At first she thought she would ignore it, but at the third ring she sighed, got out of the bath, and wrapped a towel around her. Pouting, she trailed water down the hall floor. She opened the door a crack.
"Hello," Blomkvist said.
She did not answer.
"Did you hear the evening news?"
She shook her head.
"I thought you might like to know that Ronald Niedermann is dead. He was murdered today in Norrtalje by a gang from Svavelsjo MC."
"Really?" Salander said.
"I talked to the duty officer in Norrtalje. It seems to have been some sort of internal dispute. Apparently Niedermann had been tortured and slit open with a knife. They found a bag at the factory with several hundred thousand kronor."
"Jesus."
"The Svavelsjo mob was arrested, but they put up quite a fight. There was a shoot-out and the police had to send for a backup team from Stockholm. The bikers surrendered at around 6:00."
"Is that so?"
"Your old friend Sonny Nieminen bit the dust. He went completely nuts and tried to shoot his way out."
"That's nice."
Blomkvist stood there in silence. They looked at each other through the crack in the door.
"Am I interrupting something?" he said.
She shrugged. "I was in the bath."
"I can see that. Do you want some company?"
She gave him an acid look.
"I didn't mean in the bath. I've brought some bagels," he said, holding up a bag. "And some espresso. Since you own a Jura Impressa X7, you should at least learn how to use it."
She raised her eyebrows. She did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
"Just company?"
"Just company," he confirmed. "I'm visiting a good friend. If I'm welcome, that is."
She hesitated. For two years she had kept as far away from Mikael Blomkvist as she could. And yet he kept sticking to her life like gum on the sole of her shoe, either on the Net or in real life. On the Net it was OK. There he was no more than electrons and words. In real life, standing on her doorstep, he was still fucking attractive. And he knew her secrets just as she knew all of his.
She looked at him for a moment and realized that she now had no feelings for him. At least not those kinds of feelings.
He had in fact been a good friend to her over the past year.
She trusted him. Maybe. It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding.
Then she made up her mind. It was absurd to pretend that he did not exist. It no longer hurt her to see him.
She opened the door wide and let him into her life again.
NOTES
Olof Palme was the leader of the Social Democratic Party and prime minister of Sweden at the time of his assassination on February 28, 1986. He was an outspoken politician, popular with the left and detested by the right. Two years after his death a petty criminal and drug addict was convicted of his murder but was later acquitted on appeal. Although a number of alternative theories as to who carried out the murder have since been proposed, to this day the crime remains unsolved.
Prompted by Olof Palme's assassination, Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson called an investigation into the procedures of the Swedish Security Police (Sapo) in the fall of 1987. Carl Lidbom, then Swedish ambassador to France, was given the task of leading the investigation. One of his old acquaintances, the publisher Ebbe Carlsson, firmly believed that the Kurdish organization PKK was involved in the murder and was given resources to start a private investigation. The Ebbe Carlsson affair exploded as a major political scandal in 1988, when it was revealed that the publisher had been secretly supported by the then minister of justice, Anna-Greta Leijon. She was subsequently forced to resign.
Informationsbyran (IB) was a secret intelligence agency without official status within the Swedish armed forces. Its main purpose was to gather information about communists and other individuals who were perceived to be a threat to the nation. It was thought that these findings were passed on to key politicians at cabinet level, most likely the defence minister at the time, Sven Andersson, and Prime Minister Olof Palme. The exposure of the agency's operations by journalists Jan Guillou and Peter Bratt in the magazine Folket i Bild/Kulturfront in 1973 became known as the IB affair.
Carl Bildt was prime minister of Sweden between 1991 and 1994 and leader of the liberal conservative Moderate Party from 1986 to 1999.
Anna Lindh was a Swedish Social Democratic politician who served as foreign minister from 1998 until her assassination in 2003. She was considered by many as one of the leading candidates to succeed Goran Persson as leader of the Social Democrats and prime minister of Sweden. In the final weeks of her life she was intensely involved in the pro-euro campaign preceding the Swedish referendum on the euro.
Colonel Stig Wennerstrom of the Swedish air force was convicted of treason in 1964. During the fifties he was suspected of leaking air defence plans to the Soviets, and in 1963 he was informed upon by his maid, who had been recruited by Sapo. He was initially sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was commuted to twenty years in 1973, of which he served only ten. He died in 2006. He is not to be confused with Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, the crooked financier who appears in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire.
In the late eighties and early nineties there was an immigration crisis in Sweden. The number of asylum seekers increased, and the resulting unemployment and backlash from local government prompted the city of Sjobo to hold a referendum in 1998, where the population voted against accepting immigrants. The subsequent political debate, called the Sjobo debate, led to a combined immigration and integration system in the Aliens Act of 1989.