“What are you doing?” she said.
There was no answer this time either. But Salander did at least turn and give her a look, and it felt a little like an outstretched hand. There was a new, softer light in her eyes.
“What are you doing?” she said again.
“I’m trying to discover the identity of a man,” Salander said.
“A man?”
“A Sherpa, a little over fifty years old, dead now, probably from the Khumbu Valley in northeastern Nepal, and although he could also be from Sikkim or Darjeeling in India, the signs mostly point to Nepal, and the area around Namche Bazaar. His family originates from eastern Tibet. As a child he seems to have had a fat-deficient diet.” Coming from Lisbeth that was like an entire lecture, and Paulina’s face lit up as she sat down on a chair beside her.
“Anything else?”
“I have his DNA and an autopsy report. With the injuries he has, I’m pretty sure he was a porter or guide on high-altitude climbing expeditions. He must have been very good at it.”
“What makes you say so?”
“He was unusually well endowed with type 1 muscle fibres and was probably able to carry heavy loads without consuming very much energy. But the main reason is the gene in his body which regulated the haemoglobin in his blood. He must have possessed great strength and endurance in low-oxygen environments. I suspect that he had some terrible experiences. He suffered severe frostbite and torn muscles. Several of his toes and fingers had been amputated.”
“Do you have his Y data?”
“I’ve got the whole of his genome.”
“Shouldn’t you check with YFull in that case?”
YFull was a Russian company—Paulina had written about them only a year or so ago—which was run by a team of mathematicians, biologists and programmers who collected Y chromosome DNA from people all over the world. It came either from subjects who had enrolled in academic studies or from people who had taken their own DNA samples to find out more about their origins.
“I was thinking of checking with Familytree and Ancestry, but YFull, you say?”
“I think they’re the best. The company’s run by people like you, a bunch of out-and-out nerds.”
“OK,” Salander said. “But I think it’ll be difficult.”
“Why do you say that?”
“My guess is the man belongs to a group that doesn’t have its DNA analyzed all that often.”
“There might be material from relatives of his in scientific reports? I happen to know there’s been a fair amount of research into why Sherpas are such effective climbers at high altitude,” Paulina said, proud to be actually involved.
“That’s true,” Salander said, no longer quite there.
“And it’s a pretty small population, isn’t it?”
“There are only a little over twenty thousand Sherpas in the entire world.”
“Well, then?” she said, perhaps hoping that they could have a go at it together.
But Salander opened another link on her laptop instead: a map of Stockholm.
“Why’s it so important to you?”
“It’s not important.”
Salander’s eyes darkened and Paulina got to her feet, feeling awkward, and dressed in silence. She left the room and the hotel and walked up towards Prague Castle.
CHAPTER 13
August 25
Rebecka Forsell, then Rebecka Loew, had fallen in love with Johannes’s strength and good humour. She had been the doctor on Viktor Grankin’s Everest expedition, and had long had misgivings about her assignment. Nor had she been insensitive to the criticism that was directed at them. The commercialization of Everest was a hot topic in those years.
There was talk of clients who bought themselves a place on the summit, just as others buy a Porsche. Not only were they considered to be sullying the very purity of the mountaineering ideal, they were also accused of increasing the risk to others on the mountain. Rebecka worried that too many in their group simply did not have enough experience, and perhaps Johannes especially, since he had never been above sixteen thousand feet.
But once they reached Base Camp and the others began to suffer from coughs and headaches, and had doubts about the whole undertaking, Johannes was the least of her worries. He literally bounded along on the moraine, and made buddies with everyone, even the local population, perhaps because his attitude towards them was completely natural and always respectful. He joked with them, just as with everyone else, and told his amusing stories.
He was his own man and was regarded as genuine. But Rebecka was not sure if this was entirely true. In her opinion he was an intellectual who had consciously decided to see the world in a positive light, which only made him more attractive. Often all she wanted to do was take off with him and embrace life to the full.
It was true that he went through a deep crisis after Klara and Viktor died. For some reason the tragedy affected him more deeply than it did all the others. He fell into a severe depression, and it was a while before he was his happy and energetic self again. After that he took her to Paris and Barcelona, and in April the following year—just a few months after his father died—they were married in Östersund, and she said goodbye to her home in Bergen in Norway without ever looking back.
She liked Östersund and Åre and all the skiing, and she loved Johannes. She was not in the least surprised that his business flourished and people were drawn to him, or even that he became rich and was so swiftly made a cabinet minister. He was a phenomenon. He seemed to be running non-stop yet at the same time was able to reflect, and maybe that was the reason why she rarely got cross with him. He never quit, and he firmly believed that any problem could be solved merely by rolling up one’s sleeves and trying a little harder. The flip side was that he pushed their boys too much.
“You can do better,” he was forever saying, and even though he never failed to encourage her, he seldom had time to take her concerns seriously.
He would kiss her and say, “You can do it, Becka, you can do it.” He became busier and busier, especially after being made a government minister, and he often worked into the small hours, yet he was up early and doing his three miles and his Navy Seals, as he called them, his bodyweight training. The pace was inhuman. But he liked it that way, she thought, and he did not seem to care that the tide had turned, and that he who had been so admired was now the object of so much abuse.
She was the one who suffered more. Last thing at night and first thing in the morning she would google his name compulsively, and find the most dreadful threads and accusations, and sometimes, in her darkest hours, she thought it was all her fault—she blamed her Jewish roots. Even Johannes, who was a fine Aryan specimen, fell victim to those anti-Semitic hate campaigns, yet for a long time he just shrugged it off and remained optimistic.