The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (24 page)

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 ‘
Sala
nder’ 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.