Then he stopped and looked up pleadingly. Though Blomkvist asked himself what that might mean, he dropped the thought when the policeman whose name he now knew to be Blom sat down with the boy and tried to get him to do the puzzle again. Blomkvist went into the kitchen to get some peace and quiet. He was exhausted and wanted to go home. But apparently he first had to look at some pictures from a surveillance camera. He had no idea when that was going to happen. It was all taking a long time and seemed disorganized, and Blomkvist was longing for his bed.
He had spoken to Berger twice by then and told her what had happened. They agreed that Blomkvist should write a longer piece about the murder for the next issue. Not just because the crime itself was obviously a major drama and Professor Balder’s life was worth describing, but Blomkvist had a personal connection to the story and that would raise its quality and give him an advantage over the competition. The dramatic telephone call alone, in the middle of the night, which had got him here in the first place, would give his article an edge.
The Serner situation and the crisis at the magazine were implicit in their conversation. Berger had already planned for their temp Andrei Zander to do the preliminary research while Blomkvist got some sleep. She had said rather firmly — like someone halfway between a loving mother and an authoritative editor-in-chief — that she refused to have her star reporter dead from exhaustion before the work had even begun.
Blomkvist accepted without protest. Zander was ambitious and amicable and it would be nice to wake up and find all the spadework done, ideally also with lists of people close to Balder whom he should be interviewing. For a little while Blomkvist welcomed the distraction of reflecting on Zander’s persistent problems with women, which had been confided to him during evening sessions at the Kvarnen beer hall. Zander was young, intelligent and handsome. He ought to be a catch. But because there was something soft and needy in his character, he was time and again being dumped, and that was painful for him. Zander was an incorrigible romantic, forever dreaming about the big scoop and love with a capital L.
Blomkvist sat down at Balder’s kitchen table and looked out at the darkness. In front of him, next to a matchbox, a copy of the New Scientist and a pad of paper with some incomprehensible equations on it, lay a beautiful but slightly ominous drawing of a street crossing. A man with watery, squinting eyes and thin lips was standing next to a traffic light. He was caught in a fleeting moment and yet you could see every wrinkle in his face and the folds in his quilted jacket and trousers. He did not look pleasant. He had a heart-shaped mole on his chin.
Yet the striking thing about the drawing was the traffic light. It shone with an eloquent, troubling glow, and was skilfully executed according to some sort of mathematical technique. You could almost see the underlying geometrical lines. Balder must have enjoyed doing drawings on the side. Blomkvist wondered, though, about the unconventional choice of subject. On the other hand, why would a person like Balder draw sunsets and ships? A traffic light was probably just as interesting to him as anything else. Blomkvist was intrigued by the fact that the drawing looked like a snapshot. Even if Balder had sat and studied the traffic light, he could hardly have asked the man to cross the street over and over again. Maybe he was imagined, or Balder had a photographic memory, just like... Blomkvist grew thoughtful. He picked up his mobile and for the third time called Berger.
“Are you on your way home?” she asked.
“Not yet, unfortunately. There are a couple of things I still need to look at. But I’d like you to do me a favour.”
“What else am I here for?”
“Could you go to my computer and log in? You know my password, don’t you?”
“I know everything about you.”
“Then go into Documents and open a file called LISBETH STUFF.”
“I think I have an idea where this is going.”
“Oh? Here’s what I’d like you to write...”
“Wait a second, I have to open it first. O.K., now... Hold on, there are already a few things here.”
“Ignore them. This is what I want, right at the top. Are you with me?”
“Yes, I’m with you.”
“Write: ‘Lisbeth, maybe you already know, but Frans Balder is dead, shot in the head. Can you find out why someone wanted to kill him?’”
“Is that all?”
“Well, it’s rather a lot considering that we haven’t been in touch for ages. She’ll probably think it’s cheeky of me to ask. But I don’t think it would hurt to have her help.”
“A little illegal hacking wouldn’t go amiss, you mean?”
“I didn’t hear that. I’ll see you soon, I hope.”
“I hope so.”
Salander had managed to go back to sleep, and woke again at 7.30. She was not on top form; she had a headache and she felt nauseous. Yet she felt better than she had in the night. She bandaged her hand, dressed, had a breakfast of two microwaved meat piroshki and a large glass of Coca-Cola, then she stuffed some work-out clothes into a sports bag and left the apartment. The storm had subsided, leaving rubbish and newspapers lying all over the city. She walked down from Mosebacke torg and along Götgatan, muttering to herself.
She looked angry and at least two people were alarmed enough to get out of her way. But Salander was merely determined. She was not looking forward to working out, she just wanted to stick to her routine and drive the toxins out of her body. So she continued down to Hornsgatan, and just before Hornsgatspuckeln she turned into the Zero boxing club, which was down one flight of stairs in the basement. It seemed more run-down than ever that morning.
The place could have used a coat of paint and some general freshening up. It seemed as if no improvements had been made since the ’70s. Posters of Ali and Foreman were still on the walls. It looked just like the day after that legendary bout in Kinshasa, possibly due to the fact that Obinze, the man in charge of the premises, had seen the fight live as a small boy and had afterwards run around in the liberating monsoon rain shouting “Ali Bomaye!” That double-time canter was not just his happiest memory, it also marked what he called the last moment of “the days of innocence”.
Not long after he and his family had been forced to flee Mobutu’s terror and nothing had ever been the same again. Maybe it was not so strange that he wanted to preserve that moment in history, carry it with him to this godforsaken boxing hall in the Södermalm district of Stockholm. Obinze was still constantly talking about the fight. But then he was always constantly talking about something or other.
He was tall and mighty and bald-headed, a chatterbox of epic proportions and one of many in the gym who quite fancied Salander, even if like many others he thought she was more or less crazy. Periodically she would train harder than anyone else in there and go at the punch-balls, punchbags and her sparring partners like a madwoman. She possessed a kind of primitive, furious energy which Obinze had seldom come across.
Once, before he got to know her, he had suggested that she take up competitive boxing. The derisive snort he got in response stopped him from asking again, though he had never understood why she trained so hard. Not that he really needed to know — one could train hard for no reason at all. It was better than drinking hard. It was better than lots of things.
Maybe it was true, as she said to him late one evening about a year ago, that she wanted to be physically prepared in case she ever ended up in difficulties again. He knew that there had been trouble before. He had read every single word about her on the net and understood what it meant to be prepared in case some evil shadow from the past turned up. Both his parents had been murdered by Mobutu’s thugs.