“I think you’re exaggerating. Lisbeth takes no unnecessary risks. She’s normally quite rational.”
“She is rational—in her own crazy way.”
Blomkvist thought about what Salander had said to him at Kvarnen: that she would be the hunter and not the hunted.
“So what happened?”
“Nothing. She just pushed off, and I haven’t heard a word from her since. Every day I’ve been expecting to read somewhere that Svavelsjö’s clubhouse has been blown to smithereens or that her sister’s been found burned to a crisp in a car in Moscow.”
“Camilla is being protected by the Russian mafia. Lisbeth would never start a war with them.”
“Do you honestly believe that?”
“I don’t know. But I’m certain that she never…”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he said, and bit his lip. He felt naïve and stupid.
“It’s not over till it’s over, Mikael. That was the feeling I got. Neither Lisbeth nor Camilla will give up until one of them is lying dead.”
“I think you’re making too much of this,” Blomkvist said.
“You do?”
“I hope so,” he corrected himself. He poured them both some more wine and excused himself for a moment.
He picked up his mobile and texted Salander.
To his surprise, he got an answer right away.
<Chill out, Blomkvist> it read. <I’m on holiday. Keeping out of harm’s way. Not doing anything stupid>
* * *
—
Holiday was maybe putting it a bit strongly. But Salander’s idea of happiness had to do with relief from pain, and as she knocked back her beer at the bar of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, that is precisely what she felt: a form of release, as if she were only just beginning to register how tense she had been all summer long—how the hunt for her sister had driven her to the edge of madness. Not that she really unwound; her childhood memories still went round and round in her brain. But her field of vision seemed to broaden and she even began to feel a yearning, not necessarily for anything in particular, but simply to get away from everything. It was enough to give her a sense of freedom.
“Are you OK?”
She heard the question again above the noise of the bar, and she turned to find herself looking straight at a young woman standing next to her.
“Why do you ask?” she said.
The woman was perhaps thirty years old, dark and intense, with slanting eyes and long, curly black hair. She wore jeans with a dark-blue blouse and high-heeled boots. There was something both hard and probing about her. Her right arm was bandaged.
“I’m not sure,” the woman said. “It’s just the sort of thing one says.”
“I guess it is.”
“But if you don’t mind my saying, you looked pretty fucked up.”
Salander had heard this many times in her life. People had come up to her and said that she seemed surly, or angry, or precisely that—fucked up—and she always hated it. But for some reason she accepted it now.
“I suppose I have been.”
“But it’s better now?”
“Well, it’s different, in any case.”
“I’m Paulina, by the way, and I’m not in great shape myself.”
* * *
—
Paulina Müller waited for the young woman to introduce herself. But she said nothing, she didn’t even nod. But nor did she tell her to get lost. Paulina had noticed her because of the way she walked, as if she didn’t give a damn about the world and would never bother to ingratiate herself to anyone. There was something strangely appealing about that, and Paulina thought that maybe she had once walked like that too, before Thomas took those strides away from her.
Her life had been destroyed so slowly, so gradually, that she had hardly noticed it. Even though the move to Copenhagen had brought home to her the extent of the damage, the presence of this woman made her feel it even more keenly. The mere fact of standing next to her made Paulina aware of her own lack of freedom. She was drawn to the aura of total independence the woman projected.
“Are you local?” she asked tentatively.
“No,” the woman said.
“We’ve just moved here from Munich. My husband’s been made head of Scandinavia for Angler, the pharmaceutical company,” she continued, and saying it made her feel almost respectable.
“I see.”
“But this evening I ran away from him.”
“OK,” the woman said.
“I was a journalist at Geo, you know, the science magazine, but I quit when we moved here.”
“I see,” the woman said.
“I wrote about medicine and biology, mostly.”
“OK.”
“I really enjoyed it,” she said. “But then my husband got this job, and things turned out the way they did. I’ve freelanced a bit.”
She kept answering questions which had never been asked, and the woman just said “I see,” or “OK,” until finally she asked what Paulina was drinking. “Anything, whatever,” Paulina replied, and she got a whisky, a Tullamore Dew with ice, and a smile, or at least the hint of a smile. The woman was wearing a black suit which could have done with some cleaning and a pressing, and a black shirt, and she wore no make-up at all. She looked haggard, as if she had not slept properly for a long time, and there was a dark, unsettling force in her eyes. Paulina tried to make her laugh.
It was not a great success. Except that the woman came closer, and Paulina realized that she liked that. Maybe that was why she looked nervously out into the street, even more afraid now that Thomas would appear, and then the woman suggested that they should go for another drink in her room instead.
She said, “No, no, absolutely no way, no chance. My husband really wouldn’t like that.” Then they kissed and went up to the room and made love, and she could not recall having experienced anything like it before, so full of fury and desire all at once. Then she told the woman about Thomas and the whole tragedy back home, and the woman looked as if she could kill. But Paulina could not tell whether it was Thomas or the whole world she wanted to destroy.
CHAPTER 8
August 20
Blomkvist did not show up at the magazine the following week, nor did he spend any time on his story about troll factories. He tidied up the apartment, went for some runs, read two novels by Elizabeth Strout and had dinner with his sister Annika Giannini, mainly because she was Salander’s lawyer. But Annika did not have much to report, except that Salander had been in touch, asking about German lawyers specializing in family law.