Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [3]
“I’m sorry I missed your lecture, Frank, but I hoped you might be able to give me private lessons. I’ve got a young woman here who’s been shot in the head. Entry wound just above the left ear. I badly need a second opinion, and I don’t know of a better person to ask.”
“So it’s serious?” Ellis sat up and swung his feet out of bed. He rubbed his eyes.
“She’s mid-twenties, entry wound, no exit.”
“And she’s alive?”
“Weak but regular pulse, less regular breathing, blood pressure is 100/70. She also has a bullet wound in her shoulder and another in her hip. But I know how to handle those two.”
“Sounds promising,” Ellis said.
“Promising?”
“If somebody has a bullet in their head and they’re still alive, that points to hopeful.”
“I understand … Frank, can you help me out?”
“I spent the evening in the company of good friends, Anders. I got to bed at 1.00 and no doubt I have an impressive blood alcohol content.”
“I’ll make the decisions and do the surgery. But I need somebody to tell me if I’m doing anything stupid. Even a falling-down drunk Professor Ellis is several classes better than I could ever be when it comes to assessing brain damage.”
“O.K. I’ll come. But you’re going to owe me one.”
“I’ll have a taxi waiting outside by the time you get down to the lobby. The driver will know where to drop you, and Nurse Nicander will be there to meet you and get you kitted out.”
Ellis had raven-black hair with a touch of grey, and a dark five-o’clock shadow. He looked like a bit player in E.R. The tone of his muscles testified to the fact that he spent a number of hours each week at the gym. He pushed up his glasses and scratched the back of his neck. He focused his gaze on the computer screen, which showed every nook and cranny of the patient Salander’s brain.
Ellis liked living in Sweden. He had first come as an exchange researcher in the late ’70s and stayed for two years. Then he came back regularly, until one day he was offered a permanent position at the Karolinska in Stockholm. By that time he had won an international reputation.
He had first met Jonasson at a seminar in Stockholm fourteen years earlier and discovered that they were both fly-fishing enthusiasts. They had kept in touch and had gone on fishing trips to Norway and elsewhere. But they had never worked together.
“I’m sorry for chasing you down, but …”
“Not a problem.” Ellis gave a dismissive wave. “But it’ll cost you a bottle of Cragganmore the next time we go fishing.”
“O.K., that’s a fee I’ll gladly pay.”
“I had a patient a number of years ago, in Boston – I wrote about the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was a girl the same age as your patient here. She was walking to the university when someone shot her with a crossbow. The arrow entered at the outside edge of her left eyebrow and went straight through her head, exiting from almost the middle of the back of her neck.”
“And she survived?”
“She looked like nothing on earth when she came in. We cut off the arrow shaft and put her head in a C.T. scanner. The arrow went straight through her brain. By all known reckoning she should have been dead, or at least suffered such massive trauma that she would have been in a coma.”
“And what was her condition?”
“She was conscious the whole time. Not only that; she was terribly frightened, of course, but she was completely rational. Her only problem was that she had an arrow through her skull.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I got the forceps and pulled out the arrow and bandaged the wounds. More or less.”
“And she lived to tell the tale?”
“Obviously her condition was critical, but the fact is we could have sent her home the same day. I’ve seldom had a healthier patient.”
Jonasson wondered whether Ellis was pulling his leg.
“On the other hand,” Ellis went on, “I had a 42-year-old patient in Stockholm some years ago who banged his head on a windowsill. He began to feel sick immediately