Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [80]
Lundin passed her hiding place and stopped. He hesitated for ten seconds before jogging around the courtyard. A minute later he came back. He stopped at the same place as before. This time he stood still for thirty seconds. Salander tensed her muscles, poised for instant flight if she were discovered. Then he moved again, passing less than six feet from her. She listened to his steps fade away across the courtyard.
Blomkvist felt pain in his neck and jaw as he got laboriously to his feet, feeling dizzy. He tasted blood from a split lip.
He made his way unsteadily to the top of the steps and looked around. He saw the man with the ponytail running a hundred yards further down the street. The man stopped and peered between the buildings, and then ran across Lundagatan and climbed into the Dodge van. The vehicle sped off towards Zinkensdamm.
Blomkvist walked slowly along the upper part of Lundagatan, looking for Salander. He could not see her anywhere. There was not a living soul. He was astonished how desolate a street in Stockholm can be at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning in March. After a while he went back to the front door of Salander’s apartment building on lower Lundagatan. As he passed the car where the attack had taken place he stepped on a key ring. He bent to pick it up and saw a shoulder bag under the car.
Blomkvist stood there a long time, waiting, unsure what to do. At last he tried the keys in her door. They did not fit.
Salander stayed under the bush for fifteen minutes, moving only to look at her watch. Just after 3:00 she heard a door open and close and footsteps making for the bicycle shed in the courtyard.
When the sound died away she raised herself slowly to her knees and peered out of the bush. She looked steadily at every nook and cranny in the courtyard, but she saw no sign of Lundin. She walked back to the street, prepared to turn tail at any moment. She stopped at the top of the wall and looked out over Lundagatan, where she saw Blomkvist outside her apartment building. He was holding her bag in his hand.
She stood perfectly still, hidden behind a lamppost when Blomkvist’s gaze swept over the stairs and the wall. He did not see her.
Blomkvist stood outside her door for almost half an hour. She watched him patiently, without moving, until finally he gave up and headed down the hill towards Zinkensdamm. When he was gone she began to think about what had happened.
Kalle Blomkvist.
She could not for the life of her imagine how he had sprung up out of nowhere. Apart from that, the attack was not difficult to account for.
Carl Fucking Magnus Lundin.
Lundin had met the hulk she had seen talking to Bjurman.
Nils Fucking Slimebag Bjurman.
That piece of shit has hired some diabolical alpha male to get me out of the way. And I made it crystal clear to him what the consequences would be.
Salander was seething inside. She was so enraged that she tasted blood in her mouth. Now she was going to have to punish him.
PART 3
Absurd Equations
MARCH 23–APRIL 3
Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities.
(a + b) (a − b) = a2 − b2 + 1
CHAPTER 11
Wednesday, March 23–Maundy Thursday, March 24
Blomkvist took his red pen and in the margin of Svensson’s manuscript drew a question mark with a circle around it and wrote “footnote.” He wanted a source reference inserted.
It was Wednesday, the evening before Maundy Thursday, and Millennium was more or less closed down for Easter week. Nilsson was out of the country. Karim had gone to the mountains with her husband. Cortez had come in to deal with telephone messages for a few hours, but Blomkvist sent him home since nobody was calling. Cortez left smiling happily, on his way to see a new girlfriend.
Svensson had not been around. Blomkvist sat in the office alone, plodding through his manuscript. The book was going to be twelve chapters and 288 pages long. Svensson had delivered the final text of nine of the twelve chapters, and Blomkvist had been over every word and given