The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (15 page)

She wished she could be alone with her joy, but she did not let down her guard. The merest hint of a blush might be fatal. A stammer or a nervous look might betray her. So she kept her mask in place:

“A traitor?” she said. “Who cares about a traitor?”

She got up from the table. Only later did she realize her mistake. In trying to pretend that she was uninterested she had over-played her hand. But in the moment it felt like a victory, and once she had recovered from the shock she became more focused than ever.

She was obsessed with getting hold of a telephone. Her determination must have shown – Bashir and Ahmed watched her every move, and no mobiles or keys were now left lying around. The days passed and October came. One Saturday evening their home filled with visitors and noise and movement. It took her a while to understand what was happening. No-one had bothered to tell her that the family was celebrating her engagement. Nobody seemed especially happy. But at least her prospective husband was not present – Qamar was having problems with his visa. There seemed to be others missing too, people who had fallen out of favour or who had distanced themselves from the brothers’ beliefs. All of this highlighted the family’s growing isolation. But Faria was concentrating instead on the faces of the guests. Could anyone help her?

As always, the likeliest person was Khalil. He was sixteen years old now and spent most of his time sitting around, looking nervously at her. Before, when they had lived in Vallholmen and shared a room, they often lay awake late at night talking, to the extent that it was possible to talk with him. In those days, soon after their mother had died, he had not yet started running around the city for hours on end. But already he was different. He was taciturn and what he liked most of all was to sew and draw. Often he said that he longed to go back home – to a country he had no memory of.

She considered asking him to help her run away there and then, under the cover of the party. But her nerves failed her and so she went to the toilet. It was while she was sitting there, used by now to being constantly on the lookout, that she spotted a mobile high up on the dark-blue towel cupboard. At first she could not believe her luck. It was Ahmed’s – she recognized the photo on the lock screen, Ahmed showing off with a huge grin on his face, sitting on a motorbike which did not even belong to him. Her heart pounded and she tried to remember – she had watched him so carefully – how Ahmed had keyed in his code. It was like an L-shape, maybe one, seven, eight, nine? Wrong. She tried a new combination. That didn’t work either and suddenly she became afraid. What if she locked it? She heard footsteps and voices outside. Were they waiting for her? Her father and brothers had been keeping an eye on her throughout the party, and really she should come out now and leave the telephone where she had found it. But she gave it one more try and – it ran through her like a shock – she got in. Terrified, she stepped into the bathtub, it was the place furthest from the door. Then she dialled Jamal’s number, which by now she knew as well as her own name.

The ring tone was like a foghorn in the mist, distress signals on a dark sea, and suddenly there was a rustling in the receiver. Somebody was picking up. She closed her eyes and listened anxiously for sounds from the hall, ready to hang up at any second. But then she heard his voice and his name and she whispered:

“It’s me. Faria Kazi.”

“Oh, Faria!”

“I have to be quick.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

The very sound of his voice made her throat catch. She thought of asking him to call the police, but no, she did not dare. She said simply:

“I need to see you.”

“That would make me very happy,” he said.

All she wanted to do was shout:
Happy? I’m in heaven!
“But I don’t know when I can,” she said.

“I’m always at home. I’m renting a small apartment on Upplandsgatan. I spend most of my time reading and writing. Come whenever you can,” he said, and then he gave her an address and a door code.

She deleted the number from Ahmed’s call history, placed the phone back on the cupboard, and walked out past all the relatives and family friends and into her room. There were people standing in there too. She asked them to leave and they did so with embarrassed smiles. Then she lay down under the covers and made up her mind to run away, whatever the cost. That is how it started, both the happiest and the worst time in her life.

Malin Frode and Mikael Blomkvist walked behind the audience, past the display table in the entrance, and out into the sunshine. They passed the ships moored at the wharf and looked up at the massive rock on the other side of the roadway running behind the museum and the quayside. For a long time they did not speak. It was roasting hot. Blomkvist had shaken off his irritation, but Malin again seemed to have other things on her mind.

“Interesting, what you said about his hearing.”

“Yes?” She sounded distracted.

“Seger, the psychologist who was shot on that hunt all those years ago, wrote his thesis on the impact of our hearing on our self-esteem,” Blomkvist said.

“Was that because of Leo, do you think?”

“No idea. But it doesn’t sound like your average research topic. How did Leo’s extreme sensitivity to sound manifest itself?”

“We might be in a meeting and I’d see him suddenly sit up and cock his head for no apparent reason. Soon afterwards someone would come into the room. He always picked that up before the rest of us. Once I asked him about it and he dismissed it. But later, at the end of my time at the firm, he told me that his hearing had been a burden all his life. He said he’d been useless at school.”

“I thought he was top of his class,” Blomkvist said.

“So did I. But during his first school years he couldn’t sit still. If he’d been from a more ordinary family he probably would have been moved into a class for special needs. But he was a Mannheimer and all sorts of resources were thrown at the problem. They discovered that his hearing was exceptional and that was why he couldn’t bear to be in a classroom, the slightest buzzing or rustling disturbed him. It was decided that he should be privately educated, and that would have helped him develop into the boy with the sky-high I.Q. you read about.”

“So he was never proud of his good hearing?”

“I don’t know … maybe he was ashamed of it on the one hand, but also used it to his advantage.”

“He must have been good at eavesdropping.”

“Did that psychologist write anything about exceptionally sensitive hearing?”

“I haven’t got hold of his thesis yet,” Blomkvist said. “But he did write somewhere that an evolutionary asset during one particular era can become a liability during another. In a forest in the age of hunting and gathering, someone with good hearing would be the most alert and therefore the most likely to find food. In a major city full of noise, that same person would risk confusion and overload. More recipient than participant.”

“Is that what he wrote: more recipient than participant?”

“As far as I remember.”

“How sad.”

“Why do you say that?”

“That’s Leo in a nutshell. He was always the onlooker.”

“Apart from that week in December.”

“Apart from that. But you think there’s something dodgy about that shooting in the forest, don’t you?”

He detected a new curiosity in her voice and took it as a good sign. Perhaps she would tell him more about what was so strange that time she saw Mannheimer late at night in his office.

“It’s beginning to interest me,” he said.

Leo Mannheimer never forgot Carl Seger. Even as an adult, he could still feel a sudden, sharp sense of loss at 4.00 on a Tuesday afternoon, the time he always went to Seger’s consulting rooms, and he sometimes had conversations with him in his head, as if he were talking to an imaginary friend.

Yet Mannheimer did get better at coping with the world and its sounds, just as Seger had predicted. Often his hearing and his perfect pitch were an asset – certainly when he played music. For a long time he did little else but play his piano and dream of becoming a jazz pianist. In his late teens he even had a recording offer from Metronome. He turned it down because he didn’t think the material he had was strong enough yet.

When he began his studies at the Stockholm School of Economics, he thought of them as no more than an interlude. As soon as he had put together some better pieces, he would make his record and become a new Keith Jarrett. But the interlude ended up being his life and he was never quite sure how. Was he afraid to fail and to disappoint his parents? Or was it the bouts of depression, which came as regularly as the seasons?

Mannheimer remained a bachelor, and that was no easier to understand. People were curious about him. Women were drawn to him. But he was not so easily drawn to them – in the company of others he yearned for the peace and quiet of home. However, he had genuinely loved Madeleine Bard.

And that was odd too, since they seemed not to have much in common. He did not think he had simply fallen for her looks, still less her wealth. She was different – that’s how he would always see it – with her bright-blue eyes which seemed to harbour a secret, and the streak of nostalgia which sometimes flashed across her beautiful face.

They got engaged, and for a while lived together in his apartment on Floragatan. At the time, he had just inherited his father’s shares in Alfred Ögren Securities and Madeleine’s parents – who set store by such things – saw him as an excellent catch. The relationship was not without its complications. Madeleine wanted to give dinner parties, one after the other. Leo resisted as far as he could and they would fight for hours about it. Sometimes she even locked herself in the bedroom and cried. Nevertheless, it could have been a good marriage. He was convinced of that. He and Madeleine loved each other with fire and passion.

Yet disaster struck, and that probably only went to show that he had been deluding himself all along. It happened in August at a crayfish party at the Mörners’ place out in the archipelago, on Värmdö. The atmosphere had been strained right from the start. He was feeling gloomy and found the guests loud and boring. He withdrew into himself, which sent Madeleine into social overdrive. She bounced around among the guests, gushing about how everything was “fantastic, really wonderful, it’s amazing how beautifully you’ve decorated the place, and what a fabulous piece of property. I’m soooo impressed. We’d move out here in a second …” But it was nothing out of the ordinary that evening, just a part of the charade that is life.

At midnight he gave up and took himself off to a quiet room with a book, Mezz Mezzrow’s
Really the Blues
. He was a little surprised to find it on the shelves, and it meant the party ended up being fun for him after all. He dreamed his way into the jazz clubs of New Orleans and Chicago in the 1930s, and scarcely paid any attention to the shrieking and
snaps
-drinking songs coming from next door.

Shortly after 1.00 a.m. Ivar Ögren stepped into the room, drunk as he always was at parties, dressed in a ridiculous black hat and a brown suit which strained across his midriff. Leo put his hands over his ears in case Ivar should shout or make some other foul racket, as he often did.

“I’m taking your fiancée out in a rowing boat,” Ivar said.

Mannheimer protested: “You’ve got to be joking. You’re drunk.” It did no good, but Ivar did at least put a life vest on Madeleine, as a concession. Mannheimer went onto the veranda and stared at the red jacket as it vanished over the water.

The sea was calm. It was a clear summer’s night and there were stars in the sky. Ivar and Madeleine talked softly in the boat. Not that it made any difference, Mannheimer could hear every word anyway. It was just silly chatter. A new, more vulgar Madeleine was emerging, and that hurt. Then the boat disappeared further out and not even he could hear what they were saying. They were away for a few hours.

By the time they returned, all the other guests had gone. It was beginning to get light and Mannheimer was standing on the shore with a lump in his throat. He could hear the boat being pulled up onto the shore and Madeleine coming unsteadily towards him. On the way home in a taxi, a wall seemed to rise between them and Mannheimer knew exactly what Ivar had said out there on the water. Nine days later, Madeleine packed her bags and left him. On November 21 that year, as snow fell over Stockholm and darkness settled over the country, she announced her engagement to Ivar Ögren.

Mannheimer came down with something that his doctor described as a partial paralysis.

Once he had recovered, he went back to the office and congratulated Ivar with a brotherly hug. He was at the engagement party and the wedding, and said a friendly hello to Madeleine whenever he bumped into her. He put on a cheerful face every damn day and gave the impression there was a lifelong bond of friendship between him and Ivar which could withstand any trials. But deep inside his thoughts were quite different. He was planning his revenge.

Ivar, for his part, knew that he had won only a partial victory. Mannheimer was still a threat and a rival for the top job at Alfred Ögren. He made plans to crush Mannheimer once and for all.

Up on Hornsgatspuckeln Malin stopped for no apparent reason. It was far too hot to linger in the sunlight, but there they stood, uncertain, while people passed them and a car hooted in the distance. Malin said no more about her meeting with Mannheimer. She looked down towards Mariatorget.

“Listen,” she said. “I need to go.”

She gave him a distracted kiss, dashed down the stone steps to Hornsgatan and across to Mariatorget. Blomkvist stood in the same spot, hesitating. Then he took out his mobile and rang Erika Berger, his close friend and
Millennium
’s editor-in-chief.

He told her that he would not be coming to the office for a few days. They had just put the July issue to bed. It would soon be Midsummer, and for the first time in years they had been able to afford two summer temps, which would help reduce their workload.

“You sound miserable. Has anything happened?” Berger said.