The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (23 page)

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.