. She was beautiful, with a lovely figure, like Salander’s sister Camilla and completely unlike Salander who is (as she perceives herself) ‘anorexic-looking’. Larsson addresses women’s attitudes to their own appearance almost as much as Elizabeth Gaskell does in Cranford. The sisters were unlike from an early age – Camilla outgoing and academically successful, Lisbeth introverted and doing badly at school. They were sent to separate foster homes when ‘All the Evil’ happened; one last meeting at 17 ended in a fight. Salander last visited the home 18 months ago with Blomkvist, but her mother hadn’t recognised her. She takes the box of possessions back to her flat and goes clothes shopping, but later discards the sexy underwear she bought as looking foolish on her thin, tattooed frame.
Mia Johansson is serving cheesecake to Berger, Blomkvist and Malin Eriksson, editorial assistant, at the culmination of a working dinner at Svensson’s flat. Johansson presents her thesis – ‘From Russia with Love’ – which unlike Dag’s polemic book, is a strictly statistical look at the gender-specific nature of the burgeoning sex trade (boys: abusers, girls: abused). The trafficking laws are not being enforced – almost no one has been charged yet. The girls are treated like slave labour – if they do not have sex with ‘dirty old men’, they will be tortured by their pimps. They speak no Swedish and their passports are removed. Although all of this, of course, is standard territory for Larsson the journalist, Larsson the novelist incorporates the data in The Girl Who Played with Fire without any sense of proselytising – it becomes a plot element.
Salander’s (aka ‘Irene Nesser’s’) IKEA furniture is delivered. She starts dressing the flat and finds a dildo given her by her friend Mimmi, whom she left for Blomkvist (a reminder of the amorphous sexuality of the heroine). She hadn’t said goodbye to her when she left the country, or to her friends in the rock group Evil Fingers. She also never said goodbye to the youthful George Bland in St Georges – an omission that may have the reader judging Salander to be as ruthless in her relationships as those she criticises. She knows, however, that she keeps squandering her friends. She surfs the net, ensures the blackmailed Bjurman is toeing the line, and checks out her new breasts in the mirror. She now has short, untidily cropped hair. She had to take out a nipple ring for the surgery, and then a lip ring and a labia ring – unscrewing her tongue piercing, all she has left now (apart from her earlobe rings) is an eyebrow ring and a jewel in her navel. She lies awake, musing in her big new bed. At 3.10 am, Lisbeth sneaks into Milton Security and breaks into Armansky’s office. She checks his current jobs, then back at her apartment she logs on to the 40 computers she has access to, including those belonging to Bjurman, Blomkvist and Wennerström.
Salander visits her old friend and lover Mimmi in her studio apartment. Mimmi has short, black hair, clear blue eyes, and slightly Asian features. She is 31 and works part-time at a fetish-gear shop, Domino Fashion. They met when Mimmi was dressed as a lemon doing a weird show at the city’s Gay Pride Festival a couple of years before – Mimmi had immediately said Salander was ‘the one I want’ and they’d spent the night having sex. Mimmi knew she was a lesbian at secondary school and lost her virginity at 17. Their relationship is primarily sexual.
Salander is initially embarrassed at admitting she’s had a boob job, but Mimmi is clearly still interested in her, and wants to see her new breasts, with a view to further reacquainting herself with her body. ‘Welcome back,’ she says. Once again, we are reminded of the disorienting balancing act that is Larsson’s attitude to women and sexuality – shaded with a complexity that is sufficiently opaque to suggest both an even-handed acceptance of sex in all its protean forms and a certain voyeuristic indulgence.
A mysterious – unnamed – character appears. He is massive and blond, and carries a sports bag. He stops in the tiny village of Svavelsjö, at the motorcycle club for a drug deal with club president, Carl-Magnus ‘Magge’ Lundin. Lundin is very happy to do business with the man; there are never any problems – he supplies the meth and just demands his 50% of whatever Lundin makes. The giant asks Lundin to abduct Lisbeth Salander and bring her to a warehouse near Yngern – he hands over personal details and a passport photo – so that his employer can ‘have a quiet talk’ with her. She needs to be brought there alive, but disposed of cleanly afterwards. All of this is handled with the narrative skill that readers who have reached this point in the sequence have come to expect from the author, with the necessary accumulation of detail married to storytelling nous.
Salander is (wisely) slightly paranoid about being attacked going on her travels, so she rings Mimmi and offers her the flat for as long as she wants. It’s interesting to study Salander’s relationship with one of her female lovers, as detailed here. While feminist authors have occasionally characterised relationships between women as more authentic and less power-driven than those between men and women, Larsson – unquestionably a feminist author – renders Lisbeth as frustratingly ‘other’ to her female lovers as she is to male companions such as Blomkvist. In this, perhaps, she is a descendant of the all-things-to-all-men-and-women Lulu of Wedekind, Pabst and Berg.
Erika Berger is relaxing in her office after a hard day putting the March issue of Millennium to bed. She will be 45 in three months’ time and is starting to feel her age. She is largely content with her life – 15 years of happy marriage, and an inexhaustible lover on the side (Blomkvist). She has, we are told, a passion for sex. She and her husband have indulged in group encounters, when she discovered his bisexual side. Sex with him is not boring; it is just that Blomkvist gives her a different experience. Her husband knows about her lover – in fact, she has his full consent. She couldn’t live without both men and wouldn’t want to choose between them. She likes Blomkvist’s complete lack of jealousy and the freedom he allows her. Their 20-year affair is based primarily on friendship. Inevitably, non-Swedish readers will wonder if Larsson is giving us a snapshot of Swedish middle-class sexual mores (at least in the media arena) – and the non-judgemental authorial voice here contrasts sharply with the lacerating tone of the exposure of his country’s corrupt politics. Erika goes to Mikael’s flat and lies in bed waiting for him. Her fantasy is for a twosome with him and her husband, but Blomkvist is so straight she knows it will never happen.
Larsson, perhaps aware that it is time to reintroduce the element of mystery and menace in his narrative, takes us back to the blond giant arriving at a log cabin in the middle of woods near Mariefred. He is intimidated by the trees and thinks he sees a dwarf or troll lurking in the darkness. But there is, of course, nothing there. Nils Bjurman – his employer – lets him in. Two of the author’s most sinister characters are keeping company.
Mimmi and Salander make love on the newly varnished parquet floor. Mimmi ties her up, and just for a moment Salander is reminded of how Bjurman had done the same to her (another reminder by Larsson of the minefield that is sexual behaviour), but with Mimmi it is different. She surrenders to the moment…
In Chapter 8, Lisbeth visits Armansky and asks if he’s angry that she left a year ago without saying goodbye (which, is perhaps a misstep on Larsson’s part concerning Salander’s mindset – is this concern consistent with her character?). But Armansky is just relieved she’s alive, though he reflects on how she doesn’t care about her friends, having behaved so selfishly as to vanish to travel the world without telling anyone where she was. She learns that her first carer, Palmgren, is still alive, after his stroke. She had left when he was still in a coma and assumed he had died. She feels very guilty about this – perhaps she is a shit, as Armansky has said. Lisbeth is tight-lipped when Blomkvist’s name comes up – he has been asking about her every month. Armansky has a job for her, but Salander is now financially independent. As a parting shot, she gives him advice about a case she couldn’t possibly know about (the poison-pen letters of a client, actress Christine Rutherford, are a publicity stunt), and he rings the technical department to get a CCTV camera installed in his office.
Larsson is now to address the superscription of this section, a reference to fellow thriller novelist Ian Fleming. Mia Johansson picks up Svensson from the Gamla Stan tunnelbana station. He is one month from deadline, but has only had nine of 22 planned confrontations. He can’t get hold of Björck at the Security Police, who spends time with the prostitutes. Mia’s thesis ‘From Russia with Love’ has been printed – she is to defend it and become a fully-fledged doctor next month. Svensson tells her that a girl she interviewed, Irina P, has been found drowned. Given the pseudonym ‘Tamara’, she was brought into the country by ‘Anton’ (real name probably Zala, a Pole or a Yugoslav). Svensson had recently confronted a ‘journalist’ called Sandström, who uses teen prostitutes to live out rape fantasies, and also runs errands for Sweden’s ‘sex mafia’. The one name he gave him was Zala, an uncommon name, and one all the girls are terrified of… we are, of course, back in Larsson’s domain of grim male sexual violence.
After showing us the possibilities of positive, organic growth between people (even someone as damaged as Salander), Larsson takes us back to the realm of the twisted psyche. Nils Bjurman arrives home from his summer cabin. The blond giant had told him his people were interested in his (Bjurman’s) proposal – a sinister one involving Salander – and it would cost him 100,000 kronor. He inspects his post and discovers a statement from Handelsbanken showing Salander’s withdrawal of 9,300 kronor – so he knows the woman who has humiliated him is back on the scene. He rings the blond giant and tells him.
Salander’s feelings about Blomkvist are confused. She hacks into his computer with downloads of all his e-mails, Svensson’s manuscript and Mia Johansson’s thesis. She sees Blomkvist is having an affair with Vanger. By 11.30 pm she has read everything – but the last e-mail makes her sit up in a cold sweat. Svensson had mentioned someone called Zala…
In the Millennium offices, Svensson is pondering the significance of Zala. Irina P had been found in Södertälje canal with a broken neck; Zala’s name had come up four times in Mia’s research, always as a shadowy figure. Svensson had pressurised Sandström for information, but he was frightened for his life. There is a rather similar cliff-hanger ending to the previous chapter – another example perhaps of a need for tighter editing, the boon denied to Larsson by his death.
In Chapter 10, Larsson adroitly choreographs a variety of incidents. Salander, in the Café Hedon, sees the man who brutally raped her, Nils Bjurman. She has no feelings for him; she is coldly keeping him alive so he can be useful to her. She seems to recognise the blond giant he is talking to (Larsson uses the word ‘click’ – her photographic memory taking a picture?), and follows him when he leaves. He takes the tube to Blomberg’s Café at Götgatan. The blond meets a fat biker with a ponytail – Lundin, who we encountered in Chapter 7. The blond gives him instructions, then leaves in a white Volvo; Salander notes the registration number. At her flat, she hacks into Bjurman’s hard drive but finds nothing odd, apart from the fact that he has not yet started her report this month. Why so late? First Blomkvist, then Zala, and now Bjurman meeting a thug with contacts to a gang of ex-con bikers. She is, unsurprisingly, worried…
Larsson repeatedly has his heroine breaking in to apartments, and that scenario now reappears: at 2.30 the following morning. Salander breaks into Bjurman’s flat, armed with only a Taser. She watches him sleep then goes to his office and rifles through his drawers. Although she thinks something is wrong – papers have been removed from her file – she can’t find anything concrete to back up her fears. By now, Larsson has readers in something of a dual conditioned response to his heroine. We admire her armoury of defensive – and offensive – weaponary, but still regard her from the outside – she is not a woman it is easy to identify with.
Salander downloads the images of the biker gang, including Lundin and his No. 2, the photogenic Nieminen (a man with multiple convictions), the man Lundin met at McDonald’s. Lundin was the man who met the blond giant at Blomberg’s Café. She can find no trace of Zala. The next day, after breakfast in the Jacuzzi, she has better luck searching for Svensson and Mia Johansson. Then she hacks Millennium’s intranet and downloads e-mails from Berger, Malm and Malin Eriksson. Finally she finds Svensson’s computer and a file marked <Zala>. Larsson is skilfully ensuring that things are beginning to accelerate.
Some readers might find the obfuscation practised at this point frustrating rather than tantalising. Who is the unidentified man driving to Jarna? He has just picked up 203,000 kronor from Lundin for the meth he delivered in January. (This is one of the points in the trilogy when readers suffering from information overload may struggle to keep up with the barrage of data being fed to them.) The three gangs the man supplies bring him roughly 5 million kronor a month. Yet he is in a bad mood because although the demand is almost infinite, he has a problem getting the drugs from Estonia to Sweden. He has already had to punish an inquisitive street vendor, but knows that violence is risky and not good business. Smuggling prostitutes from the Baltics, his other business, gives only small change but he is unlikely to be brought down by the government because ‘everybody likes a whore’. Even dead whores don’t interest the authorities. But he thinks the business ‘sucks’. He doesn’t like the women – they’re unclean. This is, of course, Larsson shorthand indicating (in incontrovertible fashion) we are in the presence of another woman-hating male scumbag. He also doesn’t like the contract in place with Bjurman to kidnap Salander, a contract awarded to Nieminen.
Then Larsson takes us into what looks like Stephen King territory. Suddenly he sees a sinister shape in the darkness, slithering towards him. It looks like a vast stingray with a stinger like a scorpion. A creature not of this world. He runs back to his car and speeds off. The creature tries to strike the car as he passes, shaken. (This is linked with the terror of the blond man in Chapter 7.)
Salander looks at what she’s discovered from the Millennium files. One source for Svensson’s book is Gulbrandsen, a policeman. The <Zala> file is disappointingly slight, only three documents: one about Irina P, one about Sandström, and one about Zala himself. Since the mid 1990s the name had cropped up in nine drug, weapons or prostitution cases. Zala was responsible for Irina P’s death. Zala’s name first appeared in connection with a botched security van hold-up in 1996. Nieminen, who had supplied the weapons, has links with Nazi organizations, such as the Aryan Brotherhood (we’re back to echoes of Larsson’s real-life battles with extremist organisations).
Salander sits and smokes for a couple of hours (she has her creator’s laissez-faire attitude to her own health), knowing she has to find Zala and settle their accounts once and for all.
Blomkvist is returning home from a publisher’s party just before 3 am when he passes Salander’s old apartment and – in yet another unlikely juxtaposition – sees her step out into the street, only to be accosted by a tall man in a ponytail (it is Lundin). She instinctively turns and slashes him across the face, using her keys like a knuckleduster. She runs away up some steps, followed by Lundin. She throws a sharp stone at him, wounding him still further. She resolves to punish Bjurman for sending a ‘diabolical alpha male’ to do her harm. All of this is handled with the assurance we expect from Larsson in such moments of action – the prose is economical, but apposite.
‘Absurd Equations’ is the title Larsson gives to Part Three – and the nomenclature (it has to be said) is appropriate for some of the startling plotting that follows.
Blomkvist is at the Millennium offices alone, working through Svensson’s manuscript; he has already delivered nine of the promised 12 chapters and Blomkvist is very pleased with his writing. Blomkvist knows the book will explicitly expose the corrupt system and is ‘a declaration of war’ (of the kind that Larsson, as a journalist, was all too familiar with).
The author is well aware that by this point in the narrative we’ll be hungry for another glimpse of his abrasive heroine, and obliges (her appearances are to some extent the allegros to Blomkvist’s largos). At nine that evening Svensson and Johansson are visited by Lisbeth Salander. To Svensson she appears to be in her late teens and he notes her cold, raven-black irises. She knows about the book and the thesis, much to the couple’s surprise and suspicion. She wants to know why they’re asking questions about ‘Alexander’ Zala. This is the first time Svensson has heard his first name – clearly Salander knows things he doesn’t.
Blomkvist tells his lawyer sister Annika about Salander’s dramatic reappearance in his life, and asks whether he should be consulting her for legal advice on Svensson’s book, as her professional speciality is violence on women. His sister confesses she was hurt when Blomkvist never consulted her over the Wennerström affair, but when he apologises, she says she’d be happy to read through the text.
But it is time for Stieg Larsson to remind the reader about the dangerous world his characters move in. Brother and sister arrive at Svensson’s flat, but Blomkvist hears a commotion on the stairwell and senses something is wrong (Annika waits in the car). A group of neighbours are milling outside the open door. Blomkvist goes in to find the writer slumped in a pool of blood: he has been shot in the head. Blomkvist dials 112 for police and ambulance. He finds Mia Johansson in the bedroom, shot in the face with enough force to spatter blood all over the wall three metres away. They are both dead. He is numb with shock. He goes downstairs and sees a Colt .45 on the cellar steps.
Three officers arrive: Magnusson, Ohlsson and superintendent Mårtensson. Blomkvist explains what has happened and says that since only five minutes have passed since the neighbours say they heard shots, the killer may still be in the area. He shows them the cellar door – it is locked. They enter the flat. The couple are clearly beyond help. As Annika comforts her brother, a murder investigation begins.
Blomkvist wonders if the murders are linked to the book, now near publication – has someone Svensson confronted tried to prevent it? Should they publish? Should they tell police exactly what Svensson was working on? The answer is no – because then they’d have to reveal their sources, which they promised not to do. The verisimilitude of these sections is obviously down to the fact that Larsson is dealing (in fictional terms) with a situation he would be all too familiar with from his time at the magazine Expo – and would no doubt have come across (or at least heard about) regarding the British sister magazine he also wrote for, Searchlight, which has taken on some dangerous opponents.
Critics of Stieg Larsson have taken exception to his ‘filling-in’ strategies regarding minor characters, where pen portraits are provided for people who will barely figure in the narrative (possibly inspired by Fredrick Forsyth). Such a case might be made against the details given for prosecutor Richard Ekström, who finds he will be leading the murder investigation. He’s described as a thin, vital man of 42, with thinning blond hair and a goatee. He is always impeccably dressed, and has spent four years at the Ministry of Justice. The police force, we are told, are divided about his John Birt-style policies of downsizing to increase efficiency, rather than recruiting more police (Birt, one-time Director General of the BBC, used similarly unpopular cost-cutting tactics within his organisation). He rings Criminal Investigator Jan Bublanski (nicknamed ‘Officer Bubble’), who is off duty, and asks him to come in and investigate the killings. Bublanski is 52, and has been in charge of 17 murder or manslaughter cases, and has only failed to find the killer in one. Held in high esteem, he is considered a bit odd because of his Jewish background. He is a member of the (fictitious) Söder congregation, but still works on the Sabbath when required.
At 8 am, Bublanski meets with Ekström and they discuss the case. Because of the journalistic angle, they know it will receive huge media attention. Ekström hand-picks Faste, Andersson and Holmberg for Bublanski’s team, while Bublanski himself wants Sonja Modig. Sonja is perhaps sculpted by Larsson from similar material to that utilised for Salander – though (unlike the latter) she is part of the establishment. Modig, 39, has had 12 years’ experience in the Violent Crimes Division; she is exacting and methodical, but also – very importantly – imaginative. She can make associations that are not necessarily logical, but which can lead to breakthroughs. And – as Larsson likes his idiot cops as antagonists – it’s time for another one. Hans Faste, 47, although a veteran in the investigation of violent crimes, has a huge ego and a loud-mouthed humour that winds people up, especially Bublanski; the latter finds it hard to tolerate him. However, Faste is something of a mentor to Andersson and they work well together.
Larsson has conditioned the reader to expect internet thoroughness from Salander, but he now reminds us that Blomkvist is no slouch in this territory. At the Millennium offices, the journalist has deleted 134 documents relating to protected sources. We are taken back to the police investigation – and literary proof is provided (if it were needed) that Larsson could handle the exigencies of a straightforward police procedural with quite as much authority as he deals with his two freelancers. Lennart Granlund of the National Forensics Laboratory rings Bublanski at 10 am – the Colt .45 was made in America in 1981. It is the murder weapon, and legally belongs to Nils Erik Bjurman. Fingerprints on the gun identify a second person – Lisbeth Salander, born 30 April 1978, arrested and fingerprinted for an assault in Gamla Stan in 1995.
Larsson maintains his dual narrative. Blomkvist sets to work on Svensson’s material, looking for a motive for his murder, while (at the same time) Bublanski and Modig go to Bjurman’s flat in Odenplan and his office at St Eriksplan, but he’s not in either place. They call on his office neighbour, a lawyer called Håkansson, who tells them Bjurman was seriously ill two years ago, in the spring of 2003, and only returns to his office once every couple of months. Håkansson thinks he had cancer, judging by his suddenly aged appearance. The police repair to a Burger King where Modig has a Whopper and Bublanski a Veggie Burger. It’s piquant to notice both Larsson’s customary inversion here of masculine/feminine stereotypes (as detailed in his ‘mission statement’ e-mails) – as well as his referencing of his own taste for junk food.
The crass Faste tells his colleagues what he’s discovered about Salander (and it’s amusing for the reader to compare this to what we already know of her): she is a psychiatric patient with violent tendencies first demonstrated in primary school, later a prostitute, and ‘a real psycho’. But in a reminder of the fact that there are male characters who can act honourably in Larsson’s otherwise misogynistic universe (i.e. after inappropriate sexual advances can reign themselves in and behave well), we encounter Armansky again. Bublanski questions him about Salander, but Armansky is poker-faced. He says she was their best ‘researcher’ (i.e. private investigator). Bublanski has trouble squaring this with the ‘psycho’ on their files – one of the author’s many examples of his heroine’s wrong-footing of those who do not ‘read’ her correctly.
Holmberg is at the initial crime scene, contemplating the enormous quantity of blood on the floor from the two shootings. He’s not interested in the details drawn up by the technicians – he wants to know who the killer is, and what the motivation is. He goes through their flat with a fine-tooth comb and hand-picks four books of interest: The Mafia’s Banker by Blomkvist (the kind of subject, of course, that Larsson the journalist might enthusiastically tackle), plus three political non-fiction titles and one about terrorism. He finds a great deal of money – so clearly robbery was not the motive.
Bublanski and Faste meet Ekström in his office. They don’t know who the ‘Miriam Wu’ woman is, but judging by the fetish gear she keeps, Faste thinks she is ‘a whore’. A social welfare report adjudged Salander guilty of prostitution too, but Bublanski is unconvinced. Ekström thinks that if Johansson’s thesis, ‘From Russia with Love’ was about trafficking and prostitution, she might have made contact with Wu and Salander, which could have provoked them to murder her. Bublanski and Ekström give a televised press conference, explaining they are looking for a 26-year-old woman for three murders: Bjurman is also dead, killed by his ruthless associates. Reluctantly, because he didn’t agree with the releasing of her name, Bublanski reads out a description of her. As so often with Larsson, the apparatus of the state is misdirected, targeting the innocent while protecting the guilty – the leitmotif of the author’s journalistic ethos.
Sonja Modig is still in Bjurman’s apartment at 9 pm when Bublanski arrives. She has unearthed nothing. Although Salander is the obvious culprit, Bublanski still can’t balance the ‘disabled near-psychopath’ of the police paperwork with the ‘skilled researcher’ so well-regarded by Armansky and Blomkvist. Gunnar Samuelsson from forensics has turned the body over to place on the stretcher, and found the tattoo Salander inscribed: ‘I am a sadistic pig, a pervert, and a rapist’. Modig asks if they have found their motive.
Larsson now take us back to Blomkvist at his flat, his mind whirling. He hasn’t slept for 36 hours, the horrific images of the double murder ingrained in his mind. He decides that he isn’t going to believe the police’s conclusion that Salander’s the murderer. After all, he owes his life to her – and readers recognise that the authentic characters in the Millennium Trilogy never take things at face value.
Blomkvist and Eriksson tape a list of suspects, based on Svensson’s book research, on the wall of his apartment. All men, punters or pimps. Of 37 names, 30 are readily identifiable. The trouble is that in order to publish, Millennium would have to get independent authentication to prove these individuals were who the authors claimed they were. If Svensson were alive, they could have published everything and allow him to refute objections himself. Again, the exigencies of magazine publication – something Larsson would know all too well from his Expo experience – are pressed into service for the narrative. A recurrent paradigm – the discipline of investigative journalism – is more central to this second book in the trilogy than to its companions, and perhaps accounts for the rigour in evidence here (a rigour which is sometimes subsumed in the more verisimilitude-stretching developments of the other books). Bublanski organises a meeting with Modig, Faste and Dr Peter Teleborian, head physician at St Stefan’s psychiatric clinic at Uppsala. There is hostility between Faste and Modig: bad cop and good cop. The boyish Teleborian is short with steel-rimmed glasses and a small goatee. He is one of the best-known psychiatrists in Sweden and is an authority on psychopaths and psychopathic behaviour (the lingua franca, in fact, of much of Larsson’s fiction). He believes Salander should have been held in an institution. Indeed, she was one of Teleborian’s patients in her teens and he had been partly responsible for placing her under guardianship when she turned 18 (a fact that will assume key significance later in the book).
Salander had been turned over to his care just before she was 13. She was, he says, ‘psychotic, obsessive and paranoid’. She had behaved violently towards schoolmates, teachers and acquaintances – but never strangers. Which is why Teleborian is convinced she must have known Dag and Mia, if indeed she had killed them. She attacked a stranger in the underground when she was 17, but only because the stranger, a sex offender, had attacked her first – one of the earliest of the many assaults on the spectacularly luckless Salander. When she feels threatened, she attacks with violence – the hallmark of the series. Because of her reluctance to engage with any therapy, doctors haven’t properly diagnosed her illness.
Various investigations are now taking place: Bublanski’s, who feels he’s almost solved it; Armansky’s, watching out for Salander’s interests; and Blomkvist/Millennium’s, actively seeking an alternative suspect to Salander. Modig believes the tattoo on Bjurman’s stomach, along with pornographic images on his computer, intimates that Salander was abused by him, and that could be a motive for his death. Faste’s theory is that Salander and Wu were involved in some kind of S&M escort service that went wrong, with Bjurman a client, and when Svensson was threatening to expose the sex trade, along with their S&M business, Salander killed him to prevent disclosure.
As often before, Larsson has consolidated a slew of material to set in train against his heroine, upping the ante in narrative terms; it’s a speciality that by this point in the second novel he has burnished to perfection.
Blomkvist gets home and checks his iBook, finding Salander has hacked into it, read his letter to her, and replied with a document containing just one word: ‘Zala’. He suspects she is close by, somewhere in Södermalm, and feels almost as if she is watching him. He creates another document, asking for more information: ‘Who is Zala?’ Immediately she replies: ‘You’re the journalist. Find out.’
Blomkvist receives a cryptic document from Salander about ‘Prosecutor E’ leaking information to the media, but not ‘the old police report’. He doesn’t know what she’s talking about and asks her to tell him exactly what she knows. She says she will think about it, and this is the first ‘rapprochement’ Larsson has forged between his protagonists since Lisbeth left Blomkvist – a canny delay, as the author will be well aware that his readers will now feel an impulse towards such a moment – more satisfying if delayed.
It’s interesting to speculate on how much Larsson himself may have personally used Expo as a weapon, given the tactics he now has his hero employ. When Blomkvist says Millennium will expose the sexual abuser, police officer Björck, the man pleads for compassion, but Blomkvist asks him where that quality was when he abused the underage girls. On his way out, Columbo-fashion, he asks him ‘one last question’ (the TV detective always reserved a final, crucial query): has he heard of a man named Zala? The result, after a moment of disorientation, is dramatic – Björck appears to be in shock: how could Blomkvist know about Zalachenko? (The first time we’ve heard the man’s full name.) The policeman asks him what it’s worth. If Björck could lead the journalist to him, will his name be left out of the report? Blomkvist agrees.
With a variety of plot strands in the air, it’s clear at this point that Larsson felt the need to concentrate his narrative (and, inter alia, the reader’s attention), so a compression is effected in terms of incident. Hedström, stopping off at Central Station to have a coffee at George Café, is depressed. He really wanted Salander dead by now, so to have coppers Bublanski and Modig (who he imagines might be an item) suggest she’s not even the culprit is very bad news for him. He looks up to Faste for being the only one to speak his mind. Blomkvist has visited a retired judge in Tumba – and we are now presented with another of Larsson’s subtle detonations of conventional morality, pointed up by an unexpected reversal of expectations. The judge cheerfully admits seeing prostitutes and supporting their ‘honourable profession’. Blomkvist has now crossed off six from his list of suspect names. Eriksson calls him as he is driving back at 10 pm to say the online edition of the Morgon-Posten claims that Wu is back. Blomkvist says he will go and see her right away.
In Part Four (which Larsson, in another characteristic popular culture reference, calls ‘Terminator Mode’), we are provided with a flashback to Salander’s point of view of recent events. She spends the first week of the police hunt in her new apartment in Fiskargatan, mobile off and SIM card removed. She follows the media stories with astonishment, and is irritated by the passport photo used of her, which she thinks makes her look stupid. Supposedly private medical records have been unearthed and are now openly accessible to the public, including her attack on the passenger at Gamla Stan underground station. His name was Karl Evert Norgren, an unemployed man who had tried to sexually assault her on the train.
(At this point, it might be worth considering the fact that Salander in the trilogy is such a persistent victim of violent sexual assaults – does she choose her victimhood, consciously or otherwise? The feminist response to elderly judges’ suggestions that women provoke sexual interest by their dress is rightly indignant, but it has to be said that Larsson has the reader wondering why his heroine is such magnet for rapists and brutes. Unless, of course, the answer is in the area of plot exigency: Larsson has to provide a rationale for Lisbeth’s crowd-pleasing dispensing of mayhem.)
She had swung on a pole and kicked her attacker in the face with both feet; dressed as a punk she had no hope of escape into the crowd and was apprehended by another passenger. She curses her build and gender – no one would have attacked her were she a man. (Again: is Larsson being disingenuous?)
A high-ranking witness, an MP for the Centre Party, had seen Norgren’s attempted rape, and as he already had two sexual offence convictions (and is clearly another of Larsson’s army of male dross), the case against Salander was dropped. But she was nevertheless still declared incompetent and put under guardianship.
Depending on which paper you read, Salander was psychotic, schizophrenic or paranoid – but definitely mentally handicapped; and undoubtedly violent and unbalanced. Her friendship with lesbian Miriam Wu had provoked a frenzy. Wu’s involvement with provocative S&M shows at gay events (and the publication of topless photos of her) had obviously boosted circulation figures enormously. Since Mia Johansson’s thesis was about the sex trade, this could have been a motive for Salander to kill her – because, according to the social welfare agency, she was a prostitute. Then her connection with the band Evil Fingers was revealed and the reactionary press once more had a field day. She was described as a psychotic lesbian who belonged to a cult of Satanists who propagated S&M, hated mankind, especially men, and had international links too (since Salander had ventured abroad).
One article provokes an emotional response: an old maths supply teacher, Birgitta Miass, and a class bully, David Gustavsson, have accused her of threatening to kill them when she was at school, 15 years ago. In fact, the teacher had tried to make her accept a wrong answer, which she had refused to do, leading to violence. The bully, ‘a powerful brute with the IQ of a pike’ had beaten her up badly, and she had hit him in the ear with a baseball bat the next day as retaliation. She resolves to track them down when she has the time. (Again, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon between them could not have created such a populous gallery of loathsome male grotesques as the male writer Larsson comes up with.)
Salander watches the TV interview with Dr Teleborian who expresses concern for her welfare. But when he had been caring for her, his main treatment had been to strap her down in a bed in an empty room, the idea being that stimuli of any kind might provoke an outburst. In fact, this was plain old sensory deprivation, a common technique in brainwashing and classified by the Geneva Convention as inhumane. She had spent half her time at St Stefan’s enduring this ‘psychiatric treatment’. Watching him talk turns her heart to ice, and she wonders if he still has her teeth marks on his little finger.
She had thought at first that, after ‘All the Evil’ had occurred, she would be treated well. But no one in authority would listen to her, and on her thirteenth birthday she was strapped down on the bed for the first time. Teleborian was the worst, most loathsome, sadist she had ever met – worse than Bjurman because the doctor was cloaked in a mantle of respectability. Anything he did could never be criticised. If Teleborian had been in charge of St Stefan’s, she would probably still be there to this day. As she watches him being interviewed, she realises there is no one around to question his opinions.
Lisbeth reads with interest the victim profiles in the newspapers. Bjurman (in a typically Larssonian criticism of conventional moral judgements) is described as a saintly do-gooder, a campaigner for the little people, a Greenpeace member, and genuinely committed to his ward. Svensson is just passed off as a sharp reporter, while his partner gets much more space – a sweet, intelligent young woman with a promising career ahead of her. It’s not until Easter Sunday that Svensson’s link with Millennium is established, and there are no details of what he was working on.
When she reads Blomkvist’s deliberately misleading quote in Aftonbladet about Svensson’s research on computer hacking, she realises that he is trying to contact her. She logs into his computer and finds his message to her. Now it is not just her against Sweden (‘an elegant and lucid equation’) – she has an ally, a ‘naïve do-gooder’ who she never wanted to see again.
She has not been innocent since the age of ten – ‘There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility’ is clearly an important concept for her. But ‘Kalle’ Blomkvist could be useful to her. A stubborn moral crusader, he would need a motive to act on his own, so she gives it to him: ‘Zala’.
Larsson now has his female protagonist using her hacking skills – along with her equally honed masquerading talents – to advance the plot (by now, these ‘online activity’ sections are as skilfully handled and engrossing as any of the kinetic action sequences). She logs in to the police criminal register under the name of Superintendent Douglas Skiöld of the Malmö police, but there is no trace of Alexander Zalachenko. No surprise, as he has never been convicted of a crime. While she’s online, she is contacted by ‘Plague’, the recluse weighing 150 kilograms, who makes Salander look like a positive socialite. He asks her who Zala is and she tells him to fuck off, but then requests that he hack into Ekström’s computer. Plague never leaves his apartment in Sundbyberg – Larsson is good on the sociopathic types who boast nonpareil computer skills, elements of whom he incorporates into his heroine.
Salander dons her blonde wig, removes her eyebrow ring, pockets Irene Nesser’s Norwegian passport, and packs her Mace spray and a Taser. It’s 11 pm, Friday night, nine days after the murders. She takes a bus to St Eriksplan and walks to Odenplan, where she breaks into Bjurman’s apartment.
On finding Bjurman’s bloody bed, she is happy he is out of her life (Larsson maintains a ruthlessness in his heroine). But she wants to find what the connection is between Zala and him, and also where her missing case files have gone – part of a brief which summarised her psychological state. She searches his apartment, the attic, and his Mercedes, but finds nothing.
Berger rings Blomkvist at 7.30 on Sunday morning to tell him the boxer Paolo Roberto (a real-life figure who would play himself in the film of the book) will be visiting him – training with him earned Salander the ‘Terminator’ sobriquet. Roberto arrives and says that he believes his boxing partner to be innocent of the crimes she’s accused of.
Larsson is careful to maintain the power plays and bargaining chips his characters utilise against each other – perhaps a metaphor for the subterfuges the author practises on the reader (the misdirection, for instance, that pleasurably interrupts a smooth ‘reading’ of the text). Björck is worrying about his career in the Security Police if Blomkvist reveals he slept with underage prostitutes. He knows Bjurman was hunting for Zala (Björck had given Bjurman the top secret file about him), and as Svensson had also been hunting him, then Zala is a clue in both murder scenes. On Saturday, Björck had gone to his office and re-read the old documents about Zala, the ones he himself had written. The oldest was 30 years ago, the newest a decade old. ‘A slippery fucker’, he thinks. Although he doesn’t understand how every piece slots together, the connection is crystal clear: to Enskede, Bjurman and Salander. He thinks he knows why Salander killed Mia and Dag and is terrified that if she blabs before she is apprehended and (hopefully) shot dead by the police, she could break ‘the whole story’ wide open. He knows he will have to confide in Blomkvist so that the journalist keeps quiet about his indiscretions. He has Zalachenko’s phone number, and wonders whether he should ring it.
Salander sends Blomkvist a message:
‘Keep away from Teleborian (“he’s evil”); Wu is innocent; focus on Zala; Björck may be the connection between Bjurman and Zala; why doesn’t Ekström know about her damaging 1991 police report?; she didn’t kill Dag and Mia, she left them before the murders happened; how did he know about the Wennerström affair?’ Blomkvist replies saying how relieved he is to hear her say she’s innocent.
It might be noted that Larsson has taken his own sweet time in this book: at last – 400 pages in – there’s a link between the two murders. Blomkvist calls Björck and tells him that he will name him at a press conference at 10 am later that day unless he, Björck, gives him information about Zala. The cop knows he has no choice but to agree.
The brutal criminal and rapist Sandström awakes to find himself tied up, lying on the floor in a dimly lit room. Someone slips a thick cotton rope over his neck, and he panics, seeing a block and tackle fastened to the ceiling. He looks up at his assailant, and doesn’t immediately recognise the wanted criminal Salander. She has short black hair (a wig), is dressed in black and has a hideous painted face like a mask: white make-up, with a red stripe down her face. ‘She looks out of her fucking mind,’ he thinks. She hoists him up and sits down in front of him with his own illegal gun, which she loads with bullets. Once again, although Salander has moral right on her side, the reader might question Larsson’s use of this repeated tactic of abusing the abuser; while many readers clearly consider such individuals fair game, it’s intriguing to speculate if Larsson concurs or is simply following commercial revenge fantasy imperatives.
She holds up a photo she has printed off his computer – of Sandström with 17-year-old Estonian prostitute Ines Hammujärvi – and asks him in a quiet voice why men feel the need to document their perversions. She calls him a ‘sadistic pig, a pervert, and a rapist’ and says that if he screams, once she has removed the tape from his mouth, she will zap him with 40,000 volts from her Taser, which she had previously used on him outside. This will make his legs go limp and he will hang himself. ‘It has probably not escaped your attention that I’m a madwoman who likes killing people. Especially men.’ He is crying with fear at this point. But if he answers all her questions, truthfully and without evasion, she will let him live.
The terrified Sandström tells her about Ines. She was presented to him as a favour for smuggling anabolic steroids from Estonia, with a friend called Harry Ranta. Harry’s brother, Atho, had offered Ines to him at a party, saying that she needed punishment for not doing what she was told, i.e. not whoring for him. She was living with Harry’s girlfriend; Sandström and Atho had driven to her place; Atho had tied her down and Sandström had raped her. He continued to visit her and rape her (‘They wanted her to be… to be trained’) for a ‘good price’ (a few thousand) in return for his help with the smuggling. Salander asks who Zala is – he says he doesn’t know, other than just somebody Atho knows. Svensson had asked him that too. Sandström had spoken to Zala on the phone once, when he was asked to drive an amphetamine-loaded car. It was a nightmare: Sandström had refused to do the job and to ‘persuade’ him, Harry and the brutal Atho put a bag over Sandström’s head and drove him to a warehouse in Södertälje. There he found a badly-beaten man (Kenneth Gustafsson, he discovers later) tied up on the floor plus an imposing blond giant and a man with a ponytail, Magge Lundin.
The blond giant broke Gustafsson’s neck right in front of him, literally squeezing him to death, to show him what happens to snitches. Then Lundin sawed off Gustafsson’s head and hands with a chainsaw (here again, the presiding influence may be said to be Thomas Harris, who upped the ante in terms of blood-bolstered violence in modern crime fiction). The blond then put his hands on Sandström’s shoulders, as if to repeat the action, and Atho made a call in Russian to Zala. Zala asked him whether he still wanted out – Sandström, of course, said no. Sandström has never told this story to anyone, including Svensson. But he had told Harry about Svensson’s visit. Salander can get nothing further from him and so she lowers him down, washes off her ‘mask’ make-up and leaves him a knife to cut himself loose. Then she leaves his apartment with his Colt 1911.
As noted in this study, the various popular culture influences on Larsson have been many and varied, and Chapter 25 might be said to reference the modern Jerry Bruckheimer-style action movie rather than more literary sources.
Roberto, Lisbeth’s boxer friend, sees Wu approaching her flat after 11 pm – but a dark van pulls up behind her and the blond man jumps out and grabs her from behind. A kick to his head has no effect – with a chop, she is down and he is tossing her into the van. Roberto comes to life and runs to help, but it’s too late, the van does a u-turn and disappears in the direction of Högalid Church. He follows in his car. In the van, Wu’s nose is bleeding, her lip is split and she probably has a broken nose. She tries kicking her attacker again, but he just smiles. He slaps her face hard, sits on her back and handcuffs her wrists behind her. She feels a paralysing fear.
Blomkvist is passing the Globe Arena on his way home from Tyresö; he has spent the afternoon crossing three more frightened punters off his list of suspects. He rings Berger and Eriksson to see how they’ve got on but gets no answer. So he tries Roberto and gets a broken-up phone message saying something about a van with Miriam.
At this point, Larsson is comfortably juggling his multiple ticking clocks with the assurance that is his purview by this stage of the trilogy. Roberto’s phone has gone dead. He can’t even get through to the emergency services. He’s in a BMW with a full tank, so he knows he can outrun Wu’s abductors, and he pulls back several hundred metres behind to follow them without attracting attention. He’s annoyed that he let the ‘giant on steroids’ beat up a girl in front of his eyes.
Roberto backtracks, looking down each side road until he sees a glint of light in the trees. He gets out and jogs to a warehouse in the middle of a sandy gravel area. In front is a yard full of containers, a front-loader, a white Volvo and the van. The loading bay door opens and Magge Lundin (‘Ponytail’) appears. There is a half-choked howl from the van – the blond giant carries Wu out under his arm (‘as if she were a paper bag’) and Ponytail drives the van away. Miriam Wu is dumped on the cement floor of the warehouse; she knows she’s going to die here. But she won’t die without a fight. She kicks at the giant, to his ribs, his crotch, his hip and his breastbone, but he casually slaps and kicks her, breaking a rib.
We are now squarely into Larsson in action mode – something the author handles with quite as much brio as anything else in his literary arsenal. Roberto follows the sound of her screams and sees the giant setting a chainsaw down in front of her, telling her in an accented high-pitched voice (‘as if it had never broken’) to answer a simple question: where is Salander? She doesn’t know, so the thug picks up the chainsaw. It’s at this point that Roberto strides out and punches him extremely hard in the kidneys. But it’s like smashing his hand into a concrete wall – the boxer has never experienced anything like it during his 33 professional bouts in the ring. ‘Blond’ is astonished, but not hurt. Roberto lands heavy blows on him, but Blond is unaffected. He recognises his attacker as the famous boxer he is, then swings a right hook which glances painfully off Roberto’s shoulder. Despite being slow, Blond is incredibly strong.
As so often with action sequences, Larsson is on confident ground here. They continue the life-or-death fight. All Roberto’s years of training seem geared to this one event, a mere 180 seconds. Every punch he throws has a lifetime’s force behind it, but Blond is not affected. At first Roberto thinks he’s up against another boxer, but then realises the giant is just pretending. He’s slow, telegraphs his punches, can’t box effectively – but he has a devastating power in his punch and seems insensitive to pain. They move round the rubbish-strewn warehouse, Blond connecting and breaking one of Roberto’s ribs.
Suddenly Roberto has the dreadful, but inevitable, feeling that he’s about to lose. He tries to win time, to regain strength, but Blond is just toying with him. Roberto throws a totally unexpected right hook, and at last feels something give way. He avoids the giant’s slow, obvious punches and sends in a body blow and a left hook that connects with Blond’s nose. Thinking he is now in control, the giant kicks his leg and he drops down. It’s all over… until Wu kicks her enemy from behind, landing a blow to his testicles.
Wu had managed to slip her bound hands underneath her and stand up. She had seen Roberto fighting the giant and had done the obvious thing – kicked him in the crutch. But Blond hasn’t gone down for long and now he is grabbing her and hits her on the head. As he scrambles to his feet, Roberto swings a plank onto the back of his head. Blond falls forward with a crash.
Roberto, aware of a terrible pain in his right knee where he thinks he’s torn a muscle, slings Wu over his shoulder and takes her outside and into the cover of the woods. The giant crashes after them. He picks up a sharp rock, making the sign of the cross – he is ready to kill someone, for the first time in his ‘sinful life’. But Blond realises he can’t follow them in the dark and returns to the warehouse, picks up a bag and drives away in the Volvo. Roberto sinks back, adrenalin gone, and tells Wu not to be afraid of him, that he has a car not far away. (All of this is handled in customarily pulse-racing fashion by Larsson, as if thinking of the movies that would result from his very cinematic narrative.)
Roberto is driving like a drunk, Wu asleep on the back seat. He gets onto the E20, then the E4 to Stockholm. Every part of his body aches.
Part of the pleasure of crime fiction is, of course, the careful balance of the paying out and withholding of information, and Larsson – despite his all-too-brief career as a practitioner – perfectly judges the apposite moments in this strategy. It’s Chapter 26 before we learn the identity of the murderer – neither too soon (to vitiate tension) nor too late (to seem like a conventional ‘wrapping up’ of the narrative). Bublanski, woken by Blomkvist, meets Modig outside the Söder hospital and they speak to the beaten-up Roberto, who explains what happened the night before, and that Salander used to spar with him at his gym. Blomkvist says that the ‘ponytail and beer-belly’ guy (Lundin) was the same one who attacked Salander on Lundagatan, that Wu’s kidnapping seems to have been done in order to find out where Salander was, that the two thugs hardly seem like members of a lesbian Satanist gang, and that the events have something to do with Zala – the injuries sustained by Roberto and Wu match those inflicted on the severely beaten prostitute Irina Petrova.
Modig arrives at Millennium and meets Berger, whom she immediately likes.
Now Larsson reacquaints us with his heroine. Dressed as Irene Nesser (black leather jacket, dark trousers, red sweater and glasses), Salander has taken the bus to Lake Mälaren, where Bjurman’s summer cabin is. She searches everywhere but finds nothing. Then she sees a stepladder and realises the cabin has a concealed attic: there she finds two A4 box files containing folders and documents.
Meanwhile, it turns out that the blond giant was worried, but had an enormous respect for Zala’s ‘almost uncanny strategic gifts’. He drove straight to Dag’s apartment in Enskede, parked his white Volvo two streets away, rang their doorbell and shot him dead, along with a woman (Mia Johansson). The only thing he took was a computer. In holding this and fishing for his car keys, he dropped Bjurman’s revolver, which skidded downstairs to the basement. Running out of time, he left it where it was – a mistake which proved fortunate, as the police then concluded Salander, whose fingerprints were on the gun, was the murderer.
So that left Salander as the last remaining link with them – she had known Bjurman and she knew Zala. So she had to be silenced. But everything had gone wrong after they kidnapped Wu. Paolo Roberto, of all people, had turned up and rescued her. After burning down the warehouse in Nykvarn, he had gone to Lundin’s house in Svavelsjö, to hide and lick his wounds.
Larsson’s narrative strategy often involves his characters tying up loose ends (as he himself conscientiously does as a writer). Thus, the giant suddenly remembers there is another loose end to tie up – Bjurman. The guardian had shown him a file about Salander (when Zala had accepted the job of disposing of her). If this was found, it could lead the police to Zala. He phones Lundin and tells him to get down to Stallarholmen and start another fire…
Jerker Holmberg rings from the gutted warehouse. The sniffer dog has found a man’s leg buried in a shallow grave 75 metres away in the woods. And the dog’s found another spot 80 metres from the first. Forensics have already been called.
Larsson’s parcelling out of information to the reader is at times paralleled by the fashion in which he allows his characters to learn things about themselves. Salander is reading through Bjurman’s extensive notes on her, finding things even she didn’t know existed. Palmgren’s notebook journals are included. He had started writing them when she was 15. She had spent 12 days living with elderly foster parents who expected her to be continually grateful, till she had stolen 100 kronor, escaped and gone to live with a 67-year-old man in Haninge. He had just wanted to look at her naked, not touch her, in return for which she was fed and given a place to live. When someone reported the man’s actions, he was accused by social workers of sexual abuse, but Salander denied it, saying that as she was 15 it was legal anyway. (Non-Swedish readers will note the difference in the laws here.) This is when Palmgren took over, writing entries from December 1993. He had put her up in his apartment for Christmas, treated her like an adult and explained that she had a choice – to go back to St Stefan’s or live with a foster family.
She discovers the missing police report from 1991, written by Dr Loderman, in which Teleborian features heavily. Then correspondence, dated just after ‘All the Evil’, between Björck and Teleborian, with the former telling the latter that she should be institutionalised for the rest of her life to stop her from creating problems ‘regarding the matter in hand’. She is utterly shaken. Teleborian had known Björck – so when Björck had wanted her buried, he had turned to the doctor. It wasn’t coincidence after all – nobody was innocent. She decides to have a talk with Gunnar Björck.
She packs Palmgren’s notebooks, the 1991 police report, 1996 medical report and correspondence between Björck and Teleborian, and goes to leave. She hears motorbikes outside, Harley-Davidsons. There’s no time to hide – she steps out and confronts whoever it is.
By now, readers will probably no longer consider Lisbeth’s outbursts of uninhibited violence surprising from such a physically un-intimidating source – Larsson has by now conditioned his readers to expect it. Interestingly, the novelist Lee Child is keen to avoid his hero, Jack Reacher, being perceived as invulnerable. Readers, Child knows, need to feel that the protagonist is sometimes in real danger and not able to just effortlessly triumph in every confrontation. It’s a moot point whether or not Larsson (at this juncture in the sequence) has not fallen into this trap. Lundin and Sonny Nieminen head from Svavelsjö to Stallarholmen, there to meet Salander on the driveway of Bjurman’s summer cabin. She gives them a mouthful of invective, and Lundin (still showing the scars from where she injured him with her keys) laughs, thinking, ‘How could this skinny kid think she stands a chance with two hard bikers like us?’
Lundin swings at her, but she just steps back. Then she sprays him in the eyes with Mace, kicks him in the groin and then slams her boot in his face as he topples onto his knees. Nieminen unzips his jacket to get out his gun, but Salander kicks him to the ground and fires her Taser into his crotch, using 50,000 volts. Lundin gets up, half blinded, and she coolly shoots him in the foot with his accomplice’s gun, a Polish P-83 Wanad. She walks away, and then suddenly turns round and looks at Lundin’s bike. ‘Sweet,’ she says.
Although Larsson is careful to include passages of straightforward, ‘normal’ sexual activity in the trilogy, he is perhaps most comfortable with misdirection and metaphor in this area – as when Salander rides a motorbike, huge under her tiny frame, all the way back to the fairground at Alvsjö, sensually relishing the sensation of speed and power. She takes a train to Söder, then walks to her flat at Mosebacke and takes a bath.
Björck tells Blomkvist about Alexander Zalachenko, one of the ‘most deeply buried secrets’ within the Swedish defence system: the extortion, the corruption and everything leading up to his seeking of asylum in Sweden and joining Säpo, the Security Police. Björck and Bjurman were working as junior officers for Säpo in 1976 when Zala made contact, walking straight into Norrmalm police station and seeking asylum. Björck was his mentor, dealing with Bjurman’s paranoid behaviour and binge drinking. Björck still refuses to give Blomkvist Zala’s assumed name, so the journalist decides to visit Palmgren.
It’s not until Chapter 28 that Larsson reveals Zala’s true identity. Blomkvist has persuaded Dr Sivarnandan that he must see Palmgren. The elderly doctor accepts that he wants to help Salander and so reveals to him the shocking information that the brutal Zala is… Lisbeth’s father.
Her mother was Agneta Sofia Sjölander, who never married Zala but in 1979 changed her name to ‘Salander’ to be more like ‘Zala’. But Zala – absent much of the time – became abusive to her whenever he returned home; Agneta was forced to go to hospital dozens of times. An archetype of Larsson’s ‘Man Who Hate Women’ scenario.
Then ‘All the Evil’ happened. Zala had returned when Salander was 12, and violently abused her mother. But Lisa interrupted the beating and stabbed Zala five times in the shoulder with a kitchen knife. He was hospitalised, but there was no police report – the result of Björck’s intervention. Zala returned, leaving Agneta unconscious, and Salander threw a carton of petrol at him in his car, which she lit with a match. Hence his foot was amputated due to the horrendous burns. Then Salander ended up at St Stefan’s.
Larsson’s plotting here is as rigorous as one could wish – all of the elements that motivated his narratives perfectly dovetailed. Salander re-lives the time she was taken away by the police for trying to kill her father. Palmgren, meanwhile, tells Blomkvist he’s sad he never took up Salander’s case properly. Lisbeth herself watches the TV news in astonishment – she had no idea about Wu’s kidnap or Roberto’s involvement. At least three burial pits have been found by the warehouse.
She hacks into Milton Security, gets a surveillance car hired out in an employee’s name, and (in a plot element that stretches the reader’s credulity, even given Salander’s vaunted expertise) doctors the CCTV cameras and packs her Taser, Mace spray and Nieminen’s gun. She uploads her PowerBook contents online, scrambles its hard drive and takes her PDA with her. She picks up her car, a Toyota Corolla, from Milton’s garage, having got in unseen, and drives off as the sun is rising.
Blomkvist suddenly (and it has to be said, rather too conveniently, at this stage in the plot) finds Salander’s door keys that have fallen out of the bag he picked up from her. One has a PO Box number on it – and almost immediately he is at the Hornsgatan Post Office rifling through her post. Salander goes into the Auto-Expert car hire firm in Eskilstuna and – threatening the mechanic with her gun – finds out who the owner of the hired white Volvo is. It is Ronald Niedermann, 35, a German from Hamburg – the murderous blond giant. She gets his PO Box number and heads to Göteborg. Also in the know (and armed with Salander’s Colt), Blomkvist takes the train to Göteborg.
Having cannily engineered the key elements for a confrontation, Larsson now begins to move the tempo to accelerando. Salander is now staking out Gosseberga Farm, having followed the man’s black Renault into the forests near Lake Anten. She watches as Niedermann comes out, along with a thin older man with a crutch. This is Zalachenko. Her father. She checks the bullets in her gun and puts the safety catch on.
She opens the door to the farmhouse; it is unlocked. She feels uneasy, and her instincts are correct. A trap has been laid – she is jumped from behind by the giant who throws her down onto a sofa. She Tasers him but he doesn’t react (Larsson has given him the Bond villain characteristic of an inability to feel pain). Zala enters – the figure Larsson has painted as a monstrous nemesis is now an old, emaciated man, bald, his face a patchwork of scar tissue, with a prosthetic foot and two missing fingers. He regards her without emotion and explains that the farm is surrounded by motion detectors and cameras and they’ve been monitoring her ever since she arrived. We are reminded just how adroit the author is at creating this kind of fraught scenario – and of maintaining the tension. Niedermann leaves, and Larsson gives the reader a crash refresher course in the unspeakableness of one of his chief villains, Zala, as pungently unpleasant a creature in the author’s grotesque pantheon as Larsson created in his brief novel-writing career.
Zala calls her a whore, and her mother a whore who made sure she got pregnant and tried to get him to marry her. He tells her that Bjurman wanted him to get the DVD from her, by having Niedermann saw one of her feet off – appropriate compensation for his own handicap. But when Bjurman panicked after taking Svensson’s telephone call, Niedermann, who was in his apartment, made the decision to shoot him there and then.
He calls her a dyke, says Niedermann should have sex with her, that she is filth. Salander tries to rile him, to make him drop his guard, but he refuses to rise to the bait. He asks after his other daughter Camilla, ‘the one with brains’.
It was Niedermann – currently out performing ‘an errand’ – who shot Bjurman. And who is this blond giant? Larsson has reserved another shocking surprise for us: it is none other than Salander’s half-brother, from a brief affair when Zala had an assignment in Germany in 1970. Zala tells her she has at least four more brothers and three sisters in various countries, all the products of similar liaisons. In such films as Psycho and Notorious, Alfred Hitchcock famously created off-kilter, monstrous versions of the family and parental relations; relatively radical in their day. But by Larsson’s era, the author is able to forge an even more astringent (and unholy) version of the family: Salander’s damaged psyche is, we learn, a result of an anti-family, a perfect perversion.
Salander tells Zala that Millennium, Dragan Armansky and Bublanski are all after him, but he is adamant that there is not a shred of incriminating evidence in his home. Niedermann comes back, attaches a silencer to his gun and they all troop out into the woods (needless to say, few readers will at this point be turning the pages in leisurely fashion). There Lisbeth is roughly pushed into a freshly dug pit, but before she is shot by the giant, she holds up her palmtop, claiming everything they’ve said has been broadcast on internet radio. Zala sees she’s lying, and as Niedermann examines her hand she strikes out at the giant with a spade, breaking his nose (again). They fight. But Zala has a gun too and fires three times at Salander… killing her? It appears so. A bullet lodges in her brain, causing massive trauma and… it seems… death.
Zala is shaking, amazed that she almost got away. They dump her body in the hole and bury her. Zala is relieved that she is dead at last. They go back to his house and he gently tends Niedermann’s wounds. Like one of the writers he admires, Ian Fleming, Stieg Larsson has apparently killed off his protagonist at the end of a book (although readers’ knowledge that this is Part Two of a trilogy may be an indicator of the surprises to come).
After a long train delay, Blomkvist arrives in Göteborg, takes a cab to a car he’s hired and drives out of the city at 10.30 pm.
Salander awakes to find herself buried alive. She starts digging her way upwards through the soil. (An incidental locus classicus here might be Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2.) Eventually she has surfaced and, in great pain, wanders off through the woods to Zala’s farmhouse. She thinks about looking for a petrol can and a match and goes into the woodshed. Zala hears her and goes out to investigate. Salander swings an axe at his face, cleaving into it, then wedges it in his knee. She doesn’t have the power to kill him cleanly. He is incapacitated, and she takes out the gun he shot her with – it’s only a Browning .22 (‘a bloody boy-scout pistol’) which accounts for her still being alive.
Having already ratcheted up the mayhem to a near-delirious level, Larsson shows he still has aces up his sleeve. Niedermann wakes up from a nap when he hears Zala’s screams. He enters the woodshed and sees Salander, but knowing she is dead he thinks it’s a demon. He fantasises that she has a lizard-like skin, a whipping tail, glowing eyes, spiked teeth and spouts flames from her mouth. She shoots at him but narrowly misses. He runs away in abject fear.
She doesn’t shoot Zala, choosing to keep her last bullet for Niedermann, and goes back to the farmhouse where she is shocked by her corpse-like appearance – no wonder the giant was terrified. She arms herself with his gun, a P-83 Wanad. She realises how badly she is injured. In another improbable suspension of disbelief, Larsson has us accept that she can feel her brain through the hole in the back of her head.
Niedermann is ashamed of running off, but doesn’t think there’s any point returning to help Zala – it’s a lost cause now. All he needs is a car to take him away to Göteborg, and then he sees one racing towards him. Blomkvist’s, presumably.
Salander puts the gun to her head… she is so badly injured that she just wants to end it all.
Blomkvist stops as Niedermann waves him down. Realising who he is, the journalist points his Colt 1911 Government gun at him, gets him to lie down and ties him securely to a road sign, and sets off for the farm. He finds the wounded, moaning Zala in the woodshed. Then he goes to the farmhouse and finds Salander. She has the gun in her hand, but clearly hasn’t had the energy to fire it. Her eyes are unfocused. She whispers, ‘Kalle Bastard Blomkvist.’
He dials the emergency services.
The ending of the remarkable second book in the trilogy has a markedly different feel to that of its predecessor. Whereas The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo functioned as a self-contained entity, Book Two feels very much like the consciously conceived second part of a sequence, with a masterly orchestration of effects leading inexorably to the final book of the Millennium Trilogy. And as the trilogy has clearly been conceived as an entity, there is no sense of the famous (and dreaded) ‘second book syndrome’ – whereby the debut book of a new novelist is followed by a marking-time, lower-key entry. In fact, Larsson didn’t have time for such niceties; everything had to be as near-fully-realised in its achievement as he could make it. Did he have a sense of his own pending mortality?