Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [2]
The girl on the gurney could live with a piece of lead in her hip and a piece of lead in her shoulder. But a piece of lead inside her brain was a trauma of a wholly different magnitude. He was suddenly aware of Nurse Nicander saying something.
“Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
“It’s her.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s Lisbeth Salander. The girl they’ve been hunting for the past few weeks, for the triple murder in Stockholm.”
Jonasson looked again at the unconscious patient’s face. He realized at once that Nurse Nicander was right. He and the whole of Sweden had seen her passport photograph on billboards outside every newspaper kiosk for weeks. And now the murderer herself had been shot, which was surely poetic justice of a sort.
But that was not his concern. His job was to save his patient’s life, irrespective of whether she was a triple murderer or a Nobel Prize winner. Or both.
Then the efficient chaos, the same in every A. & E. the world over, erupted. The staff on Jonasson’s shift set about their appointed tasks. Salander’s clothes were cut away. A nurse reported on her blood pressure – 100/70 – while the doctor put his stethoscope to her chest and listened to her heartbeat. It was surprisingly regular, but her breathing was not quite normal.
Jonasson did not hesitate to classify Salander’s condition as critical. The wounds in her shoulder and hip could wait until later with a compress on each, or even with the duct tape that some inspired soul had applied. What mattered was her head. Jonasson ordered tomography with the new and improved C.T. scanner that the hospital had lately acquired.
Dr Anders Jonasson was blond and blue-eyed, originally from Umeå in northern Sweden. He had worked at Sahlgrenska and Eastern hospitals for twenty years, by turns as researcher, pathologist, and in A. & E. He had achieved something that astonished his colleagues and made the rest of the medical staff proud to work with him; he had vowed that no patient would die on his shift, and in some miraculous way he had indeed managed to hold the mortality rate at zero. Some of his patients had died, of course, but it was always during subsequent treatment or for completely different reasons that had nothing to do with his interventions.
He had a view of medicine that was at times unorthodox. He thought doctors often drew conclusions that they could not substantiate. This meant that they gave up far too easily; alternatively they spent too much time at the acute stage trying to work out exactly what was wrong with the patient so as to decide on the right treatment. This was correct procedure, of course. The problem was that the patient was in danger of dying while the doctor was still doing his thinking.
But Jonasson had never before had a patient with a bullet in her skull. Most likely he would need a brain surgeon. He had all the theoretical knowledge required to make an incursion into the brain, but he did not by any means consider himself a brain surgeon. He felt inadequate but all of a sudden realized that he might be luckier than he deserved. Before he scrubbed up and put on his operating clothes he sent for Nurse Nicander.
“There’s an American professor from Boston called Frank Ellis, working at the Karolinska hospital in Stockholm. He happens to be in Göteborg tonight, staying at the Radisson on Avenyn. He just gave a lecture on brain research. He’s a good friend of mine. Could you get the number?”
While Jonasson was still waiting for the X-rays, Nurse Nicander came back with the number of the Radisson. Jonasson picked up the telephone. The night porter at the Radisson was very reluctant to wake a guest at that time of night and Jonasson had to come up with a few choice phrases about the critical nature of the situation before his call was put through.
“Good morning, Frank,” Jonasson said when the call was finally answered. “It’s Anders. Do you feel like coming over to Sahlgrenska to help out in a brain op.?”
“Are you bullshitting me?” Ellis had lived in Sweden