Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [231]
“It sounds as though he could have made a career in the ring,” Berger said.
Paolo Roberto shook his head. “According to Münster he was impossible, for several reasons. First, he couldn’t learn to box. He would stand still throwing haymakers. He was phenomenally clumsy—that fits the guy I fought in Nykvarn—but what was worse, he didn’t understand his own strength. Now and then he’d land a punch that would cause a horrible injury during sparring practice. There were broken noses and jaws—a whole series of unnecessary injuries. They just couldn’t keep him around.”
“So he could box, but not really. Is that it?” Eriksson said.
“Exactly. But the reason for him stopping was medical.”
“How do you mean?”
“He was apparently invulnerable. It didn’t matter how many punches he took, he just shook them off and kept fighting. It turned out that he suffers from a very rare condition called congenital analgesia. I looked it up. It’s an inherited genetic defect that means the transmitter substance in his nerve synapses doesn’t function properly. Or in lay terms, he can’t feel pain.”
“That sounds like a gold mine for a boxer.”
Paolo Roberto shook his head once more. “On the contrary. It can be a life-threatening disorder. Most people with congenital analgesia die relatively young, between twenty and twenty-five. Pain is the body’s warning system that something’s wrong. If you put your hand on a red-hot burner, it hurts and you snatch it away. But if you have this disease you don’t do anything until you start smelling burned flesh.”
Eriksson and Berger looked at each other.
“Are you serious?” Berger said.
“Absolutely. Niedermann can’t feel a thing, and he goes around as if he’s had a massive dose of local anaesthesia twenty-four hours a day. He’s managed to deal with it because he has another genetic feature that compensates for it. He has an extraordinary build with an extremely strong skeleton, which makes him almost invulnerable. His raw strength is damn near unique. And above all, he must heal easily.”
“I’m beginning to understand what an interesting boxing match it must have been.”
“It certainly was that. I wouldn’t want to do it again. The only thing that made an impression on him was when Miriam Wu kicked him in the balls. He actually fell to his knees for a second … which must be because there’s some sort of physical reaction connected to a blow of that type, since he doesn’t feel any pain. And believe me—even I would have collapsed if she had kicked me like that.”
“So how did you end up beating him?”
“People with this disease can in fact be injured just like anyone else. Forget that Niedermann seems to have bones of concrete. But when I whacked him with a plank on the back of his head he dropped like a rock. He was probably concussed.”
Berger looked at Eriksson.
“I’ll call Mikael,” Eriksson said.
Blomkvist heard his mobile go off, but he was so stunned that he did not answer until the fifth ring.
“Hi, it’s Malin. Paolo Roberto thinks he’s identified the giant.”
“That’s good,” Blomkvist said absentmindedly.
“Where are you?”
“That’s hard to say.”
“You sound funny.”
“Sorry. What did you say?”
Eriksson summed up Paolo Roberto’s story.
“Follow up on it,” Blomkvist said, “and see if you can find him in some database. I think it’s urgent. Call me on my mobile.”
To Eriksson’s surprise, he disconnected without even saying goodbye.
Blomkvist was standing at that moment by a window, looking out at a magnificent view that stretched far from Gamla Stan towards Saltsjön. He felt numb. There