“I had no idea.”
“Lisbeth mentioned it in passing. She didn’t want a single penny from that will — to her it was blood money — but she could tell that there was something strange about it. There were assets of four million kronor: the farm in Gosseberga, some securities and also a run-down industrial site in Norrtälje, a cottage somewhere, and various other bits and pieces. Not insignificant by any means, and yet...”
“He should have been worth much more.”
“Yes, Lisbeth was aware that he ran a vast criminal empire. Four million would have been small change in that context.”
“So you’re saying that she may have wondered if Camilla inherited the lion’s share.”
“I think that’s what she’s been trying to find out. The mere thought that her father’s fortune was going on to do harm after his death was torture to her. But she got nowhere.”
“Camilla had obviously concealed her new identity well.”
“I assume so.”
“Do you have any reason to think Camilla might have taken over her father’s trafficking business?”
“Maybe, maybe not. She may have struck out into something altogether different.”
“Such as?”
Palmgren closed his eyes and took a long sip of his brandy.
“I can’t be sure of this, Mikael. But when you told me about Professor Balder, I had a thought. Do you have any idea why Lisbeth is so good with computers? Do you know how it all started?”
“I have no idea.”
“Then I’ll tell you. I wonder if the key to your story doesn’t lie there.”
When Salander came in from the terrace and saw August huddled in a stiff and unnatural position by the round table, she realized that the boy reminded her of herself as a child.
That is exactly how she had felt at Lundagatan, until one day it became clear to her that she had to grow up far too soon, to take revenge on her father. It was a burden no child should have to bear. But it had at least been the beginning of a real life, a more dignified life. No bastard should be allowed to do what Zalachenko had done with impunity. She went to August and said solemnly, as if giving an important order, “You’re going to go to bed now. When you wake up I want you to do the drawing that will nail your father’s killer. Do you get that?” The boy nodded and shuffled into his bedroom while Salander opened her laptop and started to look for information about Lasse Westman and his circle of friends.
“I don’t think Zalachenko himself was much use with computers,” Palmgren said. “He wasn’t of that generation. But perhaps his dirty business grew to such a scale that he had to use a computer program to keep his accounts, and to keep them away from his accomplices. One day he came to Lundagatan with an I.B.M. machine which he installed on the desk next to the window. Nobody in the family had seen a computer before. Zalachenko promised that if anyone so much as touched the machine he would flay them alive. For all I know that was telling, from a purely psychological point of view. It increased the temptation.”
“Forbidden fruit.”
“Lisbeth was around eleven at the time. It was before she tore into Camilla’s right arm, and before she went for her father with knives and petrol bombs. You could say it was just before she became the Lisbeth we know today. She lacked stimulation. She had no friends to speak of, partly because Camilla had made sure that nobody came anywhere near her at school, but partly because she really was different. I don’t know if she realized it herself yet. Her teachers and those around her didn’t. But she was an extremely gifted child. Her talent alone set her apart. School was deadly boring for her. Everything was obvious and easy. She needed only to take a quick look at things to understand them, and during lessons she sat there daydreaming. I do believe, however, that by then she had managed to find some things in her free time which interested her — advanced maths books, that sort of thing. But basically she was bored stiff. She spent a lot of time reading her Marvel comics, which were way below her intellectual level but possibly fulfilled another, therapeutic function.”
“In what sense?”
“To be honest I’m reluctant to try to play the shrink with Lisbeth. She would hate it if she could hear me. But those comics are full of superheroes fighting against supervillains, taking matters into their own hands to exact revenge and see to it that justice is done. For all I know, that may have been the perfect sort of reading material. Perhaps those stories, with their black-and-white view of the world, helped her to gain some clarity.”
“You mean that she understood she had to grow up and become a superhero herself.”
“In some way, maybe, in her own little world. At the time she didn’t know that Zalachenko had been a Soviet spy, and that his secrets had given him a unique position in Swedish society. She can have had no idea either that there was a special section within Säpo which protected him. But like Camilla she sensed that her father had some sort of immunity. One day a man in a grey overcoat appeared at the apartment and hinted that their father must come to no harm. Lisbeth realized early on that there was no point in reporting Zalachenko to the police or the social services. That would only result in yet another man in a grey overcoat turning up on their doorstep.
“Powerlessness, Mikael, can be a devastating force, and before Lisbeth was old enough to do something about it she needed a place of strength, a refuge. She found that in the world of superheroes. I know better than most how important literature can be, whether it’s comic books or fine old novels, and I know that Lisbeth grew particularly attached to a young heroine called Janet van Dyne.”
“Van Dyne?”
“That’s right, a girl whose father was a rich scientist. The father is murdered — by aliens, if I remember right — and in order to take her revenge Janet van Dyne gets in touch with one of her father’s old colleagues, and in his laboratory acquires superpowers. She becomes the Wasp, someone you can’t push around, either literally or figuratively.”
“I didn’t know that. So that’s where she gets her handle from?”
“Not just the handle. I knew nothing about all that sort of stuff, obviously — I was an old dinosaur who got the Phantom mixed up with Mandrake the Magician — but the first time I saw a picture of the Wasp, it gave me a start. There was so much of Lisbeth in her. There still is, in a way. I think she picked up a lot of her style from that character. I don’t want to make too much of it, but I do know she thought a great deal about the transformation Janet van Dyne underwent when she became the Wasp. Somehow she understood that she herself had to undergo the same drastic metamorphosis: from child and victim to someone who could fight back against a highly trained and ruthless intelligence agent.
“Thoughts like these occupied her day and night and so the Wasp became an important figure for her during her period of transition, a source of inspiration. And Camilla found out about it. That girl had an uncanny ability to nose out other people’s weaknesses — she used her tentacles to feel for their sensitive points and would then strike exactly there. So she came to make fun of the Wasp in whichever way she could. She even found out who her Marvel enemies were and began to call herself by their names, Thanos and all the others.”
“Did you say Thanos?” Blomkvist said, suddenly alert.
“I think that’s what he was called, a destroyer who once fell in love with Death itself. Death had appeared to him in the shape of a woman, and after that he wanted to prove himself worthy of her, or something like that. Camilla became a fan of his so as to provoke Lisbeth. She even called her gang of friends the Spider Society — in one of the comics that group are the sworn enemies of the Sisterhood of the Wasp.”