The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (20 page)

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.