“Henrik can afford it.”
Frode nodded. He took a pen out of his breast pocket and scrawled his name.
“It’s a good thing that I’m signing it while he’s still alive. Could you put it in the letter box at Konsum on your way home?”
Blomkvist was in bed by midnight, but he could not sleep. Until now his work on Hedeby Island had seemed like research on a historical curiosity. But if someone was sufficiently interested in what he was doing to break into his office, then the solution had to be closer to the present than he had thought.
Then it occurred to him that there were others who might be interested in what he was working on. Vanger’s sudden appearance on the board of Millennium had not gone unnoticed by Wennerstr?m. Or was this paranoia?
Mikael got out of bed and went to stand naked at the kitchen window, gazing at the church on the other side of the bridge. He lit a cigarette.
He couldn’t figure out Lisbeth Salander. She was altogether odd. Long pauses in the middle of the conversation. Her apartment was messy, bordering on chaotic. Bags filled with newspapers in the hall. A kitchen that had not been cleaned or tidied in years. Clothes were scattered in heaps on the floor. She had obviously spent half the night in a bar. She had love bites on her neck and she had clearly had company overnight. She had heaven knows how many tattoos and two piercings on her face and maybe in other places. She was weird.
Armansky assured him that she was their very best researcher, and her report on him was excruciatingly thorough. A strange girl.
?
Salander was sitting at her PowerBook, but she was thinking about Mikael Blomkvist. She had never in her adult life allowed anyone to cross her threshold without an express invitation, and she could count those she had invited on one hand. Blomkvist had nonchalantly barged into her life, and she had uttered only a few lame protests.
Not only that, he had teased her.
Under normal circumstances that sort of behaviour would have made her mentally cock a pistol. But she had not felt an iota of threat or any sort of hostility from his side. He had good reason to read her the riot act, even report her to the police. Instead he had treated even her hacking into his computer as a joke.
That had been the most sensitive part of their conversation. Blomkvist seemed to be deliberately not broaching the subject, and finally she could not help asking the question.
“You said that you knew what I did.”
“You’ve been inside my computer. You’re a hacker.”
“How do you know that?” Salander was absolutely positive that she had left no traces and that her trespassing could not be discovered by anyone unless a top security consultant sat down and scanned the hard drive at the same time as she was accessing the computer.
“You made a mistake.”
She had quoted from a text that was only on his computer.
Salander sat in silence. Finally she looked up at him, her eyes expressionless.
“How did you do it?” he asked.
“My secret. What are you thinking of doing about it?”
Mikael shrugged.
“What can I do?”
“It’s exactly what you do as a journalist.”
“Of course. And that’s why we journalists have an ethics committee that keeps track of the moral issues. When I write an article about some bastard in the banking industry, I leave out, for instance, his or her private life. I don’t say that a forger is a lesbian or gets turned on by having sex with her dog or anything like that, even if it happens to be true. Bastards too have a right to their private lives. Does that make sense?”
“Yes.”
“So you encroached on my integrity. My employer doesn’t need to know who I have sex with. That’s my business.”
Salander’s face was creased by a crooked smile.
“You think I shouldn’t have mentioned that?”
“In my case it didn’t make a lot of difference. Half the city knows about my relationship with Erika. But it’s a matter of principle.”
“In that case, it might amuse you to know that I also have principles comparable to your ethics committee’s. I call them Salander’s Principles. One of them is that a bastard is always a bastard, and if I can hurt a bastard by digging up shit about him, then he deserves it.”
“OK,” Blomkvist said. “My reasoning isn’t too different from yours, but…”
“But the thing is that when I do a PI, I also look at what I think about the person. I’m not neutral. If the person seems like a good sort, I might tone down my report.”
“Really?”
“In your case I toned it down. I could have written a book about your sex life. I could have mentioned to Frode that Erika Berger has a past in Club Xtreme and played around with BDSM in the eighties—which would have prompted certain unavoidable notions about your sex life and hers.”
Blomkvist met Salander’s gaze. After a moment he laughed.
“You’re really meticulous, aren’t you? Why didn’t you put it in the report?”
“You are adults who obviously like each other. What you do in bed is nobody’s business, and the only thing I would have achieved by talking about her was to hurt both of you, or to provide someone with blackmail material. I don’t know Frode—the information could have ended up with Wennerstr?m.”
“And you don’t want to provide Wennerstr?m with information?”
“If I had to choose between you and him, I’d probably end up in your court.”
“Erika and I have a…our relationship is…”
“Please, I really don’t give a toss about what sort of relationship you have. But you haven’t answered my question: what do you plan to do about my hacking into your computer?”
“Lisbeth, I’m not here to blackmail you. I’m here to ask you to help me do some research. You can say yes or no. If you say no, fine, I’ll find someone else and you’ll never hear from me again.”
?
CHAPTER 19
Thursday, June 19–Sunday, June 29
While he waited for word on whether Vanger was going to pull through or not, Blomkvist spent the days going over his materials. He kept in close touch with Frode. On Thursday evening Frode brought him the news that the immediate crisis seemed to be over.
“I was able to talk to him for a while today. He wants to see you as soon as possible.”
So it was that, around 1:00 on the afternoon of Midsummer Eve, Blomkvist drove to Hedestad Hospital and went in search of the ward. He encountered an angry Birger Vanger, who blocked his way. Henrik could not possibly receive visitors, he said.
“That’s odd,” Blomkvist said, “Henrik sent word saying that he expressly wanted to see me today.”
