“Things are bad enough as it is in my line of business,” he said. “Competition from online companies and department stores.”
Modig smiled and tried to appear sympathetic. She had spent the early part of the morning walking around at random, making enquiries, and a young man in the hairdressers next door had told her that the beggar Bublanski had been talking about had quite often stood at the window of the electrical shop, glaring at the television screens inside.
“When did you first see him?” she said.
“He came marching in here a few weeks ago and stood in front of one of my sets,” Kurt Widmark said.
“What was on?”
“The news, and a rather tough interview with Johannes Forsell about the stock market crash and total defence.”
“Why do you think the beggar would have been interested in that?”
“How the hell should I know? I was mostly trying to get him out of the shop. I wasn’t being unfriendly. I don’t care what people look like, but I did tell him that he was alarming my customers.”
“In what way?”
“He stood there muttering to himself, and he smelled pretty bad. He seemed to me to have a screw loose.”
“Did you hear what he was saying?”
“Oh yes, he asked me very clearly in English if Forsell was a famous man now. I was somewhat taken aback, but I told him yes, he certainly is. He’s the Minister of Defence—and he’s very rich.”
“Did it seem as though he knew of Forsell before he became famous?”
“I couldn’t say. But I do remember him saying, ‘Problem, now he has problem?’ He put the question as if he wanted the answer to be yes.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him yes, absolutely, he has big problems. He’s been up to all sorts of hanky-panky and tricks with his shares, and he’s pulled off some palace coups behind the scenes.”
“But surely those are no more than idle rumours?”
“Well, the stories have been doing the rounds.”
“And what happened to the beggar then?” Modig said.
“He started shouting and kicking up a fuss, so I took him by the arm and tried to lead him outside. But he was strong and pointed at his face. ‘Look at me,’ he shouted. ‘See what happened to me! And I took him. And I took him.’ Or something like that. He looked absolutely desperate, so I let him stay there for a while, and after the Forsell interview there was a piece about schools in Sweden, and that prim little upper-class witch came on and pontificated.”
Modig felt a growing irritation.
“Which ‘upper-class witch’ would that be?”
“The Lindås woman. Talk about snooty. But that beggar stared at her as if he’d seen an angel, and he mumbled, ‘Very, very beautiful woman. Is she critical to Forsell also?’ and I tried to say that the one thing had nothing to do with the other. But he didn’t seem to understand. He was beside himself. But soon after that he took himself off.”
“And then he came back?”
“He came back every day at the same time, shortly before closing, for about a week. He would stand outside, staring in through the window, and ask my customers about journalists, people he could call. In the end I got so annoyed that I rang the police, but of course no-one there could be bothered with it.”
“So you got no name, and no other information about the man?”
“He said he was called Sardar.”
“Sardar?”
“ ‘My name is Sardar’ is what he said when I tried to get him to clear off one evening.”
“Well, that’s something,” Modig said, and she thanked Widmark and left.
In the tunnelbana on her way to Fridhelmsplan and police headquarters, she googled “Sardar.” It was an old Persian word referring to princes and aristocrats, or leaders of a group or tribe in general. It was used in the Middle East and in Central and Southeast Asia. You could also spell it Sirdar, Sardaar or Serdar. A prince, Modig thought. A prince in beggar’s clothing. That would be something. But real life is never the way it is in fairy tales.
* * *
—
It had taken them a while to get away, and not only because they had failed to pick up a single trace of Lisbeth Salander. Ivan Galinov, the old GRU agent, had been busy with other things too, and Camilla was determined to have him along. He was sixty-three, a man of great education with years of experience in intelligence work and infiltration.
He was a polyglot; he spoke eleven languages fluently and could switch between different dialects. In Britain, France or Germany he could even have passed for a native. He was tall and slim and carried himself well, and was without doubt a handsome man, with grey hair and white sideburns, even though there was something bird-like about his features. Face-to-face he was invariably polite and gallant, nevertheless he frightened people; there were rumours about events in his life which added substance to this aspect of his character, and said more about the person he really was.
One of the stories concerned the loss of an eye during the war in Chechnya. He had had it replaced with an enamel prosthesis, said to be the best available on the market. According to the anecdote—which was inspired by an old joke about a loan officer at a bank—nobody could work out which was the real eye and which the false one, until a subordinate of Galinov hit on the simple truth: “The eye with the faint gleam of humanity is the enamel one.”
Another account involved the crematorium on the second basement level of the GRU’s headquarters in Khodinka. Galinov had allegedly taken a colleague there and cremated him alive for having sold classified material to the British. It was said that his movements became slower and his eyes stopped blinking when he was torturing his enemies. Probably just talk, most of this, exaggerations becoming myth, and even though Camilla herself used the power of those stories to get what she wanted, it was not what she most valued in him.
Galinov had been close to her father; like her he had loved and admired him, and just like her he had been let down. That experience had given them a crucial bond. In Galinov she found understanding rather than cruelty, and fatherly concern, and she never had any trouble in seeing which eye was the real one. Galinov had taught her to soldier on, and quite recently, when it became clear to her what a crushing blow it had been for him all those years ago when Zalachenko defected to Sweden, she had asked:
“How did you survive?”
“The same way you did, Kira.”
“And how was that?”