The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (28 page)

He reminds the doctor that she has been described as a psychotic and a mentally ill lesbian mass murderer which is (as he says) nonsense. He also mentions the German Niedermann, a man without a shred of conscience who is being sought in connection with the murders. Finally, he tells the astonished doctor that the reason Salander was put into a children’s psychiatric clinic was because she had stirred up a ‘secret’ that Säpo was trying to keep a lid on – that Zalachenko, her father (who was murdered at the hospital) was a Soviet defector and a spy. He also points out that the police officer Hans Faste – who works for the prosecutor Ekström – is corrupt. In order to help her, Blomkvist needs to give her a hand-held computer and battery charger – the key weapon in her arsenal – but Jonasson is still not convinced. Then the journalist takes a folder from his briefcase and tells him some sobering facts about Dr Peter Teleborian.

Chapter 12 continues the balancing act that Larsson is able to pull off so effectively in terms of advancing his plot while making cogent political points which are clearly dear to his own heart. We meet Superintendent Torsten Edklinth who is a director of constitutional protection at the Security Police. He has known Salander’s employer Armansky for 12 years, ever since a woman MP had received death threats. Edklinth’s association with the sympathetic Armansky is, of course, something that ensures that the reader will be well disposed towards him. However, he is not prepared for Armansky ‘lobbing a bomb with a sizzling fuse’ into his lap. When the latter tells him that the Security Police are involved with straightforward criminal activity, Armansky qualifies it by saying that
some
people within the Security Police are involved in such activity. This leads to a section in which Edklinth has a stream of consciousness which at times seems to directly reflect its author’s opinions: ‘Swedish democracy is based on a single premise: the Right to Free Speech (RFS); this guarantees the inalienable right to say aloud, think and believe anything whatsoever’. As Larsson notes, this would also include crazy neo-Nazis – his own
bêtes noires
.

As a sort of ‘catch-up’, Larsson allows Edklinth a few paragraphs in which he assesses what he has been told: Security Police officers had ignored the fact that a series of brutal attacks took place against a Swedish woman (Salander’s mother), then her daughter was incarcerated in a mental institution on the basis of a fraudulent diagnosis, and finally,
carte blanche
was granted to an ex-service intelligence officer to commit criminal offences which involved sex trafficking and weapons. Needless to say, Edklinth is not enthusiastic about the idea of getting involved in this. He is however obliged to submit a report on the situation to a prosecutor. The woman he contacts is Inspector Monika Figuerola and she similarly regards the whole affair with horror and dismay.

Erika Berger is suffering something similar to the kind of misogynistic attacks that Salander has been the brunt of, although the attacks are in the nature of abusive e-mails. Meanwhile, Salander’s physical condition is being assessed by her doctor and he asks what she thinks of Teleborian – she replies that he is a beast. Lisbeth is soon in computer contact once again with Blomkvist, and Larsson renders their exchanges in an uncharacteristically humorous fashion (particularly at this point when the trilogy is at its darkest). There is,
inter alia
, a discussion of the difference between dedicated computer hackers and those who create viruses (‘hackers [are] implacable adversaries of those idiots who created viruses whose sole purpose is to sabotage the net and crash computers’) – perhaps an example of Larsson’s own credo here. The Hacker Republic who are now in touch with Salander are unknown to her, but become a useful source of information. Blomkvist tells her that the police haven’t found her apartment and do not yet have access to the DVD of Bjurman’s rape. Blomkvist doesn’t want to turn it over to Annika without her approval.

One of Larsson’s particular skills in the trilogy is the creation (one might almost say along assembly lines) of noxious villains, and another one is discovered by Blomkvist – Erika Berger’s boss is a crook, a man who exploits child labour in Vietnam. If any reader were in doubt about those whom the author regards as the lowest of the low by this point in the book, they haven’t been paying attention. Berger is informed of the situation by Blomkvist – she is, of course, shocked, and has to take seriously his suggestion that she must resign from
Millennium
’s board before the article is published exposing her boss, or resign from the new job (‘you can’t wear both hats’).

Salander meanwhile has enlisted the aid of her computer associate Plague (he greets her, as usual, as ‘Wasp’). She tells him she needs access to the computer of Göran Mårtensson. By the end of Part Two of the final book, Larsson has created what is undoubtedly his most labyrinthine series of plots with a rather unwieldy
dramatis personae
. Even the most faithful reader may feel a little tasked, but Larsson aficionados will know that he will be able to draw all the strands together.

Part Three is called ‘Disk Crash’. Once again we have a superscription, this time involving the Amazonian reign (described as a ‘gynaecocracy’), and Larsson reminds us that these women rejected marriage as subjugation, and that only a woman who had killed a man in battle was allowed to give up her virginity. The motif sounded in all the other superscriptions is, in fact, maintained here.

Erika Berger, meanwhile, continues to be the subject of a vicious assault conducted through jpeg images and Photoshop. She is sent a pornographic image of a naked woman wearing a dog collar, down on all fours, being mounted from the rear. There is a single word at the bottom of the picture: ‘whore’. This is the ninth message she has received containing this word, sent by someone at a well-known media outlet in Sweden. She is being cyber-stalked.

Intriguingly, as Larsson propels his protagonists through an increasingly baffling investigation, one of the tactics he allows his characters to employ is the analysis of faces in photos – a throwback, in fact, to the tactics used by Blomkvist in the first book in the sequence. Blomkvist is taking his investigation to the highest levels – including the Prime Minister – while Salander is finally writing a detailed journal of the abuses she has suffered at the hands of her many and varied enemies. It is a scarifying document, and something of a précis of the three novels we have been reading. Berger is now experiencing considerable apprehension, convinced that her cyber assailant is someone working for her new organisation, SMP, and enlists the aid of a bodyguard from no less than Armansky, Salander’s former employer.

Continuing the wistful theme of the attractions of mature male journalists, Blomkvist, the eternal middle-aged Lothario, has attracted yet another woman – Monika, the Säpo investigator who is working with him. She knows that he had a relationship with Salander – she points out that the young woman is Zalachenko’s daughter – but the couple agree to keep things on a friendly level despite the sexual attraction. Berger’s house, which has been equipped with surveillance along the lines suggested by her new minder, does not give her reassurance – particularly when she finds that her drawers have been rifled through and the familiar five-letter word, ‘whore’, has been spray-painted inside. Ironically, Berger finds herself with an unlikely ally – the combative Salander, who contacts her over the internet (needless to say, the psychological violence Berger is undergoing is very familiar territory for her).

There is a fascinating discussion between the two women of the nature of stalkers – Salander considers that the person tormenting Berger is like a parody of real stalkers (she, of course, knows what she is taking about). We are nearly 400 pages into the final book of the trilogy, and Larsson is still pulling off the trick of allowing Lisbeth to direct events (to a large extent) from a hospital bed. She tells both Berger and Blomkvist that the sinister Teleborian is meeting Jonas at Central Station – they only have a few minutes to get there. Jonas is, of course, an undercover agent. Blomkvist monitors the meeting. Also involved is the canny Modig, who is able to observe Teleborian having a rendezvous with a grey-haired man she has never seen before, along with Ekström. Are the men meeting to finalise the procedure for nailing Salander at her trial? Lisbeth, herself, meanwhile is still logging in to Berger’s e-mail and notices something about the company she works for – all the heads of department are men. Is one of them her stalker?

At times throughout the trilogy Larsson has played in a post-modern way with the concept that the reader is aware they are reading a fiction; he brings up the notion again in an electronic discussion between Blomkvist and Salander. She tells him that she is being moved to prison tomorrow and that Plague is helping out on the net. ‘So,’ he says, ‘all that’s left is the finale.’ The finale is, of course, the last 200 pages or so of the novel and it is undoubtedly true that, as before, Larsson is able to accelerate the tension at a steady and controlled rate. Plague tells Salander he has discovered that a man called Fredriksson, a colleague, is almost certainly the stalker – he accessed his work computer from home and Plague has found that he has pictures of Berger scanned onto the hard drive. Salander sends a succinct e-mail to Blomkvist, using his first name: ‘Mikael. Important. Call Berger right away and tell her Fredriksson is Poison Pen.’

The unpleasant Inspector Faste who was also involved in the meeting that was being monitored earlier, encounters Salander for the first time on Sunday morning when a woman police officer brings her into Göteborg’s headquarters. He has already decided that she is ‘fucking retarded’; she, meanwhile, is not even prepared to acknowledge his existence. Berger, during this time, has informed security guard Susanne Linder that Poison Pen is her stalker – Linder realises that the information could only have come from the enigmatic Salander. Unsurprisingly, Linder is later involved in a violent confrontation with Fredriksson, utilising the same uncompromising tactics that we have seen Salander use against sexual predators. She handcuffs him after knocking him to the ground.

In Fredriksson’s apartment, Linder finds incontrovertible proof on the former’s computer (while Fredriksson looks on, cursing splenetically that he is Berger’s stalker). Later, Berger is given the news and experiences a rush of relief, and she makes the decision to give Susanne Linder an expensive Christmas present. In her prison cell, Salander receives a very unwelcome visitor who greets her with a friendly ‘Hello, Lisbeth’. It is the unlikeable Teleborian. Readers who begin Part Four of
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
(called ‘Rebooting System’) may experience a certain twinge of regret that this will be their final encounter with the characters they have come to know so well. Once again there is a superscription involving Amazon warriors but it appears that Larsson has – largely speaking – run out of interesting things to say about them, as there is nothing that appears to illuminate the narrative we have been reading.

Chapter 23 begins two weeks before the trial of Lisbeth Salander. The case against her is closely argued and documented. The section begins with Blomkvist talking to the attractive Figuerola, telling her about his relationships with both Salander and Berger. He even admits that he is now in love with her. As we are moving towards the end of Blomkvist’s multiple conquests during the course of the trilogy, readers, both male and female, may be prepared to extend a little indulgence to him in these concluding pages. Blomkvist makes a call to another woman – one of the few who it appears is not prepared to fall at his feet – promising her an exclusive on an ‘absolutely massive story’ that he is about to break. The reader, of course, is fully aware what this is. Now begins a truly impressive task of marshalling a diverse
dramatis personae
to get the beleaguered Salander off the hook. All of the remaining nemeses of the diminutive computer hacker slowly become aware that a phalanx of evidence is being directed towards them, with Blomkvist as the progenitor. The battle is turning in Salander’s favour.

Desperate last-minute tactics are utilised by the Säpo heavies, including attempts to frame Blomkvist, but the momentum has shifted against them. And because such a resolution of the plot might seem a little sedate after the extreme violence of what has happened earlier in the sequence, Larsson allows violence to explode in time-honoured fashion as a burst of fire from a sub-machine gun is directed against Blomkvist. A massive struggle ensues, in the assailant is knocked unconscious.

Salander’s trial begins. Blomkvist notices a tactic that his sister Giannini has utilised – that is to dress Salander in her customary confrontational leather gear rather than trying to present her in some kind of sanitised version that the jury will be suspicious of. But there is still a considerable mass of evidence levelled against her. All of Salander’s nemeses are paraded in the court, including Zala and Bjurman, with attempts by the prosecution to whitewash the latter. And, unsurprisingly, the most damning case is made against her by the manipulative Teleborian, who calls the autobiography she has lodged with the court ‘a total fiction’. But then Giannini begins her expert demolition of Teleborian, pointing out that he began strapping down her client when she was 12 years old – at a time when she did not possess a single tattoo. All of the antisocial traits that he has criticised her for manifesting are torn away, and he begins to look both ridiculous and unprofessional. Then, the clincher: the involvement with Säpo is made clear, and the report damning Salander in the interests of protecting Zalachenko. By now, the momentum with which Teleborian’s position is being demolished is unstoppable. Giannini is even able to bring in Teleborian’s attacks on Salander’s sexuality and sexual behaviour, dispensing with those just as efficiently as she had made his earlier attacks seem less than objective. And Teleborian’s claim that Salander’s account of her rape by Advokat Bjurman is a fantasy is torpedoed when Giannini shows the judge the 90-minute film that Salander herself had made of the rape. She need only show a few short extracts – the judge instructs that the film be turned off. But the point is made. Satisfyingly, Teleborian himself is arrested – specifically for the possession of 8,000 pornographic pictures of children found on his computer. As he is led away, Salander’s ‘blazing eyes’ follow him inexorably.