"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (6 page)

BOOK: "There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me
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From that moment on, he devoted himself entirely to the Swedish Expo Foundation, which he had cofounded earlier, in 1995, and to its quarterly magazine,
Expo
.

Expo
 

DEEPLY IMPRESSED
as a child by his grandfather’s anti-Nazi political engagement, Stieg wanted to write for
Searchlight
, a British antifascist magazine he admired, and back in 1982 he had gone to London to meet Graeme Atkinson, the editor. They rendezvoused at a café, and since they were complete strangers, they began with a cautious “security check” by submitting each other to an in-depth interrogation about fascism. It’s a good thing they shared the same sense of humor! That turned out to be the decisive factor in establishing trust between them. In 1983 Stieg started writing for the magazine under a pseudonym, like all the other contributors.
Searchlight
was the sole exception here, however, because Stieg signed his own name,
for example, to the section on Scandinavia that appears in
Les Extrémismes en Europe
, by the French political economist Jean-Yves Camus—as he did with every other article, report, and book he ever wrote.

After Stieg’s death and the success of
The Millennium Trilogy
, a British publisher wanted to bring out a collection of all his articles written for
Searchlight
, but was rebuffed by the magazine. He even came to Stockholm to ask me to put pressure on the magazine’s editor to change his mind, and the man was so insistent that I showed him the letter I’d received from
Searchlight
saying that
not one comma
of those articles would be handed over to the “Stieg industry.” I was truly moved by the editorial staff’s respect for their collaborator of over twenty years.

After a wave of racist violence in the 1980s, the extreme right became increasingly active in Sweden in the early 1990s. Stieg and I felt it was vital to have a magazine like
Searchlight
in our country, but British culture is quite different from ours, and we didn’t want simply to create a copycat. Along with a group of like-minded people, we spent over two years in endless theoretical discussions debating the kinds of things our magazine should publish.

Founded in 1985 and inspired by the antiracist French NGO SOS Racisme and its yellow hand logo (bearing the slogan
Touche pas à mon pote
, which means “Hands off my pal!”), the organization Stop Racism decided in 1995 to enrich its newsletter with a supplement carrying in-depth articles on racist and extreme-right groups. When we joined forces with them, things took off. We suddenly had
more people, subsidies, and a concept—but no name. The magazine was christened
Expo
. After three issues, the staff decided that the magazine would work better on its own, without ties to an association. Stieg and I were really pleased to have young people join in, and we tried to give them as much autonomy as possible. They worked in a basement on a street where Lisbeth Salander lives for a while, in a space like the tiny, stuffy cellar where
Millennium
was born. At one point
Expo
had its headquarters in an apartment over the Kaffebar—a coffee bar on Hornsgatan—where Mikael Blomkvist often meets with people. (In Swedish,
gatan
means “street,” and Hornsgatan is one of the main streets of the Södermalm district in Stockholm.) The
Expo
staff was constantly changing locations to escape harassment by neo-Nazi groups, for there was no denying the fact that
Expo
’s debut had provoked serious opposition. That April, a small extremist group began issuing threats and vandalizing the premises of all of the parties in Parliament that supported
Expo
through their Youth Activities sections. Press and book outlets, like the large newsstand on Odengatan, saw their display windows smashed, while the printing house was tagged with swastikas and the warning “Don’t print
Expo
.” The political parties refused to be intimidated, but the printing house tossed in the towel.

And that led to a sensational development in June 1996: the largest national evening papers,
Aftonbladet
and
Expressen
, decided that they would print the current issue of
Expo
with no strings attached, distributing it as a special supplement to their daily papers. Both editors in chief,
Torbjörn Larsson and Christina Jutterström, wrote a joint editorial explaining that they wished through their action to defend freedom of speech. Stieg was beside himself with delight. Thanks to this decisive intervention,
Expo
managed to keep going on its own until 1997, but donations and subscription fees barely covered the rent and printing costs. When the economic crisis arrived,
Expo
began to falter. In an attempt to save it, we contacted the National Council of Culture, but the grant we received was so small that the editorial staff gave up in exhaustion. (Naturally, everyone had been working full tilt on the magazine in whatever spare time we had—in the evening, during the night, on weekends.) So
Expo
ceased regular publication, continuing to appear only as a supplement in various publications such as
Monitor
, a Norwegian antiracist magazine, in 1998, and later in Kurt Baksi’s magazine
Svartvitt
(
Black/White
). In this way
Expo
managed to stay alive thanks to a kind of artificial respiration, but it would be five years before it could appear regularly again as an independent publication.

For Stieg and me, the 1990s were a grueling period during which he worked like a man possessed. What with his job at TT, his work for
Searchlight, Expo
, and the books he was writing or on which he was collaborating, there really wasn’t any time left for me. I felt very lonely, especially after the financial crash in 1993 cost me my job as an architect in a large construction company, where I’d been thrilled to be working on exciting projects such as the Soder Crescent, an elegant residential complex designed by the Catalan postmodernist architect Ricardo Bofill.
Stieg and I were on such different schedules that sometimes we had to make an appointment even to see each other! Snatching some time between TT and
Expo
, he’d meet me at the Kafé Anna (which turns up in the trilogy, of course) to have a caffe latte together.

I left Stieg twice during those years, even if it was only for a few weeks. The first time, I went to live in an apartment lent to me by a friend, and the next time I stayed with my friend Eleanor. Each time, Stieg was in despair, and even today I feel awful for having put him through that pain—a man who had suffered from such a profound sense of abandonment as a child when his grandfather died. I should have found another way to make him understand that I needed him, especially since these wrenching separations managed to improve our lives, in spite of his efforts, for only a few months before he would quickly be overwhelmed with work again.

1999 was the year of greatest change and greatest risk. Stieg decided to leave TT, as I’ve already noted, and extreme-right violence in Sweden increased dramatically. Once more, Stieg paid homage in
The Millennium Trilogy
to an “ordinary hero” through his inclusion of Hallvigs Reklam AB in Morgongåva (in Uppsala County, just north of Stockholm), the publishing company that took over from the one that stopped printing
Expo
after receiving serious threats. The owner of Hallvigs, Jan Köbin, made a great impression on Stieg because he didn’t hesitate to use his own car to ensure that every last issue of
Expo
was delivered on time, and I was pleased when he was named
Sweden’s Businessman of the Year in 2007. In the first book of the trilogy, Mikael Blomkvist entrusts to Jan Köbin the printing of his book on the Wennerström affair and the special issue of
Millennium
that will reveal this scandal. In the second volume, Blomkvist again puts his faith in the printer who offers “the best price and service in the industry,” giving him Dag’s book on the sex-trafficking networks in Eastern Europe. And in the third volume, it’s Köbin again who prints the book exposing the Section, the secret organization of spies created during the Cold War.

Expo
continued to survive as best it could thanks to the very things that power the magazine
Millennium:
the enthusiasm of all sorts of people for a common project in which they strongly believe. In a scene in
The Girl Who Played with Fire
, Erika Berger prepares coffee in the magazine office’s kitchenette, and Stieg has her smiling at the sight of so many mismatched mugs all bearing the logos of different political parties. It was an affectionate wink at
Expo
, where the cups were as varied as the opinions of the journalists, who were allowed to support any party they wanted—but not as active members. This strict rule guaranteed the independence of the magazine, so that it would never be caught up in political rivalries.

After years of dependence on other publications,
Expo
officially resurfaced in 2003 thanks to grants we obtained to fund two projects: school programs fostering the culture of democracy among young people, and the production of RAXEN reports for the EUMC. These reports by the Racism and Xenophobia European Network for the
EU’s Monitoring Centre examined the incidence of racial discrimination and racist crimes in various sectors such as housing and employment.

So a few salaries were assured, one of them Stieg’s. We had a new team, still as young as before but more professional, most of whom had journalistic experience. I dealt only with those RAXEN reports, which I fact-checked, completed, or translated into English. It was a rather “dry” job, sort of like editing, but a necessary one, since the reports were our main source of income. I remember our New Year’s Eve in 2002, when we worked through the night on a report that absolutely had to be delivered by January 1. A few of our fellow workers peeled off at some point to go celebrate, but we “old folks” stayed on to meet our deadline.

Throughout our years of political struggle against the extreme right, Stieg wrote constantly, hoping to sound the alarm about nationalist political parties like the Sweden Democrats. He tried to show that they weren’t simply a gang of madmen plotting to infiltrate Swedish society (as one conspiracy theory had it), but a real political movement that had to be combated through political means. Given what is happening in Sweden today, with the SD now represented in the Swedish Parliament, it seems clear that Stieg’s nightmare has come true.…

Threats
 

WHEN HE
began writing for
Searchlight
and its antifascist agenda, Stieg, too, became a hated enemy of the far right. In the spring of 1991, he published
Extremhögern
(
Right-Wing Extremism
) with Anna-Lena Lodenius. The book provided an overview of all the groups and parties at that end of the political spectrum, covering the origins of their movements, their use of violence, and their current affiliated organizations in Europe, Scandinavia, and the United States. It was the first comprehensive work ever published on the subject. One of the groups mentioned in the book, VAM (Vitt Ariskt Motstand, for White Aryan Resistance), published a magazine called
Storm
that was steeped in racial violence dressed up in a romantic aura. Seven of its
members had amassed a total of twenty convictions among them for crimes such as armed robbery, stealing weapons from military depots, and homicide, so when we learned the following year that
Storm
knew both our address and that of Anna-Lena, we were worried: having your name on neo-Nazi hit lists can be very dangerous.

While we were trying to figure out how to react and protect ourselves, my sister’s companion at the time told us, “You’re part of the family. I’ll go see my uncle, an Italian; he’s connected, he’ll come up with a definitive solution for you.” At first we were delighted with the offer, especially with its suggestion of an “extended family.” Then we had second thoughts. We knew perfectly well there’d be no question of money changing hands, and that one day we’d be expected to repay a debt of honor.
But what form would it take?
Besides, finding criminals was the job of the police. So we declined the invitation, explaining that we preferred to let the law take its course. I admit, though, that I thought about that idea for some time. In 1993,
Storm
published photos of Stieg and Anna-Lena along with their social security and phone numbers, plus their personal and business addresses. Referring to Stieg, the accompanying text concluded: “Never forget his words, his face, and his address. Should he be allowed to continue his work—or should he be dealt with?”

In those days, anyone could obtain pictures of any Swedish citizen by going to the passport service of the Swedish police. In
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, Lisbeth Salander explains how simple it is to do so: “If the person
is in a database, which is absolutely the case for everyone, the target swiftly winds up in the spider’s web.” In the next book,
The Girl Who Played with Fire
, Lisbeth even hesitates to move to another apartment because that would mean a new address and would make her “someone concretely present in all sorts of computer files.” Stieg knew everything there was to know about tracking people, all the methods used by journalists, by the police, by men hunting for the wives who’d left them after conjugal violence, and as it happens—by extremists and criminal gangs. Because of the threats from
Storm
, the magazine was prosecuted and convicted. But that took time.…

In the 1990s, more than a dozen people were murdered in Sweden for political reasons by individuals involved with neo-Nazi groups. Säpo—the Security Service, an arm of the Swedish National Police—estimates that during 1998 alone, there were more than two thousand unprovoked racist attacks, more than half of which can be directly linked to neo-Nazi militants in White Power groups. And some of these extremists had managed to obtain our phone number, because although only my name appeared on our apartment door, and the telephone was listed under my name alone, we were receiving anonymous calls. Our apartment was already secured by an alarm system and a digicode keypad, but I had a new metal security door installed as well. After Mikael Blomkvist enters Lisbeth Salander’s swank new apartment at 9 Fiskargatan in the Mosebacke area of Södermalm, he stares in frustration at the alarm keypad by the front door. He knows that if he
doesn’t tap in the correct four-digit code within thirty seconds, the alarm will go off and a bunch of beefy guys from a security company will arrive in no time. Stieg and I went through that experience many times when we’d come home exhausted only to find ourselves standing at our front door, powerless to stop the “screamer”—our pet name for the alarm.

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