The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (22 page)

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.