Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [73]
She did not like the situation, but she could not think of any immediate pretext for waking him and scaring the shit out of him.
Johansson woke at 6:30 a.m. She heard the morning TV on low volume from the living room and smelled freshly brewed coffee. She also heard the clacking of keys from Svensson’s iBook. She smiled.
She had never seen him work so hard on a story before. Millennium had been a good move. He was often afflicted with writer’s block, and it seemed as though hanging out with Blomkvist and Berger and the others was having a beneficial effect on him. He would come home gloomy after Blomkvist had pointed out shortcomings or shot down some of his reasoning, but then he’d work twice as hard.
She wondered whether it was the right moment to interrupt his concentration. Her period was three weeks late. She had not yet taken a pregnancy test. Perhaps it was time.
She would soon turn thirty. In less than a month she had to defend her dissertation. Dr. Johansson. She smiled again and decided not to say anything to Svensson before she was sure. Maybe she would wait until he was finished with his book and she was giving a party after she got her doctorate.
She dozed for ten more minutes before she got up and went into the living room with a sheet wrapped around her. He looked up.
“It’s not 7:00 yet,” she said.
“Blomkvist is acting superior again.”
“Has he been mean to you? Serves you right. You like him, don’t you?”
Svensson leaned back in the living-room sofa and met her eyes. After a moment he nodded.
“Millennium is a great place to work. I talked to Mikael at Kvarnen before you picked me up last night. He was wondering what I was going to be doing after this project was finished.”
“Aha. And what did you say?”
“That I didn’t know. I’ve hung around as a freelancer for so many years now. I’d be glad of something more steady.”
“Millennium.”
He nodded.
“Mikael has tested the waters, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in a part-time job. Same contract as Henry Cortez and Lotta Karim are on. I’d get a desk and a retainer from Millennium and could take in the rest on the side.”
“Do you want to do that?”
“If they come up with a concrete offer, I’ll say yes.”
“OK, but it’s not 7:00 yet and it’s Saturday.”
“I know. I just thought I’d polish it up a bit here and there.”
“I think you should come back to bed and polish something else.”
She smiled at him and turned up a corner of the sheet. He put the computer on standby.
Salander spent a good deal of time over the next few days doing research on her PowerBook. Her search extended in many different directions, and she was not always sure what she was looking for.
Some of the fact collecting was simple. From the Media Archive she put together a history of Svavelsjö MC. The club appeared in newspaper stories going by the name Tälje Hog Riders. Police had raided the clubhouse, at that time located in an abandoned schoolhouse outside Södertälje, when neighbours reported shots fired. The police turned up in astonishing force and broke up a beer-drenched party that had degenerated into a shooting contest with an AK-4, which later turned out to have been stolen from the disbanded I20 regiment in Västerbotten in the early 1980s.
According to one evening paper, Svavelsjö MC had six or seven members and a dozen hangers-on. All the full members had been in jail. Two stood out. The club leader was Carl-Magnus “Magge” Lundin, who was pictured in Aftonbladet when the police raided the premises in 2001. He had been convicted on five charges of theft, receiving stolen goods, and for drug offences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the sentences—for a crime which involved grievous bodily harm—put him away for eighteen months. He was released in 1995 and soon afterwards became president of Tälje Hog Riders, now Svavelsjö MC.
According to the police gang unit, the club’s number two was Sonny Nieminen, now thirty-seven years old, who had run up no fewer than twenty-three convictions. He had started his career at the age of sixteen